Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 25

Václav Havel: director of a play that changed history

The former president of the Czech Republic was the epitome of a dissident because he persisted in his struggle, patiently, non-violently, with dignity and wit

Hands whirring like twin propellers, Václav Havel moved with his characteristic hurried, short-paced walk across the mirrored foyer of the Magic Lantern theatre, the headquarters of the velvet revolution. The slightly stooped, stocky figure, dressed in jeans and sweater, stopped for a moment, began to speak about some "important negotiations"; scarcely three sentences in, he was swept away. He gave an apologetic smile over his shoulder, as if to say "what can a man do?"

Often Havel talked as if he was an ironic critic watching the theatre of life, but there in the Magic Lantern, in 1989, he became the lead actor and director of a play that changed history.

Havel was a defining figure of late 20th-century Europe. He was not just a dissident; he was the epitome of the dissident, as we came to understand that novel term. He was not just the leader of a velvet revolution; he was the leader of the original velvet revolution, the one that gave us a label applied to many other non-violent mass protests since 1989. (He always insisted that a western journalist coined the term.)

Havel was not just a president; he was the founding president of what is now the Czech Republic. He was not just a European; he was a European who, with the eloquence of a professional playwright and the authority of a former political prisoner, reminded us of the historical and moral dimensions of the European project.

Looking at the mess that project is in today, one can only cry: "Havel! Europe hath need of thee."

He was also one of the most engaging human beings I have ever known. I first met him in the early 1980s, when he had just emerged from several years in prison. We spoke in his riverside apartment, with its large writer's tables and tableau view of Prague. Although the communist secret police then assessed the active core of the Charter 77 movement – probably realistically – at just a few hundred people he insisted that silent popular support was growing. One day, the flickering candles would burn through the ice. It's important to remember that no one knew when that day would come.

In the event, it came just six years later, but it might have been 22 years, as it has been for Aung San Suu Kyi – whom Havel selflessly nominated for the Nobel peace prize, at a time when he might have won it himself. The dissident's honour does not come from the political victor's crown. Havel was the epitome of a dissident because he persisted in this struggle, patiently, non-violently, with dignity and wit, not knowing when or even if the outward victory would come. The success was already in that persistence, in the practice of "antipolitics" – or politics as the art of the impossible. Meanwhile, he analysed the communist system in profound but down-to-earth essays, and in letters from prison to his first wife, Olga.

In his famous parable of the Schweikian greengrocer who puts a sign in his shop window, among the apples and onions, saying "Workers of all countries, Unite!" – although, of course, the man doesn't believe a word of it – Havel captured the essential insight on which all civil resistance draws: that even the most oppressive regimes depend on some minimal compliance by the people they govern. In a seminal essay, he talked of "the power of the powerless".

When the chance came to practise civil resistance himself, Havel turned this into political theatre of an electrifying kind. Prague's Wenceslas Square was the stage. A cast of 300,000 people spoke as one. Cry your eyes out, Cecil B DeMille. No one who was there will ever forget the sight of Havel and Aleksander Dubcek, the hero of '89 and the hero of '68, appearing side by side on the balcony: 'Dubcek-Havel! Dubcek-Havel!' Or the sound of 300,000 keyrings being shaken together, like Chinese bells. Rarely if ever has a tiny minority so rapidly become a large majority. May the same happen soon in Burma.

But Czechoslovakia – as it then still was – had the benefit of coming late to the 1989 party. The Poles, East Germans and Hungarians had done most of the hard work already, seizing the chance Gorbachev offered. When I arrived in Prague, and sought Václav out in his favourite basement pub, I joked that in Poland it had taken 10 years, in Hungary 10 months, in East Germany 10 weeks; perhaps here it would take 10 days. He immediately got me to repeat the quip to an underground video team. In the event, he was president within seven weeks. I vividly remember the moment when homemade badges appeared saying Havel for President. "May I take one?" he politely asked the student badge-peddler.

"People, your government has returned to you!" he declared in his 1990 New Year's address as newly inaugurated head of state, echoing the first president of Czechoslovakia, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. Those first weeks in Prague Castle were manic, hilarious, uplifting and chaotic. He showed off the original torture chamber: "I think we will use it for negotiations."

But then the hard slog of undoing communism began. All the poison accumulated over 40 years came seeping out. Harder-nosed political operators, such as Václav Klaus, thrust to the fore. So did nationalism, Slovak and eventually also Czech. Havel fought with all his eloquence to keep together Masaryk's dream of a civic, multinational republic – in vain.

He came back as the founding president of today's Czech Republic, which emerged from the so-called velvet divorce from Slovakia.

He felt, with good reason, that he had to be present at the creation. I think he stayed on too long in this role. Less would have been more. In diminished health, he was exhausted by the ceaseless round of ceremonial duties and petty political infighting, and, in time, his people became weary of him.

We had a long-distance argument through the 1990s about whether one could be a practising politician and an independent intellectual and at one and the same time. He insisted one could. But he would also always promise, every time we met, that once he was out of office he would write a play about the comedy of high politics, which he had now observed at first hand. Something about the powerlessness of the powerful.

Over the years, I began to doubt that he ever would. He was, however, as good as his word. "Leaving" – a characteristically ironical play about the loss of power, and the yearning to get it back – has recently been filmed, under his own direction, with his second wife, Dagmar, in a leading role.

Now, far too soon, Havel has taken his final leave. But few have left so much of value behind.

© Timothy Garton Ash

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David Cameron's 'no' is bad for Britain and for Europe | Timothy Garton Ash

The EU will never be the same again. Britain has become more Swiss, but most of Europe's gone German

It was the day that Europe united. It was the day that Europe split. To save the euro, up to 26 members of the European Union are to join a fiscal compact, submitting the core tax and spend competencies of the state to mutual supervision. If this actually happens, it will mean that the crisis of monetary union has driven them towards a political union they would not otherwise have embraced. Equally fateful is Britain's decision to stand aside. One or two other countries may sooner or later join the Brits, but even this would mean a split between a core union, embracing the large majority, and a small, scattered periphery.

Whatever follows, the European Union will never be the same again. Even if this ultimately proves to be a turning point at which history fails to turn, historians will mark the 9th of December 2011.

The Brussels communique announcing "a reinforced architecture for economic and monetary union" is anything but a resounding Jeffersonian declaration for future schoolchildren to recite. To compel anyone to learn it by heart would be an exquisite form of Belgian torture. Yet slash your way through its tangled thickets of Eurojargon and you find something remarkable. At least 23 – and possibly 26 out of 27 – states agree to bind themselves legally to balance their budgets, under the jurisdiction of the European court of justice and with deficit reduction programmes to be agreed with the European commission. More: for the 17 eurozone members, there'll be automatic sanctions if their deficit goes above 3%.

Welcome to a German Europe. In return, there are more funds for bailouts and at least a hint that the European Central Bank (ECB) will intervene more actively in the markets. Germany picks up the tab. On paper, that adds up to a big step towards a fiscal and transfer union for the current members of the eurozone, and eight others committed to join it in future. It's a step from the confederal towards the federal.

Because David Cameron refused to go along, this is to be done by "an international agreement to be signed in March or at an earlier date". Ironically, Cameron's veto on EU-wide treaty change means that the reform is more likely to happen fast. Ireland may hold a referendum on the deal. The Irish may say no. The Danes or Czechs might just cut up rough. Unlike an EU treaty change, requiring unanimity, this would merely result in there being one or two fewer inside, and one or two more outside.

There are still huge uncertainties on this continental journey into the unknown. Compared with what the United States Fed has done, this was no "big bazooka". Yields on Italian government bonds jumped nervously today. German medicine may well not produce the economic growth which is the only way to reduce Europe's burden of public and private debt in the longer term. The harshness of fiscal discipline may drive the peoples of Greece or Portugal to outright revolt. A leading bond market analyst tells me: "With the euro area's arteries clogged and its heart on the brink of failure, the ECB has said it is not qualified to perform bypass surgery, while the member states have pledged to go on a starvation diet … I'm surprised the markets aren't reacting more negatively and think they will later."

So the eurozone has plenty of crises still to come. I make no predictions. But if it survives and strengthens, then along the way, slowly, painfully, there will develop a deeper union of up to 26 states – without Britain.

Cameron's "no" is not just a fateful moment for these islands. It's a bad moment for Europe. Britain's ambivalence about Europe is centuries old. Writing in 1937, and looking back as far as 1789, the historian RW Seton-Watson wrote: "The desire for isolation, the knowledge that it is impossible – these are the two poles between which the needle of the British compass continues to waver." Plus ça change …

Having stood aside in the 1950s, as France, Germany, Italy and the Benelux countries started to form a European community, Britain decided it had to be present "at the top table" to defend its own interests, traditionally understood to include preserving the balance of power on the continent. For nearly 40 years, even under Margaret Thatcher, that is what British governments have tried to do inside what is now the European Union.

But this year, in a little-noticed sea change in British European policy, Cameron yielded to the brayings of his own Eurosceptic backbenches and said something new: you, dear friends in the eurozone, go ahead to save it. We will stand aside, applauding from the sidelines. Napoleon, bonne chance! This is not the "Very well, alone" of the British soldier in David Low's famous 1940 cartoon – for that soldier was fighting for a better future in Europe as a whole. It is a quite different "Very well, alone": leave us to be an offshore Switzerland. When a Tory Eurosceptic MP called Mark Reckless was asked on the BBC's Today programme whether yesterday's veto made us "a bit like Switzerland" he said yes – and a good thing too. Reckless, indeed.

Cameron argues that he has defended Britain's national interests. In the short term, on the narrow point of regulating financial services, perhaps he has; in the long run, emphatically not. Whatever the legal small print says, if things go on like this Britain will lose influence, even over the rules of the single market. A child of five can see that. If you have a club in which 25 or 26 members want to go one way, and one or two want to go other ways, who will prevail? Especially if the 25 or 26 have set up their own club-within-the-club.

This is bad for Britain, but also for Europe. Switzerland is one thing, Britain quite another. It does Europe no good at all to have one its largest economies – and the home of its leading financial centre – stand aside. With two parallel structures in an already labyrinthine European Union, there will be endless wrangles about who is entitled to do what. There can be no credible European foreign and security policy without Britain. In the eyes of China and America, Europe will be weakened. A big day for Europe, then, but no cause for celebration.

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The eurozone crisis: a terrifying race to become a diminished world power | Timothy Garton Ash

To see off the bond markets, the eurozone has to create a credible sovereign – but that may divide the larger EU

Europe will not be saved in Brussels this Friday. At best, it will live to face another trauma. After these "10 days to save the euro" there will be 10 weeks, 10 months, 10 years. What one Brussels observer describes as Europe's "terrifying and boring" crisis will run and run. Angela Merkel compares saving the eurozone to a marathon; actually it's more like a cross-country obstacle race, with a large new water-jump over every false horizon.

First, there is the immediate question of whether eurozone governments can win back the confidence of the markets. How difficult that will be is shown by the fact that, on the very day Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy announced how they were (once again) definitively going to save the eurozone, Standard & Poor's put even Germany's AAA credit rating on a negative watch.

A bond market analyst explains to me how, once the fundamental confidence of investors is undermined, the whole calculus is changed. Then it is no longer about price. Company X or country Y can offer yields of 5%, 6%, 7%, 8% – the investors just don't want to be there. Eurozone countries such as Italy need to borrow large sums early next year and the markets – those aggregators of individual greed and panic – may again say no. Then we'll have another "10 days to save the euro".

Next, there's the question of what mix of fiscal union, greater European Central Bank (ECB) intervention and German guarantees for at least some of other eurozone countries' debt (eurobonds, stability bonds, debt mutualisation, choose your own term) will calm the markets for a longer period – and whether the slow-grinding wheels of EU politics can get there fast enough.

The bond markets are like crocodiles; it takes elephants to drive them back into their river. The elephant in this case is a powerful, determined sovereign. It can do the one thing that financial markets cannot do but dream of at night: print money.

Of course this has to be money that others will still accept as a strong currency – not threatening the "price stability" which is the Nibelung ring of contemporary Germany. Today's ring is guarded by two Wagnerian giants, the Bundesbank (Fasolt) and the German constitutional court (Fafner), both singled out for special praise by Merkel in her address to the Bundestag last week. But the truth is that in current economic circumstances the ECB could purchase more government bonds than it is buying at the moment, print more money, and still not bring inflationary excess. As the Economist points out, price stability must also mean preventing prices going down. What is going to have people pushing their euro notes around in wheelbarrows, as they famously did their Mark notes in Weimar Germany's hyperinflation, is not, at the moment, inflation – it is a collapse of the eurozone.

James Carville, the pitbull-headed adviser to president Bill Clinton, famously quipped that if he came back to earth a second time, he would like to come back as the bond markets. The bond markets, however, dream of coming back as James Carville. They would like nothing more than to be a key adviser to the president of an absolutely secure, elephant-like sovereign, such as the United States was until recently believed to be. For only such a sovereign will guarantee – absolutely guarantee, in the bondholder's dream – a risk-free return. The eurozone does not have anything like such a sovereign. To create it is a political challenge, not just an economic one.

The next water-jump in the obstacle race, which follows close on the last, is therefore the question of which eurozone states are prepared to agree to what political steps to oversee the fiscal union. If strict budget discipline is to be imposed on eurozone member states like Italy or Spain, what institutions will supervise and legitimate this intrusion into the core competences of a nation state and the lives of its citizens? Should it be existing central institutions of the EU, such as the European Commission, perhaps given more legitimacy by direct elections? Should it be representatives of national parliaments, in a kind of senate?

France and Germany started with sharply contrasting views on this question. They split the difference this week, but will the resulting fudge be enough to satisfy even their own restless peoples and politics? (France has its presidential election next year, Germany's general election comes in 2013.) And what about the Irish, Italians, Spaniards and Greeks? Behind the dry language of "treaty change", whether by all 27 member states of the EU or just the 17 current members of the eurozone, there lurk such political fundamentals as "no taxation without representation".

What's for sure is that not everyone will be in this more united eurozone, if it comes about. Sarkozy and others now talk openly of a two-speed Europe. But it won't be a two-speed Europe. It will be a multi-speed, and possibly multi-direction, Europe. In his speech last week Sarkozy said: "Germany and France united, it's the whole of Europe that is united and strong. France and Germany disunited, it's the whole of Europe that is disunited and weakened." The second statement is true, the first evidently false. What Der Spiegel provocatively calls "the German-French diktat" does not in itself ensure larger European unity. And "variable geometry" is just a nice phrase. Unless all 27 member states can work out how a United States of the eurozone, or Little Europe, meshes with the existing structures of the EU, the whole will be weakened by the strengthening of some of its parts.

This also loops back to the economics. The eurozone will only be strengthened in the long run if its economies start to grow again. What if the anti-Keynesian policies demanded by Germany mean that significant parts of the eurozone do not return to growth? What if its weaker, southern members experience years of pain, while northerners like Germany, Austria and Finland return to gain? What if the non-euro periphery of the EU, including Britain, grows faster than the eurozone? Asymmetries in economic performance will exacerbate the political strains.

Behind all this, there is the question of Europe's diminished standing and power in the world. Ten years ago, one read rosy visions of Europe "running the 21st century". The Chinese saw the EU as an important pole of a multipolar world. The other day I talked to a senior figure at the Chinese communist party's central school. How did he see the EU now? We deal with the major individual countries, he replied. The EU itself is "something like Italy or Spain". To put it another way: today's EU is a standing invitation for China to divide and rule.

Starting on Thursday, at every European summit there should be a symbolic voice of China. He or she doesn't actually need to be Chinese; a European expert on China could play the part. Before Europe's leaders get down to work, this symbolic figure should give them China's assessment of where Europe stands, with that blunt directness of which the Chinese are capable. If that doesn't concentrate minds, I don't know what will.

• This article was amended on 8 December 2011 to correct an error introduced during the editing process. It referred to Deutschmark notes being pushed around in wheelbarrows in Weimar Germany. The Deutschmark was not introduced until 1948.

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The eurozone crisis features a water-jump over each false horizon | Timothy Garton Ash

To see off the bond markets, the eurozone has to create a credible sovereign – but that may divide the larger EU

Europe will not be saved in Brussels this Friday. At best, it will live to face another trauma. After these "10 days to save the euro" there will be 10 weeks, 10 months, 10 years. What one Brussels observer describes as Europe's "terrifying and boring" crisis will run and run. Angela Merkel compares saving the eurozone to a marathon; actually it's more like a cross-country obstacle race, with a large new water-jump over every false horizon.

First, there is the immediate question of whether eurozone governments can win back the confidence of the markets. How difficult that will be is shown by the fact that, on the very day Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy announced how they were (once again) definitively going to save the eurozone, Standard & Poor's put even Germany's AAA credit rating on a negative watch.

A bond market analyst explains to me how, once the fundamental confidence of investors is undermined, the whole calculus is changed. Then it is no longer about price. Company X or country Y can offer yields of 5%, 6%, 7%, 8% – the investors just don't want to be there. Eurozone countries such as Italy need to borrow large sums early next year and the markets – those aggregators of individual greed and panic – may again say no. Then we'll have another "10 days to save the euro".

Next, there's the question of what mix of fiscal union, greater European Central Bank (ECB) intervention and German guarantees for at least some of other eurozone countries' debt (eurobonds, stability bonds, debt mutualisation, choose your own term) will calm the markets for a longer period – and whether the slow-grinding wheels of EU politics can get there fast enough.

The bond markets are like crocodiles; it takes elephants to drive them back into their river. The elephant in this case is a powerful, determined sovereign. It can do the one thing that financial markets cannot do but dream of at night: print money.

Of course this has to be money that others will still accept as a strong currency – not threatening the "price stability" which is the Nibelung ring of contemporary Germany. Today's ring is guarded by two Wagnerian giants, the Bundesbank (Fasolt) and the German constitutional court (Fafner), both singled out for special praise by Merkel in her address to the Bundestag last week. But the truth is that in current economic circumstances the ECB could purchase more government bonds than it is buying at the moment, print more money, and still not bring inflationary excess. As the Economist points out, price stability must also mean preventing prices going down. What is going to have people pushing their euro notes around in wheelbarrows, as they famously did their Deutschmark notes in Weimar Germany's hyperinflation, is not, at the moment, inflation – it is a collapse of the eurozone.

James Carville, the pitbull-headed adviser to president Bill Clinton, famously quipped that if he came back to earth a second time, he would like to come back as the bond markets. The bond markets, however, dream of coming back as James Carville. They would like nothing more than to be a key adviser to the president of an absolutely secure, elephant-like sovereign, such as the United States was until recently believed to be. For only such a sovereign will guarantee – absolutely guarantee, in the bondholder's dream – a risk-free return. The eurozone does not have anything like such a sovereign. To create it is a political challenge, not just an economic one.

The next water-jump in the obstacle race, which follows close on the last, is therefore the question of which eurozone states are prepared to agree to what political steps to oversee the fiscal union. If strict budget discipline is to be imposed on eurozone member states like Italy or Spain, what institutions will supervise and legitimate this intrusion into the core competences of a nation state and the lives of its citizens? Should it be existing central institutions of the EU, such as the European Commission, perhaps given more legitimacy by direct elections? Should it be representatives of national parliaments, in a kind of senate?

France and Germany started with sharply contrasting views on this question. They split the difference this week, but will the resulting fudge be enough to satisfy even their own restless peoples and politics? (France has its presidential election next year, Germany's general election comes in 2013.) And what about the Irish, Italians, Spaniards and Greeks? Behind the dry language of "treaty change", whether by all 27 member states of the EU or just the 17 current members of the eurozone, there lurk such political fundamentals as "no taxation without representation".

What's for sure is that not everyone will be in this more united eurozone, if it comes about. Sarkozy and others now talk openly of a two-speed Europe. But it won't be a two-speed Europe. It will be a multi-speed, and possibly multi-direction, Europe. In his speech last week Sarkozy said: "Germany and France united, it's the whole of Europe that is united and strong. France and Germany disunited, it's the whole of Europe that is disunited and weakened." The second statement is true, the first evidently false. What Der Spiegel provocatively calls "the German-French diktat" does not in itself ensure larger European unity. And "variable geometry" is just a nice phrase. Unless all 27 member states can work out how a United States of the eurozone, or Little Europe, meshes with the existing structures of the EU, the whole will be weakened by the strengthening of some of its parts.

This also loops back to the economics. The eurozone will only be strengthened in the long run if its economies start to grow again. What if the anti-Keynesian policies demanded by Germany mean that significant parts of the eurozone do not return to growth? What if its weaker, southern members experience years of pain, while northerners like Germany, Austria and Finland return to gain? What if the non-euro periphery of the EU, including Britain, grows faster than the eurozone? Asymmetries in economic performance will exacerbate the political strains.

Behind all this, there is the question of Europe's diminished standing and power in the world. Ten years ago, one read rosy visions of Europe "running the 21st century". The Chinese saw the EU as an important pole of a multipolar world. The other day I talked to a senior figure at the Chinese communist party's central school. How did he see the EU now? We deal with the major individual countries, he replied. The EU itself is "something like Italy or Spain". To put it another way: today's EU is a standing invitation for China to divide and rule.

Starting on Thursday, at every European summit there should be a symbolic voice of China. He or she doesn't actually need to be Chinese; a European expert on China could play the part. Before Europe's leaders get down to work, this symbolic figure should give them China's assessment of where Europe stands, with that blunt directness of which the Chinese are capable. If that doesn't concentrate minds, I don't know what will.

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Dr Saif Gaddafi's LSE thesis makes a case for the action that crushed him | Timothy Garton Ash

Libya is a case of intervention justified by specific circumstances. Go beyond that, and you have a disaster like Iraq

It is a little noticed fact that the London School of Economics doctoral thesis that bears the name "Saif Al-Islam Alqadhafi" makes the case for the military intervention that resulted in his capture, current detention, and possible death sentence at the hands of what may pass in Libya for justice. Perhaps in his pre-trial captivity, Dr Gaddafi will have a chance to reflect upon the words he once supposedly wrote.

"The international order," says this thesis, "has a responsibility to protect the basic rights of those citizens who live under non-liberal governments" (such as, the reader cannot resist adding, his dad's). An academic panel – not to be confused with the inquiry by Lord Woolf, whose very critical report on the LSE's links with Libya was published on Wednesday – has yet to pronounce on charges of plagiarism made against this thesis. But whoever wrote it, it does not stop there. In the version available online it argues for a so-called collective management system, involving representatives of civil society and business as well as governments. And "to the extent that the mechanisms of the collective management system succeed in providing a way to give voice to the citizens of illiberal states, then interventions can be at the invitation of these individuals. When the top levels of the system decide to intervene in another state's affairs, it is therefore an action that has originated from the will of the people at the bottom-most levels."

Translated into plain English, this surely means that when leaders of the Libyan uprising in Benghazi pointed out that Dr Gaddafi's dad was threatening to hunt them down "alley by alley" showing "no mercy", and they asked for outside assistance, that helped justify an air campaign called for by Nicolas Sarkozy and sanctioned by the UN. The resulting Nato air strikes reportedly cost Dr Gaddafi the use of several fingers on his right hand. They also tipped the balance in favour of anti-Gaddafi forces on the ground, leading to the killing of his father (a French jet having just shot up his convoy) and the subsequent seizure of Saif.

Extraordinary photos taken soon after Saif's capture showed him in desert garb, his face and hair coated with sand, as if for a theatrical portrayal of death: the mask for a masque. What worlds away from the neat, western-dressed figure who had sat in front of Professor Lord Meghnad Desai to defend his LSE thesis just a few years earlier, presumably discussing such deathless themes as "the '3x3=3' model as a system of multi-level governance" (section 5.7) and "Collective management and cosmopolitan multi-level citizenship" (5.8).

"Yet," that thesis judiciously continues, "the difficulties involved in any decision to intervene across borders, and the dangers of 'liberal imperialism', remain, and the likelihood that military interventions could be justified, given [the] unpredictable consequences of such action, remains low." Fair comment.

"After Libya" is a good moment to take stock of what is sometimes called liberal intervention. I've recently heard two contrasting views: one from a former American ambassador, the other from a serving British one. Peter Galbraith was a protagonist of US intervention in former Yugoslavia, where he served as ambassador to Croatia, but has become a fierce critic of the massive, costly incompetence and disastrous unintended consequences of US-led interventions and bungled nation-building efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Yet, looking back over the 20 years since the end of the cold war, Galbraith sees four "modest successes": Kuwait (the first Gulf war), Bosnia, Kosovo and now Libya. They have, he argues, some features in common. The military action was relatively brief, and much of it from the air. The interventions had broad international and regional support. The action relied upon local partners. The objectives were limited.

How can Galbraith already claim Libya as a success? Because success is defined as the achievement of that limited objective: reversing a current or seemingly imminent mass killing of civilians (Bosnia, Kosovo, Libya), or an armed occupation (Kuwait). Yes, Libya today is no Switzerland, nor is it likely to be. If things again become really horrible there – and reputable observers have already documented human rights abuses by the country's liberators – you deal with that as it comes. "Modest success" is defined also by the modesty of the goal against which it is measured.

Sir John Jenkins, Britain's ambassador to Libya and former ambassador to Iraq, will not settle for that. He recognises all the elements that made the Libyan action different and better than that in Iraq, emphasising particularly the support from the Arab League. But he argues that the lesson often drawn from the chequered record of these interventions over two decades – namely, that "state-building is a mug's game" – is precisely the wrong one. The right lesson is that "state-building is what we have to get right". So the success of the intervention can only be claimed in the longer run, if the state it affects (or creates, in the case of Kosovo) turns out to be significantly better than it had been for some time before – and not just better than in the moment of maximum humanitarian danger. What Libya, like other Arab states, needs is "legitimate, accountable, removeable government".

There's no doubting the seriousness of Jenkins's concern for a region he knows very well, but Galbraith is right on the immediate point. Liberal, humanitarian interventions must be rare, exceptional responses to extreme, inhumane circumstances, and should be judged above all by their achievement in averting or reversing the disaster.

This is pretty much what the now UN-endorsed doctrine of "responsibility to protect" (R2P) says. This is elaborated in a series of UN documents and other studies – notably a pathbreaking one by a Canadian-sponsored international commission. It sets a very demanding set of conditions, starting with the presence of an extreme humanitarian crisis but including such criteria as right intention, proper authority, last resort and proportional means. There should also be a "reasonable prospect" that the suffering can be averted or halted – and the consequences of inaction are likely to be worse than those of action. I think we can already say this of Libya. If the Gaddafis had been allowed to crush the people in Benghazi, it would be worse today.

But then comes the objection often raised in America's Iraq debate, quoting the familiar sign in an antique shop: "If you break it, you own it." To this there are two answers. First, the west didn't "break" Libya in the sense that it did break Iraq, in a war of choice not justified under the true principles of R2P. More fundamentally: the world is not an antique shop. Countries are not porcelain figurines to be picked up and carelessly smashed by visiting Americans.

Change the metaphor and think of it like this. You see your neighbour's two-year-old daughter being savaged by his rottweiler. What do you do? If you are able to, you jump over the fence and beat the dog off with a stout stick, or shoot it with your gun. You may take a special interest in the little girl's future from then on, but she doesn't become your daughter, you don't "own" her. No more does the west "own" Libya just because it made a limited, justified intervention there.

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We must be free and able to defend private lives against tabloid tyranny | Timothy Garton Ash

The Leveson inquiry has shown the ravages of an unchecked media. Alas, privacy cannot be trusted solely to self-regulation

Like a truth commission, this inquiry exposes the horrors of a bad recent past. We gasp as we hear story after story of intrusion and intimidation, a mother's agony, a child driven to take his own life. But this is Britain we are talking about, so the unchecked power that created this culture of fear was not the military or secret police; it was tabloid newspapers.

Most tabloid editors and proprietors are still in denial. They invoke free speech and the public interest while condemning those few bad apples (a small orchard, in the meantime) who used phone-hacking and other illegal methods. But one former editor has now faced up to the difficult past.

David Yelland, who edited the Sun for nearly five years, this week acknowledged that tabloid editors in the era of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, and the early months of David Cameron, simply had too much unaccountable power. Faced with a story about a footballer's sex life, Yelland recalled honestly, he would not have asked himself if publishing it was in the public interest; he would have asked if the story "stood up". When he was editor of the Sun, he felt as if there was a "big red button on my desk". If he pressed it, then next morning there would be a giant explosion somewhere. (Bang goes a career. Bang goes a family. Bang goes a life.) He added that what is remarkable about bosses like James Murdoch (of News International) and editors like Paul Dacre (of the Daily Mail) is their almost total lack of self-awareness. They see themselves as the boys at the back of the class "when in fact they own the whole school".

Yelland was responding to a searching Reuters lecture by the philosopher Onora O'Neill, who asked why journalists should be immune to the kinds of accountability that are now the norm in other areas of public life. "The media have been keen enough on transparency for others with power and influence," she concluded, "and what is sauce for political geese is surely also sauce for media ganders."

But what will change the behaviour of those geese and ganders? For the last two decades, the mightiest in the land, including the prime minister, have trembled like King John before these media barons. British politicians have feared that these mass circulation papers would swing elections against them. Many have also been personally afraid of hounding, ridicule or the exposure of some painful or embarrassing corner of their private lives. The word blackmail is not so far away.

Has this relationship changed irreversibly for the better since the exposure of the hacking scandal? I wouldn't count on it. Opening the Sun on Wednesday, to see how it has reacted to the Leveson inquiry, I found an article by "Prime Minister David Cameron" calling on Labour leader Ed Miliband to "tell the union bosses that pay Labour's bills that these strikes are WRONG". When will I read an article by Cameron, in a mass circulation paper, saying "how Sun and Daily Mail reporters have behaved is WRONG"? When the moon blooms red carnations. The tabloids wouldn't print it – and he wouldn't write it.

Remember that it was only at the very end of his decade as prime minister that Blair dared to describe the British media as behaving "like a feral beast". If the phone-hacking scandal had not exploded when it did – after 18 months of the Guardian pursuing the story virtually single-handed – the Cameron government would almost certainly have allowed News International to take full control of BSkyB. I bet that privately, Downing Street is as eager as ever to woo the Daily Mail and the Sun.

We need our elected politicians to be braver in standing up to unelected media barons, and we need more regulation of ownership and competition policy. As Yelland pointed out, if the bosses of Associated Newspapers (owners of the Daily Mail) and News International get together for lunch and agree on something, which they have done from time to time, it will almost certainly happen – for between them they control about 60% of the British newspaper market.

What we emphatically don't need is politicians having the power to curb the editorial content of newspapers. After all, politicians should be afraid of the press – for the right reasons. Here the best answer is "self-regulation with teeth". But one or two of these teeth should be publicly funded, with some form of legal enforcement.

This applies above all to privacy. Most free speech experts would agree that the one major justification of intrusions into privacy is the public interest. The difficulty comes in defining the one and the other. In some places, the balance has been too much in favour of privacy. Was there not a genuine public interest in French voters being told a little earlier about presidential candidate-in-waiting Dominique Strauss-Kahn's predatory record with women?

In Britain, the boot is on the other foot. Newspapers cite "the public interest" when there is none. Lawyers for the News of the World invoked the memory of the Holocaust to suggest that there was a genuine public interest in the (unsubstantiated) revelations of Nazi insignia at Max Mosley's private orgy. Total humbug. What they really mean is not the public interest but "what interests the public" – and therefore sells newspapers. And let's be honest, most of us are interested in the gossipy detail of other people's private lives, even if we think we shouldn't be. This is how the American journalist Michael Kinsley summarises his experience at the on-line magazine Slate during the Monica Lewinsky affair: "Their emails say no no, but their mouse clicks say yes yes."

As the online competition to printed newspapers grows, and ever more intimate gossip appears somewhere on the internet, where privacy is even more under threat than in the old-fashioned world of print, so the commercial pressure on tabloids to keep the voyeuristic revelations flowing will only increase. It is hard to see how self-regulation alone can stop them. The profit motive is too intense.

They will argue, as Jane Moore did in her column in Wednesday'sSun, that they are only giving readers what they want. And, as Dacre did to a Leveson inquiry seminar, they will quote senior judges to back up their case that unless they maintain circulation by such methods, "there will be fewer newspapers published, which will not be in the public interest" (thus Lord Woolf, in a 2002 judgment). What recourse will the wronged individual have? To go to law? For most people, that is prohibitively expensive. Mosley, who is due to appear before the inquiry on Thursday, spent about £1m on his case in the British courts alone.

"Self-regulation with teeth" must be the general prescription for newspapers. But in this particular area – privacy – there should be an independent, publicly funded tribunal to which anyone can turn to get rapid, low-cost redress for intrusions that are justified by no genuine public interest. There are very few values that can stand, so to speak, eye-to-eye with that of free speech – but privacy is among them. To balance the two is a duty for the common weal.

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If David Cameron has a British vision for Europe, let him tell us what it is | Timothy Garton Ash

Angela Merkel's clear plan for closer union will not appeal to all, but there is no substance to the British government's alternative

She says more Europe. He says less Europe. Let's call the whole thing off? At the beginning of this week, the German and British leaders gave their responses to what is clearly an existential crisis of the post-1945 European project. At the end of this week, they meet in Berlin to see if they can bridge the gap. If they succeed, it will be a miracle on the Spree.

Speaking at the Lord Mayor's banquet in London, David Cameron evoked a Europe "with the flexibility of a network, not the rigidity of a bloc". "We sceptics," he averred, "have a vital point. We should look sceptically at grand plans and utopian visions." This crisis offers an opportunity "in Britain's case, for powers to ebb back instead of flow away … and for the European Union to focus on what really matters". In short: less Europe.

"The task of our generation," Angela Merkel told her party conference in Leipzig, "is to complete the economic and monetary union in Europe and step by step to create a political union". If Europe is not doing well, Germany cannot do well, and Europe finds itself in "perhaps its most difficult hour since world war two". The answer must be "not less Europe but … more Europe". Germany should lead the way towards this "European domestic policy" with measures including automatic sanctions on eurozone members that cannot or will not keep their fiscal houses in order. Oh yes, plus a financial transactions tax, "at least in the euro area".

It needs to be said clearly that Germany did not seek this leadership role. When you look out from Berlin's central railway station towards the federal chancellery and the Reichstag you see, flying from a building between them, the Swiss flag. That's an accident of history (the building is the Swiss embassy, which politely declined to move after German unification) but also a fitting symbol. What most of today's Germans want is to be left alone to get rich and live life in their own way: in short, to be a Greater Switzerland.

Here's the irony. It is the European monetary union that was intended (especially by France) to bind united Germany into Europe that now almost compels Germany to stomp around telling other European countries what to do. For the Germans reasonably enough say: if we're going to bail you (Greece, Portugal, Italy, maybe soon France) out by digging into our hard-earned surpluses, then we have the right to set conditions for our help. Otherwise you'll drag us down into a swamp of debt, deficits and inflation.

I have in the past heard Merkel herself characterise the German dilemma in relation to Europe like this: if we don't lead, they charge us with lack of European commitment; if we do, they accuse us of throwing our weight around. For two years, she's been confronted with the first charge; now she faces the second. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

So I welcome the fact that she has now spelled out a German vision of where Europe should go. Unfortunately, there are two problems with it: one of style, one of substance. The problem of style arises not with Merkel herself, but with other members of her party. Some of us have had a taste of this in private conversations. Now, in a speech delivered by the Christian Democrats' parliamentary leader, Volker Kauder, on the closing day of that party conference, we hear it in public. Unsurprisingly, this made the front page of Wednesday's British papers. The Daily Mail ran the banner headline "Europe speaks German now!" – plus the obligatory reference to Goebbels on an inside page.

You can watch the whole speech on YouTube. It must in fairness be noted that this is obviously a "rallying the party faithful" number, always a bombastic genre. That said, his tone is insufferable. Having delivered himself of the line that he will surely live to regret – "now all at once German is spoken in Europe, not in the language, but in the acceptance of the instruments for which Angela Merkel has fought so long" – Kauder goes on, with extraordinary self-righteousness and arrogance, to lecture and hector not just the Brits but also the French, the Greeks (should never have been allowed into the eurozone) and the Turks (discourteously referring to the Turkish prime minister just as "Erdogan"). The German for gibberish is Kauderwelsch, but we need a new German word now: kaudern, "to Kauder", meaning to bring the late-night language of the pub to the European political stage.

This tone would be bad enough if the German policy prescription for saving the eurozone were 100% right. But it isn't. It's only about 70% right – which, in a world of panicking markets, can suddenly become 100% wrong. At a meeting of the European council on foreign relations in Warsaw last week, speakers from all corners of the continent got up to explain what virtually every economist outside Germany has been saying. If it is to save the eurozone, Berlin must show more flexibility in allowing the European Central Bank to support struggling governments (if only indirectly, by lending to the new European financial stability facility) and at least the temporary use of joint-and-severally guaranteed eurobonds, as suggested by Germany's own council of economic advisers. If it doesn't, there may be no eurozone left to save.

Still and all, at least there is an articulated version of a "German Europe", so we can point out its flaws. What is Cameron's vision for a "British Europe"? At the moment, purest waffle. He denounces "utopian visions", but says nothing at all about how his own utopian vision of a "networked Europe" would work in practice. One of his most eloquent supporters, Daniel Finkelstein, writes in the Times that this Europe would be like Microsoft rather than the closed systems of Apple. What on earth does that mean? How exactly would "networked Europe" preserve the benefits Britain does want to keep, especially those of the single market? How would "networked Europe" relate to a more integrated eurozone? Who would speak for "networked Europe" when it came to negotiations with China?

I agree with the veteran Eurosceptic Charles Moore when he writes in the Spectator that Cameron should seize this moment to spell out his ideas for Europe. Otherwise everyone else in Europe will conclude that the British leader only really has a policy for Britain – a country in which, according to one ICM poll, 49% want to leave the EU. Or something narrower still: just a tactic to prevent his now tripartite coalition (Liberal Democrats, Conservatives, Eurosceptics) from tearing itself apart over "Europe".

So here is a modest proposal to liven up the next European council meeting, on 9 December. Over dinner, let Merkel present her vision of German Europe (more tactfully: German vision for Europe). Let Cameron present his British Europe. Their fellow leaders should proceed to vote, in a strictly secret ballot, on which they would rather be part of. Then, of course, the result has to be leaked – but, even in these uncertain times, that we can still rely on.

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Germany's rendezvous with history will also put Cameron on the rack | Timothy Garton Ash

If the eurozone is saved, it will be on German terms. Britain needs to take its partners' concerns more seriously

As it marks the 22nd anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Germany faces its biggest external challenge since its miraculously peaceful liberation and unification. How it handles the eurozone crisis will shape future generations' verdict on the way in which Europe's central power has used what the historian Fritz Stern called "Germany's second chance". Germany spectacularly blew its first chance, as a dynamic, innovative, rising economic and cultural power at the beginning of the 20th century. Will it make a better fist of it this time, at the beginning of the 21st?

The challenge is not just the one every angry German voter sees: to save the eurozone without abandoning Germany's own cherished principles of economic discipline. Beyond that, and too little discussed here in Berlin, is a still larger and more difficult task.

If the eurozone is saved, it will be as a fiscal union, on largely German terms. A senior politician explains to me that Germany is the "stability hegemon". Not just Greece and Portugal but Italy and France must "do their homework" to meet these exacting standards of budgetary and wage discipline.

For anyone who remembers the old Franco-German relationship, when Helmut Kohl used to say that "one must always bow three times before the tricolour", the language in which people here now talk about their once senior partner is startling. "France must decide whether it wants to be on the periphery or in the core," confides one politician. There's no doubt who wears the trousers now, and it's not that tiresome little man in Paris.

Most if not all of the existing 17 members of the eurozone, including post-Berlusconi Italy, will probably manage to stay in on these demanding terms, although their domestic practice will lag behind the theory. (If Greece remains a member of such a eurozone in 2015, I'll be surprised.) Of the 10 EU members not in the eurozone, eight are committed by treaty to join it. If the eurozone is saved – still a big if – countries like Poland will work hard to be part of what they see as the EU's hard core, not just economically but also politically.

That would leave a few other EU member states who either could be in such a monetary and fiscal union but don't want to be (north Europeans such as Denmark and Britain) or who would want to be but cannot bear the pain (south Europeans such as Greece). There would also be a number of European countries (Norway, Switzerland, east Europeans) who are not members of the EU. The most important for this project is Britain – a major north European economy, home to the City and one of Europe's big three political powers.

So the question, beyond the immediate one, is how to relate the tightening of the eurozone into a fiscal union to the larger architecture of the EU and Europe as a whole. How to ensure that the unification of the eurozone does not lead to the disunification of the EU?

German policymakers have an immediate answer. At the next European Council, in December, they want all 27 members of the EU to start the process of negotiating a treaty change. They would like the negotiation concluded by the time of the German general election in 2013. This way, the budgetary supervision of eurozone member states could be done at least partly by existing EU institutions. And this way, the other member states, both those that say they intend to join the eurozone one day and the two who have no such plans, would have at least some say in the design of a structure which will inevitably affect the whole single market.

The man this puts on the torture rack is David Cameron. On the one hand, he is desperate to be at the table in Brussels whenever these issues are discussed. On the other, he is desperate to avoid involvement in anything which could eventually be construed as a further transfer of powers to Brussels – thus triggering a referendum which he fears he would lose. Clever mandarins may produce a Jesuitical squaring of the circle, claiming that any resulting EU treaty would only affect eurozone members, but Cameron's Eurosceptic backbenchers and the Eurosceptic press will cry foul. In substance, they will be right. Any such deepening of the eurozone would fundamentally change the architecture of the EU.

If, however, Cameron simply says no in December then German policymakers leave no doubt about their determination to go ahead, probably with a separate "enhanced co-operation" treaty of the current 17 eurozone members – or just possibly with a negotiation of the perhaps 24 or 25 EU member states who wish to have a voice in determining the rules of a euro-club that they, unlike Britain, do want to join. The doyen of EU jurists, Jean-Claude Piris, says both are legally possible.

As we hurtle towards this crunch, both Britain and Germany should stop and think. Britain needs to take more seriously the underlying German argument, which is that the kind of budget, debt and wage discipline it has practised with such impressive results over the last decade, and now seeks for the whole eurozone, is precisely what Europe needs.

How else are we to be competitive with the rising economic powers of the 21st century, yet still fund pensions and healthcare for our ageing populations? Otherwise, says one senior German official, we can settle for being like Venice, sinking in beautiful, waterlogged decay. Ironically enough, this stern north European protestant discipline is what Britain's liberal conservative government is itself trying to practice at home. It just doesn't want any Luther telling it how to make a reformation.

Germany, for its part, needs to ask itself how realistic it is to expect the majority of Europeans to behave like Germans. And if they all did, becoming champion savers and exporters, who would buy their exports? It also needs to reflect on the fact that this kind of deepened eurozone will be seen as a German Europe.

Twenty years ago, Germans endlessly repeated Thomas Mann's post-1945 wish to see "not a German Europe but a European Germany". Today, an interesting variation is doing the rounds in Berlin: "a European Germany in a German Europe". To secure Europe's future in a highly competitive world we could do a lot worse than have a somewhat more "German" Europe, in the economic sense. We could have a Greek Europe, for example.

These days, Germany being so demanding also plays well at home, with German public opinion. But one should not underestimate the concerns such a prospect can also raise – not least in Britain. After all, if memory serves, that had something to do with Germany's first chance going awry. The risks of going ahead without agreement from the whole EU – and be it with only two or three states standing aside – should not be ignored.

The conclusion is clear. The task for German, British and European statecraft over the next few weeks is to find a way forward which both allows for a deepening of the eurozone and preserves the essential unity of the EU. Easier said than done.

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Those who profited on the road to financial crisis can compensate now. Get giving | Timothy Garton Ash

Charity is no substitute for systemic reform, but it can help a lot in the meantime. And bankers have a moral debt to pay

Between the steps of St Paul's Cathedral and the G20 meeting in Cannes, I have this message to bankers: give some of it back. By "bankers" I mean everyone who has made a heap of money in the financial sector over the last quarter-century. By "it" I mean money, moolah, dough, as in that glossy shopping supplement to the Financial Times with the beyond-parody title How To Spend It. By "back" I mean back to societies, at home and abroad, which are now suffering as a result of a crisis that began with these financial institutions; societies which then had to bail out some of those institutions because they were "too big to fail". By "give" I mean give. As Christmas tinkles into view, take your chequebook or online bank account, find charities that really help the poor, the weak, the afflicted, and donate to them just a modest proportion of your (choose your own adjective) gains. It will be a small step for you, a big one for those in need.

There are very rich people who give with great generosity, sometimes declining all public recognition. Honour to them, every one. But in general it seems that in Britain, at least, charitable giving does not scale with wealth. Research conducted by the National Council of Voluntary Organisations and the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF) suggests that whereas those earning less than £32,000 a year give on average more than 1% of their income to charity, those on more than £52,000 give on average just 0.8%. As a proportion of their income, the less well-off give more than the better off.

The calculation is doubtless complicated by the fact that the rich have large parts of their wealth in equity stakes and other not so easily measurable forms of capital or property. The Sunday Times' Giving List, based on its longer Rich List, estimates that donations from Britain's top hundred philanthropists totalled £2.49bn in 2010. That is nearly one quarter of total estimated charitable giving by individuals in the same year (£10.6bn). What we don't know is how much is accounted for by the rest of the roughly five thousand people with personal assets of at least £20m, whose tax affairs are handled by a special "high net worth unit" at Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs. But it is a racing certainty that many of them could give a lot more without any effect on their personal lifestyles.

John Low, the chief executive of CAF, yesterday appealed for people to give at least 1.5% to charity every year, "with the percentage rising for those with greater wealth". An Oxford-based initiative called Giving What We Can sets an even more ambitious target. It invites you to take a pledge to give at least 10% of your annual income. With stern and rigorous utilitarianism, this group – led by the Oxford philosopher Toby Ord – suggests that you should give to the most cost-effective charities, those having measurable impacts in terms of saved lives and other indices. It offers an online calculator which indicates that, for instance, if you gave one tenth of a £100,000 per year income for the next 10 years, you could save 368 lives – or fund 55,193 years of school attendance for children in developing countries. If conscience prompts you to concentrate on those in need in your own country, the quantitative returns will be lower, but still very substantial.

But why single out bankers? Well, it's not only them, of course. The broader ethical argument holds for everyone who is well off (including many Guardian readers – and writers). It applies with special force to the overpaid chief executives of top companies. But there is something particular about the bankers whose collective conduct and miscalculations played a central role in getting us into this mess.

They had more ready access to highly liquid assets than people working in most other businesses. More than in most other businesses, they personally took a lion's share of the profits. Those profits were calculated on a paper gain, on a year-to-year basis, with inadequate provision against the longer-term risk. The deals, the gambles, that drove up these year-on-year profits were to a significant degree motivated by the knowledge that they would translate within months into huge take-home bonuses. "Let's be honest," John Nelson, the new head of Lloyd's of London, told the BBC's Today programme the other day, "it was driven as much by remuneration as by anything else."

And when the crash came, they just walked away, with nothing worse than a slightly tarnished collective name. How different from those earlier partners with unlimited individual liability, in the stolid old City where my father and grandfather worked their upright days.

Other new-style bankers perhaps simply carried on, in banks bailed out by us, the taxpayers. This Christmas they will again walk home – perhaps past protesters still camped in front of St Paul's – with vast, unjustified bonuses. And when I say unjustified, I mean unjustified. We are constantly told that these huge rewards must be paid because there is this tiny pool of supermen and superwomen who will otherwise be wooed away to Frankfurt, New York or Shanghai. Humbug and bunkum. There is a tiny pool of fantastic violinists, writers, entrepreneurs, tennis players. Let them reap vast rewards. Roger Federer, JK Rowling, Steve Jobs, Yehudi Menuhin – worth every million they earned, I say. But bankers?

I had several university friends who went on to become bankers some 30 years ago. They were among the brightest, most highly motivated and hard-working of us, to be sure – but were they really exceptional, unique, irreplaceable? No. All that was exceptional was the largesse that this particular profession, in this particular moment, showered upon them. So that, within a few years, I would sit with one of them amid a spread of estate agents' brochures for multimillion-pound country houses, and he would explain: "Yes, the City again has been kind to me." O glorious euphemism.

Let me be clear what I am not saying. I am not saying, as many of the St Paul's protesters are, that we need an alternative to capitalism. Rather, we need an alternative capitalism, with more Scandinavia and less riverboat casino. I am not saying, in neo-Victorian fashion, that individual charity will address the underlying problems. For that, we need structural change, firewalls if not complete separation between retail and investment banks (so the latter can be allowed to go bust), multi-year clawback arrangements on bonuses that prove to be unjustified, a financial transactions tax, and so on. Nor am I saying that these bankers were bad people. Faced with such organised temptation, how many of us would have resisted?

All I am saying is that here is something that a particular historical cohort of individuals, who got very rich very quickly at what turns out to have been the expense of others, can do to help right now. Call it an atonement, if you will. Call it doing the right thing. Call it whatever you like. Just do it.

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These national Euro-debates are just what we need – if there is still time | Timothy Garton Ash

Vigorous exchanges have taken place in Westminster and the Bundestag, but the markets have little patience for such things

Untangle this knot if you can. In the next days and months, the future of the eurozone will be decided by the verdict of financial markets on those complex measures that are all the conflicting national politics of different European countries will allow their governments to agree on. Country after country, parliament after parliament, is raising its voice and saying: thus far and no farther. But what the one nation insists upon the other cannot abide: Germany's "must" is Greece's "can't"; Nicolas Sarkozy's "essential" is Angela Merkel's "impossible"; Slovakia's red line is Spain's indispensable minimum. And every day, this cacophony of national democracies is prey to the transnational superpower of markets.

This week, I have watched – live, on my computer screen – two fascinating parliamentary debates on Europe: one on Monday evening, in the British House of Commons; and one which started at high noon in the German Bundestag today. At first glance the contrast was great: the varnished wood and green leather of the opposing benches in the Westminster parliament against the cool, modern greys and blues of the segmented, hemisphere-style plenary chamber of the Bundestag; the old-fashioned pinstripe suits, paunches and plummy sub-Churchillian tones of Tory Eurosceptics against the almost colour-coded light greys and blues of German parliamentarians, delivering their characteristic, long Lego-like phrases. Yet underneath, both had a common theme: democracy.

The German Social Democrat and former foreign minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called Merkel's treatment of the German parliament over the euro issue "shameless" (unverschämt). Speaker after speaker, including the parliamentary leader of the Greens, rose to insist – sometimes hitting the grey and blue lectern for emphasis – that every new financial commitment Germany makes to save the eurozone must be debated and agreed "here, in the German Bundestag" (hier, im deutschen Bundestag). Do I hear a plummy "hear, hear!" from the Conservative backbenches? In both places, it's absolutely clear that democratic authority for European decisions comes from national parliaments, not the European one.

And in both places, behind the insistence on the rights of the national parliament, one hears the drumbeat of popular dissatisfaction, as articulated and magnified through the media – but also in opinion polls, in MPs' constituency conversations, in pub, cafe and corner Kneipe. Not to mention the tent village in front of St Paul's Cathedral and the protest-hardened square before the Greek parliament. All these national publics are demanding to be heard. The trouble is that what they want to say is hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with the demands of other European peoples.

Take Merkel's speech, for example. After belatedly acknowledging that the sacrifices of people in Greece should command Germans' respect (tell that to the German tabloids), she went on to say that helping to solve Greece's problems will require not just "strict conditions" but also "a permanent oversight [Überwachung] in Greece". Think for a moment how that German word sounds in Greek ears, with Greek memories.

Then she categorically ruled out the European Central Bank becoming the eurozone's lender of last resort, a kind of Euro-Fed. Loud applause followed in the Bundestag, but she had just dismissed out of hand the main direction in which France wants the eurozone solution to go – and the one move that, beside German-guaranteed eurobonds, would awe the markets.

Marching briskly on, she insisted that a satisfactory solution would require a change to the EU treaties. And such a treaty change should not take another decade; after all, had not the treaties for German unification been done and dusted in a matter of months? But Angela's dream is David's nightmare. The British parliamentary debate was initiated by an e-petition and Cameron's own backbenchers, precisely so as to put pressure on him to hold a referendum on Britain's position in the EU. His government is firmly committed to holding one if there is a treaty change.

Is he afraid of that prospect? Is he, as Margaret Thatcher once famously put it, "frit"? You bet he is. And then, for good measure, Germany's iron lady added that the German government supports a financial transaction tax – something that would not please the Conservative party's principal funders in the City of London.

Does that leave any other European partners to be rubbed up the wrong way, just in order to convince your own German voters to do the half of what is needed? Ah yes, it would be necessary to take tough, intrusive measures to deal with countries that permanently infringe the eurozone's stability and growth pact … "and Greece is not the biggest". There's one for you, caro Silvio.

And this is only to take one speech of one national politician in one country – albeit the most important. One could do the same exercise with speeches of Portuguese, Italian, French or British leaders. Now don't get me wrong. I am not saying that these searching democratic national debates about Europe are a bad thing. Quite the reverse; they are long overdue. In Germany, doubts and questions about the euro were swept under the carpet of political correctness for far too long. In Britain, we do need a referendum on our relationship to the EU – and we should have it as soon as there is a proper yes/no question to put on the ballot paper. (Incidentally, I already wrote this under the last government, earning some tut-tutting from nervous Labour ministers.)

The Tory backbenchers' idea of a three-way referendum – in, out or renegotiate – is a recipe for confusion. A simpler "status quo or renegotiate our relationship" referendum would almost certainly result in a vote for "renegotiate". So the sensible thing would be to see if the eurozone collapses or is saved, what kind of closer economic and political integration of eurozone countries results if it is saved, and what powers other EU members are prepared to repatriate to Britain if Cameron asks them. Then have a straight yes or no on the resulting package, probably some time in 2013 or 2014.

Not only do I think these national democratic debates are a good thing in themselves; I also believe that, given time, the case for a sustainable continuation of today's EU would win the argument. Although triggered by scepticism – euro-scepticism in Germany, a broader Euroscepticism in Britain – both these parliamentary debates actually produced some vigorous articulation of the underlying case for "Europe". We should not be afraid of open debate. Bring it on.

The catch is in the "given time". Ten years ago, we still had that time. If this were just a matter of national parliaments and plebiscites, we would still have that time. But it isn't and we don't. The markets could pull the rug from under the euro any day. We gather bond traders are already pulling back from Spanish, Italian and even French government bonds. A final irony is that they are doing so partly in order to protect the financial interests of European pension funds: that is to say, the long-term retirement benefits of some of the very same people who, in another capacity, as national voters, are making it so difficult to arrive at a solution that would impress the markets. Answers, anyone?

European UnionEuropeEuroEconomicsTimothy Garton Ash
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