Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 21

Europe must condemn Erdoğan, but without hubris or illusions | Timothy Garton Ash

Europe should support those who stand up for our shared values, but don't expect miracles from Turkish democracy

Another year, another country, another square: after Wenceslas in Prague, Independence in Kiev, Azadi in Tehran, Red in Moscow and Tahrir in Cairo, there's now Taksim in Istanbul. Each square reaches the world through totemic photographic images. In Istanbul it is that young woman in a red dress – Ceyda Sungur, a young academic at the city's technical university – being sprayed with tear gas at close quarters by a riot policeman. The national symbols, flags and colours change – green in Iran, orange in Kiev, red in Istanbul – but the essence of the image is the same. A young, modern, urban, probably secular young woman faces the armed, helmeted, faceless man. He represents the forces of reaction, authoritarianism and domination, whether in the service of the ayatollahs, President Vladimir Putin, or this would-be sultan, the Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

We see this iconography of peaceful protest, and we know at once where we stand. We stand with them. They are our people; we are their people. Influenced by the suggestive power of the visual images selected by television and newspaper picture editors, and by the spontaneous group preferences of social media, we somehow half-consciously feel it is the same long struggle.

In one way, this feeling is not entirely wrong. All over the world there is now a kind of Fifth International of young, better-educated, mainly urban men and women who recognise and relate to each other everywhere from Shanghai to Caracas and Tehran to Moscow. Like the generation of 1968, but this time across the globe, they have something in common. That's partly because they move around a lot, live and are educated in several places. Here in Berlin I've just watched a Turkish-German or German-Turkish student called Ebru Dursun, who participated in the protests, calmly explain to television viewers in impeccable German what is going on, and to what protesters like her aspire.

In another way, this feeling can lead us dangerously astray. Each of these squares marks a different moment, in a very different context – and the outcomes have been starkly contrasting too. On Taksim Square – until it was brutally cleared by water cannon, tear gas and baton-wielding police – there were also people from the country's Alevi minority, "anti-capitalist Muslims", football fans from three rival clubs, Sufis, anarchists and yogis. All were united in one cause: to stop Erdoğan becoming the new sultan, were he to take over next year as a strengthened, executive president.

When the prime minister returned to Turkey from a foreign trip, he mounted his double-decker bus and declaimed to his supporters: "From here I greet Istanbul's sister cities, Sarajevo, Baku, Beirut, Cairo, Skopje, Baghdad, Damascus, Gaza, Ramallah, Mecca and Medina." Phew. Most political leaders succumb to hubris after more than 10 years in power. Erdoğan, always an authoritarian personality, has done the same since his re-election in 2011, after which he cast aside his more independent-minded advisers: but this is hubris on a grand scale. One result is already certain: even if he stays in power, his international reputation will never recover. Ranting about "an end to tolerance", "vandals", "provocateurs" and "terrorists", he has gone from being a regional beacon of hope to a symbol of fear.

We must also be clear what this was not. An improvised sign in what demonstrators called "Resistanbul" read "Now Tahrir is Taksim". But Taksim was never Tahrir, let alone Tiananmen, because Turkey is not a dictatorship. It is an electoral democracy: a very imperfect democracy, to be sure, with an eroded rule of law, inadequate minority rights, and an intimidated or manipulated mass media – Turkey has imprisoned more journalists than China – but still a democracy. And in the last election, Erdoğan won 50% of the popular vote.

The other thing this definitely is not is what Erdoğan darkly suggests it is: some kind of a western plot. The protesters we like to focus our cameras on may embrace what we regard as western and European values, but not as a result of any western or European policy. Ten years ago, when people in Turkey still believed that the European Union seriously meant its promise of negotiations leading to Turkish membership, one could view such manifestations as part of a larger national journey towards Europe. But now that belief in the magnetic promise of EU membership has largely faded. So Turks are plainly embracing those values in and for themselves – not as the means to any geopolitical or economic end. In a backhanded way this can be seen as a good thing. This is then a Turkish battle for Turkish freedoms, nothing more, nothing less.

Last week I asked an astute Turkish political observer, fresh from Istanbul, what European leaders should say in response to Taksim. His answer was: nothing. Leave it to the Turks. I agreed with him then, but I cannot now. Faced with such arrogant bullying of his own people by Erdoğan, European leaders must speak out – even if, as happened to the EU enlargement commissioner Stefan Füle, the Turkish leader pulls off his simultaneous interpretation headphones while the message is being delivered.

Yet we have to strike a balance. We need to show complete solidarity with those who are standing up for values we share, with those young women in the photos whom we instinctively recognise as "us". Among them are quite a few who are, in fact, also "us" in the narrower sense of living at least part of the time in Europe and being European citizens.

At the same time, we have to acknowledge that they did not win the last election and are unlikely to win the next one. Politically, a realistic outcome is that the current president Abdullah Gül and his now more moderate tendency in the ruling party could gain the upper hand. Even in a more genuinely liberal democracy, the Turkish model would not be some French republic in the eastern Mediterranean. It would, in the best case, combine secularism and democracy with recognition of Islam as the religion of the majority. As such, it could again become a magnet for much of the wider Middle East, as well as a serious candidate for membership of the European Union. If Turkey moves in that direction over the next few years, partly as a result of this Taksim moment, the tear-gassed protesters will not have cried in vain.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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After Woolwich, don't ban hate speech, counter it. Hate it, too | Timothy Garton Ash

Facing Islamist violence, the British home secretary, like her counterparts in Europe, wrongly reaches for censorship

In response to the vile murder of a British soldier by two Islamist extremists armed with meat cleavers, the home secretary, Theresa May, has suggested a broadcasting ban on people who hold "disgusting views" and the pre-censorship of online hate speech. We face a real threat of violence here, as do other European countries. Another Islamist extremist was arrested in France and has admitted to stabbing a French soldier. But this is not the way to reduce that threat. What May proposes is impractical, illiberal, short-sighted and counter-productive. It would curb a vital freedom without enhancing our security. Her suggestion should be consigned to the dustbin of hysteria.

Incitement to violence is a criminal offence in all liberal jurisdictions, including our own. Our lawmakers and judges need to keep under constant review what, in the transformed circumstances of the internet age, constitutes such incitement. But generalised pre-censorship of "disgusting views" at the behest of an interior minister would start us down a very slippery slope.

To entrust our freedom of expression to the Home Office is like putting your aching tooth in the tender care of a road-mender wielding a waist-high pneumatic drill. This is the same department that, under a Labour home secretary, arbitrarily banned a whole list of people from entering this country because they would "foster extremist views". The list included the US radio host Michael Savage. As if the nation of John Milton and John Stuart Mill were incapable of seeing through and seeing off some crude, ranting shock jock by the strength of our own wits and the vigour of our own language.

The home secretary will reply that she wants to place the blocking duty not with her own bureaucratic enforcers but with Ofcom, the public regulator of broadcasting. Ofcom already has considerable powers to sanction broadcasters who violate its carefully drawn editorial standards, and it uses those powers independently, scrupulously and well. But now a state regulator is to pre-censor editorial content, at the bidding of an interior minister, in the name of defending public security and fighting terrorism? Where we have seen that before? Egypt. China. Russia. Welcome to the club. And this, by the way, from a Conservative party so frightened of our press barons that it continues to let them ravage the private lives of ordinary, innocent Britons, in the interest solely of prurience for profit – most recently, contributing to the suicide of a sex-change schoolteacher who was exposed to what a coroner called "character assassination" in the popular press – without even the minimal structure of press regulation that is plainly needed.

May's proposed ban is impractical. If it didn't work in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher tried to stop Sinn Féin/IRA spokespeople breathing the "oxygen of publicity" on terrestrial television, how much less will it work today – when publicity-hungry Islamist provocateurs like Anjem Choudary can just go off and post their videos on YouTube. So, says our knee-jerk home secretary, we should consider getting Google and YouTube, as well as the broadcasters, to block such footage in advance. Now not everything that Google does is good, whether on tax, competition or privacy, but to impose on it the editorial obligation to pre-screen everything going up on YouTube would destroy something incredibly valuable: an unprecedented ability to speak directly to one another, across oceans and continents.

Moreover, censorship would be counter-productive. Jack Straw, a former Labour home secretary, says the 1980s partial ban on Sinn Féin/IRA spokespeople (whose statements were, ludicrously, voiced over by actors) was "a great recruiting sergeant for them". So it would be for today's venomous extremists. They would like nothing more than to be banned. They are gagging to be gagged. Then they can pose as martyrs – martyrs of the Islamophobic west, martyrs for free speech.

No, the way to fight these preachers of violent extremism is not to ban them but to take them on, in every medium. Editorial judgments must be made – by editors, not by interior ministers. I think the BBC and Channel 4 are probably wrong to have media-savvy extremists like Choudary on screen in formats that in any way suggest they might be legitimate participants in a civilised national debate. It would, however, be absolutely right for journalists to film and interview him as part of an investigative report on how a young British-born man came to be convinced that he should butcher a British soldier in the name of Allah. The London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue has started some interesting work on how you can counter extremist narratives online with other online narratives and tools.

Finally, in the footsteps of Edmund Burke, I want to put in a good word for hate. It is as foolish and futile to try to criminalise a whole emotion as it is to aspire to defeat one in a war. (The "war on terror".) Moreover, as that great British Conservative thinker pointed out, some hate is healthy. "They will never love where they ought to love," wrote Burke, "who do not hate where they ought to hate." I hate the violent Islamist ideology that poisoned that young man's mind. I hate fascism. I hate oppression of all kinds. I hate humbug. I hate sloppy thinking. And, in the cause of these good hatreds, I warn against the superficial, short-sighted, counter-productive "something must be done" knee-jerk reactions of home secretaries who end up eroding our freedom in the name of defending it.

• Comments on this thread will be premoderated for legal reasons

• Twitter: @fromTGA

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The flight paths of Britain and Poland diverge in a disunited Europe | Timothy Garton Ash

Poland is eyeing a place in the group of leading EU nations just as Britain seems to be leaving

Like two Spitfires tipping their wings in the sky, Britain and Poland are beginning to fly in different directions. The Polish pilot is heading for Berlin, not to strafe it but to join it. The British pilot is steering out into the Atlantic. Their old friendship is strained. Each country's choice is influenced as much by history, politics and emotion as it is by any cool calculation of self-interest. Both flight paths carry risks that the pilots may not see clearly enough from the cockpit – and both may yet change course.

The tensions became apparent at a sometimes emotional meeting of the Polish-British Round Table in Krakow last week, very different in tone from the shared optimism of our first encounter in Poland's former royal capital six years ago. A Polish participant said "our friendship is getting harder these days" and deplored the British government's "transactional approach" to the EU. A British politician wondered why the Poles were not more grateful for everything the United Kingdom had done for them – including Tony Blair's extraordinary opening of the British labour market to what turned out to be up to a million Poles. (Polish is now the most-spoken foreign language in Britain.)

Yes, replied a Polish politician, that helped when there was high unemployment in Poland and a Polish referendum on joining the European Union. But Britain had no right to expect eternal gratitude – and not everything Britain had done in history had been so positive for Poland. (The word "Yalta" was not spoken, except by me in a whisper, but hung heavy in the Polish air.) And after all, it was a British statesman, Lord Palmerston, who said that Britain has no eternal allies, only eternal interests. Poland, too.

But you will be worse off without us, cried the Brits. Asked one: "Do you want to be left alone … I don't want to use the phrase … at the mercy of Germany?" To which a Polish participant replied: "If the UK leaves, it's not the German demons we're afraid of – it's the Southerners, the French demons …" For Poland wants to be part of a strong, disciplined northern Europe. Having escaped from Soviet-dominated eastern Europe and reinvented itself as part of central Europe, Poland now sometimes speaks of itself as a north European country.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday night, 130 members of the British House of Commons voted to express their regret that prime minister David Cameron's commitment to a 2017 referendum on Britain's membership in the EU will not be set in the stone of law during this parliamentary session; 114 of the rebels were Cameron's own backbenchers. "Very well, alone!" they cry, like the British soldier standing atop the white cliffs of Dover in a famous 1940 cartoon. And now such a law will be proposed as a private member's bill by a Tory backbencher, with full support from the Conservative party.Britain's "Island Story" will, they insist, be carried forward much better if we Brits are freed from the shackles binding us to a sclerotic continent and sick eurozone. Contrast the latest US growth figures with those for the eurozone. There is a whole world of dynamic, emerging economies out there, which post-imperial Britain, speaking the world language of English, is well-placed to embrace. Remarkably, two big-hitting former Conservative cabinet ministers, Nigel Lawson, who as chancellor of the exchequer wanted to bring Britain closer to the European monetary system, and the half-Spanish Michael Portillo, have already said they would for Britain to leave the EU in an in-or-out referendum.

By contrast, Poland's current government will do everything it can to be at the very heart of Europe. Here too, history and emotion play a large role. After decades of being cut off from the west by the iron curtain, and centuries of feeling itself to be on the periphery of the ancient Carolingian core of Europe – "a suburb of Europe", as the Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki titled his book about 19th-century Polish attitudes to western civilisation – the Poles want to seize their chance to be in the hard core at last. And if that means being part of a German Europe, well, so be it. For anyone who knows Poland's 20th-century history – Krakow's buildings are replete with memorial tablets to those who died under the Nazi occupation, and Auschwitz is just down the road – this is amazing.

It is also explicable. Poland's elites judge Germany's economic model to be a lot more solid than Britain's. A quarter of the country's trade is with Germany. Germany is a powerful friend in the EU. Berlin also contributes most to an EU budget from which Poland is – and, under the seven-year deal agreed in February, will continue to be – by far the largest single beneficiary. History, shmistory: getting a load of money from Brussels certainly helps a nation to love the EU. And the very fact that past enemies have become partners generates a positive emotional charge, in a way that the old but neglected friendship with Britain does not.

So while the British-educated Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski calls for more German leadership in the eurozone, he says that Britain is a country of "special concern". (The Polish phrase sounds almost like "special needs", as used of children with learning difficulties.) And he argues that if Poland gets into the eurozone, it could be part of a leading group of three to five countries from which Britain is currently resiling itself.

Yet the fact that planes tip their wings in opposite directions does not mean they will forever continue on diverging flight paths. Most Poles like their country's membership of the EU but only one in three of them currently wants it to join the euro. Polish experts have learned from the examples of Spain and Italy that you have to be very well prepared before you join that club. If Germany does the necessary to enable the eurozone to grow again, I think Poland will be right to join – but it will take many more years and tough, careful preparation. (At our first Krakow meeting, in 2008, we were told Poland's target date for euro membership was – er – 2012.)

Meanwhile, as the British debate gets slightly more real, the risks of leaving the EU become more apparent. It is already extraordinary that so much euro-denominated financial business is done outside the euro currency area, in London. The chairman of TheCityUK, representing Britain's financial services industry, says the idea that the City could thrive outside the EU is "poppycock".

So maybe the British and Polish Spitfires will end up flying in roughly the same direction after all, albeit at different ends of a rather widely spread squadron, and with a friendly Messerschmitt inbetween.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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The flight paths of Britain and Poland diverge in a disunited Europe | Timothy Garton Ash

Poland is eyeing a place in the group of leading EU nations just as Britain seems to be leaving

Like two Spitfires tipping their wings in the sky, Britain and Poland are beginning to fly in different directions. The Polish pilot is heading for Berlin, not to strafe it but to join it. The British pilot is steering out into the Atlantic. Their old friendship is strained. Each country's choice is influenced as much by history, politics and emotion as it is by any cool calculation of self-interest. Both flight paths carry risks that the pilots may not see clearly enough from the cockpit – and both may yet change course.

The tensions became apparent at a sometimes emotional meeting of the Polish-British Round Table in Krakow last week, very different in tone from the shared optimism of our first encounter in Poland's former royal capital six years ago. A Polish participant said "our friendship is getting harder these days" and deplored the British government's "transactional approach" to the EU. A British politician wondered why the Poles were not more grateful for everything the United Kingdom had done for them – including Tony Blair's extraordinary opening of the British labour market to what turned out to be up to a million Poles. (Polish is now the most-spoken foreign language in Britain.)

Yes, replied a Polish politician, that helped when there was high unemployment in Poland and a Polish referendum on joining the European Union. But Britain had no right to expect eternal gratitude – and not everything Britain had done in history had been so positive for Poland. (The word "Yalta" was not spoken, except by me in a whisper, but hung heavy in the Polish air.) And after all, it was a British statesman, Lord Palmerston, who said that Britain has no eternal allies, only eternal interests. Poland, too.

But you will be worse off without us, cried the Brits. Asked one: "Do you want to be left alone … I don't want to use the phrase … at the mercy of Germany?" To which a Polish participant replied: "If the UK leaves, it's not the German demons we're afraid of – it's the Southerners, the French demons …" For Poland wants to be part of a strong, disciplined northern Europe. Having escaped from Soviet-dominated eastern Europe and reinvented itself as part of central Europe, Poland now sometimes speaks of itself as a north European country.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday night, 130 members of the British House of Commons voted to express their regret that prime minister David Cameron's commitment to a 2017 referendum on Britain's membership in the EU will not be set in the stone of law during this parliamentary session; 114 of the rebels were Cameron's own backbenchers. "Very well, alone!" they cry, like the British soldier standing atop the white cliffs of Dover in a famous 1940 cartoon. And now such a law will be proposed as a private member's bill by a Tory backbencher, with full support from the Conservative party.Britain's "Island Story" will, they insist, be carried forward much better if we Brits are freed from the shackles binding us to a sclerotic continent and sick eurozone. Contrast the latest US growth figures with those for the eurozone. There is a whole world of dynamic, emerging economies out there, which post-imperial Britain, speaking the world language of English, is well-placed to embrace. Remarkably, two big-hitting former Conservative cabinet ministers, Nigel Lawson, who as chancellor of the exchequer wanted to bring Britain closer to the European monetary system, and the half-Spanish Michael Portillo, have already said they would for Britain to leave the EU in an in-or-out referendum.

By contrast, Poland's current government will do everything it can to be at the very heart of Europe. Here too, history and emotion play a large role. After decades of being cut off from the west by the iron curtain, and centuries of feeling itself to be on the periphery of the ancient Carolingian core of Europe – "a suburb of Europe", as the Polish historian Jerzy Jedlicki titled his book about 19th-century Polish attitudes to western civilisation – the Poles want to seize their chance to be in the hard core at last. And if that means being part of a German Europe, well, so be it. For anyone who knows Poland's 20th-century history – Krakow's buildings are replete with memorial tablets to those who died under the Nazi occupation, and Auschwitz is just down the road – this is amazing.

It is also explicable. Poland's elites judge Germany's economic model to be a lot more solid than Britain's. A quarter of the country's trade is with Germany. Germany is a powerful friend in the EU. Berlin also contributes most to an EU budget from which Poland is – and, under the seven-year deal agreed in February, will continue to be – by far the largest single beneficiary. History, shmistory: getting a load of money from Brussels certainly helps a nation to love the EU. And the very fact that past enemies have become partners generates a positive emotional charge, in a way that the old but neglected friendship with Britain does not.

So while the British-educated Polish foreign minister Radek Sikorski calls for more German leadership in the eurozone, he says that Britain is a country of "special concern". (The Polish phrase sounds almost like "special needs", as used of children with learning difficulties.) And he argues that if Poland gets into the eurozone, it could be part of a leading group of three to five countries from which Britain is currently resiling itself.

Yet the fact that planes tip their wings in opposite directions does not mean they will forever continue on diverging flight paths. Most Poles like their country's membership of the EU but only one in three of them currently wants it to join the euro. Polish experts have learned from the examples of Spain and Italy that you have to be very well prepared before you join that club. If Germany does the necessary to enable the eurozone to grow again, I think Poland will be right to join – but it will take many more years and tough, careful preparation. (At our first Krakow meeting, in 2008, we were told Poland's target date for euro membership was – er – 2012.)

Meanwhile, as the British debate gets slightly more real, the risks of leaving the EU become more apparent. It is already extraordinary that so much euro-denominated financial business is done outside the euro currency area, in London. The chairman of TheCityUK, representing Britain's financial services industry, says the idea that the City could thrive outside the EU is "poppycock".

So maybe the British and Polish Spitfires will end up flying in roughly the same direction after all, albeit at different ends of a rather widely spread squadron, and with a friendly Messerschmitt inbetween.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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We glimpse in Syria the ghost of wars to come | Timothy Garton Ash

In the Balkans, outsiders stepped in to finally halt the misery. But this is a different kind of conflict

'Never again!" we cry. After the second world war. After Rwanda. After Bosnia. Then it happens again. And again. According to the latest estimates, close to 70,000 people have died in Syria's raging civil and proxy war, with more than 4 million Syrians needing humanitarian assistance, some 2 million internally displaced and perhaps as many as 1.5 million refugees outside the country. Unicef says the needy and displaced include nearly 3 million children. Already, this is one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies in recent times. If it is not stopped, those numbers are expected to rise rapidly. Soon we will have Somalia on the Mediterranean.

The population of Syria when this armed conflict started in 2011 was roughly that of Yugoslavia when its wars began in 1991: some 23 million. Over the subsequent decade of the Yugoslavian wars, more than 100,000 people died and some 4 million were displaced. In just two years, Syria is approaching the harvest of misery for which former Yugoslavia needed 10.

So why isn't the word "Syria" on all our lips? Twenty years ago, in 1993, everyone was talking about Bosnia. Ten years ago, in 2003, everyone was talking about Iraq.

Meanwhile, we have a UN-sanctioned doctrine of the "responsibility to protect", in response to what happened in Yugoslavia and Rwanda. If the responsibility to protect does not apply to the man-made humanitarian catastrophe in Syria, where does it apply?

And then, prompted by the encouraging news about a deal between Serbia and Kosovo – painstakingly brokered by the EU's foreign policy high representative, Catherine Ashton – an unsettling thought intrudes: how different would things be if Syria were in Europe and Serbia in the Middle East?

At the most shameful, this would suggest that for Europeans an Arab life is not worth as much as a European one. Not to mention an African life: even if the figure of 5.4 million dead since 1998 as a result of armed conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is an overestimate, all these other wars pale by comparison. Whether or not a kind of subconscious racism is at play here, it clearly did make a difference that the people dying in former Yugoslavia were Europeans, while in Iraq many western countries had their own soldiers on the ground.

A more honourable explanation of the asymmetry of concern between Serbia and Syria is that Europe, after plunging everyone else into two world wars, has defined itself as a continent of peace. So war and attempted genocide happening on European soil challenged its own core narrative and identity. We, in the rest of Europe, still allowed other Europeans to die and lose their homes in large numbers, while our so called leaders pathetically intoned that "the hour of Europe has come" – but at least we cared.

Syria is, as the phrase goes, a faraway country of which we know nothing. Our own men and women are not dying there – except for some brave war correspondents and, as recently reported, a few European jihadis and adventure-seekers. But there's another reason we are not swept up in the kind of passionate popular debate that we had about Bosnia and Iraq: nobody knows what to do about it.

In Bosnia we tipped the scales of armed conflict between Croats, Serbs and Bosniaks, then brought all the parties to negotiate a rough-and-ready settlement based on accepting ethnic division. In Kosovo we applied direct force, by air and land, to secure a peace based on even more far-reaching ethnic division. Thirteen years on, the still embryonic rapprochement between Serbia and Kosovo civilises that division, European style, helped by the large incentive of eventual membership of the European Union.

Some, especially in America, Britain and France, are tempted by the notion that, if we allow the EU arms embargo on Syria to lapse in mid-May, we could tip the balance in favour of the rebels – correction: of the right rebels, not the nasty, al-Qaida-connected ones. We could then broker a negotiated transition to a new, post-Assad Syria. Julien Barnes-Dacey of the European Council on Foreign Relations argues that this is unlikely. Not only will Assad continue to fight furiously. Not only will he have support from the country's Alawite, Christian, Shia and Druze minorities, against an opposition now overwhelmingly identified with Sunni Islam. Most important, he will have backing from outside powers, above all Iran, which feels that its own future is at stake. Probably the war could be won for the rebels by a full aerial assault and foreign troops on the ground. But then, "if you break it, you own it". Up for a new Iraq, anyone?

Yet, while we must await the details of his proposal, the radical alternative that Barnes-Dacey has sketched out – a de-escalation negotiated between all the external powers involved, who would agree to turn off, rather than increase, the flow of arms, and urge all their proteges on the ground to negotiate a political compromise – seems equally unlikely to succeed.

I fear the truth is that Syria may be a harbinger of things to come. In the former Yugoslavia there was the overwhelming presence of one set of like-minded powers: Europe and the west. Russia was a countervailing force, as was China to a lesser degree, but neither felt its vital national interests were at stake in Serbia – whereas many outside powers do in Syria. And still it took 10 years, more than 100,000 dead and millions uprooted, before we reached an untidy peace.

In a no-polar or G-Zero world – with multiple competing powers, both global and regional, having an interest in a fractured country – such civil and proxy wars become more difficult to stop. Starting 100 years ago, with the Balkan wars that fed into the first world war, the 20th century became the bloodiest in human history.

Unless we develop new ways of conflict resolution, strong enough to constrain this new world disorder, the 21st century may be bloodier yet.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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The Panorama North Korea row is a storm in a British teacup | Timothy Garton Ash

Neither the LSE nor the BBC's John Sweeney come well out of this affair. Still, academics and journalists need each other

It's a good thing the BBC did not send its undercover reporter to North Korea with a group of students from Oxford University. Otherwise Oxford's chancellor, Chris Patten, would have had to send a strongly worded letter of protest to the chairman of the BBC Trust, Chris Patten. "I cannot understand how you could allow …"

I refer, of course, to the row about journalist John Sweeney travelling to North Korea with a group of students from the London School of Economics on undercover assignment for the BBC's Panorama. Compared with working out if there is a real threat of nuclear war from the world's last full-dress totalitarian state, this may seem like a storm in a British teacup. But it prompts us to reflect on how we can discover what nasty, secretive regimes are up to, without sacrificing our own values and endangering others along the way.

As someone who has spent a good chunk of his life trying to do just that, in journalism and in academia, I've been interested in responses on both sides of the academia-journalism fence. I start from a strong sympathy with the undercover reporter. We owe no duty of honesty to tyrants. There is nothing to compare with being there, on the spot. The first article I ever published was a report based on joining a "Progressive Tour" to Albania, then suffering under a totalitarian regime with a strong resemblance to today's North Korea. If Sweeney had embedded himself in one of the tours that travel regularly to North Korea, as other journalists have, he would deserve only praise. But he didn't, and no one comes out of this story very well.

The LSE had legitimate grounds for concern. It seems that a few of those on the trip had not been told about their journalistic accompaniment. The students subsequently received bullying emails from a North Korean official, threatening to publish their "personal data" because they had broken North Korean law. If any of them wanted to pursue an academic career in North Korean studies, this would not be a good start. But the LSE's highly public reaction was over the top, and arguably counterproductive.

The BBC's expert prior assessment, which concluded that the students risked at most brief detention and expulsion, was probably about right. The LSE made virtually no acknowledgement of the genuine public interest in such a journalistic investigation. Its call for the programme not to be broadcast at all was ridiculous. Its thermonuclear response must draw the attention of every authoritarian regime to the journalistic worm that might be hidden in any LSE study group. A strong private protest to the BBC would have been best.

The BBC exhibited that proclivity for weak and contorted compromise that seems to be a hallmark of its recent management. If it had got written, informed consent from everyone on the trip, as its own editorial guidelines suggest, then no reasonable person could have complained. "Students are adults, after all," as a former head of Oxford's department of politics and international relations exclaimed. Instead, most of them seem to have been partially informed, apparently in individual conversations with the reporter's wife (an LSE alumna, who was organising the trip) and the cameraman. But even those students were not fully informed – for their own protection, BBC managers said.

This is inconsistent and silly. It's the same muddled management style which led to only a tiny clip from Ding Dong! The Witch is Dead, virally promoted online as a posthumous insult to Margaret Thatcher, being played on Radio 1's chart show, together with a spoken explanation of the background. For God's sake, Auntie, make up your mind. Either play the bloody song or don't. Either get the students' consent or don't.

As for Sweeney Agonistes, one can see why the fact that his wife was organising this trip for an LSE student society was tempting. But a whizz around the BBC website reveals a story posted just five days before the Panorama broadcast, explaining the possibilities of tourism to North Korea. One satisfied customer describes himself as an "adventure tourist". An expert on Pyongyang's nuclear programme tells me that when he spoke at a foreign correspondents' club in London, half the journalists in the room seemed to have visited North Korea on such tours.

Moreover, the value added by the Panorama programme did not match its hype. It was interesting to see what foreigners are shown – a chilly model hospital with no patients, for example – and a few blurry glimpses of what they are not shown: the miserable poor, squatting in ditches. But most of the real insights came from experts and defectors interviewed outside the country. "So, welcome to the real North Korea" declared Sweeney dramatically, standing inside a barbed wire fence apparently built to keep ordinary people away from his tour group's hotel. Cut to a long-distance shot of some miserable-looking apartment buildings. But he wasn't in the real North Korea; he was in a Potemkin village inn. Back in downtown Pyongyang, he teetered over the edge into self-parody, intoning "something's going on … you can feel the tension rising. The problem is, it's impossible for us to ask what's really happening. We don't know."

Contrast this with Barbara Demick's book Nothing to Envy, which carefully and movingly tells the personal stories of six North Koreans, based on extensive interviews and all other available sources. Demick, a journalist with a decade's experience in the region, makes extensive acknowledgement to fellow correspondents, academics and experts of all kinds. The result is a fantastic book, which gives us some of the truth that North Korea's progressive tour guides are paid to hide. Moral of the story? It's precisely in those secretive, nasty places that real knowledge only comes from years of hard work by journalists and academics alike, sharing the fruits of their complementary crafts.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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The euro survives, but where are the Europeans? | Timothy Garton Ash

The downward spiral of mutual resentment is caused by the mismatch of one currency area and 17 democratic nations

'We have made Italy, now we must make Italians" – thus the old saying. Today we have made the euro and the crisis of the euro is unmaking Europeans. People who felt enthusiastically European 10 years ago are reverting to angry national stereotypes.

"Hitler-Merkel" said a banner carried by young Cypriot protesters earlier this week. Next to those words there was an image of the European flag, its yellow stars on a blue background now angrily crossed out in red. Sweeping negative generalisations are heard about "north" and "south" Europeans, almost as if these were two different species. Yet what historian could seriously maintain that Milan has more in common with Nicosia than it does with Nice or Geneva? Even highly educated pro-Europeans say things in public about other nations that a decade ago they would not even have thought, let alone expressed. As parts of Europe became more anti-German so parts of Germany became more anti-European. A vicious spiral looms into view, like a twister on a rural highway in the American midwest.

We should note with relief what has not happened – or at least not for the most part and not yet. With the exception of neofascist parties such as Golden Dawn in Greece, European rage has not been turned against immigrants, minorities, and imagined fifth columns. Germans do not blame their woes on rootless Jews, Muslims or freemasons; they blame them on feckless Greeks. Greeks do not blame their woes on rootless Jews, Muslims or freemasons; they blame them on heartless Germans.

Nonetheless, this is bloody dangerous. To be sure, 2013 is not 1913. Germany may be calling the shots in the eurozone, but it never sought this place in the sun. The German people were never asked if they wanted to give up the deutschmark – the answer would have been "no" – and roughly one in three of them now say they would like to return to it. In saying this, they profoundly misunderstand their own national economic interest, but that's another story.

The EU as a whole is the most reluctant empire in European history, and Germany is a reluctant empire within this reluctant empire. The risk of interstate war in EU Europe is tiny. (The 1913 analogy is more applicable to Asia today, with China taking the part of Wilhelmine Germany.) There is, however, a real danger that the bonds of sentiment and fellow-feeling essential to any political community are being rent asunder.

Remember that for countries like Cyprus the worst is yet to come. I hesitate even to raise the spectre – to "paint the devil on the wall", as one says in German – but what if some unemployed and mentally unbalanced Greek or Cypriot youth were to take a pot shot at a German politician? With luck, the shock would cool the overheated rhetoric and bring all Europeans together. But we should not wait until a shot rings out.

Why are we in this downward spiral of mutual resentment? Because of the basic design flaws of the euro, certainly. Also because of mistaken economic policies in some of the so-called peripheral countries of the eurozone and – more recently – in the northern core. (As I explained in this column a fortnight ago, the big problem with German policy is not what it asks others to do but what it does not do itself. It should help adjustment across the eurozone by boosting its own domestic demand.) Meanwhile, each short-term eurozone fix sows the seeds of another eurozone crisis. Thus, for example, a 50% haircut for holders of Greek government bonds, agreed in autumn 2011, helped topple Cypriot banks into the abyss.

Yet the deepest cause is the mismatch between a single currency area and 17 national polities. The economics are continental, the politics are still national. What is more, those politics are democratic. If this is not 1913 it is also not the 1930s. Instead of the "Europe of the dictators" we have a Europe of democracies. Instead of Trotsky's "permanent revolution", we have permanent elections. Some leader somewhere in Europe is always having to trim the jib and pull in the mainsail because of an imminent vote. This year, it happens to be Angela Merkel, whose general election looms in September. Every one of the eurozone's 17 and the EU's 27 national leaders thinks first of their national politics, media and opinion polls. Tempting though it is to say: "We have made Europe, now we must make Europeans," the truth is that in this respect we have not made Europe.

So what is to be done about these politics? An ingenious Italian professor, Giorgio Basevi of Bologna University, recently sent me a proposal for alleviating the problem by synchronising national and European elections. It's a brilliant idea and, of course, a total nonstarter. Tell that to the electorates of Europe! Others suggest that the next president of the European commission should be directly elected, perhaps with candidates nominated by each of the main party groupings in the European parliament. Well, why not? But if you think this will make unemployed Greeks and resentful Germans suddenly become all warmly pro-European again, you need your head examined.

For now, there is simply no substitute for national politicians going against the wind of their national public opinions to explain, in their own national languages and idioms, that – according to place and need – Greeks are not all feckless spendthrifts, Germans are not all heartless Teutons, and so on. They it is who must seize every opportunity to enlarge on why, even if we are cold and wet in the European boat, we would be even colder and wetter in the water.

And if it takes a new enemy? As an ethnic scapegoat acceptable to almost all continental Europeans I would usually be happy to suggest my sterling compatriots, the English. (We are used to it. We can take it.) But whatever else you may load on the English, you can't blame them for the shemozzle of the eurozone.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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Germany has one last chance to really save the eurozone | Timothy Garton Ash

Europe's largest economy must try harder. It has far more to lose from a collapse than any other country in the union

'The crisis of the euro is over. Crisis in the euro is strong." Thus a senior French politician. A looming collapse in Cyprus, which eurozone leaders will discuss after the European Union summit dinner in Brussels tomorrow, may yet prove him wrong in a matter of days. My hunch, though, is that he is probably right, at least for a year or two.

Germany and the European Central Bank have done just enough to convince the markets that the eurozone will survive, for now. But many eurozone economies remain on the critical list. Some have made heroic efforts, with results already visible. In Spain, for instance, unit labour costs are already down and exports are at a 30-year high. The pain has been immense, with 50% youth unemployment and house prices falling between 30% and 40%, but somehow people are getting through it. This has had political spin-off effects – literally so, encouraging Catalans to want to spin off from the Spanish state – but in terms of conventional party politics, the centre has held. There has been very little xenophobic rhetoric and virtually no scapegoating of immigrants.

What has happened in Spain is remarkable testimony to the resilience of the European political mainstream, with its almost instinctive commitment to moderation, bound up in a deep-rooted desire to remain part of a larger European project. But for how long, oh Lord, how long? For how many more years can these societies endure such levels of socioeconomic stress before their democratic politics lurch to extremes?

We have seen the danger already with the electoral success of the ultra-nationalist, xenophobic and (for once, the label is justified) neo-fascist Golden Dawn party in Greece. Quite different in kind, but larger in its political impact, is the Italian political impasse, which results from voters being split between the comedian Beppe Grillo's protest movement, Silvio Berlusconi and the left, plus a smaller vote for Mario Monti's "Monti for Italy" grouping, with the votes breaking differently in the two houses of parliament. With a stalemate between the two chambers, reform is stymied in the eurozone's third largest economy.

Some of this was inevitable, but it has been made worse by human error in general and German error in particular. I can entirely understand German voters' initial angry reaction to being asked to bail out other Europeans who had been much less disciplined, hard-working and productive than them, in order to save a currency which the Germans never voted to join. (In bringing down its unit labour costs, Spain is doing, in an involuntary crash course, what Germany started doing a decade ago, on its own initiative.) I would have felt that way myself. I can understand Angela Merkel and her colleagues hanging tough.

But facts are stubborn things. When the facts change, or at least become clearer, policies must be adjusted accordingly. The duty of politicians in a well-functioning liberal democracy is to recognise those facts and then explain them to voters, not to string voters along with waffle and false promises. Here's an example: the so-called fiscal multipliers, that is, the impact on GDP of a cut (or increase) in public spending. In normal times, when most of the countries with which you do business are faring OK, this multiplier may be as low as 0.2 or 0.4 – that is, GDP declines by some 0.2-0.4% for every 1% you cut public spending. But when everyone around is in recession, the effect is dramatically increased.

This was the case in the Great Depression, as the Oxford economic historian Kevin O'Rourke and his collaborators have clearly established. It is the case again today, in our Great Recession, as the economists at the IMF, the EU and other institutions are now acknowledging. In conditions of all-round recession, the fiscal multipliers can soar above one, so a 1% cut in public spending may cause a 1.5% drop in GDP. That significantly alters the calculus of austerity.

Here's another fact, slightly larger and therefore more contestable, but still quite firm: the pain of adjustment has been born mainly by the southern European "periphery", not the north European "core". Yet it took two to create this mess. Blame the feckless borrower in the south but also the shortsighted lender in the north – for instance, in German banks. That leads to another, only slightly more speculative statement. Germany has more to lose than any other country from a collapse of the eurozone. One estimate puts its banks' exposure to Greek, Spanish, Portuguese and Irish debtors alone at about €400bn. The German government's own council of economic advisers last year assessed the maximum potential losses to German creditors in a eurozone breakup at €2.8 trillion, topping the country's €2.65trn annual GDP. Any successor currency, be it an old-new Deutschmark or a north European euro (the Nordo or Neuro), would have a less advantageous exchange rate for German exports.

Not from any Keynesian dogma, not from idealism, not from sentimentality towards fellow Europeans, but in its own enlightened national interest, Germany needs to do more. It should increase its domestic demand, support a strong banking union, and embrace something like its own economic advisers' proposal for a limited mutualisation of eurozone debt – with appropriately stringent conditions. In terms of the political economy of the whole eurozone or, perhaps more accurately, its economy-driven politics, the best moment to do this has passed. That was what we must now call the Monti Moment.

As prime minister, Monti was wrestling manfully to do the right thing in Italy, but also urging Germany to do its part. Having failed to grasp that moment, Germany has one more opening. Whoever emerges as chancellor in the German general election this September, in whatever coalition, needs to go that extra kilometre to save the eurozone properly, making sure that future euro-crises are never again "of" but only "in". What people call "the European elections" are scheduled for June 2014, but the truly decisive elections for Europe are all national – and none more so than Germany's.

It is, of course, pure coincidence that Germany faces this challenge as we approach the 100th anniversary of 1914; but it is a coincidence that also reveals a historic opportunity for constructive European leadership by the continent's central power. Go on, Germany, seize what Fritz Stern once called your historic "second chance", and use it well.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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Germany has one last chance to really save the eurozone | Timothy Garton Ash

Europe's largest economy must try harder. It has far more to lose from a collapse than any other country in the union

'The crisis of the euro is over. Crisis in the euro is strong." Thus a senior French politician. A looming collapse in Cyprus, which eurozone leaders will discuss after the European Union summit dinner in Brussels tomorrow, may yet prove him wrong in a matter of days. My hunch, though, is that he is probably right, at least for a year or two.

Germany and the European Central Bank have done just enough to convince the markets that the eurozone will survive, for now. But many eurozone economies remain on the critical list. Some have made heroic efforts, with results already visible. In Spain, for instance, unit labour costs are already down and exports are at a 30-year high. The pain has been immense, with 50% youth unemployment and house prices falling between 30% and 40%, but somehow people are getting through it. This has had political spin-off effects – literally so, encouraging Catalans to want to spin off from the Spanish state – but in terms of conventional party politics, the centre has held. There has been very little xenophobic rhetoric and virtually no scapegoating of immigrants.

What has happened in Spain is remarkable testimony to the resilience of the European political mainstream, with its almost instinctive commitment to moderation, bound up in a deep-rooted desire to remain part of a larger European project. But for how long, oh Lord, how long? For how many more years can these societies endure such levels of socioeconomic stress before their democratic politics lurch to extremes?

We have seen the danger already with the electoral success of the ultra-nationalist, xenophobic and (for once, the label is justified) neo-fascist Golden Dawn party in Greece. Quite different in kind, but larger in its political impact, is the Italian political impasse, which results from voters being split between the comedian Beppe Grillo's protest movement, Silvio Berlusconi and the left, plus a smaller vote for Mario Monti's "Monti for Italy" grouping, with the votes breaking differently in the two houses of parliament. With a stalemate between the two chambers, reform is stymied in the eurozone's third largest economy.

Some of this was inevitable, but it has been made worse by human error in general and German error in particular. I can entirely understand German voters' initial angry reaction to being asked to bail out other Europeans who had been much less disciplined, hard-working and productive than them, in order to save a currency which the Germans never voted to join. (In bringing down its unit labour costs, Spain is doing, in an involuntary crash course, what Germany started doing a decade ago, on its own initiative.) I would have felt that way myself. I can understand Angela Merkel and her colleagues hanging tough.

But facts are stubborn things. When the facts change, or at least become clearer, policies must be adjusted accordingly. The duty of politicians in a well-functioning liberal democracy is to recognise those facts and then explain them to voters, not to string voters along with waffle and false promises. Here's an example: the so-called fiscal multipliers, that is, the impact on GDP of a cut (or increase) in public spending. In normal times, when most of the countries with which you do business are faring OK, this multiplier may be as low as 0.2 or 0.4 – that is, GDP declines by some 0.2-0.4% for every 1% you cut public spending. But when everyone around is in recession, the effect is dramatically increased.

This was the case in the Great Depression, as the Oxford economic historian Kevin O'Rourke and his collaborators have clearly established. It is the case again today, in our Great Recession, as the economists at the IMF, the EU and other institutions are now acknowledging. In conditions of all-round recession, the fiscal multipliers can soar above one, so a 1% cut in public spending may cause a 1.5% drop in GDP. That significantly alters the calculus of austerity.

Here's another fact, slightly larger and therefore more contestable, but still quite firm: the pain of adjustment has been born mainly by the southern European "periphery", not the north European "core". Yet it took two to create this mess. Blame the feckless borrower in the south but also the shortsighted lender in the north – for instance, in German banks. That leads to another, only slightly more speculative statement. Germany has more to lose than any other country from a collapse of the eurozone. One estimate puts its banks' exposure to Greek, Spanish, Portuguese and Irish debtors alone at about €400bn. The German government's own council of economic advisers last year assessed the maximum potential losses to German creditors in a eurozone breakup at €2.8 trillion, topping the country's €2.65trn annual GDP. Any successor currency, be it an old-new Deutschmark or a north European euro (the Nordo or Neuro), would have a less advantageous exchange rate for German exports.

Not from any Keynesian dogma, not from idealism, not from sentimentality towards fellow Europeans, but in its own enlightened national interest, Germany needs to do more. It should increase its domestic demand, support a strong banking union, and embrace something like its own economic advisers' proposal for a limited mutualisation of eurozone debt – with appropriately stringent conditions. In terms of the political economy of the whole eurozone or, perhaps more accurately, its economy-driven politics, the best moment to do this has passed. That was what we must now call the Monti Moment.

As prime minister, Monti was wrestling manfully to do the right thing in Italy, but also urging Germany to do its part. Having failed to grasp that moment, Germany has one more opening. Whoever emerges as chancellor in the German general election this September, in whatever coalition, needs to go that extra kilometre to save the eurozone properly, making sure that future euro-crises are never again "of" but only "in". What people call "the European elections" are scheduled for June 2014, but the truly decisive elections for Europe are all national – and none more so than Germany's.

It is, of course, pure coincidence that Germany faces this challenge as we approach the 100th anniversary of 1914; but it is a coincidence that also reveals a historic opportunity for constructive European leadership by the continent's central power. Go on, Germany, seize what Fritz Stern once called your historic "second chance", and use it well.

Twitter: @fromTGA

Eurozone crisisEuropean UnionEuropean monetary unionEconomicsBankingEuropean banksEuroEuropeGermanyTimothy Garton Ash
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Is there a doctor in the house? | Timothy Garton Ash

Have a laugh at Germany's fetish for doctorates – and the ministers tripped up by it. But is the British title cult any better?

'Please tell me when I can call you Herr Doktor," said the white-haired waitress in the old-fashioned cafe on Güntzelstrasse in Berlin, as she served me my morning coffee. That was a lifetime ago, and she never got the pleasure because I never finished my Oxford doctoral thesis. But the German cult of academic titles, sweetly expressed in the old waitress's inquiry, has now claimed yet another top-level German political scalp.

Professor (ex-) Dr Annette Schavan, federal minister for education and research and one of Angela Merkel's closest cabinet allies, has resigned. An academic commission at her former university in Düsseldorf withdrew the doctoral title awarded for her 1980 thesis on the subject of "person and conscience" (irony upon irony), on the grounds that she had been – shall we say – somewhat unconscientious in not attributing passages to their original sources.

She is not the first. Two years ago, a rising star of the German right, the then defence minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, also had to resign on the grounds that he had plagiarised his doctoral dissertation. Since he is a baron, this earned him the unforgettable title Baron zu Googleberg. In between, two German members of the European parliament have also been stripped of their doctoral titles, thanks to online netizen hunts (Tally ho! What a jolly German sport) using a Wikipedia-like collaborative platform called VroniPlag.

I jest, but in Germany such titles are no laughing matter. According to research by my superb German assistant, until last week 10 out of 16 members of the German federal cabinet, obviously including Dr Merkel herself, had academic doctorates. Then there were nine. But now Dr Merkel has appointed another academic, Dr Johanna Wanka, as education minister, bringing the tally back up to 10. For comparison: so far as we can establish, just one out of 22 full members of the British cabinet admits to having an academic doctorate (Dr Vince Cable.) In Britain, a "proper doctor" means a medical doctor, even if they have long since stopped practising: Dr David Owen, Dr Liam Fox, Dr Evan Harris.

When Baron zu Googleberg fell from his high horse, the Economist reckoned that nearly one out of five members of the Bundestag, the lower house of Germany's parliament, had a doctorate, compared with roughly one in every 33 members of the then US Congress – and not a single US senator. A doctorate used to be almost an entry-level requirement for work on a prestigious broadsheet such as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. If you are then made a professor, you become Prof Dr, or often Prof Dr Dr; and, if you then acquire multiple honorary doctorates, you can be Prof Dr Dr h.c. mult. (for honoris causa multiplex). My favourite was the Hamburg conference panel badge I saw for Ralf Dahrendorf, the German-British liberal intellectual and politician. It read: Lord Prof Dr Dr Ralf Dahrendorf.

I had my own mildly ridiculous experience of this cult some years ago when, on account of some slight work I had done on German history and politics, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (indirect successor to Frederick the Great's Royal Academy of Sciences) kindly elected me to a fellowship. A form arrived asking, among other things, for my academic title. I replied, correctly at that time, "Mr". A polite letter came back, saying there must be some misunderstanding; they wanted my academic title. I wrote back: "Mr". A third letter arrived, saying in effect that this simply could not be, and I responded, in exasperated capitals, "MR".

The register of fellows arrived, and there I was, listed with the academic title MR, in capitals – MR clearly being an obscure Oxford academic title, perhaps some kind of ancient magisterium. The Prussian academic clerk's mind just could not accommodate the possibility that a fellow of a German academy would not possess at least one doctorate – if not three.

Of course, other countries have their own peculiar ways with titles. For example, my edition of the British Citizenship Test for Dummies, preparing people to take the test for becoming a British citizen, has this question: "Who is normally appointed a life peer? a) Ex-prime ministers, b) Church leaders, c) Distinguished politicians, business people or lawyers, d) People who make financial gifts to the government." According to the Dummies' guide, the correct answer is c). But the truth is that it would be equally accurate to say d) – elaborating slightly as "people who make large financial gifts to the parties in government (and preferably to some good causes as well)". That makes you a lord in Britain. It is, so to speak, the British form of plagiarism.

Are there any serious points to be taken from this rollicking German tale of vanishing doctorates? Yes, a few. First, the titles that a nation or a group esteem tell you something about that nation or group. (A joke from Weimar Berlin. Q: What's the most common Jewish first name? A: Doktor.) I find it hard to argue that Britain's hierarchy of political placeling and party donor peers is better than one that at least nominally values scholarship. Second, the internet makes it both easier to plagiarise and easier to be caught out plagiarising – even many years later.

Last, and far from least, academic standards do matter. It is a real disgrace that the London School of Economics awarded Saif Gaddafi a doctorate for a pile of global governance waffle that obviously wasn't all his own work. Having supervised and advised many students who work incredibly hard to get it right, be rigorous, learn and practise a discipline, argue clearly, consult and acknowledge all the relevant sources, I feel strongly that no one, however "distinguished", should be allowed to get away with cheating. When I say Frau Doktor or Herr Doktor to someone, I want it to mean something.

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