Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 24

One rule for Jesus, another for Muhammad? | Timothy Garton Ash

Equality is essential, but complicated – that is why some Christians feel that Muslims get an easy ride

Simple things can be so difficult. Take equality, for instance. Britain now has an Equality Act, to promote that good thing. But when you start looking at what it means in practice, matters get more complicated.

I've been thinking about this because of some media reaction to a conversation I had recently with Mark Thompson, the director general of the BBC, for our Oxford University project on free speech. After we talked about the BBC's broadcast of Jerry Springer: the Opera, which provoked angry protests from evangelical Christians because the satirical musical depicted Jesus as a petulant overgrown baby in a nappy, I put it to him that the BBC wouldn't dream of broadcasting something comparably satirical about the Prophet Muhammad. He replied: "I think essentially the answer to that question is yes."

This was picked up, first by the Daily Mail, then by the Daily Telegraph, the Spectator and at least one Christian website, with headlines such as "BBC director general admits Christianity gets tougher treatment" (Telegraph) and "Should Christians kill Mark Thompson?" (Spectator). On Mail Online, a reader identifying him or herself as D Acres of Balls Cross, West Sussex, posted the comment: "This man is disgusting. He should be taken out and put up on a cross. That would teach him not to disrespect this country and its Christian faith." Plainly a fine patriotic Christian, Outraged of Balls Cross.

I suggested to Thompson that this asymmetry in the way broadcasters (not just the BBC) treat Islam as compared with other belief systems was a result of the threat of violence from Muslim extremists. He replied: "Well clearly it's a very notable move in the game … 'I complain in the strongest possible terms', is different from 'I complain in the strongest possible terms and I'm loading my AK47 as I write'." That's a frank acknowledgment of one of the biggest threats to free speech around the world today. Classic American free speech literature talks of "the heckler's veto". These days, we face the assassin's veto. Such violent intimidation must always be resisted. To yield to it ultimately encourages others to threaten violence. If only we atheists and Christians were credibly thought to be loading our AK47s, more "respect" might mysteriously follow.

But in his very thoughtful response,Thompson mentioned two other reasons for asymmetric treatment. First, whereas Christianity is the "broad-shouldered", established religion of the majority in Britain, Islam is that of vulnerable ethnic minorities, "who may already feel in other ways isolated, prejudiced against, and where they may well regard an attack on their religion as racism by other means".

Second, speaking as a practising Christian himself, Thompson said you have to understand the emotional force of "what blasphemy feels like to someone who is a realist in their religious belief". Religious beliefs cannot simply be compared with rational, propositional statements, such as 2 + 2 = 4. Indeed, "to a Muslim and potentially also to a Christian, there are certain as it were quasi-blasphemous things or blasphemous things that could be said which would themselves feel to them very like a threat of violence".

Now, to be clear, I don't think these two further arguments justify the asymmetry. I think the BBC should feel free to air something equally satirical in relation to Islam – which, by the way, would not really be satirical about the religion, since Jerry Springer: the Opera was a satire on the Jerry Springer show and US popular culture, not on Jesus Christ or Christianity. And I do think the main reason the BBC, and most other media, are more nervous around Islam is the threat of violence.

Yet his two other arguments deserve to be engaged with seriously, and they both ultimately come back to equality. It is not self-evidently wrong or illiberal to suggest that members of disadvantaged minorities should be treated with special sensitivity. Equality does not mean, for instance, that Oxford University admissions interviewers, when confronted with two candidates, one the son of poor immigrants who has struggled through a failing comprehensive school, the other the Etonian son of a millionaire, should say: well, Sunder has worse exam grades and performed worse at interview so obviously we must admit David. So the right questions here are: is it true that Muslims still constitute a vulnerable, disadvantaged minority in the UK? (To complicate things further that might be true in aggregate, but not in Bradford.) And if so, is this the right way in which to display special sensitivity?

His point about the special character of religious beliefs also brings us back to equality. Empirically speaking, it is undoubtedly true that many people care especially strongly about their religious beliefs. But those are not sufficient grounds on which to privilege faith over reason. Suppose I feel as passionately about the scientific reality of evolution as literalist Christians or Muslims do about creation. Why should public policy or a public service broadcaster protect their feelings more than mine? Britain's Equality Act suggests they should not, with this glorious definitional contortion: "Belief means any religious or philosophical belief and a reference to belief includes a reference to a lack of belief."

Difficult though it is, we must never abandon the quest for equal liberty under law. Everyone is entitled to what the philosopher Ronald Dworkin calls "equal respect and concern". That does not mean treating everyone exactly the same in every circumstance. But whenever you hear anyone (including me or you) arguing for unequal treatment of any kind, shine the searchlight and take a closer look. The same evangelical Christian who complains of unequal treatment from the BBC will vociferously oppose gay marriage. The same European liberal who argues passionately that newspapers should be free to publish cartoons of Muhammad will defend laws criminalising genocide denial. Double standards are the warning signals of a free society.

Twitter: @fromtga

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America, the Middle East and the strange tale of Sam LaHood | Timothy Garton Ash

Washington is torn between supporting Arab democracy and its long-standing security priorities in the Middle East

Help me, dear reader, solve a little puzzle. While I was moving freely around Cairo last week, Sam LaHood, the son of the US transportation secretary, was confined to US diplomatic quarters. He had taken refuge there because he, along with 42 other foreign and Egyptian NGO activists, was to be put on trial by a still military-dominated Egyptian regime which receives more than $1.5bn in aid from the United States. LaHood had tried to leave the country in January, but been turned back.

The activists' alleged offence is to have violated the proper registration procedures for an NGO, under a Mubarak-era law which makes it almost impossible to register an NGO properly. No one in their right mind believes this is anything but a pretext, or that the Egyptian judicial process is truly independent of a military and security apparatus which for decades has put itself beyond the law.

It took a pilgrimage to Field Marshal Mohamed Hossein Tantawi by Senator John McCain – who chairs the International Republican Institute for which LaHood Jr works – a military-to-military visit by the head of the US joint chiefs of staff, and much huffing and puffing by Hillary Clinton, to arrive at the following deal. Court proceedings have been put off until 26 April.

The local Egyptian activists, some of whom were paraded in a cage at the original court hearing, must stay to face the music, but there are hints that the charges will be downgraded to less serious ones. The foreign activists, not just the Americans but also Germans, Serbs, a Norwegian and a Palestinian, have been allowed to leave the country. On Thursday 1 March, while I boarded a regular BA flight from Cairo to London, they were flown to Cyprus on a specially chartered DC-3 cargo plane. According to a report on the American website Politico.com, their in-flight movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Politico.com explains that "United States officials shelled out $5m-plus in bail money to spring LaHood and the other NGO workers". Some $300,000 of that was for young Sam, who told CNN that he can now go on a belated honeymoon with his wife of a few months. The CNN interviewer asked him: "Were you held hostage?'

"Well," replied Sam, "that's the analogy our attorney used – it was a de facto detention."

Thus, to recap, the son of a US government minister was held hostage by a regime to which that same US government gives more than $1.5bn in aid.

His crime? Attempting to promote democracy. So why did Washington not react more strongly? Why was Uncle Sam standing up so gingerly for son Sam? Why was the Egyptian military tail-wagging – not to say, taunting – the American dog? And why did John McCain, that Indiana Jones of American politics, that scourge of dictators, the man who recently told a Chinese vice-foreign minister that "the Arab spring is coming to China", behave like Puss in Boots when it came to dealing with Egypt's still military-dominated regime?

Compare and contrast two McCain tweets. On Vladimir Putin, last December: "Dear Vlad, the #Arab Spring is coming to a neighbourhood near you." On his visit to Egypt last month: "Constructive meeting today w/Field Marshall Tantawi, the head of #Egypt's military." All guns blazing for the Arab spring except at the heart of the Arab spring.

So there's the little puzzle. Now, I'm no expert on the Middle East, but I have asked some people who are. Here are just a few elements of their complex answers. First, and obviously, McCain was publicly holding back, with visibly clenched lips, till he got their guys out. Second, and more fundamentally, when asked by CNN (while the hostage crisis was still going on) whether the US should cut its $1.5bn aid to Egypt, McCain said no – and reminded the interviewer of the terms of the Camp David accords of 1978. In other words, the security of the state of Israel, which the US regards as a vital moral and historical obligation – as I believe Europe also should – is held to require the continued collaboration of the Egyptian military.

Since the Camp David accords, and the subsequent Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, Washington has relied on Egypt as a vital subcontractor in its own compact to keep Israel safe – a compact solemnly reaffirmed by President Barack Obama on Sunday, in his address to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac). This Egyptian cornerstone of American policy – which also involves safe passage through the Suez canal and other American strategic interests – is seen as too important to risk at a time when Israel feels deeply unsettled by Islamists winning elections out of the Arab spring, as they have done in Egypt. And, more immediately, when Israel feels so directly threatened by an almost nuclear-capable Iran that Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, is threatening to bomb Iran – in a US presidential election year.

Talking of US elections, the experts add one further detail. Much of the $1.3bn in military aid to Egypt (the rest of the grand total is more conventional economic assistance) comes straight back to American military suppliers, often with lucrative maintenance contracts. To factories like the General Dynamics one in Lima, Ohio, for example, where (wholly or partly US government-funded) Egyptian army orders for M1A1 Abrams tanks will help keep the production lines going despite Pentagon cutbacks at home. Risk those American jobs, in the crucial swing state of Ohio, in an election year? You must be joking.

I stress again that I'm no expert in this (mine)field. I merely report what some experts say. Whatever the exact mix of causes, the net result is that in Egypt the US has managed to tie its own hands behind its back when it comes to doing what Americans have done so well in countries I know better, and what Sam LaHood was trying to do in Cairo: promote the values and practices of liberal democracy.

In fact, one might almost argue that it's the real, down-home working of American democracy which hinders consistent, full-hearted American support for Arab democracy. If so, that is both tragic and short-sighted. The long-term interests of both Israel and the United States will not be served by being faint-hearted or ambivalent in supporting what is still one of the most hopeful developments of our time.

• This article will be open to comments from 9am Thursday morning (8 March), UK time

Twitter: @fromtga

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Egypt a year on: this is not the Tahrir dream, but there's much to be won | Timothy Garton Ash

The country is torn between an entrenched security state, politically savvy Islamists and anxious revolutionaries

'So let's talk about bread," the local member of parliament, Gamal al-Ashri, tells a room packed with his constituents. It's late evening. Outside the shabby apartment block where the meeting takes place, a woman sifts through a vast pile of stinking rubbish at the side of a dusty, potholed road. She seizes something and stuffs it quickly into a plastic bag. Horse-drawn carts, battered old white Volkswagen minibuses and tiny black-painted three-wheelers (known as "tuk-tuks") compete with pedestrians in the honking mayhem that is an Egyptian street. We are in a poor neighbourhood of Giza – just a few miles from the pyramids, but not on any tourist itinerary.

The point about bread is that there's not enough of the cheap, state-subsidised kind. Next to this apartment block there's a brightly lit private bakery selling fragrant fresh loaves and pastries – but the poor can't afford them. The MP explains the folly of a corrupt state that has reduced Egypt to dependence on imported wheat. Questions follow about issues like the rubbish on the streets, crime and local transport.

A middle-aged man, smartly dressed in jacket, shirt and tie, gets up and asks: "But why do we have women in parliament?" And, as translated to me, he adds: "The Muslim Brotherhood are interested in women. I'm not. I want women back in the house."

The MP comes from the Freedom and Justice party (FJP), the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is the biggest winner from the country's relatively free parliamentary elections and will almost certainly dominate the next government. I await his answer with interest. (So far as I can judge, he's not aware that there's a foreigner at the back of the room.) "No," he says. "We want freedom for everyone. Egypt can only be rebuilt by all the people. Women can help us address a lot of problems, such as drugs and education."

Then, in a room largely filled with men, an angry woman stands up and asks not about the position of women but about another MP who has denounced the might-have-been presidential candidate Mohamed ElBaradei as a foreign agent.

Welcome to Egypt in the raw. There are two sharply contrasting western cliched images attached to the Egyptian revolution, and more broadly to the Arab spring. One is beautiful, young Facebook and Twitter-using women revolutionaries, explaining in perfect English their immaculate secular, liberal goals. Hurray, hurray. The other is swarthy, hatchet-bearded Islamist men, exploiting a brief moment of semi-democracy to impose their violent, theocratic, misogynist oppression. Boo, boo. Arab spring, Arab fall.

As so often, there is a grain of truth in each cliche. There are fantastic, brave, bright young women and men here, who have faced down extreme intimidation of many kinds (from police bullets to sexual harassment) and deserve our total, unstinting solidarity, and support. And there are indeed some Islamist monsters. But the cliched images miss two larger and more important truths.

First, the biggest, most immediate obstacle to freedom in Egypt today, the force that is actively trying to roll back the revolution, is not the Muslim Brotherhood but the military-dominated security state that has run Egypt for 60 years and is now identified with the acronym Scaf, for Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. It is they who recently had built two hideous makeshift walls of giant concrete blocks – reminding me irresistibly of photos of the Berlin Wall in its early days – to block access to Tahrir Square and nearby government offices.

They have commanded the legions of spies, goons and torturers who for decades have terrorised secularists, Salafists, Coptic Christians and ordinary people. More recently, they have locked up bloggers just for daring to criticise them. They control large parts of the economy – estimates vary from 10% to 40%. So much, anyway, that when the central bank's reserves get depleted they can casually pass it $1bn, "as if they'd found it down the back of the sofa", one observer commented.

It is Scaf that is wrangling with the elected parliament to keep control of the interior as well as the defence ministry and the defence budget beyond any scrutiny. Despite receiving some $1.3bn in military aid from Washington, they have cocked the most amazing snook at the US by putting on trial 43 NGO activists, among them the son of the current US transportation secretary. In short, it is they who are still the biggest blockade on Egypt's long road to freedom.

Second, insofar as Egypt had partly free and partly fair elections, Islamists won. The FJP and Salafist al-Nour blocs between them have a large majority in both houses of parliament. Like them or loathe them, they – not the urban, educated youth who spearheaded the revolution in Tahrir Square – have, for now, won politically. That is not surprising in a conservative, majority-Muslim society, where the Muslim Brotherhood had a formidable underground organisation. The FJP compromises and makes deals with the military-security state, but will also try to clip its wings.

These people we lump together as Islamists come in many shapes and sizes: fat and skinny, hard and soft, dogmatic and pragmatic. Some prioritise free market economics, others social welfare, others again cultural and religious conservatism. Across the lands of the Arab spring, it matters enormously which kinds of Islamist gain the upper hand, in what context, under which internal and external constraints. For now, the FJP's priorities in Egypt seem clear: to show some improvements in the economy, welfare and personal security. Otherwise, they know they will lose popularity, and therefore votes.

A year on from the fall of Hosni Mubarak, this is not what the young revolutionaries of Tahrir dreamed of. It's not what we western secular liberals dreamed of. It's not, in its consequences, another 1989. But nor is it 1979 in Iran, a rainbow revolution rapidly degenerating into an oppressive Islamic theocracy. It's Egypt 2012. Even secular liberal and Coptic friends say that a pragmatic Islamist government, wrangling a gradual reduction of the hypertrophied military, security and bureaucratic state, may be the best they can expect in the near future.

If those of us who live in more prosperous and free countries want to help Egypt's transition – and realistically, that help will only be at the margins – we need to start by understanding what is happening on the ground, in all its dusty, pot-holed complexity. We have nothing to lose but our cliches.

Twitter: @fromtga

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To avoid depression, Greece needs a strategy for growth | Timothy Garton Ash

Even if you disagree on who is to blame for this crisis, the responsibility for getting out of it must still be shared

Let's be honest: if this eurozone did not exist, no one would now invent it. The key word in that sentence is "this". A smaller eurozone of more compatible, mainly north European economies – a nordozone or neurozone – could probably have weathered the post-2008 crisis of western capitalism, even with Maastricht's design flaws. Alternatively, a eurozone of the current size might eventually have followed from the creation of a political union, in institutions but also in hearts and minds, if and when that proved possible.

That would require a degree of fellow-feeling and inter-operability – so to speak – between Germans and Greeks comparable with that between New Englanders and Alabamans in the US, and (unless Alex Salmond, the Scottish nationalist leader, is to be believed) between Old Englanders and Scots in the UK. Still very different folks, but accepting large-scale redistribution of taxpayers' money from one place to the other; individually ready and able to move easily between and work in both places; having a common politics, budget, media and public sphere.

If only. If ever. But, as psychological counsellors tell depressed patients, you have to start from where you are. No obsessive rumination on what might have been. No regrets. Start from here. Make the best of it. Find a path towards something better.

That is what eurozone leaders insist they did this week. Their exhausting, day-and-night efforts must be acknowledged. They have worked hard to square many circles. It is easy to criticise from the sidelines. Nonetheless, this has to be said once again: they have not succeeded yet. It is not just, as the cliche has it, that they are still kicking the can down the road. Now they are kicking a Molotov cocktail down the road.

At the moment, there is still a solid majority in Greece for staying in the euro. Yet I find it hard to believe that the people of Greece can for months and years take the extreme pain demanded of them, with the only argument being "to leave the euro would be worse". The personal stories are already heartrending. The journalist, teacher, civil servant reduced to queueing at the soup kitchen. Students in a "lost generation" who have left the country or are about to. Unemployment at 21% and rising. An estimated 150,000 businesses that have closed. The minimum wage to be cut by more than one fifth. Thousands sleeping on the streets. The homeless by night; demonstrators by day. The octogenarian musician Mikis Theodorakis – a favourite with generations of German tourists – has called for an "uprising". And the government has to implement a bunch of further austerity and liberalisation measures over the next week, before it can get the €130bn bailout.

Sitting at his regular table in the pub, his Stammtisch, the reader of Germany's tabloid Bild may still mutter, "Well, they have only themselves to blame." But he would be wrong. It is true that a very large share of the blame lies with irresponsible, deceitful and corrupt Greek policies and business practices. But the scale of this mess, and the difficulty of getting out of it, also results from the fact that Greece was accepted into a badly designed, over-extended eurozone; that the way bond markets and banks (including German and French ones) treated that eurozone positively encouraged such irresponsibility; and that this bailout is as much to help those banks as it is to help Greece. So the blame must be shared.

Even if you disagree with that, the responsibility for getting out of it is still shared. This is obviously true so long as Greece remains in the eurozone; but even if Greece leaves, it will remain a member of the EU, and there will be a moral and historical responsibility that derives from having got into this mess together.

Then there's that troublesome thing we call, from the ancient Greek, democracy. Many European leaders privately agree with the German finance minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, that it would be better if Greece did not have an election scheduled for this April. Democracy? Ask the people? What an appalling idea. But the Greek people will be asked. Unless they are shown some realistic prospect of growth, parties opposed to the draconian terms of the bailout may yet gain a majority. No one will then be able (though some may privately wish) to follow Bertolt Brecht's famous ironic suggestion: dissolve the people and elect another.

At that moment, Angela Merkel will have more than a year to go to her own general election, which she is self-evidently determined to win. The eurozone will then be torn between the maximum pain that Greek voters will accept and the maximum price that Merkel believes German voters are prepared to pay. That dilemma – call it Merkel's fork – is just the most critical example of the deeper problem of this eurozone: the contradiction between already European policies and still national politics. You could have close, similar economies and still diverse politics (the nordozone that might have been). Or you could have fairly diverse economies if you had converged politics, with one eurozone election for one eurozone government. That common politics would then allow for the financial transfers to compensate for differences, as in the United States, and work towards economic convergence in the longer term. What is unsustainable is to have, within a single currency zone, both divergent national economies and divergent national politics.

So far as I can see, there are only two ways out of this. One is that Germany, all other European governments (including Britain's), the European Central Bank, the EU institutions, the IMF and every other relevant player work over the next few weeks, like Mozart in his most inspired frenzy, do what every sensible political economist (including many in Germany) says is necessary: produce a strategy for short- to medium-term growth as well as fiscal consolidation and structural reform. For as Mohamed el-Erian, the chief executive of the giant bond investment firm Pimco, observes, this week's agreement "leaves Greece's basic problem unresolved. The country still faces the prospect of too much debt and way too little growth."

That strategy for growth must not only be found, it must be seen to be found – seen by Greek voters, that is, before the next election. The other alternative is that, sooner or later, Greece leaves the eurozone. The former is more desirable, the latter more probable.

Twitter: @fromtga

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Why Barack Obama and Xi Jinping need an Australian retreat with Kevin Rudd | Timothy Garton Ash

This century's greatest power rivals need to have a frank, strategic talk about the terms of international order

Individuals make history. If the last leader of the Soviet Union had not been a man called Mikhail Gorbachev, the world would be a different place. So the character and views of China's leader-designate, Xi Jinping, who is currently visiting the United States, do matter. After spending several years failing to obtain a clear impression of President Hu, attention now turns to the man who will, barring accidents, succeed him.

The best thumbnail summary that I have read comes in a forthcoming book by Jonathan Fenby, titled Tiger Head, Snake Tails. (The title refers to modern China, not vice-president Xi.) As you would expect, the available evidence is thin and inconclusive. The fact that Xi suffered personally in the Cultural Revolution ("I ate a lot more bitterness than most people"), the reformist communist sympathies of his father, his evident pragmatism, the discovery that he has a sister in Canada, a brother in Hong Kong and a daughter studying under a pseudonym at Harvard: all this suggests someone who might push forward essential political reforms at home and be equipped with a better understanding of the west.

The fact that he has risen to the top by carefully staying on the right side of all the main groups in the communist establishment, his close ties to the People's Liberation Army, his remarkable outburst in Mexico in 2009, denouncing "some bored foreigners, with full stomachs, who have nothing better to do than point fingers at us": these straws point to a potentially colder wind from the east.

Every little phrase and gesture in his current American trip will be pored over with neo-Kremlinological zeal, to identify him as either great reformer or hardnosed realist. Or, inevitably, "enigmatic". As with Gorbachev, western leaders may get hints of the personality now, but we won't really know until he's firmly in the saddle, which means 2013 at the earliest.

Individuals make history, but they do not make it just as they please. Even when he becomes president, in spring 2013, Xi will face multiple constraints. China now seems to have a genuinely collective party leadership, more than the Soviet Union did. There are enormous economic and social tensions that have to be managed, from the country's own internal debt problem, through the rural-urban divide, to the difficulty of moving beyond an overwhelmingly export-led model of growth. There are the unresolved problems of Xinjiang and of Tibet, where an 18-year-old nun just burned herself to death in a despairing protest.

Increasingly, there is the voice of public opinion, using everything from street protests to micro-blogging sites such as Sina Weibo. That voice is often fiercely critical of official corruption and mismanagement, but it can also be very nationalist. And the truth is that there are now all the makings of a classic great power rivalry between China and the US, expressed most directly through a military buildup in the Pacific region. For all the obvious differences, the high seas rivalry between Britain and Germany 100 years ago should serve as a lesson in what to avoid.

So how should the west engage with China, and vice versa? Earlier this month, I saw two textbook examples of how not to do it – and one of how we should. At the Munich Security Conference, Zhang Zhijun, China's vice-minister of foreign affairs, woodenly waffled on about how "the people of Asia" had chosen a different path from the west, and how the west should simply leave China to go its own way. Oh, and by the way, there was no problem at all in the South China Sea, where everyone enjoys free navigation.

Sitting next to him, Senator John McCain launched into a ballistic attack. It is a matter of concern, he said, when a Vietnamese ship has its cables cut by a Chinese vessel. The Vietnamese remember 2,000 years of Chinese domination. People are immolating themselves in Tibet. The Arab spring represents universal aspirations and "the Arab spring is coming to China as well".

Part of me felt there was something magnificent about this – like John Wayne in the film True Grit, charging alone at four armed bandits, with the reins clenched between his teeth. But McCain's charge, like Wayne's, was so obviously done for the cameras and the audience back home.

Then there was a rare example of how to get it right. Kevin Rudd, Australia's foreign minister and a Mandarin-speaker, spoke briefly and pungently. People in Europe haven't fully woken up to what is happening, he said. China will have the world's largest economy within this decade. For the first time in 200 years the world's largest economy will be a non-democracy; for the first time in 500 years, it will be a non-western country.

Moreover, according to what Rudd called "credible" analysis, China's total military expenditure is likely to exceed that of the US by about 2025. This in a region, Asia, filled with every kind of strategic challenge – from the divided Korean peninsula through the disputed Taiwan straits to the standoff between nuclear-armed India and Pakistan. Unlike for the last half-century, US hegemony can no longer be relied on to keep the peace. To craft a new Pax Pacifica is therefore the great strategic challenge of our time. Australia, as "a western country in Asia", would do what it could.

In response to the Zhang-McCain exchange, Rudd calmly sketched both the huge growth in individual freedom and prosperity in China over the past 30 years, and the distance still to go before China can be described as a well-governed country under the rule of law. Implicitly rejecting the positions taken by both McCain and Zhang, he said "we need to shape global values together".

That seems to me exactly right. Both the US and China must be prepared to get into a conversation about the terms of international order in the 21st century. Each country must remain true to its own values, but work to see where there is common ground – and where adjustment, compromise or simply agreeing to disagree are viable.

This may fail, but it would be criminal folly not to attempt it. So Xi and Barack Obama should now plan to take a joint summer retreat on the coast of Australia, guided by Rudd, with a snorkelling trip to the Great Barrier Reef. Full-blown, Castlemaine XXXX mateship between Chinese and Americans may be too much to expect, but it is essential for them to open a frank, strategic conversation about global values and the foundations of international order.

Twitter: @fromtga

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Angela Merkel needs all the help she can get | Timothy Garton Ash

Few had anticipated the leadership dilemmas of a European Germany in a German Europe

In 1953 the novelist Thomas Mann appealed to an audience of students in Hamburg to strive for "not a German Europe but a European Germany". This stirring pledge was endlessly repeated at the time of German unification. Today we have a variation that few foresaw: a European Germany in a German Europe.

Angela Merkel's Berlin republic is a European Germany, in the rich, positive sense that the great novelist had come to use the term. It is free, civilised, democratic, law-bound, and socially and environmentally conscious. It's far from perfect, obviously, but as good as any other big country in Europe – and the best Germany we've ever had.

Yet because of the crisis of the eurozone this European Germany finds itself, unwillingly, at the centre of a German Europe. No one can seriously doubt that Germany is calling the shots in the eurozone. The reason we have a fiscal compact treaty agreed by 25 EU member states is that Berlin wanted it. Desperate, impoverished Greeks are being told to "do your homework" by Germans. More extraordinary still, the German chancellor is now telling French voters who to vote for in their own presidential election, through a series of campaign appearances with Nicolas Sarkozy. Everyone says that Europe is being led by "Merkozy", but the reality is more like Merkelzy.

Germany did not seek this leadership position. Rather, this is a perfect illustration of the law of unintended consequences. German leaders, from Helmut Schmidt to Helmut Kohl, had envisaged advancing the European project through a European monetary union, but it was François Mitterrand's France that insisted on pinning Germany down to it, in the context of German unification.

Historians can argue about how far the commitment in the Maastricht treaty was a direct quid pro quo for French support for German unification, but two things are clear. Both sides of the Rhine agreed that this was an important part of binding a newly united Germany into a more united Europe, in which France would continue to play a – if not the – leading role. And many Germans saw giving up their precious deutschmark as paying an economic price for a larger political good.

Twenty years on from Maastricht, we see that the precise opposite has happened. Economically, the euro turned out to be very good for Germany. Politically, it is precisely the monetary union that has put Germany in the driving seat and relegated France to the front passenger seat.

So far Germany is proving a reluctant, nervous and not very skilful driver. There are many reasons for this. One of these is not wanting to be in the driving seat in the first place. Another is suspecting that everyone else in the car wants you to pay for the petrol, the motorway meal and probably the overnight hotel too. On a panel at the Munich Security Conference last week, I and Robert Zoellick of the World Bank suggested in our different ways that Germany should show a little more economic and political leadership. The German defence minister, Thomas de Maizière, responded that Anglo-Saxon calls for more German leadership "usually meant … not leadership but money". He was wrong – but accurately reflected the way many Germans feel.

Then there is the unhappy sense that they are damned if they do lead and damned if they don't. The terrible history that prompted Mann's postwar appeal plays a role here. If Germany suggests a commissar to oversee Greek budget cuts, he inevitably gets called a Gauleiter. Then there is the fact that the German elite simply is not used to playing such a leadership role in Europe, unlike the French elite, who like nothing better. The French want to, but can't; the Germans can, but don't want to.

Above all, there is the perennial dilemma of Germany's awkward, inbetween size: "too big for Europe, too small for the world", said Henry Kissinger. Even with the most self-confident, adroit elite, and even without the memories of 1914-1945, leadership from that inbetween position would be difficult.

Two things are therefore needed. First, all Germans should go back and read Mann's short talk, both to understand the historical dimension of today's challenge and to recall the intellectual and moral grandeur that was once theirs. For Mann's beautifully crafted, profoundly moving message to those young Germans in 1953 can also be summarised in three short American words: "Yes we can".

Second, they need a lot of help from their friends. They won't manage it on their own. We may laugh at Sarko's antics in the front passenger seat ("Non, non, ma chérie! Tout droit, tout droit!'), but he's got the right idea. For David Cameron to consign Britain to the back seat – if not the dog boot – of the European car at this critical moment is folly beyond words. Earlier this week, Merkel again stressed how much Germany wants to see this fellow north European, free-market liberal country return to the heart of European affairs.

Back in Hamburg in 1953, the British were doing everything they could, in a far from ignoble way, to help ruined Germany back on its feet. It would be so short-sighted, so plain dumb, for Britain to abandon Germany to its own devices just when it finds itself playing such a decisive role in Europe – a role that it did not seek, for which it is ill-prepared and in which it needs all the help that it can get.

Twitter: @fromtga

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Just like Scotland, Britain needs its referendum too | Timothy Garton Ash

David Cameron wants devo max for Britain in Europe. His fear of direct democracy will land us with the worst of both worlds

David Cameron may yet go down to history as the man who pushed Scotland away from England and England away from Europe. That would earn him a place in the schoolbooks, though not the one he might like. On both Scotland and the EU, his stance risks triggering a dynamic that he cannot control.

Blairishly brilliant at presentation, supremely self-confident, handling the premiership as if he had been born in 10 Downing Street, Cameron radiates firmness, charm and competence. Initially, I bought it. His politics are not mine, but I thought Britain could do worse than to have a competent, pragmatic, liberal conservative prime minister, in coalition with liberals. But as the months go by, as mistake has followed mistake – over the EU, Scotland, benefits reform, NHS reform – a still, small voice has been nagging in my ear: maybe he doesn't know what he's doing, after all?

On Scotland and the EU, his positions are contradictory. When Scotland's nationalist leader Alex Salmond wants a three-way referendum, including the option of "devo max" (maximum devolution) as an alternative to full independence, Cameron says: that's nonsense – a referendum needs a clear, binary choice. He's right about that.

Yet devo max is precisely what he seeks for Britain in relation to the EU. He insists on a clear "in or out" choice for Scotland in relation to the British union. He ducks and weaves, rubbing all our European partners up the wrong way, to avoid a clear "in or out" choice for Britain in relation to the European Union.

And what has he got for his pains? In December, when he "vetoed" the German proposal for an all-EU treaty to endorse a fiscal compact for the eurozone, he was cheered to the echo by Eurosceptic backbenchers at Westminster. Most of our European partners were angry and dismayed. Asked at Davos last week why more was not being done to ensure the full involvement of all EU members and institutions in arrangements for saving the eurozone, Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister, said: "I would like to give you the mobile number of David Cameron."

But if you look at the fiscal compact treaty agreed in Brussels on Monday, you find it pullulating with references to EU institutions – commission, council, court of justice, even the parliament. It is more complicated than it would otherwise have been (the preamble alone runs to more than three pages in my printout), but essentially this is most of the EU going ahead with a German-led framework for saving the eurozone.

Whether it's a good way forward is another question. Were it not for Angela Merkel's need to reassure German public opinion, we would not have a new treaty. Most of this could be done under existing treaties and the so-called "six pack" of EU regulations. As macroeconomic policy, the German prescription is not sufficient to pull the European economy out of crisis. If across-the-continent budget cuts deepen recession, a debt-reduction pact could end up being, in effect, a debt-increase pact. Germany faces a rising chorus of well-informed criticism on exactly this point.

The question is: what does non-euro Britain gain by standing aside from this fiscal compact that non-euro Sweden loses by signing it? The answer: less than nothing. The future regulatory challenge to the City of London is no smaller. Britain will have fewer allies when it comes. If the eurozone gets more sickly on its cocktail of Greek ouzo and German beer, the British economy will be just as hard hit.

Cameron gave a fine speech in Davos, analysing the troubles of the eurozone. Much of his analysis was spot on. But his reception was at best lukewarm. For he came across like a man in white tie and top hat standing on the edge of an open sewer which a group of concerned residents is trying to clear, exclaiming: "Now come on you chaps, you really must dig harder; look, there's a mighty pile of turds over there, I would strongly advise you to get a larger spade."

Both tactically and strategically, Cameron's devo max for Britain will end up minimising British influence on the continent while not reducing British vulnerability to the consequences of what happens there.

Devo max for Scotland would have a different dynamic. In the short term, it might well be a good deal for Scotland, which could continue to enjoy the benefits of being part of the United Kingdom while reducing still further its membership costs. But the English would soon wake up to that. At least one recent poll has shown a larger percentage for Scottish independence among the English than among the Scots. When Czechoslovakia broke up, it was the Slovak nationalist insistence on its version of devo max that started the story, but it was the Czechs, under the forceful leadership of Václav Klaus, who gave the final push. The same could happen here, in our disuniting kingdom.

There's a simple solution to both problems, one that speaks to what we like to regard as a trait of – according to taste – Scottish, English and/or British national character. That solution is: ask a straight question, get a straight answer. Ask the people directly, that is, not the politicians. In a representative democracy you should not try this too often – but these are two exceptional and, in a larger sense, constitutional moments.

Before the next election, scheduled for 2015, we need two referendums. In the Scottish one, planned for 2014, the Scottish government wants to ask the Scots: "Do you agree that Scotland should be an independent country?" That's good enough, provided it's the only question on the paper.

The British one could ask: "Should Britain remain a member of the European Union?" By 2014 we'll have a better idea of what that involves, as the wider effects of a eurozone fiscal union become clear (or it has collapsed). There's a remarkable symmetry about the responses I get when I suggest this to strong British supporters of European integration and to some forceful opponents. Both "Europhiles" and some "Europhobes" are privately horrified at the idea of a straight "in or out" referendum. "Why?" I ask. "Because we'd lose!" Europhiles think the Brits would vote to leave the EU; Europhobes think they would vote to stay.

As someone who wants Scotland to stay in Britain and Britain to stay in Europe, I think we should take the risks of democracy. Let us write our own history.

Twitter: @fromtga

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Fear may well save the euro. Now for the politics of hope | Timothy Garton Ash

We must recognise that stability of the eurozone is no substitute for the larger project it was designed to usher in

Angela Merkel came to Davos on Wednesday and, in a speech as solidly built as a Mercedes, once again assured the world's business leaders that the euro would be saved. But this time, there is a difference: more of them seem to believe it. That immediately raises two further questions: even if the eurozone is saved, where is the strategy for growth? And where would this saving of the euro leave the larger politics of Europe?

On the euro, I find a noticeable shift in mood. Six months ago, business and political leaders were not convinced that Europe in general, and Germany in particular, would do what it takes. A gradual accumulation of piecemeal, pragmatic steps – very much in the Merkel style – has changed the balance of sentiment.

There is the decision to accelerate the introduction of the European stability mechanism this summer, following hard on the heels of the existing European financial stability facility. There is more than a hint from Merkel that Germany would be willing to contribute a bit more through these channels. There is the very active role of the International Monetary Fund, another indirect way for European governments to help out (and impose conditions on) other European governments. And there are the "two Marios".

I recently heard one leading banker describe Mario Draghi's initiative to give generous three-year loans from the European Central Bank (of which he is president) to European banks as "the European form of quantitative easing". Mario Monti's professorial programme for Italy has also earned plaudits. This is not an American or Chinese-style "big bazooka"; but the European version of a big bazooka is an array of small- to medium-sized bazookas.

Since the reality of markets is all about sentiment, and those human beings who make up "the markets" are strongly represented here in Davos, we can say that this sentiment is also an element of reality. This mood may swing again, even in the next few days, if the apparent impasse over Greek debt is not resolved. But one increasingly hears Greece being discounted as a special case. In case of a Greek default, the eurozone would have to move very fast to show that it would not let Portugal go the same way. But that, if achieved, could also prove a positive turning point. A line would be drawn.

Let's assume then, for the sake of argument, that over the next six months the eurozone is saved. Two problems arise. The first: where is the growth to come from? The German austerity recipe – the one Merkel feels that she needs, to convince reluctant German voters (with a national election coming next year), the Bundesbank and the German constitutional court – has no clear answer to that question.

As George Soros warned in a speech here, unless Europe has a growth strategy it is in danger of falling into a "deflationary debt spiral". If economies contract and tax revenues fall, the debt burden – the ratio of accumulated debt to GDP – would actually increase. Earlier this week the IMF came out with a revised forecast, predicting a contraction of the eurozone economy by 0.5 % in 2012 and only feeble growth in 2013. Needless to say, some countries will do much worse than others, and Britain will be pulled down with the eurozone.

That takes us to the politics. If markets are about perceptions and emotions, so are democracies. If the former are about those of the few, the latter are about those of the many. And the feelings in Europe are very bad. Read the newspapers, watch television, check out the opinion polls, listen to debates in national parliaments, watch the demos in the streets: you will find precious little of what Merkel on Wednesday called "the happiness of being able to shape things together".

There are massive resentments between nations – Greeks against Germans, and Germans against Greeks; north against south Europeans; Brits against almost everybody, and almost everybody against Brits. There is a general crisis of confidence in the European project. And there is a widespread scepticism, if not cynicism, about politicians, both nationally and at the European level.

If we are witnessing the euro being saved, this is a triumph of fear, not of hope. Other great moments of the European project – the introduction of the single market, 1989, successive enlargements, the launch of the euro itself – were driven by hope. Here, it is fear that has led Germany and others to do the minimum necessary: fear that the costs of collapse would be higher than the unpalatable, resented alternative of "bailing out" the countries in trouble.

If the eurozone does not return to growth, or does so only in a few better-placed countries, these resentments will multiply. Even if it does, there will be a legacy of bitterness. More and more people inside Europe will ask: "So what is this Europe really for?" (Remember that European monetary union was conceived of not just as an economic step but also, perhaps even more, as a political one.)

There are good answers to this question, and they urgently need to be spelled out. They have to do with our negotiating power in the 21st-century world of emerging, non-western giants such as China and India; climate change and other global challenges; the Arab spring, the most hopeful development of this decade; and defending (with the help of essential, managed immigration from the Arab world) the domestic achievements of the last half-century, including a certain European mix of relative prosperity, quality of life, social justice and security.

It would be foolish to pretend that the euro has been the best and straightest path to those larger goals. If the euro did not exist, it would not be necessary to introduce it yet awhile. But it does exist, with all the design faults that have now become evident. We have to start from where we are. To go back now would be worse than to go forward. Difficult though it will be, Europeans have to correct those design faults as they go along, working within the necessary constraints of national democracies, and adding a strategy for growth.

Above all, we have to recognise that saving the euro is no substitute for the larger political project, of which it was once meant to be both core and catalyst. The politics of fear may have saved the euro. We need a politics of hope to find a European answer to the Arab spring.

Twitter: @fromTGA

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In France, genocide has become a political brickbat | Timothy Garton Ash

Next week's bill on denial of Ottoman atrocities against Armenians is an attack on free speech, one of many around the world

Next Monday the French Senate is to vote on a bill that will criminalise denial of the Armenian genocide of 1915, along with any other events recognised as genocide in French law. The bill has already passed through the National Assembly, the lower house of the French parliament. The Senate should reject it, in the name of free speech, the freedom of historical inquiry and article 11 of France's path-breaking 1789 declaration of the rights of man and citizen ("the free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the most precious rights …").

The question here is not whether the atrocities committed against the Armenians in the last years of the Ottoman empire were terrible, or whether they should be acknowledged in Turkish and European memory. They were and they should be. The question is: should it be a crime under the law of France, or other countries, to dispute whether those terrible events constituted a genocide, a term used in international law? While not minimising the suffering of the Armenians, the celebrated Ottoman specialist Bernard Lewis has in the past disputed that precise point. And is the French parliament equipped and entitled to set itself up as a tribunal on world history, handing down verdicts on the past conduct of other nations? The answers are: no and no.

In a further twist, the bill would criminalise not just the "contestation" of the Armenian genocide but also "outrageous minimisation" of it. As Françoise Chandernagor of the Liberté pour l'histoire campaign points out, this introduces a concept vague even by the standards of such memory laws. If Turkish estimates of the Armenian dead run at around 500,000 and Armenian ones at 1.5 million, what would count as minimisation? 547,000? And should the Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, be arrested for such "minimisation" on his next official visit to France? (The bill envisages a fine of €45,000 and a year's imprisonment.)

Taking a benign view of human nature in general, and French politics in particular, you might say that this is a clumsy attempt to realise a noble intention. That would be naive. There is a remarkable correlation between the appearance of such proposals in the French parliament and the proximity of national elections, in which some half a million voters of Armenian origin play a significant part. What happened to the Armenians was officially recognised as genocide in French law in December 2001, just before the presidential and parliamentary elections. A bill similar to this one was passed in the lower house in 2006 (but rejected by the upper) in the runup to the elections of 2007. And what's happening this year? Yes, elections.

Not that all leading politicians of Nicolas Sarkozy's UMP party have supported the bill proposed by one of their parliamentarians. The foreign minister, Alain Juppé, opposes it. But that's because he's worried about the implications for France's relations with Turkey. The Turkish government's reaction has been predictably vehement. It withdrew its ambassador in protest, and prime minister Erdogan said, "approximately 15% of the population in Algeria was subjected to a massacre by the French, starting from 1945. This is genocide."

Thus a tragedy which should be the subject for grave commemoration and free historical debate, calmly testing even wayward hypotheses against the evidence, is reduced to an instrument of political manipulation, a politician's brickbat. The corpse counts of yesterday are parlayed into the vote counts of tomorrow. You accuse me of genocide, I accuse you of genocide.

Meanwhile, Turkish intellectuals – such as the Nobel prizewinning writer Orhan Pamuk – who have bravely said that what was done to the Armenians was genocide are liable to get prosecuted in Turkey itself. What is state-ordained truth in France is state-ordained falsehood in Turkey.

Yet these are increasingly symbolic rather than effective acts. In a country like France, and with rather more difficulty in Turkey, the internet allows people to find those forbidden views anyway. They are just a couple more mouse-clicks away.

So this is but the latest instance of a much wider challenge. What should be the limits of free expression in the internet age? What should be the free speech norms of an interconnected world? And who should set them? These are among the questions being addressed in a project called Free Speech Debate (freespeechdebate.com) that we have just launched at Oxford University. Among the 10 draft principles we offer for debate, criticism and revision, one is especially relevant to the Armenian genocide controversy. It says: "We allow no taboos in the discussion and dissemination of knowledge."

Memory laws such as the one proposed in France clearly fail this test; but they are not the only example. In Britain, the science writer Simon Singh had to defend a lengthy, costly libel action because of his criticism of claims made for chiropractic treatments. The Church of Scientology uses its copyright in the immortal words of L Ron Hubbard to prevent people seeing the higher secrets of the Operating Thetan. (Tip: if you're interested, search for Operation Clambake.) Today, the English-language Wikipedia was blacked out for 24 hours to protest against the proposed US Stop Online Piracy Act, which, in the current version, will have a disastrous, chilling effect on the free, online dissemination of knowledge.

There are also more genuinely difficult cases. Late last year, the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity asked the journals Science and Nature to redact details of a study about an easily transmitted form of the H5N1 virus, or bird flu, for fear it could be misused by bioterrorists. And what about Aids denialism? When endorsed by president Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, this resulted quite directly in the death of hundreds of thousands of people who might otherwise have been properly treated. The "no taboos" principle needs to be tested against such hard cases.

France's opportunistic, misbegotten bill is not a hard case. It's a no-brainer. Next week, let the French Senate give an example to the US Congress in the defence of intellectual freedom.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales will be in conversation with Timothy Garton Ash, livestreamed on freespeechdebate.com, at 5pm UK time tomorrow

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Cameron and co are deluded – it's cold on Europe's margins | Timothy Garton Ash

I fear my nightmare about England's direction may come true. In 10 years we'll beg the French (and Scots) to let us back in

If you see a fork in the road, take it! For 60 years, in its relations with Europe, Britain has been following Yogi Berra's advice. At the end of 2011, the question is: can it continue to take both roads at once – and if not, which should it choose? In today's British debate, there is a minority Eurosceptic position that I can respect, although I completely disagree with it, and a majority Eurosceptic position that I cannot respect, because it is rooted in self-deception.

The minority position says: Britain's independence, sovereignty and freedom to manoeuvre in a fast-changing, increasingly post-western world are supremely important to us. We recognise that, by standing aside from the mainstream of European integration we shall lose influence, also in the eyes of Washington and Beijing. We recognise that this English stance towards the European Union may hasten the departure of Scotland from the British union. But that's a price we are prepared to pay. Norway without the oil? An offshore Switzerland? Why not? The English are a tough, inventive people and will find a way to negotiate the high seas of the 21st century.

By contrast, the majority Eurosceptic position, to which David Cameron essentially adheres, says: we can have our cake and eat it. Even though we stand aside from the central projects of European integration, our European and global influence will be undiminished. "Let me say something about the UK's influence in Europe," the Foreign Office minister Henry Bellingham told the Commons last week. "The decision not to proceed with a treaty at 27 has no impact on our status in the European Union." This is ridiculous. Every cat in Brussels, every dog in Washington, every panda in Beijing knows that is untrue.

In fact, that decision came about precisely because Britain had marginalised itself in Europe. It was not Cameron's plan to end up one against 26. The crypto-Churchillian rhetoric of "Very well, alone" was after-the-event spin. Cameron thought he had a deal with Angela Merkel to get Britain the special provisions on financial services that it wanted. He miscalculated. At the crunch, Germany sided with France. When Cameron overplayed his hand early that Friday morning, with everyone round the table conscious that global financial markets were opening in a few hours, he found himself alone.

Since Britain is not a member of the eurozone, its members said, in effect: "What business have you stopping us?" Crucially, there was no reservoir of goodwill round the table, such as there normally is to help an important member state address a domestic political difficulty. As a result of Cameron's decision to take the Conservatives out of the European People's party (EPP) grouping in the European parliament, he was not present at a crucial meeting of EPP leaders, including Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy, just before the Brussels summit. If he had been, he might have got what he wanted. Marginalise yourself and you will be marginalised.

Another variant of majority Eurosceptic self-deception says: all right, we may lose influence in Europe, but not in the world. "Isolated? No. Now the whole world's our oyster," is the headline on a classic exemplar of this genre, by the Mail columnist Simon Heffer. Freed from the shackles of "the impossibly idealistic, sclerotic and corrupt European family", Britain can be off trading merrily with India, China and Brazil. Nor will America take us any less seriously. True, concedes Heffer, some Americans have a bizarre conception of Europe as some kind of federal state like the US, but "it should be a goal of our foreign policy to re-educate our American cousins out of this mindset". Cousin Barack, Cousin Hillary, you have been warned. Prepare to be re-educated.

This is self-delusion of a high order. But let's be honest. For every EU member state, there is a trade-off. You do lose some of your sovereignty and independence. In return, you gain influence, scale, clout – and therefore the ability to secure more effective freedom, security and prosperity for your own people. As David Lidington, the British minister for Europe, himself reminded the Commons last week: "One voice representing 500 million consumers is heard more loudly in Beijing, Delhi and Brasilia than 27 separate voices."

It is quite likely that this moment of apparent clarity – the parting of the ways! – will fade into the usual muddle next year. The eurozone has not been saved. Nick Clegg and the Foreign Office, helped by sympathetic, economically liberal member states, may somehow finagle Britain back into the game. Lots of other governments have special interests to protect. The whole thing is, as one diplomat observed, "a bugger's muddle" – and Brits are widely considered to be good at those.

But are we really content to go on muddling through for another 10 or 20 years? Both sides of the British argument about Europe can surely agree that we made a big mistake at some point over the last 60 years, even if we don't agree what it was. Those of us who think Britain's national interest requires that we remain full members of the EU will regard the fact that we stood aside at its birth in the 1950s as that historic mistake. Had Britain been present at the creation, this would have been a different EU. Those who believe the opposite will see the historic mistake in joining it, belatedly, in the 1970s, and then going along with further steps of integration.

Either way, we can't afford another big mistake. My nightmare – which I also think quite probable – is that the Westminster closed circuit of parliament, government and press will continue to muddle this country (or what's left of it when Scotland has left) through to the margins of Europe. When the English discover, in five to 10 years' time, that Heffer, Bellingham and co are dead wrong; when the country's self-marginalisation is damaging its standing in Washington, its capacity to project its interests in China, India and Brazil, and the City of London; then it – now just England and possibly Wales – will come creeping back, saying "Please let us in", as Britain did in the 1960s. And then the French, Croats and Scots will decide whether to say oui or non.

Now there's a vision from the ghost of Christmas future.

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