Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 22

Before Aung San Suu Kyi is crowned there are vital battles to be won | Timothy Garton Ash

Burma faces years of transition politics, peacemaking over ethnic conflicts and dealing with its people's poverty

By the old Shwedagon pagoda, lookin' lazy at the tourists, there stands the tall whitewashed tomb of Queen Supayalat, immortalised by Rudyard Kipling in his lines about a beautiful "Burma girl" whose "name was Supi-Yaw-Lat – jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen". On one side of "Her Late Majesty, Chief Queen Suphayalatt" I find a memorial to U Thant, the former UN secretary-general; on the other, that to ambassador Khin Kyi, widow of this country's independence hero, general Aung San, and a formidable figure in her own right. One day there will be a monument somewhere hereabouts to their even more formidable daughter, Aung San Suu Kyi, who by then will probably be a former president, and is already treated like a queen.

But we need to remind ourselves that she is not yet president. Not for her the Czech playwright Václav Havel's magical three-month ascent from persecuted dissident to the president's castle. Instead, there are three years of complex struggle ahead before she may, aged 70, become head of state.

These years of transition, until parliamentary elections in 2015, followed by the indirect election of a president, will be decisive for the future of this impoverished, traumatised and divided country. So much needs to be done in three interlocking areas which can be labelled with three Ps: politics, peace and the people.

The politics are intricate. Most international coverage has focused on the relationship between president Thein Sein, a decent if dull man, genuinely concerned about the condition of his poor country, and the uncrowned queen. One is told of a pivotal moment in August 2011, when she was invited to the president's private quarters in the surreal new capital of Nay Piy Taw, and welcomed especially warmly by his wife. But as important is her working relationship with the speaker of the parliament, Shwe Mann, another former general with large political ambitions of his own.

Meanwhile, there has to be a proper election law, electoral register and the conditions for a fair campaign. Aung San Suu Kyi's National League for Democracy (NLD) has to organise, mobilise and win a landslide victory among the country's ethnic Burman majority.

(Bet on that.)They should prepare themselves well for government. (Don't be so sure of that.) They also have to forge alliances with parties from the large swaths of this south-east Asian Yugoslavia inhabited by ethnic minorities. Then, despite a 25% appointed military block in parliament, they must get the more than 75% parliamentary vote required to remove the current constitutional bar on someone with close foreign relatives – ie Aung San Suu Kyi – becoming president.

Though some Burmese observers remain sceptical, I would place a large bet that, one way or another, this will happen. But of course it involves her (as it involved Havel) doing real politics, rather than remaining a pure moral heroine or becoming a British-style constitutional monarch. She herself makes no bones about this. At the unprecedented literary festival that brought me here, she talked eloquently about novels and poetry, but said that almost every moment of her life is now spent on politics.

As important as these high politics, and intertwined with them, are the other two Ps. It is vital that this country achieves peace as soon as possible. To do so, Burma must be a Yugoslavia-in-reverse. Yugoslavia was a multi-ethnic state that fell apart in politically orchestrated inter-ethnic violence precisely at the moment of a very imperfect transition to democracy. Burma, now officially Myanmar, is a multi-ethnic state in which many ethnic minority areas have already experienced decades of armed conflict.

As I write, a Chinese-brokered negotiation may still not actually stop fierce fighting in the resource-rich Kachin state. If these issues are not resolved before the 2015 elections, with a degree of federalism that itself would require constitutional change, then voters might be polarised, late-Yugoslav-style, along ethno-religious chauvinist lines. In Kachin Baptist churches, I am told, prayers have been heard that "God grant us independence".

Last, but really first, are the people. When I travelled here previously, in 2000, before being blacklisted from the country for 12 years, the place was strewn with the military regime's Orwellian propaganda posters bearing slogans such as "People's Desire". But the truth is that the military and their cronies – "crony" has itself become a Burmese word – have for decades realised their own desires at the expense of their people's.

Their lavish, high-walled villas contrast obscenely with the hovels of the majority of the population who still struggle to subsist as farmers. Burma has slipped to 149th on the UN Human Development Index, with an average of just four years of schooling. To make things worse, those poor farmers' export price for their rice has fallen, and many have plunged further into debt to extortionate local moneylenders.

Meanwhile, foreign businesses pour in: Carlsberg is the latest, with Best Western hotels to follow. A long-legged Sloane tells me how she and her husband plan to open a cool restaurant downtown ("kind of Soho House look") where those new investors will presumably scoff and quaff with the junta's old cronies.

The good news is that many able and well-intentioned people – highly qualified Burmese returning from long spells abroad, almost superhumanly magnanimous former political prisoners, NGO activists and foreign donors – are working with the current government, as well as with the NLD, to ensure that the essential transparency(especially for extractive industries), accountability, economic policies and the rule of law are put in place right now. Otherwise, Orwellian dictatorship will morph into entrenched crony capitalism.

Whatever the criticisms to be made of Aung San Suu Kyi – for example, over her apparently tactical reticence on the appalling ethno-religious violence between Buddhist Rakhine and Muslim Rohingyas – there is no doubt that her global charisma and her tireless, unflinching personal engagement contribute incomparably to the scale and quality of this support. That is another reason she must be, will be, Burma's new queen – sorry, president.

So there it is: the fairytale is over but the happy ending has yet to begin. There are three years of tough politics ahead. This will not be neat, pretty or clean: such transitions never are. But, with a lot of help from its friends, Burma still has a historic chance of ending up a far, far better place than it has ever been.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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Come on, India! Show us that freedom can outdo tyranny | Timothy Garton Ash

How can such poverty, corruption and inequality endure in the world's largest, most diverse democracy?

Why is the world's largest democracy apparently doing worse than the world's largest dictatorship? Hold on to that word "apparently", since there is precious little comfort in all the comparative indicators on the current performances of India and China. Yet anyone who cares for freedom must want this free country to do better.

On growth, inflation, output per capita, unemployment, budget deficit, corruption – almost every indicator believed in by Davos Man – India is doing worse than China. The great catch-up predicted a few years ago has just not happened. On per capita GDP, for instance, India limps along at $3,851 against China's $9,146. According to official figures for 2011, India's unemployment was more than double China's. Transparency International's index measuring the perception of corruption ranks China a poor (joint) 80th in the world, but India comes in (joint) 94th. And so it goes on.

Yes, China probably cooks its books more than India does, so discount a bit for "lies, damned lies and statistics". But almost everyone I have talked to in more than two weeks travelling around India, be they journalist, businesswoman, scholar or outside observer, basically accepts that verdict. In fact, they add to it. The rural poor, they say, are hardly better off than they were two or three decades ago. A former supreme court justice – a craggy, towering survivor of the old, progressive Nehruvian India – tells me with passionate indignation that more than 40% of Indian children are probably malnourished. "Worse than in Africa!" he cries – and a detailed 2005 World Bank report supports that view. Some 17,000 Indian farmers took their own lives in 2010, when their crops failed. Even the most superficial, privileged traveller can not avoid seeing the shocking proximity of wealth and want, whether in the garbage-piled slums of Mumbai or the medieval-looking peasant farms visible just off a brand new expressway.

Why? Here are a few suggested explanations. Unlike China, but like Europe, India expends a vast amount of its energy simply coping with its incredible diversity. The French president Charles de Gaulle once exclaimed: how can you possibly govern a country that has 246 varieties of cheese? Well, how about a country with 330 million gods? And when we say a country: a 19th-century English observer once observed that "Scotland is more like Spain than Bengal is like Punjab". A poetic exaggeration, no doubt, but this country is a continent, a commonwealth, an empire in itself. And like Europe, it is trying to manage this diversity in freedom. China has diversity too, in vast if sparsely populated areas of mainly Tibetan and mainly Muslim population, but it copes with it mainly by repression.

To make freedom in diversity work, you need a powerful uniting narrative. The United States has that, as we saw again in the inauguration of president Barack Obama. (Yes, it's a myth, but national myths move mountains.) Europe had such a narrative after 1945, but has lost it, and India too had it in the first decades after independence – but, like Europe, has now lost the plot. Instead there are multiple competing stories in a political and media free-for-all. Unfortunately, if unsurprisingly, many of these are sectarian, regional, petty-chauvinist narratives, dividing rather than uniting.

Then there is what has been called the Licence Raj. Administrative structures inherited from the British empire, and amazingly unchanged in many respects, have hypertrophied into nightmarish bureaucracy. Captains of industry such as Lakshmi Mittal and the recently retired Ratan Tata like to invest elsewhere because it takes up to eight years to get all the permissions in India.

If the bureaucracy of a post-colonial state is the problem, more deregulation and economic liberalisation should be the answer; and so, in some respects, it is. That is, for instance, the only way that we will get to an EU-India free trade agreement, which could bring great benefits to both sides. But the free market liberalisation that was let rip in the 1990s is also part of the problem. Take the media. India's media now boast a commercial, sensationalist, race-to-the-bottom culture that makes Fox News look truly "fair and balanced" and British tabloid the Sun look like a news bulletin for the Salvation Army. A few quality papers, such as the Hindu, are exceptions that prove the rule. Elsewhere, "paid news" (corporations paying for favourable news coverage) is the order of the day.

Then there is politics. Everyone, but everyone, tells me that business and politics in Delhi are carnally intertwined like tantric gods and goddesses. Beside the shrill name-calling, regional and religious identity politics, and dynastic principle (witness the irresistible rise of Rahul Gandhi in the Congress party), there is the monstrous condescension to the two out of every three Indians who are still dirt poor.

While some corporate and philanthropic initiatives do offer them the essential means for self-help, politicians mainly just throw at them subsidies for basic foodstuffs, a few other cheap goodies, guaranteed low wage employment for a number of days a year – and then buy their votes every election time. As in the ancient Roman formula, the plebs are offered bread and circuses. The circuses in this case are cricket ("an Indian game that the British just happen to have invented") and the celebrity razzmatazz of Bollywood.

So is China bound to go on winning? No, and again no. No, because while the Indian system is a daily soap opera of small crises, the big crisis of China's self-contradictory system of Leninist capitalism is yet to come. And no, again, because India is a free country, with the most amazing diversity of human talent, originality, personality and spirituality. Surely that free expression of human individuality must tell out in the end.

So I say, come on, India! So far as I'm concerned, you can beat England at cricket in every single Test match for the next 10 years, but on one condition: that you also start beating China at politics. And by politics I mean not the petty competition for power and privilege, but realising the full potential of your people.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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From outside, it's clear why Britain has to stay in Europe | Timothy Garton Ash

Cameron's speech could have been a lot worse, but five years of anxious uncertainty are bad news for Europe and the world

So now we know: Europe will be roiled by internal turmoil for another five years. While Germany, France and others wrestle to build a stronger core Europe around the eurozone, David Cameron's Conservatives, if elected in 2015, will try to renegotiate the terms of Britain's membership in the whole EU club and then put that "new settlement" to the British people in an "in or out" referendum by the end of 2017.

World, you have been warned. Europe as an economic giant? Yes, still. Europe as a strong force in a new multipolar world? Postponed to the Greek calends – and now to the British ones as well. Whether you are watching from India, China, Russia, America or Brazil, you can forget that prospect for the foreseeable future. In fact, most people in those countries already have.

But first, what of the speech itself? Well, it could have been a lot worse. As a pro-European who has argued that Britain should hold an "in or out" referendum in the next parliament, once the shape of eurozone-Europe and the results of any attempted renegotiation of the terms of Britain's membership are known, I can hardly complain if the British prime minister plumps for exactly that. While much of the phrasing was patently crafted to please Eurosceptics, some of his criticisms of today's EU are also justified.

Above all, the peroration of the speech was as clear, eloquent and forceful an argument for Britain staying in the EU, on clearsighted, hard-nosed Palmerstonian grounds of national interest, as you could hope to hear from a leader of today's Conservative party. Those last minutes, between about 8.35am and 8.45am London time, confirmed me in a view that I have taken against nervous British pro-Europeans for some time: when it comes to the point, the British people will vote to stay in the EU.

Yet they also confirmed the futility of this entire strategy. For those basic arguments of national interest for Britain to stay in the EU will remain true, however paltry the results of any formal renegotiation after 2015. In fact, since Europe is a permanent negotiation, Britain would get a better deal if it remained fully involved and committed all the time.

If other EU member states agree on nothing else, they agree on this: Britain should not be given any major new exceptions from the rules of the whole club. Now they will concede even less. If EU politics were a game of bridge, Cameron has just effectively thrown away his strongest ace: the credible threat of Britain leaving. Germany and other free-market north Europeans would not really want to be left alone with the southerners. Even France would be ambivalent, since Britain is the only other European country with a serious tradition of projecting hard power – as most recently in Libya.

It's also bad for Europe. Some of the good reforms Cameron is preaching at continental Europeans are now even less likely to happen since, whatever he says, our partners all feel that he is batting for Britain not for Europe. In a rare and revealing stumble by this otherwise accomplished speaker, when he was arguing for his preferred option of a new reform treaty for the whole of the EU, he said: "But if there is no appetite for a new treaty for us [pause, stumble] … for us all." Freudian slip or Thatcherite one: that's what most continental Europeans think he subconsciously means.

And yet, even though it would have been better for Europe to carry on without this added diversion to the core problems of the whole project, a referendum would have come sooner or later anyway. With the stakes raised like this, it will be hard for other parties to refuse the British people a direct choice. As a nice Polish phrase has it: we have to swallow this frog.

Meanwhile, the world will yawn its way through five more years of euroshemozzle. And it will deal with Europe as it finds it: economic giant, political hydra-head.

Like Reading Lolita in Tehran, watching Cameron in Mumbai has been a surreal experience. Here I am, surrounded by the afterlife of British colonialism at its most grandiloquent – the monumental Gateway to India, built in Bombay harbour to celebrate the visit of the King-Emperor George V in 1911, colonial-style tearooms fluttering with now Indian talk of "tiffin" and "chaps". And there, on the television screen, a hundred years later, is a vaguely viceregal British prime minister who nonetheless feels it necessary to explain, to what was once the party of empire, why Britain really should not opt to be an offshore Switzerland, a Norway without the oil or the Greater Cayman Islands.

And the Indians, those at the top of the pile who are now prosperous and sophisticated representatives of one of the 21st-century's great emerging powers, how do they view this distant political gymkhana? Mainly not at all. Indian acquaintances confirm my impression that the speech did not make the news bulletins of the main local channels. Indians have their own politics to worry about, and their own problems: India's poverty makes hard-hit Greece look like paradise. But beyond that, they view Britain's agonising about its place in the world with mixed feelings.

One hears of a liking for London as a place to live and do business; of admiration for UK universities (if only the Cameron government's misbegotten student visa squeeze does not prevent their children studying there); of some attachment to British traditions of literature, good government and common law (a shipping merchant here tells me he makes contracts with Chinese partners under English law).

But there is absolutely no echo of the neo-Tory idea that a strategic special relationship between Britain and India, Britain and the whole Commonwealth, could be any substitute for Britain's place in Europe, and India's relationship with Europe as a whole. India, like Britain, will pursue its own national interest, starting in its own neighbourhood. If Cameron doesn't know that already, he will hear it again on his planned second official visit to India next month.

Ultimately the point is this. History has dealt Britain an amazing hand. Though a shadow of its former imperial self, the country has unique ties to Europe, to the United States, to the rest of the English-speaking world, and to quite a few other places (for instance, in Latin America) as well: spades, hearts, diamonds and clubs. Who but an idiot would throw away one of his (or her) strongest suits? And we Brits are not idiots, are we? Are we?

Twitter: @fromTGA

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A referendum on Europe? Bring it on, for all our sakes | Timothy Garton Ash

Cameron, Clegg and Miliband all fear a public vote - but they should go for it nonetheless. Let the people decide

As we approach the 40th anniversary of Britain joining what was then just the European Economic Community, there is only one good way forward for the tortuous domestic politics of Britain's so-called European policy. This is for the leaders of the three main parties in the Westminster parliament to commit themselves to hold a straightforward "in or out" referendum once the shape of the new European Union that is emerging from the eurozone crisis, and the terms available in it for Britain, have become clear.

Since the eurozone is now likely to be saved, but only quite slowly, step-by-step, à la Merkel, and since Britain's position can only be clarified once the political consequences of saving the eurozone have emerged, that moment will arrive some time in the life of the next parliament: between 2015 and 2020, on current plans.

This is what David Cameron's tantrically delayed Europe speech, which he has now scheduled for mid-January, should promise. If Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg have the guts and gumption, they will beat Cameron to it and steal his thunder – not to mention, some of Ukip's lightning. All of them can quite reasonably refer to the exhaustive review of the "balance of competences" between the UK and the EU being conducted across Whitehall, and to be completed only in 2014, as a starting point for the conversation across the Channel. There would then be a settled national position. We, the people, will have the chance to decide whether we want to be in or out, as soon as we have an answer to the essential prior question: "In or out of what?"

The British public do want to be asked. In a YouGov poll earlier this year, 67% said they favoured "holding a referendum on Britain's relationship with Europe within the next few years". Though referendums should be used sparingly in a representative democracy, they have become an established part of Britain's evolving constitution. Four decades after the British people last had their direct say on the issue, in the 1975 referendum, it is right that they should have another chance – for today's deep and wide European Union is something very different from what most Brits then called "the common market".

To have a referendum before 2015, as some Tory Eurosceptics urge, would be a complete waste of time and taxpayers' money. We simply will not know what the post-crisis EU will look like, and you cannot have a proper "renegotiation" of Britain's place in, or semi-detached relation to, an unknown unknown. "Renegotiation" and "repatriation of powers" are Eurosceptic buzzwords which Labour and Lib Dems will probably not want to use. But the truth is that the EU is a permanent negotiation – and now more than ever.

Moreover, even a "renegotiation" can in practice be anything from a few tweaks at the margins (as Harold Wilson demonstrated in his "renegotiation" before the 1975 referendum) to a complete new deal of institutional detachment, putting Britain right up the fjord with Norway.

So this basic in-or-out referendum commitment is what all three party leaders should make; it is also what all three have thus far been wriggling and squirming to avoid. Why?

Cameron fears it will blight his premiership and end up splitting his party. Miliband fears it would hang over his government like an albatross if Labour won the 2015 election. Nick Clegg fears it would lose the Lib Dems some of the few voters they have left according to recent polls. In short, to use a word once popularised by Margaret Thatcher, they are all frit.

It is like a Monty Python parody of the great shoot-out scene at the end of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Three sharpshooters eyeball each other under a blazing sun – except that in this British version they are standing in the rain, armed with water pistols, and all privately wishing they could walk away to have a nice cup of tea.

But they can't and they shouldn't. True, Europe is not high on the list of voters' priorities. People are worried about jobs, fuel bills, schools, hospitals, crime, immigration. But they are concerned about Europe too. When – if – things are looking up at home, and the shape of the post-crisis EU has become clearer, they want to be consulted. If all three party leaders, the Good, the Bad and the Ugly – assign roles according to taste – were to settle on this position, it might even reduce the salience of the European question in British politics over the next couple of years.

This would not, however, simply be kicking the problem into the long grass, in the hope that "tomorrow never comes". Tomorrow will come, some time between 2015 and 2020. Forty plus years on, we will again have the chance to conduct a serious debate about Britain's place in Europe and the world – not the tabloidised phoney war we have experienced over the 20 years since the Maastricht treaty travails of John Major. It will be the job of this government and of the next, whatever its political complexion, to prepare the ground as well as possible with our European partners so as to secure the best possible deal for Britain.

As the good agreement on the eurozone banking union has just shown, such things can be done. There are people in the EU who would be happy to see the back of us (or whatever the French phrase is) but there are also many, not least the Germans and the Poles, who really want to keep Britain in.

As someone whose whole working life has been bound up with the matter of Europe, I welcome the prospect of this great referendum debate. Unlike many of my pro-European friends, I think we will win. I do not believe the brains of the British people have been so addled by the Sun and Daily Mail that they will, confronted with the facts about what it is really like to be Norway (without the oil) or Switzerland, decide that exit – Brexit or Brixit – is the best option for this country. And if they do? Well, that will be a historic mistake, but the people will have spoken. I believe in the European project, but I believe even more in democracy. Bring it on, I say, and may the best arguments win.

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A global battle for internet freedom puts Leveson in perspective | Timothy Garton Ash

There's no reason ethical standards have to slip online. The real challenge for journalism is how to make the internet pay

Are you reading this column in an ethical vacuum? Or on virtuous paper? Lord Justice Leveson's description of the internet as an "ethical vacuum" is one of the few missteps in his report on what we still Gutenberg-ishly call "the press". For the internet is not an ethical vacuum; it is an ethical battlefield. Across its vast virtual steppes there now rages one of the great power struggles of our time. The fate of authoritarian regimes such as China, and hence the future of freedom, will depend on the outcome.

Against that backdrop, Britain's little local battle over those bundles of folded paper that dwindling ranks of ageing persons buy from a quaint venue called a newsagent may appear like an episode of Dad's Army. But to see it this way (it's all on the internet anyway") is quite wrong. It also gives tabloids like the Sun a hypocritical excuse for continuing with their bad old ways. As Leveson notes, the Sun justified its publication of photos of Prince Harry's naked cavorting in Las Vegas with the headline "HEIR IT IS! Pic of naked Harry you've already seen on the internet" – and then "WE FIGHT FOR PRESS FREEDOM". Were there a Nobel prize for humbug, it would be the Sun wot won it.

In essence, the ethics of good journalism, and the practices of good independent self-regulation, both should and can be the same online as in print. After all, why should these words you are reading right now be weighed, checked or treated any differently just because of the material form in which you happen to be viewing them?

Of course the internet has thrown up major new challenges. Some are being fought over this week at a so-called World Conference on Information Technology organised by the International Telecommunications Union, a UN body, in Dubai, part of the United Arab Emirates. That federation of Gulf emirates recently issued a decree making punishable by a minimum of three years' imprisonment the use of a website or any other information technology medium "to deride or damage the reputation or stature of the state or any of its institutions"; and those "institutions" are held to include the rulers of the emirates, their crown princes and deputy rulers. So: just the place to hold a conference on regulating the internet.

The big issue in Dubai is whether governments, including many authoritarian ones, will manage to grab more control over an internet that still bears generous traces of its American free speech origins. From many sides come attempts to make search engines such as Google, social networks such as Facebook and microblogging sites such as Twitter answerable as if they were publishers for what users – you, me, pseudonymous dissident, anonymous idiot and, most recently, the Pope (@Pontifex) – post online. Standing firm against any more intrusive version of what is called "intermediary liability" is vital to the future of global free speech.

Then there is the matter of how individual bloggers and tweeters should be held responsible for rude, nasty, or inaccurate things they say in the heat of the tweet. The former Conservative party treasurer Lord McAlpine, who is going after hundreds of Twitter users for repeating an erroneous and defamatory suggestion that he was involved in the sexual abuse of children, is testing that one in English law. But beyond or beside the law, there is a host of questions about how we should choose to speak online, and how we should react to the stupidity of, for example, schoolboy racist tweets.

These are genuinely new, complicated and difficult issues. But oddly enough, the ones the internet changes least are those about the ethics of journalism. (The ethics, I stress, not the business model.) What was good journalism in 1962 is still good journalism in 2012. What was lousy journalism then is still lousy journalism now.

The sheer quantity of content that the Guardian or the BBC puts up online every hour, and the speed at which it is done, does make quality control more difficult. The rules of the game for readers' comments online are obviously different from those for the traditional reader's letter on the printed page. But essentially the same ethical standards should apply to any journalism for which what we still call "the paper" takes editorial responsibility. The WikiLeaks trove of US diplomatic cables was a new way of getting leaked information, made possible by the internet, but the editorial standards the New York Times, Le Monde, El Pais and the Guardian applied to it were much the same as they would have been for the Watergate tapes, the Pentagon papers or, indeed, the Zimmermann telegram in 1917.

As Leveson points out, Mail Online, the world's most visited newspaper website, is voluntarily committed to observing the Editors' Code of Practice of Britain's now discredited PCC (the Press Complaints Commission). So is guardian.co.uk – the online version of the Guardian. The purely online Huffington Post UK is also a member of the PCC. Yes, I know the PCC has fewer teeth than a 100-year-old Ukrainian babushka. But if Britain now gets a proper independent regulator of "the press", there is absolutely no reason why online journals, large and small, should not sign up to its standards and procedures – and enjoy the promised legal and financial advantages.

In short, the internet is no more an "ethical vacuum" than a paper is. It may be easier to put toxic rubbish online, but there are also new opportunities for doing great journalism there. The real problem the internet poses for journalism is not the ethics but the money. How to make the necessary amount of the necessary to sustain high-quality news reporting and analysis, especially reporting from abroad, when "comment is free but facts are expensive"? That is the question.

But fortunately, since I'm also writing this column for quaint old print, where precise word limits are dictated by the centimetres on a physical page, I've run out of space in which to offer the answer I do not have.

Twitter: @fromtga

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Britain is standing on a ledge, while Europe screams, 'Don't do it!' | Timothy Garton Ash

The relationship between Britain and its EU partners has reached breaking point. Both must abandon their cliches

Beyond the predictable tedious horror of this week's EU budget summit, which starts tomorrow, what is the best Europe we can hope for over the next few years? There's an awful symmetry between the answers given by British Eurosceptics and continental Europhiles. Both pose a binary choice: either Britain follows Germany and France in a drive for "more Europe", or Britain stands further apart. Fed up to the back teeth with each other, both sides are close to the point when they are ready to say: "Very well, alone." You go your way, we go ours.

And both are wrong. If there were more political imagination on both sides of the Channel, we would work towards a Europe that has not one hard core but at least two. Germany, France and other eurozone countries have to deepen their monetary union, with a banking union and elements of a fiscal – and consequently political – union. For the foreseeable future Britain will not be part of it. It does not follow that the eurozone must be the hard core of everything the EU does. Why should it be?

The hard core in which Britain should keep a leading role is the EU's foreign and security policy. Here, Germany rather than Britain is the awkward customer. Over the past 20 years Germany has built its own bilateral energy relationship with Russia and its own trade- and investment-driven special relationship with China. Last year Germany sided with China and Russia in refusing to endorse UN backing for the French- and British-led intervention in Libya. Most recently, Berlin vetoed the merger of EADS and BAE, which would have given Europe a global aerospace giant. Who were the bad Europeans there?

Because of its historical hang-ups and domestic interests, Germany is incapable of giving a bold lead in the external power projection that the EU needs if it is to defend our shared interests and values in a world of emerging giants such as China. Because of its historical hang-ups and domestic interests, Britain is not prepared to join the emerging German-led monetary and economic union.

OK, why not have a division of labour? Why not let Britain take a leading role in a hard core for foreign and security policy, while Germany leads in the economic and monetary one? France would, of course, continue to play a very important part in both. Countries like Poland hope in time to do the same.

Yes, this would be complicated; but organisational complexity is not the real obstacle to such a dual-core Europe. Rather, it is the lack of political imagination and will. This is most spectacularly apparent in Britain. David Cameron has got himself into a corner where he cannot be seen to favour "more Europe" in anything at all. Whatever his personal convictions, so terrified is he of his own Eurosceptic Conservative party backbenchers and of the rising vote for the UK Independence party that the symbolic politics of saying "not a penny or an inch more!" trump any pragmatic calculations of national interest.

If the sum of money in the EU budget were really the issue, we'd have a deal. Relative to overall expenditure, the difference between London's and Berlin's target figures is small. But such sums can be made to sound enormous, and Cameron to look weak, on the front page of the Daily Mail. Politically, that appearance is the reality.

Britain may be off on a planet of its own, but some leading continental politicians don't help either. They remain wedded to an outdated vision of a Europe of "concentric circles", with France and Germany at the magnetic core of the innermost circle. Yes, they acknowledge that we may have a "multi-speed" Europe – with an avant garde of France, Germany, Belgium and others going faster, Spain, Sweden and Poland somewhat slower, and Britain bringing up the rear. The somewhat condescending implication is: "You'll all get there in the end."

But this multi-speed metaphor completely misses the reality, and the danger, of what is happening. We already have a multi-group, multi-tier Europe, and it is on the brink of becoming a multi-directional one. When the component parts of any political community start travelling in different directions, that community is no longer integrating – it is disintegrating.

At the moment, Britain appears to most of its European partners like the middle-aged businessman in a New Yorker cartoon, standing on a ledge outside his office window, 18 floors up. A few of our European friends (in the Facebook sense of that word) are saying: "Go on, jump. Get on with it!" But most are urging us not to. Earlier this year in Siena, I heard the Italian president, Giorgio Napolitano – an 87-year-old former communist – passionately call on Britain not to detach itself from Europe. That same evening the Polish foreign minister, Radek Sikorski – a still youthful anti-communist – was delivering an almost identical message to an audience at Blenheim Palace. From left and right, east and west, young and old, the cry goes up: "Don't do it!"

This message from Britain's concerned co-workers at the office window would, however, be more persuasive if they at least allowed for the possibility that the company might in future do things somewhat differently. My idea of a dual-core Europe is one way of imagining that.

Let me be clear: there's fat chance of this PM and Tory party being more positive about any aspect of Europe until after the next election. Then it will take an "in or out" referendum to bring Britain back off the ledge – or make it finally jump. But, starting now, there is an important debate to be had about what exactly it is the British people should decide to be in or out of. Many of the matters on which Eurosceptics concentrate – the working time directive, European arrest warrant, etc – are secondary. Meanwhile, the eurozone will do what it has to do, or it will fail. There will then be an important negotiation to ensure that the result does not harm British interests – through the regulations of the new banking union, for instance, or creeping changes in the single market.

The real question, however, for pro-Europeans in Britain – but also pro-Brits in Europe – is this: are there any major areas of policy where Britain could, should and would be prepared to do more in and for Europe, and thereby for itself? If we can find a good answer to that question, we will change the terms of the debate on both sides of the Channel – and we might even end up with a better Europe.

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两个新的超级大国领导人，两种制度，两个危机 | Timothy Garton Ash

改革所面临的挑战在中国比在美国的更深层 。这将可能是一个是战争还是和平的问题

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在同一个星期，我们揭示了谁将会成为下一个领导者两个超级大国的领导者： 奥巴马和习近平。唯一的区别是，在周二的投票之前我们不知道下一个美国领导人将会是奥巴马 。对比，上周四 18大开始前我们已知道习近平将成为中国共产党的下一个 领袖.这个时候巧合的提示了两个问题：哪一个超级大国越来越强大吗？和哪一个超级大国面临着更深层次的危机，其经济和政治制度？虽然这也许听起来矛盾，答案是：中国和中国。
透过其庞大的规模，发育"落后"的优势，企业家精神的人, 帝国建国的历史和个人和集体对于"财富与权力" 的饥饿感 (一个众所周知的短语), 中国将比美国相对更强，因而，所有的权力是相对的，美国比中国相对较弱。但中国也有更深刻的系统性问题，如果不加以解决，可能减缓其上升和进入
稳定，不可预测的，甚至侵略性的状态。在过去的五年里，乔治·W·布什时代，美国已经经历了一个伟大的时间的烦恼。不是幸灾乐祸，我预测，中国将在未来五年的时间内面对自己的问题 。
我们都知道美国的问题, 奥巴马在接受提名的演讲时已经提到，有时听起来更像是一个公民演讲。赤字和债务，僵局的国会, 税务代码的列表比"圣经" 更长, 被忽视的基础设施和学校，对外国石油的依赖，金钱对政治的束缚：我不低估解决这些问题的难度。但我们都知道美国的问题 - 这就是很重要的一点. 我们不充分地了解中国的问题，因为中国的媒体不可以充分地报告中国的问题 。

在正式的党和国家讨论，问题背后都隐藏着思想的代码短语。即使中国有世界上最好的政治制度, 现在一些中国发展上的挑战还将存在. 它经历了人类历史最大和最快的工业革命. 30年来，城市的人口增长了约4.8亿，一半以上的人居住在城市。这可能是接近所谓的"刘易斯转折点"，当来自农村的廉价劳动力的供应开始干涸。它必须照顾其国内需求，因为它不能永远依靠美国的消费者作为最后手段。

其非常独特的系统导致许多问题，该系统可称为列宁主义的资本主义。 解释美国的舉人團制度已经到达了精疲力竭的地步, 但让我提醒你中国的制度. 2,270 代表将会在周四开始的共產黨第十八次全國代表大會 '选出' 370 中央委员再 '选出' 约二十几政治局成员再 '选出' 谁转"选出"九或也许现在只有7名成员组成的常设委员会，为党和国家的巅峰之作。所有的关键任命，实际上已经提前决定。弗拉基米尔·伊里奇·列宁当然彻底的批准。

然而，在同一时间，广袤的中国几乎没有控制权力下放和无百无禁忌资本主义的杂交种. 结果是动态的。 但畸形的经济发展让城市积累了一整座山的坏账但是金融机构最终控制的还是党和国家. 目前，调用资金的分配在中国离理想有一段距离. 金钱和政治的关系，可能堵塞美国的心脏，但它在中国也是一样的。 前苏联和东欧, 你可以看到前共产党领导人已成为超级丰富资本主义的实践者; 在中国，他们的同行已经成为了丰富资本主义的实践者，但仍保持共产党的领导。

彭博社的调查指出最近的新任主席习近平的家庭私人财富总额估计接近$100亿美元; 纽约时报的调查付诸表决即将离任总理温家宝的家庭私人财富约$270亿美元. 两个家庭之间，他们可能可以支付罗姆尼整个竞选活动的开支。

在中国，还是其他地方，危机可以推动改革或革命。 祈求，这是改革。这种日益紧迫的改革，如果它发生，不会导致一个西式自由民主的. 但即使是一些共产党分析师承认，考虑到中国的长期国家利益，变化将需要发展在多个规则的法律，问责制，社会保障和生态可持续发展的方向。

很重要的一点: 我们在世界其他地区对于美国和中国的改革成功感到巨大的兴趣. 在这相对早期阶段，一个新兴的超级中国对抗日本， 美国的盟国， 让人们深感忧虑。最近的一项皮尤民意调查显示， 国和美国公众之间的相互不信任快速增长中。不快乐的国家，自己的结构性问题未能解决，更容易向国外来发泄自己的愤怒。我们必须祝愿他们成功。

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Xi Jinping and Barack Obama: two leaders facing very different crises | Timothy Garton Ash

Xi Jinping faces deeper challenges than Barack Obama. We must hope they are met: it could be a matter of war and peace

So, in the same week, it is revealed to us who will be the next leaders of both superpowers: Barack Obama and Xi Jinping. The only difference is that we didn't know it would be Obama until after Tuesday's vote. By contrast, we knew it would be Xi long before the process that begins in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing tomorrow, from which he will emerge as Communist party leader, becoming the country's president next spring.

The coincidence prompts two questions: which superpower is getting stronger? And which faces the deeper crisis of its economic and political system? Though this may sound contradictory, the answers are: China and China.

Through its sheer size, developmental "advantages of backwardness", entrepreneurial people, history of imperial statehood and manifest individual and collective hunger for "wealth and power" (a proverbial phrase in Chinese), China will become relatively stronger and therefore, since all power is relative, the US will become relatively weaker. But China also has the more profound systemic problems which, if not addressed, may both slow its rise and make it an unstable, unpredictable and even aggressive state.

Over the last five years, starting already in the twilight of George W Bush, the US has gone through a great time of troubles. With no schadenfreude at all, I predict that China will face its own time of troubles over the next five.

We all know about America's problems, which were comprehensively aired in the election campaign and referred to by Obama in an acceptance speech that at times sounded more like a civics lecture. Deficit and debt, gridlocked Congress, a tax code longer than the Bible, neglected infrastructure and schools, dependence on foreign oil, the stranglehold of money over politics: I don't underestimate the difficulty of tackling them.

But we all know about them – and that's the point. We don't know the full extent of China's problems because Chinese media are not allowed to report them properly. In official party-state deliberations, the issues are hidden behind ideological code phrases. Some of China's developmental challenges would exist even if it had the best political system in the world. It has gone through the biggest, fastest industrial revolution in human history. Its urban population has grown by some 480 million in 30 years, so more than half its people now live in cities. It may be close to the so-called "Lewis turning point", when the supply of cheap labour from the countryside begins to dry up. It must attend to its own domestic demand, for it cannot rely on the US being forever the consumer of last resort.

But many of its problems result from its peculiar system, which may be called Leninist capitalism. Since the mechanics of America's electoral college have been explained to the point of exhaustion, let me just remind you of the Chinese version: 2,270 delegates to the 18th national congress of the Chinese Communist party, which starts tomorrow, "elect" some 370 members of the central committee, who in turn "elect" some two dozen members of the politburo, who in turn "elect" a nine- or perhaps now only seven-member standing committee, which stands at the pinnacle of the party-state. All the key appointments will in fact have been decided in advance, in horsetrading and intrigue behind closed doors. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin would thoroughly approve.

Yet at the same time, the vast Chinese state has a staggering degree of barely controlled decentralisation and a no-holds-barred hybrid kind of capitalism, both of which would have the wax melting on Lenin's mummified brow. The result is dynamic but deformed economic development in which, for example, cities have run up mountains of bad debt with financial institutions ultimately controlled by the party-state. To call the allocation of capital in China "sub-optimal" would be beneath understatement.

The nexus of money and politics may be at the heart of America's systemic blockage, but so it is of China's. In the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe you see former Communist party leaders who have become mega-rich practitioners of capitalism-in-one-family. In China, their counterparts have become mega-rich practitioners of capitalism-in-one-family, but remained communist party leaders. A Bloomberg investigation recently estimated the total private wealth of incoming president Xi's family at close to $1bn. A New York Times inquiry put that of outgoing premier Wen Jiabao's family at about $2.7bn. Between the two families they could have funded the entire US election campaign.

In China, as anywhere else, a crisis can catalyse reform or revolution. Pray that it is reform. This increasingly urgent reform, if it happens, will not result in a western-style liberal democracy any time soon, if ever. But even some Communist party analysts acknowledge that, in China's own long-term national interest, the changes will need to go in the direction of more rule of law, accountability, social security and ecologically sustainable development.

Now here's the rub. We, in the rest of the world, have an existential interest in the success of both America's and China's reforms. The bellicose edge to confrontations in the Asia-Pacific region between China and US allies such as Japan is deeply worrying at such early stage of an emerging superpower rivalry. A recent Pew poll shows mutual distrust between the Chinese and US publics growing rapidly. Unhappy countries, unable to solve their own structural problems at home, are more likely to vent their anger abroad. We must want them both to succeed.

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Britain needs a vote on Europe – but not now | Timothy Garton Ash

The eurozone must first resolve what the EU is going to be – and Scotland what Britain will be

All Britain's political parties should make a commitment in their general election manifestos to hold a referendum on Britain's EU membership during the lifetime of the next parliament. That referendum should ask a plain question: do you want Britain to stay in the EU? Whatever the EU has by then become, that is, and on the best terms that our government has then been able to negotiate. In or out. Yes or no. Only thus will we work out who we are and where we want our country to be. Without that defining moment, we will carry on mugwumping for ever more.

It is, however, ridiculous to spend much time on the subject now, when we still don't know if and how the eurozone will be saved, and hence what this Europe will be.

If the eurozone collapses, all bets are off. The Eurosceptics might yet get the looser Europe of their dreams without lifting a finger, and then we'll see how they like it.

If the eurozone is saved, it will only be by moving forward to add major elements of a banking, fiscal and therefore necessarily political union. That will change the whole nature of the EU. It will pose the question, not just for us but for the nine other EU member states not currently in the eurozone, of how the eurozone core relates structurally to the EU of 27. Political economy is still at the heart of what the EU does, and that core, if it acts and votes as one, could potentially dictate terms to the rest, even on issues such as the single market – as the EU itself currently does to countries like Norway and Switzerland, those little paradises of the more extreme Tory Eurosceptics' dreams.

This prospective negotiation between eurozone ins and outs is quite distinct from any British attempt to renegotiate its relationship with the EU, including repatriation of powers on issues such as the social chapter, the working time directive and environmental regulations. To start that renegotiation now, as the former defence secretary Liam Fox and many Conservative backbenchers are demanding, would be the height of folly. Even a child of five could see that this is the worst possible moment.

Your neighbour's house, a ramshackle Second Empire-style mansion, is in flames. The German housewife, whom we suspect wears the trousers, the voluble French husband, the resident Italian maestro, the Spanish … OK, that's enough ethnic stereotyping … are running around with buckets and hoses trying to put out the fire.

At this critical moment, David Cameron strolls over from the solid stockbroker Tudor house next door and says: "I say, you chaps, could we just have a word about moving the garden fence? And cutting back that false acacia of yours? It's dropping leaves into one's swimming pool."

Imagine the response. Merde would be the mildest. Especially since good neighbour Cameron has already been shouting helpful advice from his balcony: "Come on, you chaps, look sharp there and put your backs into it. What you need is a fiscal union. Angela will pay. Sorry we can't contribute a penny ourselves to your Emergency Fire Smothering Fund (EFSF), but we're British, you know."

Actually, Cameron knows all this perfectly well. It's what he was saying until last Saturday. Now he has been compelled to trim a little by the huffing and puffing from his own Eurosceptic backbenches, and by the threat from the UK Independence party, which according to the opinion pollsters is attracting Tory Eurosceptic voters. So on the referendum, Cameron now doesn't say yes and doesn't say no. He says yes and no. Mugwump again.

There's another good reason for waiting till after 2015: Britain is going to see one important referendum in this parliament anyway. In 2014 the Scots will vote on whether they want independence. If they vote for independence, the verb and subject of the European referendum question might remain the same, but the object – Britain – would have changed. It would then be the United Kingdom only of England, Wales and Northern Ireland. And there would need to be a general constitutional disentangling, which would also involve the EU membership of the two new states.

So working out who "we" are is a two-step process: first Britain, then Europe. In a conversation with me earlier this week, Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister and the leader of the Liberal Democrats, suggested that perhaps we should concentrate on the British union in this parliament, and the European one in the next.

Of course it won't work out so tidily in practice. If Angela Merkel should want a new treaty for the eurozone, British Eurosceptics will argue that this calls for a referendum. There's a technical but important decision Britain has to make in 2014, about whether a set of crime-fighting and policing laws should be subject to the final say of the European court of justice.

But Britain would be well advised to spend the next two years mending fences with our European neighbours, not trying to move them; cultivating friends, which Britain will need in the upcoming negotiation of the EU budget; being as helpful as possible to a eurozone solution, but also building partnerships with others who are not members of the eurozone and therefore face the same prospect of exclusion from the places where key decisions are made; and, yes, pressing for reforms that Europe needs. And if Conservatives also want to have an "audit" of our relationship with the EU, why not?

I'm now disappearing from the Guardian for four months to write a book. Dramatic developments on the continent may yank me back; Britain's relationship with Europe will certainly not, because nothing decisive is going to happen any time soon. In fact, the British debate about Europe goes around the same old issues, year in, year out, like one of those old 78rpm gramophone records with the needle stuck in a groove: Rule-Britannia-Britannia-rules-the click, Rule-Britannia-Britannia-rules-the click, Rule-Britannia-Britannia-rules-the click ...

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The four lives of Aung San Suu Kyi | Timothy Garton Ash

After 24 years, Europe is enthralled by her return. But her uniqueness lies in her synthesis of East and West

For the last two days the corner of Oxford where I live and work has been touched by magic. The Lady, Aung San Suu Kyi, has been staying just across the road, at St Hugh's College, where she studied as an undergraduate almost half a century ago. On Tuesday, her 67th birthday, there was a joyful, informal party of family and friends; today there followed all the Latinate pomp of the university's annual honorary degree ceremony.

This whole five-country visit to Europe marks the turning point between what might be called the third and fourth lives of Aung San Suu Kyi. Her first life saw her growing up as the child of the Burmese independence hero, General Aung San, who was assassinated when she was two years old, but whom she none the less reportedly remembers binding flowers into her hair. She was raised under the decisive influence of her mother, first in Burma and then in India, with an education combining elements of both the eastern, especially Buddhist, and the western, especially English-language traditions.

Her second life, which opened here at Oxford in 1964, spanned 24 years as student, part-time academic, full-time mother, homemaker and beloved wife of the scholar of Tibetan and Himalayan studies, Michael Aris, a colleague and friend of mine at St Antony's College. Here was a life full of everyday joys and sorrows, walked and bicycled, under often grey skies, on these wide, drowsy streets with their tall, wistaria-clad, 19th-century houses – streets that she was not to see again for another 24 years, until this week's return.

Her third life began in spring 1988 with a telephone call to their Oxford home, causing her to return to Rangoon to care for her sick mother. It was transformed when she accepted her compatriots' call to place herself at the head of that summer's rising. This life consisted, for large stretches, in simply holding out, alone, under house arrest in her mother's large, increasingly run-down villa at 54 University Avenue, Rangoon, reading, listening to the BBC World Service, keeping the body fit and the mind mindful.

Somewhere between her release from house arrest in November 2010 and this triumphal progress across Europe, a fourth life has begun. Because Burma's new president Thein Sein has – credit where credit is due – made a political opening that she finds credible, she has taken the gamble of engaging in parliamentary politics on terms still largely set by the regime. In the years up to a general election scheduled for 2015, this will be a very difficult transition. Here is a country ruined by a half-century of misrule, be it in the economy, education or healthcare, with a still entrenched military, an ethnic patchwork that makes Yugoslavia look simple, and ethno-religious tensions that have just erupted into violence in Rakhine province. The fragile network of her National League for Democracy must be built up in record time. The country's mightiest neighbour, a nervous, authoritarian China, cannot be ignored.

So there will inevitably be compromises and disappointments. In Max Weber's famous distinction, the intellectual's "ethics of conscience" will, at the very least, be commingled with the politician's "ethics of responsibility". Like Nelson Mandela emerging from prison, like the Czech dissident Václav Havel catapulted to Prague Castle, the 67-year old Daw Suu now faces a life sentence of politics, whether as opposition leader, president or elder stateswoman. Time, an almost unlimited resource under house arrest, is now sliced and diced relentlessly into 30-minute meetings and 30-second segments of face time.

So there will be years enough ahead to chronicle, assess and, if need be, fairly criticise the fourth life, now just begun. For today, at this sunlit turning point, let us pause to honour that third life, those 24 years. To honour properly, you must first understand; and to understand what has already earned her an ineradicable place in the history books, I would highlight three things.

First, so much of it comes to us in her own words, penned under house arrest (on occasion, smuggled out from the University Avenue house written on the inside of a domestic helper's wraparound cotton longyi), and more recently, spoken. The finest of her texts – the classic early 1990s essay, Freedom from Fear, her BBC Reith lectures, delivered by videolink last year, Saturday's Nobel peace prize speech in Oslo – stand comparison with Havel's best. They convey a sensibility that is as much spiritual and literary as it is political. Though she argues in her first Reith lecture that political freedom can build on inner, spiritual freedom, in her fourth life the balance between spiritual, literary and political will inevitably shift – as it did for Havel.

Second, there is her courage, pure and simple, simple and pure. That courage, without which there is no freedom, is a virtue rare, precious and hard. It was, by all accounts, particularly hard in the first years of house arrest, torn from her still young children, isolated, not yet inwardly liberated by the mastered disciplines of Buddhist meditation. But, as she herself puts it, with almost Victorian English understatement: "I have a stubborn streak."

That brings me to the third and less often noticed characteristic of her life and work: the blending of east and west. The Nobel lecture, for example, has many old-fashioned, literary English, almost Anglican turns of phrase – "other reaches of the earth", "some of our warriors fell at their post", "perfect peace is not of this earth". Yet in the next breath, she reflects deeply on the six great dukha (loosely: sufferings) identified by Buddhism, and their implications for both private life and politics. This is not just a side-by-side of these two traditions, let alone an either-or; it is a genuine synthesis in one person.

In an address delivered in Latin, the historic language of the west, Oxford University's public orator presented her for her honorary doctorate as an eastern star (praesento stellam orientalem). But in her own personal and moving response, she said that universities, at their best, teach "respect for the best in human civilisation, which comes from all parts of the world".

As a relatively declining west must learn to live with a powerfully renascent east, this has particular significance. Rudyard Kipling, one of her favourite English authors, famously wrote "but there is neither East nor West … when two strong men stand face to face". In the case of the Lady, we must adapt this to read "and there is both East and West, when one strong woman faces the generals and the world".

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