Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 20

Ukraine stands on the brink – and Europe must bring it back | Timothy Garton Ash

This is no velvet revolution, but nor is it an uprising of fascist Cossacks or a zero-sum game with Russia. Europe must intervene on the side of democracy and human rights

Ukraine has not yet died – as the country's anthem observes. But the face of Ukraine today is that of the bloodied, scarred opposition activist Dmytro Bulatov. Comparisons with Bosnia are still far-fetched, but think of this as a political Chernobyl.

I have no idea what will happen in Ukraine tomorrow, let alone next week. But I know what all Europeans should want to happen over the next year and the next decades. In February 2015, on the 70th anniversary of the Yalta agreement, Ukraine should again be a halfway functioning state. A corrupt and rackety one, but still the kind of state that, in the long run, forges a nation. It should have signed an association agreement with the EU, but also have close ties with Russia. In February 2045, on the 100th anniversary of the Yalta agreement, it should be a liberal democratic, rule-of-law state that is a member of the EU, but has a special relationship with a democratic Russia. "Pie in the sky!" you may say. But if you don't know where you want to go, all roads are equally good. This is where we should want to go.

That outcome would obviously be good for Ukraine. Less obviously, it would be good for Europe. Look at the shifting balance of world power, and look at the demographic projections for western Europe's ageing population. We'll need those young Ukrainians sooner than you think, if we are to pay our pensions, maintain economic growth and defend our way of life in a post-western world. Less obviously still, it would good for Russia. Russia has lost an empire but not yet found a role. Its uncertain sense of itself is inextricably bound up with its deep-seated confusion about Ukraine, a cradle of Russian history that many Russians still regard as belonging back in Russia's nursery.

Once upon a time, young Conservatives like David Cameron shared such a vision of a wider Europe of freedom. Inspired by the velvet revolutions of 1989, and by Margaret Thatcher, they loathed the statist, federalist and socialist Little Europe of Brussels, but loved that far horizon of liberty. Yet where is the British prime minister's voice on Ukraine today?

Back in his idealistic youth, Germans were the mealy-mouthed stability-huggers, and Brits spoke out for human rights in eastern Europe. Now, Angela Merkel tells her parliament – to applause – that the Ukrainian authorities must not ignore "many people who have shown in courageous demonstrations that they are not willing to turn away from Europe. They must be heard", while the Conservative benches of the British parliament resound with appeals to turn away from Europe, and to keep out those numberless hordes of eastern European welfare scroungers. Among the few Ukrainians welcome here are the oligarchs, who get Britain's special visas for the very rich, and buy the fanciest places in London. One of them, Rinat Akhmetov, paid £136m for a 25,000 sq ft pied-a-terre in the luxurious One Hyde Park apartment complex.

Granted, it is hard to see how we can make much difference in the short term. This is no longer a velvet revolution, as the 2004 Orange Revolution was. It started as a protest against the (freely and largely fairly elected) President Viktor Yanukovych's sudden refusal to sign an association agreement with the EU. Opinion polls show that a majority of Ukrainians favour more European integration. The heart of protest in Kiev is still nicknamed the Euromaidan (Eurosquare). What characterises a velvet revolution, however, is that non-violent discipline is largely maintained – even in the face of violent oppression by the state – and it ends in a political negotiation. Now, mainly because of the stupidity of the Yanukovych machine and the brutality of its Berkut militia thugs, but also because there are other opposition forces at work in different parts of a fractured country, the velvet is burning.

Some very nasty far-right groups have mounted the barricades. How large a role they play is disputed. A Ukrainian specialist on the European far right, Anton Shekhovtsov, who was there during the recent protests, says that while there is a real neo-Nazi and hooligan fringe, especially in a group called White Hammer, most of the so-called Right Sector activists see themselves as national revolutionaries fighting for independence from Russia. Yet even if you take a more alarmist view, to suggest that Europe should just sit on its hands because fascists and antisemitic Cossacks (recognise a stereotype anyone?) are taking over the show is even more ridiculous than it would be to pretend that this is all the sweetness and light of Václav Havel's Wenceslas Square in 1989. Abandon all meta-narratives, ye reporters who enter here.

Worse than ridiculous is the notion that the EU should not intervene in any way because this is a purely Ukrainian affair. Putin's Russia has been intervening for years, overtly and covertly, while insisting no "outsiders" should interfere. In the last decade, Russia has twice turned off the gas tap to force Ukrainian hands, and the methods Moscow uses behind the scenes to persuade Yanukovych and pivotal oligarchs can barely be described in a family newspaper.

By contrast, the EU's "imperialist" intervention has consisted in offering an association agreement, attempting to broker a negotiated settlement between the warring parties and mainly verbal support for non-violent, pro-European demonstrators. To denounce this herbivorous intervention while ignoring Russia's carnivorous ones is Orwellian doublethink.

But comrade Lenin's question remains: what is to be done? The Poles, with members of the Ukrainian opposition, call for a larger carrot. "Not martial law but a Marshall Plan," says opposition leader Arseniy Yatseniuk. In your dreams, Arseniy. Others call for targeted western sanctions against the Yanukovych clan and selected oligarchs.

I suspect all this will make only a marginal difference. History is being written hour by hour on the ground in Ukraine. But if the British prime minister does want to reconnect with the idealism of his youth, while practising the realpolitik required in his current job, I suggest he has a private word with those key swing-players in Ukraine, the oligarchs. Men like Victor Pinchuk, Dmytro Firtash (a generous donor to Cambridge University) and Akhmetov. We know where they live – in London, among other places. So to have that discreet fireside chat, the prime minister would only need to pop down the road, from Downing Street to One Hyde Park.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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2014 is not 1914, but Europe is getting increasingly angry and nationalist | Timothy Garton Ash

While Germany focuses on forging a government, populist anti-EU parties look set to do well at next year's elections

Now the German elections are over, Germany and France will launch a great initiative to save the European project. Marking the centennial of 1914, this will contrast favourably with the weak and confused leadership under which Europe stumbled into the first world war. Before next May's elections to the European parliament, the Franco-German couple's decisive action and inspiring oratory will drive back the anti-EU parties that are gaining ground in so many European countries.

In your dreams, Mr and Ms Pro-European, in your dreams. Now for the reality. We will not even have a new German government until just before Christmas. In the German coalition negotiations, which are meant to be concluded next week, European affairs are being handled in – wait for it – a sub-group of the working group on finance. That sub-group is called "Bank regulation, Europe, Euro". For all the three participating parties, Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union, the Bavarian Christian Social Union and the opposition Social Democrats, the hot-button issues are domestic. The introduction of a minimum wage, energy policy, dual citizenship, a proposed motorway toll – all count for more than the future of the continent.

Germany's politicians know what really matters for selling their parties to voters in future elections. As ordinary Germans get into the swing of their Christmas shopping, most are not feeling the pinch of the euro crisis. Youth unemployment is around 8% in Germany, compared with 56% in Spain. It is hard to convey just how far away, and how un-urgent, the crisis of Europe feels to the man on the Berlin U-bahn. Unlike his counterpart in Madrid, he does not emerge from the underground to find stinking garbage piling up on the streets.

Once the German government is formed, its European policy will be the product of compromises between three departments of state – the dominant federal chancellery, the finance ministry, and the foreign ministry – which will themselves be divided politically between Christian and Social Democrats.

Europe's reluctant leading power will have to make further compromises with France, which has different views on several key issues. France also has a weak president, François Hollande, who is failing to reform his own country, let alone helping anyone else's. The ageing and increasingly unequal German-French couple – which in January marked a rather downbeat golden wedding anniversary, with the German wife now definitely wearing the trousers – will have to take account of the concerns of valued partners such as Poland, as well as proposals coming from European institutions.

And from this dysfunctional orchestra is to emerge a clarion call that will knock the sceptics of all countries back on their heels and mobilise Europeans to vote for Europe? Ha, ha, ha.

Partly as a result, this will be the most interesting European election campaign since direct elections to the European parliament began in 1979 – for all across Europe there is the most amazing array of national protest parties. "Populists" is the blanket term lazily draped over them all, but it does not capture their diversity. With all due disrespect to the UK Independence party and Germany's anti-euro Allianz für Deutschland, it is quite wrong to tar them with the same brush as Greece's neo-fascist Golden Dawn, Hungary's Jobbik or France's Front National. That's even more true of, say, Catalan nationalists, let alone Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement in Italy – which could not be farther from the far right. Closer to the xenophobic politics of the French Front National – but with multiple national and sub-national variations – are groupings such as the Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Finland's The Finns party (until recently, True Finns), the Danish People's party, and so-called Freedom parties in Austria and Holland.

Two of their most skilful leaders, Marine Le Pen of the French Front National and Geert Wilders of the Dutch Freedom party, have started trying to pull them together. After wooing in spring, over lunch at the elegant La Grande Cascade restaurant in Paris's Bois de Boulogne, this odd couple last week performed the political equivalent of a wedding dance in The Hague.

"Today is the beginning of the liberation from the European elite, the monster in Brussels," cried Wilders. "Patriotic parties", added Le Pen, want "to give freedom back to our people", rather than being "forced to submit their budget to the headmistress". In Vienna on Friday, four others – Austria's Freedom party, Sweden's Democrats, Italy's Northern League and Vlaams Belang – joined a wary waltz with Le Pen.

I will be amazed if these parties do not do well in the European elections. I see nothing at all coming from the current leadership in Berlin, Paris or Brussels (forget London) that is likely to reverse an electoral grande cascade. Behind these parties' typically 10% to 25% standing in opinion polls is a wider popular discontent with unemployment, austerity and a Brussels bureaucracy that goes on spewing out regulations about the specifications of your vacuum cleaner and how much water you can use in the lavatory flush. A German Christian Democrat candidate for the European elections tells me that the anti-euro and anti-Brussels arguments of the Allianz für Deutschland resonate with quite a few of his local activists.

I am now taking a couple of months off from regular commentary to finish the book I'm writing about free speech (a vital right, anchored in the European convention on human rights, which these parties enjoy and exploit to its limits). When I come back, I'll be up for the good fight against Le Pen, Wilders, Jobbik and their ilk. Yet, with this divided, slow-moving and uninspiring European leadership, I have no illusions that we'll succeed in stopping the cascade. And if my guess is right, what happens then?

Since the one thing most of these parties have in common is that they are nationalists, they may have difficulty agreeing on much beyond their shared dislike of the EU. If they are strongly represented in the European parliament, the immediate effect will be to drive the mainstream socialist, conservative and liberal groupings closer together. So you'd have an explicit "grand coalition" in Berlin and an implicit grand coalition in Brussels.

The trouble with grand coalitions is that since the mainstream, centrist parties are burdened with the responsibility of government, the field of opposition is left wide open for protest parties. On the other hand, the anti-parties' very success could at last mobilise a younger generation of Europeans to defend achievements that they take for granted. Nineteen-fourteen this won't be, but a hundred years on, Europe will again be living in interesting times.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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Whether it's hacking or the NSA, some of us don't accept that privacy is dead | Timothy Garton Ash

The common threat here is a massive, digitally enabled erosion of the individual citizen's private life

What a week this was. It has seen David Cameron's former communications director, Andy Coulson, going on trial in connection with phone hacking by journalists during his time as editor of the News of the World, German officials storming off to Washington to read the riot act about the bugging of Angela Merkel's phone, the medieval mumbo-jumbo of the Queen accepting a royal charter underpinning a system of press self-regulation that much of the press doesn't accept, and the EU threatening internet giants like Google and Facebook with a data protection directive that could end up splitting the internet into separate US and European clouds. One thing unites these apparently disparate stories: the revolutionary development of technologies that massively increase our power to communicate with each other, and as massively erode our privacy.

"Privacy is dead. Get over it," a Silicon Valley boss once reportedly remarked. Some of us don't accept that. We still want to keep a few clothes on. We believe that preserving individual privacy is essential, not just to basic human dignity but also to freedom and security.

The trouble is that privacy is at once essential to, and in tension with, both freedom and security. A cabinet minister who keeps his mistress in satin sheets at the French taxpayer's expense cannot justly object when the press exposes his misuse of public funds. Our freedom to scrutinise the conduct of public figures trumps that minister's claim to privacy. The question is: where and how do we draw the line between a genuine public interest and that which is merely what interests the public? Equally, if we are to be protected from terrorist bombs on our daily commute, some potentially dangerous people must have their phones bugged and emails read. The question is: who, how many, with what controls?

What the reporting of Edward Snowden's leaks by the Guardian, the New York Times and other organisations has revealed is that those checks and balances were not working properly in the US and Britain. So a free press has struck a blow for our privacy, when legal and parliamentary controls had fallen short. But state-employed spooks are not the only ones illegitimately snooping on us. Private Eye captures this brilliantly. Under the headline "Merkel Fury at Obama Phone Hacking", it shows a photo of the German chancellor grimly clasping her mobile. Her speech bubble says: "Who do you think you are? Rupert Murdoch?"

So a free press is needed to check the secret surveillance excesses of the state, but opinion polling shows that a clear majority of the British public also wants to see curbs on the secret surveillance excesses of a free press. As clearly, their main reason is the concern for privacy. Without the scandal of tabloid journalists hacking into the phones of everyone from the deputy prime minister to a murdered teenager, we would not have had this push for more press regulation.

Today's Daily Telegraph displays a wonderful piece of double-think, or cognitive dissonance. In its leading article it warns, with some reason, against the possibility of future political curbing of the press under the provisions of the royal charter approved by the Queen in privy council on Wednesday afternoon, but then continues: "The Guardian's recent investigation into state spying is exactly the kind of reporting that could spark a moral panic among politicians and give them cause to limit what the press can publish." Meanwhile, its own front page splashes the opening of the phone-hacking trial involving, among others, two former editors of Murdoch's News of the World. A simple, chronological reading of back numbers of the Daily Telegraph will show that it was that phone hacking by Murdoch's journalists, not the more recent Guardian reporting about the NSA and GCHQ, which sparked "moral panic" (interesting phrase) among the British public – not just politicians – and led to calls for more regulation of the press.

But opinion polls also show that the public don't want these regulatory powers put into the hands of politicians. And the public are right: witness the recent attempt by the Conservative party chairman, Grant Shapps, to whip the BBC into line in the runup to the next general election.

Now we have ended up with an almighty mess. Where the US has its magnificent, clear and simple First Amendment, we have Queen Elizabeth II declaring: "Now know ye that we by our prerogative royal and of our especial grace, certain knowledge and mere motion" do create "a body corporate known as the recognition panel". But all Her Majesty's mere motion does is to establish a mechanism for officially recognising a press self-regulation body that many leading newspapers (including the Murdoch group and the Telegraph) are currently saying they won't set up for recognition in the royally approved form. Meanwhile, press dog continues to savage press dog, and long-time fellow-campaigners for freedom of expression and human rights are all at sixes and sevens. Even today's Washington could barely make such a mess of things.

What is more, while Britain's journalists wrangle and politicians fumble, the very idea of regulating something called "the press" in a purely national framework is becoming anachronistic. Where does "the press" end and an individual speaking on Twitter or Facebook begin? Data, words and pictures are spilling not just across platforms but across national frontiers. So the EU aims to enforce stronger protection for the privacy of all Europeans, against US giants, through a new data protection directive. But that in turn brings the danger of fragmenting the internet into multiple sovereign patches – something authoritarian regimes such as China and Russia would welcome. Privacy for some could then be enhanced at the cost of online freedom of expression for all.

There are no easy answers in this dense, transnational triangle between freedom, security and privacy, but let's at least keep our eyes on the main threat that runs through these stories. That threat is the massive, digitally enabled erosion of privacy – your privacy.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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Americans need to discover how the world sees them | Timothy Garton Ash

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.

The 24/7 US news coverage follows every last lunge and twist of the stagfight. It is the political equivalent of ESPN, the non-stop sports network. Just occasionally, the rest of the world breaks through: for instance, when the World Bank and the IMF hold their annual meetings – right there in Washington – and the heads of both institutions, Jim Yong Kim and Christine Lagarde, warn of dire consequences. That gets a few column inches. Or when the government shutdown and debt-ceiling brinkmanship leads Barack Obama to cancel a major trip to Asia, including the Apec summit in Bali, leaving the floor wide open for president Xi Jinping to assert China's regional leadership ("the Asia-Pacific cannot prosper without China").

A more direct taste of foreign news is available just a few clicks away. On my cable TV control, if I scroll down to channel number 73, or 355, or whatever it is, I can get Al-Jazeera, China's CCTV and Russia's RT. Their reporters often speak perfect American-accented journalese, and sometimes actually are career American journalists, lured away from job-shedding US news organisations to give credibility to these channels. CCTV's Washington bureau chief, for instance, is Jim Spellman, formerly of CNN. These channels' take on the Washington dégringolade is much harder edged than the ESPN version. The website of the Russian state-backed RT quotes an editorial published by the Chinese state news agency, Xinhua, proposing that, in the light of this crisis, "several cornerstones should be laid to underpin a de-Americanised world".

Of course these channels are representative of their undemocratic states, not their peoples. And you may ask, well, who on earth watches CCTV or RT? Does anyone take them seriously? In Europe and North America the answers are still "not many" and "not very". (That is somewhat less true of Al-Jazeera.) But in Africa, Latin America and parts of Asia, it's already a different story. In the global competition of international broadcasting, these well-funded networks are gaining influence.

It's not just in the arena of soft power that perceptions are also realities. As George Soros keeps pointing out, that's true of financial markets. Just as a reminder: the US hit its debt limit of $16.699 trillion in May this year. (For comparison: the World Bank estimates its 2012 GDP at $15.685tn.) Since May, the federal government has been using so-called extraordinary measures to pay its bills and refinance its debt.

These measures are what treasury secretary Jack Lew said would reach the end of their tether on October 17. A few days ago he told the Senate treasury committee that rates on short-term treasury bonds had almost tripled in a single seven-day period. And last week Fidelity, the largest American money market mutual fund manager, sold all its short-dated US government bonds. Just a temporary precaution, you understand. But if the US goes on like this, then one day – one year, one decade – the copper bottom of investors' confidence will fall out.

Even the hardest form of hard power, military action, involves a significant element of perception. Vietnam has just said farewell to its war hero, General Vo Nguyen Giap, credited with driving both France and the US out of his country. As obituaries pointed out, his Tet offensive of 1968 was a military failure, since the Viet Cong were thrown back with huge losses. But politically, it played a key role in turning American public opinion against the war. Similarly, there is no purely objective truth about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the view of a large part of the world, the US military did not exactly win.

At the time of writing, it looks as if the rutting stags in the Senate and House of Representatives will step back from the canyon's edge at the last minute. But even if they do, huge damage has already been done. Politically, in the eyes of the world, the "full faith and credit" of the US has been further eroded.

Americans need to see those views from outside. Some understand this need: that's one reason so many visit the US version of the Guardian's website. It's also a service the digital International New York Times (formerly International Herald Tribune) may help provide, with a wider range of international voices – although its target audience is modestly described by the responsible assistant managing editor, in a New York Times piece about itself, as "the political, business and cultural elite of the world". But what about those proudly less cosmopolitan, non-elite Americans back home, including the active minorities who pre-select Democrat and Republican representatives in Washington, in partisan primaries for gerrymandered constituencies?

So here's my au revoir suggestion. Let some public-spirited American billionaire set up a mainstream TV and internet channel dedicated to conveying to a wider American audience, in a vivid and accessible way, how the US is seen around the world. In Britain, people still occasionally use an old-fashioned slang phrase to express incredulity at something that is at once amazing and a bit ludicrous too – such as what's been happening in Washington. They say: "Christopher Columbus!" Complete with Yahoo!-style exclamation mark, that might be a good name for the channel.

Twitter: @fromTGA

• This piece was amended on 16 October. The article originally stated that the US had exceeded its debt limit of $16.699 trillion in May this year, when in fact it hit its debt limit. This has now been corrected.

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With Angela Merkel's Germany at the helm, Europe will remain a tortoise | Timothy Garton Ash

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.

On Monday, Merkel suggested that there would be no change in her own approach to a southern Europe traumatised by debt, austerity and depression (in both the economic and psychological senses of the word). Referring to the impressive way Germany managed down its own unit labour costs and restored its competitiveness, she said: "What we have done, everyone else can do."

The Social Democrats understand a little better, or perhaps just express more frankly, that the economics of eurozone recovery are not that simple. Some debt burdens are just unsustainable. Improved supply also requires demand. But since the Social Democrats will be the junior partner in this coalition (if that is what emerges), since the results on which they will be judged by voters are primarily domestic, and since most German voters don't want to pay another cent for allegedly feckless southerners, those eurozone policy adjustments will be modest.

At best, the soft underbelly of the European tortoise – a debt and depression-ridden southern Europe – will continue to bleed. At worst, it will haemorrhage, politically as well as economically. As Costas Douzinas noted in the Guardian on Tuesday, the Greek economy has shrunk by 25%, with youth unemployment at around 70% and a growing national debt-to-GDP ratio approaching 175%. In Greece more social misery and political extremism seem inevitable. Elsewhere, in Spain and Ireland for example, painful reforms are beginning to show some slow, uncertain results.

In the German election, the political centre held. In next May's 28-country elections to the European parliament, that is less likely. Representatives of protest parties of all shapes and colours – from Greece's fascist Golden Dawn to Ukip, from the partly post-communist The Left party in Germany (which is back in the Bundestag, unlike the liberal Free Democrats) to Geert Wilders' Freedom party in the Netherlands – might fill those parliamentary seats in Brussels. If this happens, the European parliament will become a glasshouse full of people throwing stones. Yet that fragmentation will also compel the mainstream, pan-European alliances of conservative, liberal and socialist parties to work more closely together, thus producing a kind of implicit grand coalition in the Brussels parliament, as well as (probably) an explicit one in the Berlin one.

At the same time, Merkel will be even more inclined than she is already to run the European show by pragmatic inter-governmental deal-making, whether in the eurozone of 18 states (when Latvia adopts the euro in January) or the EU of 28 (now that Croatia has joined the larger club). But Merkel's problem is that she does not have a strategic partner in either of the EU's other two leading powers.

France's François Hollande is the Little President Who Would – but his country is weakened by its own domestic economic problems and slowness to reform. Britain's David Cameron, with a stable coalition government and a slowly recovering north European free market economy, could in theory be that partner. In practice, his Eurosceptic Conservative party and his own tactical miscalculations have launched him on a foolish course of attempted "renegotiation" of the terms of Britain's membership of the EU. In short, Britain could, but won't; France would, but can't. That leaves Merkel as Europe's single Mutti. She has a few solid medium-sized partners in countries such as Poland, but they alone are not enough.

So there you have the EU for the foreseeable future: a giant, weary tortoise, with chancellor Merkel sitting astride its shell, trying to steer its woozy head and coax its bleeding underbelly across stony ground. Yet before one falls into deepest melancholy, as a European, it's worth taking a leaf out of Aesop's book and looking at the competition – the American eagle and the Chinese dragon. After all, in Aesop's fable, it was as much the hare that lost as it was the tortoise that won.

I'm watching the German and European slow motion spectacle from the United States. But my TV screen is filled with a partisan style of politics that is the diametric opposite of Germany's centrist, consensual, coalition-building democracy. While Berlin's Christian and Social Democrats negotiate their incremental differences, Washington is engulfed in shrieking brinkmanship, like a giant game of "chicken", with Republicans threatening not to lift the country's national debt ceiling unless that ghastly European-style Obamacare can be brought down. There is even talk of a government shutdown in just a few days' time. Imagine that happening in the United States' erstwhile governance pupil, and now exemplar, Germany. While the US private sector is recovering some of its legendary dynamism, it still faces deep problems of imperial and welfare overstretch, and neglected infrastructure.

And rising China? The failure of president Xi Jinping's new administration to show any signs of political reform makes a deeper crisis in that country ever more probable at some point over the next decade. Jamil Anderlini, of the Financial Times, reports a professor at the Party School of the central committee of the Communist party of China saying this: "We just had a seminar with a big group of very influential party members and they were asking us how long we think the party will be in charge and what we have planned when it collapses. To be honest, this is a question that everyone in China is asking but I'm afraid it's very difficult to answer."

In short, the world's three giant economies all have substantial political problems, of strikingly different kinds. Europe's Merkelian tortoise will not gather speed any time soon, but nor is it now likely to take a big fall. Can we say the same of the eagle and the dragon?

Twitter: @fromTGA

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This crisis resolves little in Syria but says a lot about the United States | Timothy Garton Ash

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.

There will be many more turns on the road to Damascus, but the politics of these weeks since the criminal use of chemical weapons in Syria on 21 August already tell us a lot about the US. First and foremost, they tell us what Obama himself acknowledged in his televised address, quoting the words of a letter sent him by a veteran: "This nation is sick and tired of war."

Yes, the shadow of being misled by Colin Powell (of all people) about the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction hangs over this debate, as over European debates. But that's not the main point for most Americans. According to a New York Times-CBS poll this week, 75% of Americans think the Syrian government "probably did" use chemical weapons against Syrian civilians – and still they're overwhelmingly against the US military response that Obama advocated.

Every one of the countless members of Congress I've seen interviewed on cable television news has acknowledged this, be they Republican or Democrat, for or against striking Syria. Only "three or four" of at least a thousand constituents he's talked to favour military action, reports Congressman Elijah Cummings, a Democrat and Obama supporter. Senator Rand (son of Ron) Paul, a rising star of the Republican party, says his phone calls are "100 to 1" against war.

The American people are "sick and tired" of it. They don't think it's done any good in the Middle East. It's cost trillions of dollars, while they've been losing their jobs and homes, struggling to get by, seeing their own roads, hospitals and schools decay. Now here's the great irony: this is Obama's own theme tune. He's the president who came into office to end "a decade of war" (a trademark phrase he used again in this speech) and concentrate on "nation-building at home". So the popular sentiment is one he both reflected and reinforced.

And – irony upon irony – if Obama's own best enemy, Russian president Vladimir Putin, had not self-interestedly ridden to the rescue at the eleventh hour, that very sentiment would probably have delivered a shattering blow to the American presidency. For when we woke up on Monday morning, it looked as if he faced defeat in a vote in the House of Representatives, if not in the Senate.

"Isolationism" is the lazy term often applied to the attitude now found among Democrats and Republicans alike. It is true that the US has a history of periodically withdrawing into its own vast continental indifference, as it did after the first world war. But this time feels different. While the current withdrawalism undoubtedly drinks from some of those traditional wells, it flows through a country not brashly rising on the world stage but fearfully conscious of relative decline. Back in the 1920s, Americans were not worried about a rising China eating their lunch – and then buying the hamburger stall. They are now.

A few more specific ingredients of this American pie also deserve mention. One is Israel. It is hard to overstate the impact of concerns about Israel on American foreign policy in general, and its Middle East policy in particular.

Some of the most chilling analysis I have read over these weeks identifies an Israeli realpolitik which concludes that the least worst outcome for Israel is that two sets of its arch-enemies – the Iran and Hezbollah-backed Assad regime and the increasingly Sunni Islamist extremist and partly al-Qaida oriented rebels – should go on beating the living daylights out of each other.

"Our 'best case scenario' is that they continue to busy themselves fighting each other and don't turn their attention to us," an unnamed Israeli intelligence officer tells a writer on buzzfeed.com. "Let them both bleed, haemorrhage to death: that's the strategic thinking here," says Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli consul general in New York. This makes Machiavelli look like Mahatma Gandhi.

Then there are the interventionist hawks, such as John McCain and Paul Wolfowitz, who believe the US should act more decisively so as to enable more moderate rebels to overthrow Bashar al-Assad. They'll be very unhappy with a fix that may only contain the chemical weapons, and that only by making a Russian-brokered deal with Assad. Beside them are Republican politicos so incurably partisan that doing down Obama takes precedence over stopping Assad. And there are the seasoned strategic types – quite a lot of them, actually, not least in or connected to the American military – who carefully think through all the implications for the US and the region. Overwhelmingly, their message is caution.

Last but not least, there are still a few liberal, humanitarian interventionists, of the old 1990s genre, shaped by the experiences of Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo. Obama has appointed as his ambassador to the UN an almost totemic representative of that persuasion, Samantha Power, the author of a 2002 book called A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide. Well, Syria is a problem from hell, all right. These liberal humanitarian interventionists are not the predominant voice in an administration characterised by cautious, security-first pragmatism, but they're still there.

I am writing this column on the 12th anniversary of the 11 September terrorist attacks which launched the US into that decade of war – justifiably, in the immediate response to al-Qaida in Afghanistan, unjustifiably and disastrously in Iraq. This is a very different America now.

Maybe after some years spent putting its own house in order it will come back as the – for all its many faults and hypocrisies – indispensable anchor of some kind of liberal international order. Yet given not just its structural domestic problems but above all the changing global power constellation around it, I doubt it. To the many critics and downright enemies of the US in Europe and across the globe, I say only this: if you didn't like that old world in which the US regularly intervened, just see how you like the new one in which it does not.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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All we can do for Syria now is donate to the relief effort | Timothy Garton Ash

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.

António Guterres, the UN high commissioner for refugees, says the displacement of people has not risen "at such a frightening rate" since the Rwandan genocide of 1994. And he told the Guardian yesterday that this might mean asking countries like Britain to take some of Syria's uprooted. The absolute size of the humanitarian catastrophe may not yet match the largest, but Syria is working hard to catch up.

Moreover, its political knock-on effects are potentially far greater than those of any mere tsunami, drought or earthquake. Syria's civil war has set the old Sunni-Shia wound bleeding again in the whole neighbourhood. Iran, Hezbollah and Shia Muslims in Iraq support the forces of president Bashar al-Assad against internal and external Sunni foes. Blood flows more freely than water across the arbitrary, post-colonial frontiers of the region. Beside the external Islamic patron states, including Saudi Arabia and Turkey on the Sunni side, there is Russia arming al-Assad's forces against rebels who are being (very tentatively) supported by the US – almost as if we were back in the cold war.

Syria also fits into a larger picture, with the UNHCR recording an 18-year high of more than 45 million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2012. The current rate of displacement is about one person every four seconds. Give the wider Middle East another year or two, and the world will have a whole England of the uprooted (around 56 million people). "Something must be done," we cry, as we pack our suitcases for the summer holidays. But what? Make the decisive, massive military intervention that alone would defeat Assad, and you face another Iraq. Don't intervene, and accept another Bosnia. The record of western military intervention in this region is disastrous. Yet the notion that not intervening in any way, militarily or otherwise, is always the most moral option simply does not stand honest scrutiny.

Syria demands that we think again about the relationship between politics and humanitarian action. Earlier this month, the former foreign secretary David Miliband reflected on this in his last major public speech before leaving his first life, as a politician in London, to begin his second life, as the leader of a humanitarian organisation – the International Rescue Committee – in New York.

On the one hand, the morality of what he will do as a humanitarian is far simpler than that of what he did, or might still be doing, as a politician. Deploying tents to shelter people in desperate need is more obviously, unambiguously good than deploying half-truths to win votes. In that sense, David might exclaim "it is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done". On the other hand, it could also be a far less effective thing than what his brother Ed may yet have a chance to do as Britain's prime minister.

For the nature of humanitarian relief in man-made disasters is that you are treating the symptoms and not the causes. Were politicians to address the political causes of Syria's disaster, that would be more valuable than everything all the humanitarian organisations in the world can do. If the US, Europe and Russia really got together and said, "we're going to de-escalate this conflict, through stopping all the arms supplies we have any influence on, followed by a negotiation involving all the relevant internal parties and external powers, including Iran under its new president", they might get somewhere. But it's simply not happening, nor likely to happen any time soon.

David Cameron described the situation inside the country as a "stalemate", with Assad's military position somewhat strengthened, and growing sectarian extremism on the opposition side. Pressed for a no-fly zone by angry Syrian refugees in the Zaatari refugee camp – a tent settlement so densely populated it is said to be Jordan's fourth largest city – US secretary of state John Kerry explained to them that "a lot of different options are under consideration". Translation: Washington sees no good ones.

That's no excuse for abandoning the politics. But given that they are blocked, humanitarian relief becomes even more vital. Until the surgeons finally tackle the causes of the disease, we have to keep changing the bandages, alleviating the pain and feeding the patient. But this too is not happening enough. Governments have only met a third of the UN's funding targets for humanitarian assistance for Syria. That puts even more strain on non-governmental humanitarian organisations, yet Oxfam says people have so far donated just a third of its £30m Syria target. Four months into a six-month campaign for Syria, the UK-based Disasters Emergency Committee, a seasoned coalition of charities, has only raised £17m. By contrast, its six-month campaign for victims of the Asian tsunami raised £392m, and that for the Haiti earthquake, £107m.

It seems that visually shocking natural disasters, where people are seen to be innocent victims of what insurers call "acts of God", get us giving far more generously than political conflicts do. The Disasters Emergency Committee's 2009 campaign for Gaza raised just over £8m, its 2008 one for the Democratic Republic of Congo, £10.5m. This is perhaps understandable, but not rational. Why should what innocent people suffer as a result of "acts of God" be considered worse than what innocent people suffer as a result of their compatriots fighting each other in the name of God?

As a columnist on international affairs, I get tired of telling governments they "must" do something, knowing perfectly well that nine times out of 10 they won't. This time I have a simpler conclusion. Before we go away on holiday, we should all make a donation to humanitarian relief for Syria. That's what I shall do when I've clicked the "send" button for this column.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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Welcome to the geopolitics of trade, where Dr Pangloss meets Machiavelli | Timothy Garton Ash

For the sake of Britain's own unemployed, we need a new transatlantic trade deal. But not so we can also gang up on China

Hidden behind thickets of acronyms and gorse bushes of detail, a new great game is under way across the globe. Some call it geoeconomics, but it's geopolitics too. The current power play consists of an extraordinary range of countries simultaneously sitting down to negotiate big free trade and investment agreements. One way of thinking about this is to see it as the Widest West Web, though a definition of the west that includes Japan, Peru, Brunei and Vietnam is wide indeed. Another way to describe it is EBC: Everyone But China.

The biggest of these negotiations got under way this week, as a European commission delegation sat down with its US counterparts in the White House Conference Centre in Washington DC. The deal they're trying to thrash out is currently called TTIP, for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. That's a terrible acronym. (Want to be on the TTIP anyone?) The first thing those negotiators should do is to change the name. TAP, for Trans-Atlantic Partnership, is a much better alternative.

TAP would then neatly complement TPP, for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the other biggest show on the Broadway of geoeconomics. Total transatlantic trade and investment is estimated to be worth around $4.7 trillion. The proposed TPP region, a diverse grouping currently slated to include the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia and Japan, as well as such towering market democracies as Vietnam and Brunei, accounts for about one third of world trade. There are also ongoing EU-Canada and EU-Japan negotiations, while both the US and the EU are trying to intensify their trade and investment relationships with countries such as India and Brazil.

With glorious can-do American optimism, the White House is describing its big push to get the US on the TTIP – soon, I trust, to be renamed TAP – as a job for "one tank of gas". That apparently means the period up to the Congressional midterm elections next year. Well, they have big petrol tanks over there, although it has also to be said that, like your all-American SUV, the US Congress does pitifully few miles to the gallon. On the European side that period would take us to the end of the current European commission and parliament. Most of the other talks, including those on TPP, EU-Canada and EU-Japan are also looking towards 2014.

It may never happen. The recent history of trade talks is a history of stalling or, to stay with the Obama administration's metaphor, of running out of gas. The fact that most of the countries involved are democracies only makes it more difficult. The way contemporary democracies work, they excel in aggregating the special needs of interest groups, both monied interests (corporations, sectoral lobbies) and electorally important ones, such as farmers. And the EU is itself an aggregation of 28 such national aggregations. It is no accident that Brussels competes with Washington for the title of lobbyists' nirvana.

But just imagine that, with politicians' minds unusually focused by years of global recession and the rise of China, it did all come together. This would be huge in two ways: a huge potential gain for the world economy, and a huge challenge to China. To mark the centenary of 1914, we would be getting back to something like the free-trading world we had before 1914 – but on a larger scale, with less formal colonialism, and with more complex and deeper forms of interconnection.

Not everyone would be a winner, even inside the Widest West Web, but the potential benefits are enormous. The economists' projections must be taken with a large pinch of salt, but just to give you an idea: according to a study commissioned by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the TAP – or TTIP, if you still insist – could mean a long-term increase of more than 13% in GDP per capita for the US, and average real income growth per capita of 5% for the EU – with no less than 10% per head for the UK. The European commission estimates that an EU-Japan deal alone could result in the creation of 400,000 jobs. For a European Union that has nearly 6 million unemployed young people, that is not nothing. Done right, the expansion of free trade and investment is about as close as we get in human affairs to a win-win. So turn on the TAP, I say, and all those other faucets.

But this is also, let us not kid ourselves, a geopolitical challenge to the Chinese Communist party. For in the geopolitics of free trade, Dr Pangloss meets Machiavelli. Americans know this. (It's one of the things some of them like about it. Irwin Stelzer writes that trade "is politics, and war, by other means".) Europeans know it. The Japanese know it. (Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, says joining the TPP will contribute to Japan's "security".)

The Chinese know it too. An article in the Washington Quarterly by Guoyou Song, of Fudan University in Shanghai, and Wen Jin Yuan, of the University of Maryland, reports a "strong voice in Chinese academic and policy circles" characterising TPP as an American tool to contain China's rise. Yet the conclusion of their very sober analysis of the many interests and lobbies shaping Chinese policy is intriguing: "It is worth pointing out that China has not closed its doors towards the possibility of joining TPP itself. If the Chinese government feels that the benefits of joining outweigh the costs, then China may indeed apply."

This is where the economic Pangloss and the political Machiavelli could actually combine, in a way that is – if Chinese communists will pardon such an old-fashioned expression – dialectical. The Widest West Web is a challenge to China, but it is also an incentive to China. If China were to decide that it wanted to join a network of proper free trade and investment areas, and actually play by the rules, and we were then to say no, we would be behaving almost as irresponsibly as European leaders did in 1914.

Our ultimate objective in this new great game must not be an EBC bloc. Rather, these free trade areas should all be seen as building blocks of a liberal international order that could include and embrace China. China would obviously then have a right to shape that order, alongside western powers, but its participation would also eventually help to move China domestically towards more openness, pluralism and rule of law, as desired by a growing number of its own people. Welcome to the dialectics of TAP and TPP.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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Welcome to the geopolitics of trade, where Dr Pangloss meets Machiavelli | Timothey Garton Ash

For the sake of Britain's own unemployed, we need a new transatlantic trade deal. But not so we can also gang up on China

Hidden behind thickets of acronyms and gorse bushes of detail, a new great game is under way across the globe. Some call it geoeconomics, but it's geopolitics too. The current power play consists of an extraordinary range of countries simultaneously sitting down to negotiate big free trade and investment agreements. One way of thinking about this is to see it as the Widest West Web, though a definition of the west that includes Japan, Peru, Brunei and Vietnam is wide indeed. Another way to describe it is EBC: Everyone But China.

The biggest of these negotiations got under way this week, as a European commission delegation sat down with its US counterparts in the White House Conference Centre in Washington DC. The deal they're trying to thrash out is currently called TTIP, for Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. That's a terrible acronym. (Want to be on the TTIP anyone?) The first thing those negotiators should do is to change the name. TAP, for Trans-Atlantic Partnership, is a much better alternative.

TAP would then neatly complement TPP, for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the other biggest show on the Broadway of geoeconomics. Total transatlantic trade and investment is estimated to be worth around $4.7 trillion. The proposed TPP region, a diverse grouping currently slated to include the US, Canada, Mexico, Australia and Japan, as well as such towering market democracies as Vietnam and Brunei, accounts for about one third of world trade. There are also ongoing EU-Canada and EU-Japan negotiations, while both the US and the EU are trying to intensify their trade and investment relationships with countries such as India and Brazil.

With glorious can-do American optimism, the White House is describing its big push to get the US on the TTIP – soon, I trust, to be renamed TAP – as a job for "one tank of gas". That apparently means the period up to the Congressional midterm elections next year. Well, they have big petrol tanks over there, although it has also to be said that, like your all-American SUV, the US Congress does pitifully few miles to the gallon. On the European side that period would take us to the end of the current European commission and parliament. Most of the other talks, including those on TPP, EU-Canada and EU-Japan are also looking towards 2014.

It may never happen. The recent history of trade talks is a history of stalling or, to stay with the Obama administration's metaphor, of running out of gas. The fact that most of the countries involved are democracies only makes it more difficult. The way contemporary democracies work, they excel in aggregating the special needs of interest groups, both monied interests (corporations, sectoral lobbies) and electorally important ones, such as farmers. And the EU is itself an aggregation of 28 such national aggregations. It is no accident that Brussels competes with Washington for the title of lobbyists' nirvana.

But just imagine that, with politicians' minds unusually focused by years of global recession and the rise of China, it did all come together. This would be huge in two ways: a huge potential gain for the world economy, and a huge challenge to China. To mark the centenary of 1914, we would be getting back to something like the free-trading world we had before 1914 – but on a larger scale, with less formal colonialism, and with more complex and deeper forms of interconnection.

Not everyone would be a winner, even inside the Widest West Web, but the potential benefits are enormous. The economists' projections must be taken with a large pinch of salt, but just to give you an idea: according to a study commissioned by the Bertelsmann Foundation, the TAP – or TTIP, if you still insist – could mean a long-term increase of more than 13% in GDP per capita for the US, and average real income growth per capita of 5% for the EU – with no less than 10% per head for the UK. The European commission estimates that an EU-Japan deal alone could result in the creation of 400,000 jobs. For a European Union that has nearly 6 million unemployed young people, that is not nothing. Done right, the expansion of free trade and investment is about as close as we get in human affairs to a win-win. So turn on the TAP, I say, and all those other faucets.

But this is also, let us not kid ourselves, a geopolitical challenge to the Chinese Communist party. For in the geopolitics of free trade, Dr Pangloss meets Machiavelli. Americans know this. (It's one of the things some of them like about it. Irwin Stelzer writes that trade "is politics, and war, by other means".) Europeans know it. The Japanese know it. (Japan's prime minister, Shinzo Abe, says joining the TPP will contribute to Japan's "security".)

The Chinese know it too. An article in the Washington Quarterly by Guoyou Song, of Fudan University in Shanghai, and Wen Jin Yuan, of the University of Maryland, reports a "strong voice in Chinese academic and policy circles" characterising TPP as an American tool to contain China's rise. Yet the conclusion of their very sober analysis of the many interests and lobbies shaping Chinese policy is intriguing: "It is worth pointing out that China has not closed its doors towards the possibility of joining TPP itself. If the Chinese government feels that the benefits of joining outweigh the costs, then China may indeed apply."

This is where the economic Pangloss and the political Machiavelli could actually combine, in a way that is – if Chinese communists will pardon such an old-fashioned expression – dialectical. The Widest West Web is a challenge to China, but it is also an incentive to China. If China were to decide that it wanted to join a network of proper free trade and investment areas, and actually play by the rules, and we were then to say no, we would be behaving almost as irresponsibly as European leaders did in 1914.

Our ultimate objective in this new great game must not be an EBC bloc. Rather, these free trade areas should all be seen as building blocks of a liberal international order that could include and embrace China. China would obviously then have a right to shape that order, alongside western powers, but its participation would also eventually help to move China domestically towards more openness, pluralism and rule of law, as desired by a growing number of its own people. Welcome to the dialectics of TAP and TPP.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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If Big Brother came back, he'd be a public-private partnership | Timothy Garton Ash

GCHQ and NSA mine data collected by private companies such as Google and Facebook. They have a duty of openness too

Edward Snowden's revelations about massive data-mining by American and British spying agencies show that most of the sources they are digging into are privately owned. Often they merely exploit the piles of revealing data that we have ourselves consented to share with the commercial giants of the IT world, usually by clicking the "I Agree" button on legal terms and conditions we never read. What our spooks collect directly, through undercover agents and the like, is a tiny proportion of what they gather electronically from these commercially owned sources. The conclusion is clear: were Big Brother to come back in the 21st century, he would return as a public-private partnership.

Almost the entire infrastructure of the electronically connected world is commercially run. Our motorways may be public property, but our information superhighways are privately owned. Thus, for example, the UK's Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Cheltenham apparently tapped into the super-capacity communications cables that pass through Britain on the basis of secret agreements with some of the companies that own them. According to reports in the Guardian and Washington Post, the Prism program of the National Security Agency (NSA) secured the co-operation of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

Companies such as these are interested in learning as much as possible about the people who use their products – but for their own purposes, not for the state. The acceptable reason they have for monitoring you and me so closely is to give us the best service. I like Google search coming up with the most relevant results for me. I like Amazon popping up with book suggestions because they are often rather good suggestions.

Yet there is also a more troubling reason. Especially if they do not charge you directly for the service they offer, many of these companies make their money by selling you to advertisers. The more they know about your habits, tastes and innermost desires, the better placed they are to offer you as a target for customised advertising. You search for pink panthers; next thing you know, ads pop up for pink panthers.

This commercial accumulation of intimate personal information is worrying in itself. The reassurance we are offered from Facebook, Google and others – "trust us" – is not good enough. After all, it now turns out they've been sharing some of it with the spooks. On the whole, I credit them with doing this unwillingly – although it is unsettling to learn that the former chief security officer for Facebook, Max Kelly, went on to work for the NSA.

I first smelled this rat a couple of years ago, when I talked with senior executives at Facebook and Twitter. They became visibly embarrassed when our conversation turned to the so-called Fisa (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) orders, under which they are compelled to turn over what they know about some individuals or groups to US security agencies. With a grimace, they said they were not allowed to give me even a ballpark figure for the number of Fisa orders they had received.

Several of the companies named in the reports have come back protesting that they had never heard of Prism, but offering figures for the total number of US law enforcement requests they received in the six months to the end of May, most of them apparently related to criminal rather than Fisa cases. Thus Uncle Sam demanded info on some 31,000 to 32,000 Microsoft users, 18,000-19,000 Facebook users, and up to 10,000 Apple accounts and devices. Is that a lot or a little? If the user is you, it's a lot. Yahoo makes its embarrassment explicit: "Like all companies, Yahoo! cannot lawfully break out Fisa request numbers at this time because those numbers are classified; however, we strongly urge the federal government to reconsider its stance on this issue."

Some readers will have stumbled over my subjunctive "were Big Brother to come back …"; "What do you mean, were?" they will exclaim. "Big Brother is back already, in the NSA and Facebook, Google and GCHQ." This is hyperbole. Yes, the quantity and intimacy of what the spooks and companies together know about you and me outstrip a Stasi general's wettest dream. That's already dangerous. But Britain and the US are not totalitarian states. We face a real threat of violence from diverse and elusive radicalised people, as the Boston Marathon bombings and the Woolwich murder of an off-duty soldier have again showed. They are harder to track than a Soviet nuclear arsenal.

Yet the UK and US governments cannot simply assert that the end of keeping us safe justifies the means. It is not sufficient for them to repeat that everything is done within the law – especially when the laws used, such as the UK's Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act, are made of stretchable old elastic. It is insulting for ministers to fob us off with "we never comment on intelligence matters".

Without telling terrorists anything they don't already know, the US government could, for example, perfectly well allow companies to reveal the number of Fisa orders they have complied with. As the admirably privacy-sensitive German government has insisted, the UK government owes us – not just Brits, but all other Europeans whose metadata it vacuumed up – a proper statement on GCHQ's seemingly gargantuan Tempora programme.

There are many operational details that we will always have to take on trust; but in a democracy it is ultimately for us, the citizens, to judge where to place the balance between security and privacy, safety and liberty. It's our lives and liberties that are threatened, not only by terrorism but also by massive depredations of our privacy in the name of counter-terrorism. If those companies from which governments actually take most of our intimate details want to show that they are still on the side of the angels, they had better join this struggle for transparency too. A good starting place would be to offer more transparency about the data they themselves collect on us. Our "right to know" does not only apply to governments.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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