Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 26

As Poland shines, Ukraine sinks. Yet both their trajectories can be changed | Timothy Garton Ash

While the EU is right to react firmly to the show trial of Tymoshenko, it shouldn't see history as a reason to give up on Kiev

In a welcome display of firmness, EU leaders this week disinvited the Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych from important meetings he was due to have in Brussels today. Anything less would have been a pathetically inadequate response to the outrageous, para-Putinesque conviction of Yanukovych's political opponent Yulia Tymoshenko to seven years in prison, a £120m fine and a three-year ban from holding government office after the end of her jail term.

The disinvitation (or "postponement") raises the interesting question where Yanukovych will be today. Earlier this week, asked about his planned Brussels trip, he reportedly said "I will fly in that direction in any case on Thursday … I am not going begging to anyone. If I need to, I will fly farther." Farther? This delphic comment presumably refers to his planned onward trip to Cuba and Brazil. But perhaps, on his mental map, it also lands him in Moscow? The EU must not let itself be blackmailed by the implicit threat so often deployed in Kiev: "If you don't embrace us just as we are, we'll fall into bed with Russia". In fact, though the methods of politically instrumentalised justice are his own, Vladimir Putin is unhappy about the Tymoshenko conviction too. It's a corrupt gas deal with his Russia that she's ostensibly being imprisoned for. (Corrupt gas deal? With Russia? Whoever heard of such a thing.)

No one is more concerned about all this than Ukraine's western neighbour, Poland, which has been Ukraine's most consistent friend and advocate inside the EU. As a symbolic expression of this friendship, Poland and Ukraine will jointly host the Euro 2012 football championship. Warsaw has used its first ever tenure of the EU's rotating presidency to plead that the union's struggling eastern neighbours should not be entirely forgotten amid the torments of the eurozone and the excitements of the Arab spring.

It was partly through Warsaw that Yanukovych had been sending European leaders private messages of likely concessions on the Tymoshenko case – thus giving the lie to pious protestations about the independence of Ukrainian courts. The president's own party has been proposing parliamentary repeal or amendment of the law on economic crimes under which she was convicted. The Tymoshenko sentence was thus a political foul which makes Zinedine Zidane's notorious 2006 World Cup head butt look like the height of gentlemanly fair play.

The contrast between the trajectories of these two neighbouring countries could not be sharper. While Ukraine was having its show trial, Poland was holding a parliamentary election more normal, tranquil – even boring – than many western European ones. It resulted in the return to office of a perfectly sensible, if chronically reform-shy, party of the moderate centre-right, the Civic Platform, in coalition with a small farmers' party whose leader is rarely seen without his iPad. The country's economy grew by 3.8% last year. Its government has so far handled the modest tasks of the EU rotating presidency with aplomb.

To fly to Warsaw these days is like travelling to Madrid or Rome, except that you are less likely to encounter angry anti-capitalist demonstrators and nervous riot police. The country still has its fair share of the paranoid style in politics: represented most recently by the conservative nationalist opposition leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski's farcical insinuation that Angela Merkel was somehow helped to the German chancellorship by a Stasi past. It still has more than its fair share of poverty, especially in the east and south-east, where Kaczynski's support is strongest. But the direction of travel is plain. By any reasonable measure, the history of Poland since its velvet revolution in 1989 is a great success story.

Compare and contrast Ukraine since its orange revolution in 2004. Having witnessed that inspiring moment at first hand, I hoped that Ukraine would play catch-up in democratic transition as it had in velvet revolution. So did many Poles; not to mention many Ukrainians. The hopes – ours and, much more important, theirs – have been dashed. Many individual Ukrainian lives have improved. In many ways, they are more free. But the political and economic system remains mired in corruption, thuggishness and inefficiency.

In Transparency International's 2010 corruption perceptions index, Ukraine ranks 134=, alongside Zimbabwe. (Poland comes in at 41, well ahead of Italy and Greece.) And, just to remind you, the president who has just tried to remove a political opponent by locking her up is the same man whose attempt to steal the 2004 presidential election sparked the orange revolution. (A popular joke at the time was that Yanukovych was seeking a third term – the first two having been prison terms for criminal offences in his youth.) But that's also because the victors of the orange revolution, including Tymoshenko, were great disappointments in government – and no angels either.

Why this horrible divergence between two countries, significant parts of which belonged to the same empires or states for long stretches of history? Some point to the different external setting: the much weaker pull of the EU and the stronger hand of Russia, especially in Ukraine's Russian-speaking east. Others single out economics – as if this could somehow be divorced from politics and law. Others again point to deep cultural factors. Treading in the footsteps of the late Samuel Huntington, these vulgar Huntingtonians suggest that Ukraine's eastern, Orthodox cultural legacy somehow condemns it to democratic failure, while Poland's western, Catholic heritage predestined it for democratic success.

There's a grain of truth in all these theories. The EU has been lukewarm in relation to Ukraine – and not a few old west European EU member states are privately quite happy to see Ukraine crassly disqualifying itself. Poland's vibrant private sector, helped by millions of Poles who have worked and studied in the west, has been a big asset in that country's transition. It is remarkable to see how the frontiers of long-dead empires re-emerge on the election maps of post-communist democracies, including Poland's most recent one. But neither geography nor economy nor culture make inevitable fate.

As the American politician and thinker Daniel Patrick Moynihan wonderfully observed: "The central conservative truth is that it is culture, not politics, that determines the success of a society. The central liberal truth is that politics can change a culture and save it from itself." Good politics, good constitutions and good courts can, given time and luck, change the course of rivers. Degraded, drunken, corrupt societies – such as Poland might have seemed to the casual visitor 40 years ago – can become modern, open, democratic ones. And the liberal wager is that Orthodox, Islamic and Asian societies can transform themselves too.

This is not just a thought for the philosophical observer; it's a policy lesson for the EU. In post-communist eastern Europe, Bill Clinton's aphorism must be varied. It's the politics, stupid. Politics and the rule of law. The Tymoshenko case matters because in it politics and law meet in precisely the wrong way. That is why the EU must not go soft on this one, as it tends to. And if President Yanukovych wants to fly even farther – to Kamchatka, say – we should wish him bon voyage.

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Those gloating at the eurozone's plight should be careful what they wish for | Timothy Garton Ash

Monetary union, with an ailing south, may have been a bridge too far. But imagine the disintegrated Europe of sceptic dreams

What if it falls apart? For all my adult life, I have been what in England is called a pro-European or Europhile. For most of that time, European history has been going our way. Now it may be on the turn. Soon, it could be heading the Eurosceptics' way. What then?

Over the last half-century, the institutional organisation of Europe has progressed from a common market of six west European states to a broader and deeper union of 500 million individual Europeans and 27 countries, from Portugal to Estonia and Finland to Greece; 17 of them share a single currency, the euro. There are no border controls between 25 European countries in the Schengen area. Enveloping it all is the fragile skin of the European convention on human rights (now under facile attack from some British Conservatives) which allows any individual resident of no less than 47 countries, including Russia, to contest a violation of their inalienable human rights all the way to a European court of human rights in Strasbourg.

Never has Europe been so united as this. Never have more of its people been more free. Never before have most European countries been democracies, joined as equal members in the same economic, political and security community. Our continent still has a grotesque amount of poverty, injustice, intolerance and outright persecution. (Try living as a Roma or Sinti in eastern Europe for a taste of all that.) I prettify nothing. But – to adapt a famous remark about democracy by that great pro-European British conservative, Winston Churchill – I do say that this is the worst possible Europe, apart from all the other Europes that have been tried from time to time.

Now all this is under threat. A poorly designed, over-extended and ill-disciplined monetary union is in danger of falling apart, bringing bitter recriminations and lasting divisions. More fundamentally, the past emotional motivators and political engines of European unification are no longer there. The peoples of Germany, the Netherlands and other core countries of the European Union are loth to take steps of further integration which many of the creators of monetary union thought would be necessary to sustain it.

I blame politicians like Angela Merkel for not showing more leadership in this respect, but such leadership would involve a heroic, uphill struggle to persuade reluctant publics in what are still (contrary to what Eurosceptics claim) largely sovereign national democracies. If these were not sovereign national democracies, the whole financial world – from Washington to Beijing – would not this week have been waiting with bated breath on the vote of one small party in the parliament of Slovakia.

I note in passing that many of the current difficulties of the eurozone were predicted back in the 1990s, and I was a sceptic about monetary union at that time. This is what I wrote in 1998: "The rationalist, functionalist, perfectionist attempt to 'make Europe' or 'complete Europe' through a hard core built around a rapid monetary union could well end up achieving the opposite of the desired effect. One can all too plausibly argue that what we are likely to witness in the next five to 10 years is the writing of another entry for [Arnold] Toynbee's index [to his A Study of History], under 'Europe, unification of, failure of attempts at'." But I am not now going to hide behind that testament to my own earlier scepticism about one element of a larger project.

As a pro-European, I stand by the whole project, warts and all. I recently contributed to an appeal – which you too can sign – arguing that the eurozone can only be saved by further fiscal integration and a strategy for growth. Remarkably, even the Eurosceptic prime minister David Cameron recently told the Financial Times that Germany and France need to fire a "big bazooka" to convince financial markets and hence preserve the eurozone. That is a bit like the Duke of Wellington wishing Napoleon success in consolidating his continental empire – but extraordinary times do produce such delicious moments.

Beyond this, however, I'm not going to add a single word to the 537 newspaper columns you have already read explaining how the eurozone must and can, or must not and can not, be saved. You decide which economic commentator you believe.

Instead, I want to ask what happens if the eurozone does fail, one way or another – and that failure begins a much larger process of gradual disintegration. Suppose that the EU in 2030 has become something like the Holy Roman Empire in, say, 1730: still extant on paper, but more origami than political reality. What then?

For us pro-Europeans, what happens then will be, first of all, a paradoxical kind of liberation. Rather like the supporters of a long-term incumbent government, for decades now we have felt some obligation to defend the existing state of affairs, with all its obvious flaws. Eurosceptics, by contrast, have enjoyed the glorious irresponsibility of opposition – and, heaven knows, the Brussels institutions furnish endless easy targets for the sceptic and the satirist.

Now the boot will be on the other foot. For a few years, like an incoming government, Eurosceptics will be able to blame current problems on the preceding regime (overhasty monetary union led to German-Greek loathing, etc), but that only lasts so long. Sooner or later it will become clear that it is their kind of Europe we are living in, not mine.

Eurosceptics make two fundamental claims. First, that European nations enjoying full, unfettered sovereignty can better achieve freedom, prosperity and security for their own peoples, and avoid conflict with their neighbours. Second, that such wholly independent states can still effectively defend the interests of their people, even in an interdependent world increasingly dominated by non-European powers. Both claims fly in the face of evidence from past and present.

My evidence for disputing the first claim is Europe's 20th century. As Bosnia in the 1990s showed, Europeans can revert to barbarism, both within and across existing state frontiers, as quickly as anyone else. Even more settled, liberal states benefit from having European structures of permanent conflict-regulation – or, to quote Churchill again, from making jaw-jaw rather than war-war.

My evidence for disputing the second claim is the emerging world of the 21st century, in which Europe's relative power has diminished, is diminishing and will continue to diminish. Faced with old and new superpowers, we Europeans must hang together or we'll hang separately. Take the Eurosceptic path, and the Chinese will be laughing all the way to the bank (which, by then, they'll probably own anyway).

Of course, after a decade or two of living in a Eurosceptic's dream Europe, I may turn out to be wrong. If so, I promise to admit it. If Europeans can remain free, prosperous and secure without these supporting structures – which do involve some loss of sovereignty, as well as infuriating bureaucracy – I'll be entirely happy. European union is not an end in itself; it is a means to those ends. If, however, I am right, then no human being will ever have been sadder as he cries "I told you so".

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The years since 9/11 already look like a detour, not the main road of history | Timothy Garton Ash

The defining feature of world politics in the long term will not be Islamist terrorism, but the shift in power from west to east

Amid the plethora of conspiracy theories about 9/11, one I have not yet seen is that Osama bin Laden was a Chinese agent. Yet objectively, comrades – as communists used to say – one could argue that China has been the greatest beneficiary of America's decade-long reaction to those Islamist stabs at her heart.

Put it this way: When the anniversary articles come to be written on 11 September 2031, will commentators look back on a 30 years war against Islamist terrorism, comparable to the cold war, as the defining feature of world politics since 2001? I think not. They will most likely see this longer period as being defined by the historic power shift from west to east, with a much more powerful China and a less powerful United States, a stronger India and a weaker European Union.

As the Stanford historian Ian Morris points out in his mind-stretching book Why the West Rules – for Now, this geopolitical shift will occur within the larger frame of an unprecedented rate of technological advance, on the bright side, and an unprecedented array of global challenges, on the dark side.

Of course, this is only historically informed guesswork. But if things develop in anything like this direction (or in another direction unrelated to Islam) then the post-9/11 decade in American foreign policy will look like a detour – a massive, consequential detour, to be sure – rather than history's main road.

Moreover, if the Arab spring fulfils its modernising promise, the terrorist attacks on New York, Madrid and London will look more than ever like blasts from the past: an ending, not an opening. Even if the Arab spring wanes into an Islamist winter, and neighbouring Europe faces multiple threats as a result, this still does not mean that the struggle with illiberal and violent Islamism will be the defining feature of the next decades. Violent Islamism will remain a significant threat, but not, I suggest, the defining one – and particularly not for the US.

We can explore the same thought by means of a "what if". To the extent that the administration of George W Bush had a geopolitical worldview in the summer of 2001, it was focused on China as the US's new strategic competitor. What if the 9/11 attacks had not happened, and the US had continued to concentrate on the competition with China? What if it had realised how the west's own victory at the end of the cold war, and the resulting globalisation of capitalism, had unleashed economic forces in the east which would become the greatest long-term challenge to the west? What if Washington had concluded that this competition required not more military might, but more and smarter investment in education, innovation, energy and the environment, and the full unfolding of America's soft power? What if it had recognised that, faced with the renaissance of Asia, the relationship between consumption, investment and savings inside the US had to be rebalanced? What if its political system and leadership had enabled it to act effectively on those reality-based conclusions?

Even then, China and India would be rising. Even then, power would be shifting from west to east. Even then, we would face global warming, water shortage, pandemics, and all the other new horsemen of the apocalypse. But how much better shape the west, and especially the US, would be in.

End of "what if". The attacks happened; America was bound to respond them. An administration that had previously been casting around for an overall direction found it with a vengeance. Ten years on, we can say that the threat from al-Qaida has been significantly reduced. It has not been eliminated, that is not what happens with terrorism, but reduced. That is an achievement, but at what a cost.

America fought two major wars, one of necessity, in Afghanistan, one of choice, in Iraq. That in Afghanistan might have been over sooner, at less cost, and with a better result, if the Bush administration had not hared off into Iraq. The US has done damage to its own reputation and soft power (the power to attract) through such horrors as Abu Ghraib.

Meanwhile, and partly as a result of what has happened in this decade, nuclear-armed Pakistan is a greater danger than it was 10 years ago. In the wider Muslim world, including Muslim communities in Europe, there are contradictory tendencies. We can point to evidence of liberalising modernisation, both in the Arab spring and among Muslims in Europe, but also, as in Pakistan and Yemen, of further Islamist radicalisation.

A major research project on the Costs of War at Brown University records that over these 10 years "more than 2.2 million Americans have gone to war and over a million have returned as veterans". It estimates the overall, long-term economic costs so far incurred as a result of the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan and other theatres of counter-terrorist action at between $3.2 and $4 trillion. On its projections of likely future activity until 2020, that could rise to as much as $4.4tn. Experts can argue about the numbers, but there is no doubt that they are huge. In round figures, this amounts to something like a quarter of the US's soaring national debt, which itself is heading up towards 100% of GDP.

Yet this is nothing like a full accounting of what economists call the opportunity cost. It's not just a matter of how much investment in human resources, skilled jobs, infrastructure and innovation the US could have bought for $4tn – or even for half that amount, if you make the generous assumption that $2tn was actually needed to reduce the terrorist threat to the US by military, intelligence and homeland security means.

Above all, it's the opportunity cost in terms of national focus, energy and imagination. If you want to understand a country, ask who its heroes are. In this decade, the US has had two kinds of hero. One kind is the businessman-innovator: Steve Jobs, Bill Gates. The other is the warrior: the marine, the Navy Seal, the firefighters, all "our men and women in uniform". On CNN the other day (not Fox News) I actually heard the anchorwoman use the phrase "our warriors", as if it were a neutral, newscaster's term.

And when you hear some of those stories of individual bravery by Americans in uniform, they are incredible, inspiring, humbling. (Watch Jon Stewart's Daily Show interview with Sergeant Leroy Petry for an example.) That needs to be said clearly on this anniversary. But I find myself wondering what kinds of jobs – if any – these brave men and women will come back to. What kind of homes, lives, schools for their children? Opinion polls suggest that is what a great many Americans are wondering too. Their priorities are now back at home.

What president Barack Obama says this week in his special address to Congress about job creation will be more important to them than even the most eloquent words he might muster when he speaks in Washington's earthquake-damaged National Cathedral on the September 11 anniversary this Sunday. Honour to those warriors, but the heroes America needs now are the heroes of job creation.

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Facing gridlock and hysteria, the US may yet be reformed | Timothy Garton Ash

An ambitious plan to nominate a non-partisan, centrist candidate for the White House shows the can-do spirit is still alive

American politics have become so hopeless that I begin to be hopeful. From anger and disgust flow the energy for reform. In a CNN poll, 77% of Americans say elected officials in Washington have behaved like "spoiled children" in the crisis over the debt ceiling; 84% disapprove of the way Congress is doing its job.

A couple of years back, it was still vaguely original to describe America's political system as dysfunctional. Now the word is on every commentator's lips. More than that: it's official. In his address to the nation at the height of the crisis, urging patriotic compromise, Barack Obama said "the American people may have voted for divided government but they didn't vote for a dysfunctional government". Announcing the final deal, just 27 hours before default day, he talked of "the crisis that Washington imposed on the rest of America". But he's one of those elected officials in Washington too.

Why does the system work so badly? Decades of gerrymandering mean that politicians have to worry more about being deposed by members of their own party in primaries than convincing undecided voters in elections. This is what the Tea Party did to prominent Republicans before last year's midterms, putting the fear of Tea into moderate Republican members of Congress. It is now a verb – "he was primaried".

The undue influence of money also distorts US democracy. A supreme court ruling last year means that unlimited private money can be spent on political broadcasts. Politicians scuttle from one fundraising meeting to the next. Special interests and lobbyists infect the whole legislative process. Meanwhile, Senate procedures have evolved so that you need the "supermajority" of 60 votes to prevent legislation being filibustered out. Culture wars dating back to the 60s, and partisan networks such as Fox News on the right and MSNBC on the left, increase the hysterical polarisation.

Throughout the cold war, the sense of facing a full-spectrum Soviet threat contributed to co-operation and compromise across the aisle, facilitated by centrist Democrats and Republicans. Somehow, neither the threat from al-Qaida nor the competition from China has had the same effect.

On one thing, however, Democrats and Republicans all agree. In the great game of politics, there can be only two teams: Republicans and Democrats. Ballot access regulations, for example, are stacked against outsiders. This is a two-party political cartel: a duopoly. Yet two of every three Americans now say they would like another choice in elections.

Some states have politics that are even more dysfunctional. Two years ago the government of California was reduced to handing out IOUs because it could not pay its bills. Gerrymandering here has been so outrageous that in the 2004 elections not one of 153 federal and state seats changed sides.

Yet if California led on the way down, it may lead on the way back up. Thanks to two state-wide referendum votes, the corrupt business of redrawing constituency boundaries has been taken out of politicians' hands. Last week a citizen redistricting commission presented maps of new boundaries for state and national elections that should produce more genuine democratic competition. Thanks to another referendum initiative, next year's state and congressional races will begin not with the traditional party primaries, but with a single open one. The two best-performing candidates from the open primary, of whatever party, will go through to a run-off in November 2012. This autumn, civic initiatives will present further proposals for reforming the governance of California.

Nobody knows how this will work. The effects may be quite different from those desired. But it does show that if things get bad enough, this kind of political system – shall we call it democracy? – can find sufficient inner resources to start reforming itself, unlike other systems, which bend only to revolution.

Now there's an exciting attempt to do something similar on a national scale: to change not just the personalities or the policies but the functioning of the system itself. It is called Americans Elect . One of its prime movers, the investor and philanthropist-activist Peter Ackerman, explained the plan to me.

The ambition is breathtaking. Americans Elect intends to use the power of the internet to give effective voice to that majority who declare themselves deeply frustrated with the Washington duopoly politics of polarisation and gridlock. Through online debate, nomination and voting, it aims to have identified, by 21 June next year, a credible centrist candidate for president, with a running mate who must be from another party (or an independent). Instead of the polarising dynamic of American politics, the hope is to produce an irresistible magnet in the middle. Democrats and Republicans will then have to come back to the centre ground, where consensual, pragmatic answers can be found.

It is hoped that the winning pair could reflect the online voting of perhaps as many as 30 million Americans. What is more, these candidates should be on the ballot in all 50 states. Americans Elect has set out systematically, and at considerable expense, to overcome the diverse hurdles to ballot access in each state. Already more than 1.7 million people are signed up. Everything depends on what happens next. Will enough of those millions of disaffected Americans, who say the politicians in Washington are behaving like spoiled children, take the trouble to register, participate and vote? Will this online project go viral? If yes, will credible candidates actually accept the nominations next summer? Imagine, just imagine, a Michael Bloomberg-David Petraeus all-American, non-partisan ticket, with tens of millions of votes from an online convention.

Even more than what is happening in California, this is a huge experiment. It, too, may fall victim to the law of unintended consequences. (Some Democrats fear it will take more votes from Obama than the Republicans.) But in a sense, that is beside the point. The point is that here, much more than in Europe, I keep meeting people who have the will, patriotism, self-belief, ingenuity and energy to affirm: this place must be renewed; its system can be reformed; here's how. That spirit is a resource more valuable than oil, gas or gold.

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The internet nourished Norway's killer, but censorship would be folly | Timothy Garton Ash

A poisonous ideology, spread by all kinds of media, fed the ramblings of Anders Breivik. It must not be left unanswered

'You can ignore jihad, but you cannot avoid the consequences of ignoring jihad." That was the first reaction of the American anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller to news of the terror attacks in Norway, and on her Atlas Shrugs website she linked to an earlier video of a pro-Hamas demo in Oslo. When it turned out the mass murderer was not an Islamic terrorist but an anti-Islamic terrorist, whose 1,500-page online manifesto was replete with material from anti-Islam writers like her, Atlas Geller shrugged: "He's a bloody murderer. Period. He is responsible for his actions. He and only he. There was no 'ideology' here."

"No one has explained or can explain how this guy's supposed anti-jihad views have anything to do with his murdering children," protested Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch, another blogger quoted favourably by Anders Breivik. "Freedom fighters" like Spencer, said Spencer, should not be tarred with this brush.

Bruce Bawer, the Oslo-based American author of a jeremiad about the Muslim takeover of Europe, was more thoughtful. Noting that in his neo-Knights Templar manifesto, Anders Behring Breivik "quotes approvingly and at length from my work, mentioning my name 22 times", Bawer reflects, with decent dismay: "It is chilling to think that blog entries that I composed in my home in west Oslo over the last couple of years were being read and copied out by this future mass-murderer in his home in west Oslo."

So what, if any, is the connection between their words and Breivik's deeds? What should be the consequences for the way free societies treat writers that this mass murderer quoted so approvingly?

First of all, people like Geller and Spencer, not to mention the milder-mannered Bawer, are not responsible for what Breivik did. It is as wrong to proclaim them guilty by association of mass murder as it is to make non-violent (though sometimes illiberal and extreme) Muslim writers guilty by association with the Muslim terrorists who bombed New York, London and Madrid. Since that is a game they themselves have been playing for years, one might feel a bat's squeak of schadenfreude at seeing Geller & Co so effectively hoist with their own petard. But we must not do the same. They are not guilty by association. Period.

However, if it is ridiculous to suggest that there is no connection at all between Islamist ideology and Islamist terror, it is also ridiculous to suggest that was no connection between the alarmist view of the Islamicisation of Europe that these writers spread, and what Breivik understood himself to be doing. "No 'ideology' here"? You bet there was. A significant part of Breivik's manifesto is a restatement – often by internet copy-and-paste quotation – of precisely their horror story of Europe as "Eurabia": so weakened by the poison of multiculturalism, and other leftist diseases, that it submits without a fight to a condition of dhimmitude under Muslim supremacy. His clearly unbalanced mind (whether "insane" in legal terms is another question) then leaps to the conclusion that the lonely Justiciar Knight (himself) must deliver a heroic, brutal wake-up call to his enfeebled society – a "sharp signal", as he told Norwegian investigators.

What, then, should be done about such inflammatory words? One answer, quite popular in parts of the European left, is "ban them!". If the thought was father to the deed, stop the thought. A further roster of offensive, extreme terms and sentiments should be added to the already long list of "hate speech" for which you may be prosecuted in one or other parts of Europe. A few years ago, the then German justice minister, Brigitte Zypries, got the EU to agree a "framework decision" for a pan-European multiplication of such taboos, although the practice has fortunately fallen far short of her intentions.

Fortunately – for this is quite the wrong way to go. It will not stop these thoughts, just drive them underground, where they fester and become more poisonous. It will chill legitimate debate about important issues: immigration, the nature of Islam, historical facts. It will bring to court fantasists such as Samina Malik, a 23-year-old shop assistant prosecuted in Britain for writing bad verse glorifying jihadi martyrdom and murder, but not the real men of violence.

Direct incitement to violence should everywhere and always be met with the full rigour of the law. The ideological texts that fed Breivik's madness did not, so far as I can see, cross that line. Allowing the expression of the crusader fantasies of extreme Islamists and anti-Islamists alike is the price we pay for free speech in an open society.

Does that mean they should go unanswered? Of course not. Just because the price of banning is too high, and in the internet age impossible to achieve anyway ("like jumping on a shadow", says the free speech expert Peter Molnar), we need to meet them in open combat. One key battlefield is politics, where mainstream European politicians, looking at the electoral success of xenophobic populist parties, are appeasing rather than speaking out against extremist myths. Another is the so-called mainstream media. In a country like Norway – and in Britain – public service broadcasting and a responsible quality press do generally assure that, while extreme views are aired, the dangerous myths they peddle are punctured by fact, reason and common sense. For those who still read and listen to those media, that is.

But what if you get your news from rabble-rousing, sensationalist tabloids, of the kind favoured by Rupert Murdoch? Or from a systematically partisan television channel, be it one of Silvio Berlusconi's in Italy or Murdoch's Fox News channel in the US? On the night of the Oslo shootings the guest host on the Fox News show The O'Reilly Factor, Laura Ingraham, reported "two deadly terror attacks in Norway, in what appears to be the work, once again, of Muslim extremists". After describing what was then known of the attacks, she continued: "In the meantime, in New York City, the Muslims who want to build the mosque at Ground Zero recently scored a huge legal victory …" Bloody Muslims, you see, planting bombs in Oslo, mosques in New York.

And what if you get your news of the world mainly from the internet? The Breivik story shows again what a fantastic resource the internet is for those who care to seek with an open mind. Within a few hours, you can gather a quantity of information that would previously have taken weeks, and probably a trip to the country concerned. But there is a growing body of evidence that the way the internet works can also contribute to closing minds, reinforcing prejudices and nourishing conspiracy theories.

Online, you can so easily find the thousand other people who share your perverted views. You then get a vicious spiral of groupthink, reinforcing the worst kind of ideology: an internally consistent, systematic world-view, totally divorced from everyday humanity. The Breivik manifesto, with its endless copy-and-pasted pieces from online sources, is a textbook example of that process.

There are no easy answers here. "Ban it!" is the wrong one. The real challenge is to work out how we can maximise the extraordinary capacity of the internet to open minds – and minimise its now evident tendency to close them.

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Debt crisis: In our competitive decadence, we face eurogeddon and dollargeddon | Timothy Garton Ash

There are profound reasons why the twin giants of the liberal democratic west are both on the edge of default

Call me Oswald Spengler if you must, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that the United States and the European Union are currently engaged in competitive decadence. The two leading polities of the west seem incapable of tackling the debt and deficit burdens which their closely related versions of liberal democratic capitalism have built up. Their politicians dance like drunkards along the cliff's edge of default.

If Thursday's crunchtime meeting of eurozone leaders in Brussels does not reassure the markets, some part of the eurozone may fall within days. In Washington, the countdown continues to what Americans are calling D-day, 2 August, when the US government says it would no longer be able to pay its bills within the existing debt ceiling of $14.3 trillion. The two largest economies in the world teeter on the brink of eurogeddon and dollargeddon.

It looks as if America will step back from the brink, though without fixing the underlying problem. And Europe? I wouldn't count on it.

The west's twin competitors in decadence are different in many ways. The US's soaring debt is a danger to the country's credibility and power in the world; it does not threaten the union itself. The eurozone crisis puts in question the very future of Europe's more recent and looser union.

The EU is a commonwealth of 27 sovereign states, with a union budget distributing just 1% of their combined GDP. The public debts of those states vary from going on 150% in Greece to less than 7% in virtuous Estonia. The US is a full federal union of 50 states, but with a national government redistributing just under a quarter of the country's GDP – whereas the national government of a European country would typically redistribute around a half.

US Republicans and Democrats are more polarised by ideology than any mainstream European parties are. Where Americans are divided by ideology, Europeans are divided by nationality. The Republicans of the eurozone crisis are the Germans. German chancellor Angela Merkel is to Brussels what House Republican leader Eric Cantor is to Washington: the powerful but shortsighted blocker.

The US debt burden rose thanks to tax cuts introduced under President George W Bush and expenditure on foreign wars, as well as growing health and welfare spending – and then the bailouts and Obama's large-scale Keynesian deficit spending following the financial crisis. Europeans typically did not do major tax cuts, let alone wars. With a few exceptions, such as Britain and France, their defence spending has shrunk from small to tiny.

But Europeans went on their own kinds of binge over the last decade. Notably this included a splurge of irresponsible spending and borrowing by the peripheral member states of the eurozone, such as Greece, Portugal and Spain, facilitated by a splurge of irresponsible lending by French and German banks. Both sides were lulled into a sense of false security by the apparent one-for-all and all-for-one interest rates and promise of the eurozone.

So there are obvious differences between the two sides of the Atlantic. But dig a little deeper and you find profound similarities. For in truth, this is a structural crisis of liberal democratic capitalism – or, if you prefer to emphasise the politics, liberal capitalist democracy – as it has developed in the heartlands of the west over the last decades.

On both sides of the Atlantic we have lived beyond our means. Look at the graphs and you can see corporate, household and public debt piling up over the last 40 years. Now, with the nationalisation of private debt following the financial crisis, and the slump in growth and government revenues, the figure for public debt is creeping up, like the temperature gauge on an overheating car, to the danger level of 90%, 100%, 110% of GDP.

Our financial system, which privatised profit and socialised risk, must bear a significant part of the blame. (Last year, according to the Office for National Statistics, Britain's bankers and insurance brokers still found themselves worth £14bn in bonuses.) So must relentless consumerism, with advertisers discovering ever more refined ways to manufacture "needs". So must postwar baby boomers' expectations of ever more healthcare, welfare, social security and pensions: a fair aspiration, you might say, were it not bought at the expense of our children.

Again, the differences between the US and Europe in this respect are greatly overstated. A breakdown on the US website factcheck.org shows that nearly half of US federal government expenditure is already going on what Europeans call the welfare state. (To be precise: social security, Medicare, Medicaid, the children's health insurance program and low-income assistance totalled 46.9% of spending in the 2010 fiscal year.) Admittedly, that's half of a quarter of GDP, rather than, say, two thirds of a half, as in a generous European welfare state; but it's still the lion's share – and going up.

Then there's the politics. What we see today on both sides of the Atlantic is a perversion of democracy. It consists in giving vocal sections of the people what they want in the short term rather than proposing to most of the people what they need in the longer term – and taking the risk of short-term unpopularity along the way, as all good leaders have done. As the New York Times columnist David Brooks points out, US Republicans last week refused a deal that could actually have cut US government spending by at least $3 trillion over a decade. Back in Europe, contrast Helmut Kohl and Merkel. The former led German public opinion, the latter has followed it to the cliff's edge.

This is a politics that is hyper-responsive to money, special interests, media campaigns, pressure groups, focus groups and the latest opinion poll or sub-national election. It's no accident that Washington and Brussels compete for the title of lobbyist's paradise. It turns out that what both these huge, sprawling polities, the EU and the US, do better than anything else is the aggregation of particular interests – and the appeasement of as many of them as can be appeased at any one time.

There's the echo of an old argument here. Federalist paper No 10, written by James Madison, argued that a large republic would be better equipped than small states to defend the public weal against special interests and factions. It would make it more difficult for unworthy candidates to "practise with success the vicious arts, by which elections are too often carried". Wise, farsighted representatives would "refine and enlarge the public views". Montesquieu had therefore been wrong to suggest democracy might work best in smaller units, and be harder to sustain in large ones.

The Chinese communist party goes one step further. With $3 trillion dollars in the safe – that's Safe, the English acronym for China's State Administration of Foreign Exchange – it argues that the People's Republic has found a better, more effective way to run a large, diverse territory.

The task that now confronts the twin giants of the liberal democratic west is to prove Madison right, Spengler and the Chinese Communist party wrong. So far, we're making quite a hash of it.

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Phone-hacking scandal: Britain should seize this chance to break the culture of fear at its heart

From the putrid quagmire of the hacking scandal must emerge a new settlement between politics, media and the law

Britain's drama has penetrated the carapace of American self-preoccupation. Legendary reporter Carl Bernstein compares it to Watergate. On morning television, Hugh Grant appeals to Americans to wake up to Rupert Murdoch's pernicious influence on their own media. Business reporters track the impact on News Corp shares. Senator John Rockefeller calls for an inquiry into whether Americans' phones were hacked. If it turns out that 9/11 victims were targeted, as suggested by the campaigning MP Tom Watson in prime minister's questions, then this will no longer be just a foreign story. Only on Murdoch-owned Fox News is it as if none of this had really happened. A clip from Fox News Watch, filmed during a commercial break, shows the panellists joking about the one story they are not going to discuss. News watch indeed.

But what does it all mean? "A kind of British spring is under way," writes the media columnist David Carr in the New York Times. "Democracy, aided by sunlight, has broken out in Britain." Hyperbole, of course, but he has a point. I'd put it like this: the Murdoch debacle reveals a disease that has been slowly clogging up the heart of the British state for the last 30 years. This is the heart attack that warns you that you are sick, but also gives you the chance to emerge healthier than before. The root cause of this British disease has been overmighty, ruthless, out-of-control media power; its main symptom has been fear.

To talk of a British spring, by analogy with the Arab spring, is obviously poetic exaggeration. Compared to most other places in the world, Britain is a free country. In many ways, it is a better one now than it was when Murdoch bought the Times in 1981. But at the apex of British public life there have been men and women walking around with small icicles of fear in their hearts; and fear is inimical to freedom.

This was a fear that dared not speak its name; a self-deceiving cowardice that cloaked itself in silence, euphemism and excuse. Inwardly, politicians, spin doctors, PR men, public figures and, it now emerges, even senior police officers, said to themselves: don't take on Murdoch. Never go up against the tabloids. Murdoch & Co used shameless, unscrupulous and illegal intrusions into privacy both to sell newspapers, by titillating a celebrity-hungry public with intimate details, and to secure political influence.

If the tabloids had not actually gone after you, the threat was always there. In corrupt, thuggish Russia, they call it kompromat: compromising material, ready to be used if you step too far out of line. We now know that the hacks and their hackers stopped at no one and at nothing. The royal family, families of soldiers killed in action, kidnapped children – all were targets for intrusion and exposure.

Overweening media power has also shaped British policy in important ways. Contemplating the ruins of Tony Blair's well-intentioned attempt to resolve Britain's chronic indecision about its place in the European Union, an attempt destroyed by the Eurosceptic press, I once concluded that Murdoch was the second most powerful man in Britain. But if the ultimate measure of relative power is "who is more afraid of whom?" then you would have to say that Murdoch was – in this narrow, hard core sense – more powerful than the last three prime ministers of Britain. They have been more frightened of him than he of them.

Consider the evidence. Blair had seen his predecessor as prime minister, John Major, and a Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, destroyed by a hostile press. He learned his lesson. He wooed those press barons for all he was worth. Only as he was about to leave office, after 10 years, did he dare to denounce the British media for behaving "like a feral beast".

This week we learned that Blair's successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, believes his family's bank and perhaps tax records were hacked or blagged into. Brown tells us he was reduced to tears after the then editor of the Sun, Rebekah Wade, rang him to say that the paper was going to reveal that his four-year-old son Fraser had cystic fibrosis. Yet a few years later Brown still attended the wedding of said Rebekah – who is now, as Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch's right-hand woman at News International. The Morgan le Fay of British journalism was just too powerful for a prime minister seeking reelection to slight.

David Cameron out-Blaired Blair in wooing the press barons in general and Murdoch in particular. Worse, he hired the former editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, to be his communications director. I can not recall meeting anyone in British journalism who believed the ex-editor was as innocently unknowing as he claimed of what his reporters had been up to. But Cameron ignored all the warnings he was given.

Most shockingly, the Metropolitan police shelved an investigation that they should have pursued vigorously. They failed to tell thousands of people whose names appeared in the books of a private investigator that their phones might have been hacked. Only tenacious investigative reporting in the Guardian and the New York Times forced a reopening of the police investigation.

Perhaps the single most important thing the promised public inquiry now has to establish is why the police acted as they did. Here again, the most plausible explanation boils down to fear. The police were afraid of imperilling their cosy relationship with the Murdoch papers, which helped them in their inquiries and praised them for their crime-fighting efforts. Some police were paid by the Murdoch press. Senior officers now say that their own phones were hacked. Absent strong evidence to the contrary, the only reasonable conclusion is that the police feared being mauled rather than embraced by the feral beast. So they, too, bent the knee.

All that remains is for us to discover that a senior judge was spied upon, won over or intimidated. "Surely not!" we cry. "Not that!" But how many times before have we thought that we had reached bottom, only to hear knocking from underneath?

Yet even if there are still worse revelations to come about the past, the future looks brighter. The best of British journalism has exposed the worst. In parliament, the worms have finally turned. Party leaders and ordinary MPs are, at long last, reasserting the supremacy of elected politicians over unelected media barons. The barrier of fear has been overcome.

Out of this putrid quagmire there should emerge a whole new settlement: in the balances between politics, the media, the police and the law; in the self-regulation of the press and in the practice of journalism. The danger is that, once the initial outrage has passed, Britain will again settle for half-measures, half-implemented, as has already happened with the impulse for constitutional reform that came out of the parliamentary expenses scandal. But for now, one of the most important crises of the British political system in 30 years has produced an opportunity. I will return this autumn to a Britain that is slightly more free.

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• This article was amended on 15 July 2011 to remove references to the obtaining of "medical records" - in line with the following correction, that appeared in the Guardian on 15 July 2011:
Articles in the Guardian of Tuesday 12 July incorrectly reported that the Sun newspaper had obtained information on the medical condition of Gordon Brown's son from his medical records. In fact the information came from a different source and the Guardian apologises for its error (The Brown files: How Murdoch papers targeted ex-PM's family, 12 July, page 1; When Brown decided that the Sun was out to destroy him politically, 12 July, page 2).

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Phone hacking scandal: Britain should seize this chance to break the culture of fear at its heart

From the putrid quagmire of the hacking scandal must emerge a new settlement between politics, media and the law

Britain's drama has penetrated the carapace of American self-preoccupation. Legendary reporter Carl Bernstein compares it to Watergate. On morning television, Hugh Grant appeals to Americans to wake up to Rupert Murdoch's pernicious influence on their own media. Business reporters track the impact on News Corp shares. Senator John Rockefeller calls for an inquiry into whether Americans' phones were hacked. If it turns out that 9/11 victims were targeted, as suggested by the campaigning MP Tom Watson in prime minister's questions, then this will no longer be just a foreign story. Only on Murdoch-owned Fox News is it as if none of this had really happened. A clip from Fox News Watch, filmed during a commercial break, shows the panellists joking about the one story they are not going to discuss. News watch indeed.

But what does it all mean? "A kind of British spring is under way," writes the media columnist David Carr in the New York Times. "Democracy, aided by sunlight, has broken out in Britain." Hyperbole, of course, but he has a point. I'd put it like this: the Murdoch debacle reveals a disease that has been slowly clogging up the heart of the British state for the last 30 years. This is the heart attack that warns you that you are sick, but also gives you the chance to emerge healthier than before. The root cause of this British disease has been overmighty, ruthless, out-of-control media power; its main symptom has been fear.

To talk of a British spring, by analogy with the Arab spring, is obviously poetic exaggeration. Compared to most other places in the world, Britain is a free country. In many ways, it is a better one now than it was when Murdoch bought the Times in 1981. But at the apex of British public life there have been men and women walking around with small icicles of fear in their hearts; and fear is inimical to freedom.

This was a fear that dared not speak its name; a self-deceiving cowardice that cloaked itself in silence, euphemism and excuse. Inwardly, politicians, spin doctors, PR men, public figures and, it now emerges, even senior police officers, said to themselves: don't take on Murdoch. Never go up against the tabloids. Murdoch & Co used shameless, unscrupulous and illegal intrusions into privacy both to sell newspapers, by titillating a celebrity-hungry public with intimate details, and to secure political influence.

If the tabloids had not actually gone after you, the threat was always there. In corrupt, thuggish Russia, they call it kompromat: compromising material, ready to be used if you step too far out of line. We now know that the hacks and their hackers stopped at no one and at nothing. The royal family, families of soldiers killed in action, kidnapped children – all were targets for intrusion and exposure.

Overweening media power has also shaped British policy in important ways. Contemplating the ruins of Tony Blair's well-intentioned attempt to resolve Britain's chronic indecision about its place in the European Union, an attempt destroyed by the Eurosceptic press, I once concluded that Murdoch was the second most powerful man in Britain. But if the ultimate measure of relative power is "who is more afraid of whom?" then you would have to say that Murdoch was – in this narrow, hard core sense – more powerful than the last three prime ministers of Britain. They have been more frightened of him than he of them.

Consider the evidence. Blair had seen his predecessor as prime minister, John Major, and a Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, destroyed by a hostile press. He learned his lesson. He wooed those press barons for all he was worth. Only as he was about to leave office, after 10 years, did he dare to denounce the British media for behaving "like a feral beast".

This week we learned that Blair's successor as prime minister, Gordon Brown, believes his family's medical, bank and perhaps tax records were hacked or blagged into. Brown tells us he was reduced to tears after the then editor of the Sun, Rebekah Wade, rang him to say that the paper was going to reveal that his four-year-old son Fraser had cystic fibrosis. Yet a few years later Brown still attended the wedding of said Rebekah – who is now, as Rebekah Brooks, Murdoch's right-hand woman at News International. The Morgan le Fay of British journalism was just too powerful for a prime minister seeking reelection to slight.

David Cameron out-Blaired Blair in wooing the press barons in general and Murdoch in particular. Worse, he hired the former editor of the News of the World, Andy Coulson, to be his communications director. I can not recall meeting anyone in British journalism who believed the ex-editor was as innocently unknowing as he claimed of what his reporters had been up to. But Cameron ignored all the warnings he was given.

Most shockingly, the Metropolitan police shelved an investigation that they should have pursued vigorously. They failed to tell thousands of people whose names appeared in the books of a private investigator that their phones might have been hacked. Only tenacious investigative reporting in the Guardian and the New York Times forced a reopening of the police investigation.

Perhaps the single most important thing the promised public inquiry now has to establish is why the police acted as they did. Here again, the most plausible explanation boils down to fear. The police were afraid of imperilling their cosy relationship with the Murdoch papers, which helped them in their inquiries and praised them for their crime-fighting efforts. Some police were paid by the Murdoch press. Senior officers now say that their own phones were hacked. Absent strong evidence to the contrary, the only reasonable conclusion is that the police feared being mauled rather than embraced by the feral beast. So they, too, bent the knee.

All that remains is for us to discover that a senior judge was spied upon, won over or intimidated. "Surely not!" we cry. "Not that!" But how many times before have we thought that we had reached bottom, only to hear knocking from underneath?

Yet even if there are still worse revelations to come about the past, the future looks brighter. The best of British journalism has exposed the worst. In parliament, the worms have finally turned. Party leaders and ordinary MPs are, at long last, reasserting the supremacy of elected politicians over unelected media barons. The barrier of fear has been overcome.

Out of this putrid quagmire there should emerge a whole new settlement: in the balances between politics, the media, the police and the law; in the self-regulation of the press and in the practice of journalism. The danger is that, once the initial outrage has passed, Britain will again settle for half-measures, half-implemented, as has already happened with the impulse for constitutional reform that came out of the parliamentary expenses scandal. But for now, one of the most important crises of the British political system in 30 years has produced an opportunity. I will return this autumn to a Britain that is slightly more free.

• Comments on this article will be turned on at 9am UK time

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The Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair shines a troubling light on French society – and US justice | Timothy Garton Ash

The DSK drama unfolding in New York was unforgettable. Powerful men everywhere have been put on notice

I will long remember the statement that the lawyer Kenneth P Thompson delivered to a group of reporters on the pavement outside the New York state supreme court around noon last Friday. I happened to be in New York that day and caught it live on television. Thompson represents the Guinean woman who says she was raped by Dominique Strauss-Kahn in a suite in the New York Sofitel this May. The lawyer had just seen his case begin to fold, as the prosecution acknowledged multiple inconsistencies and apparent lies in the woman's story, as well as suspicious circumstances around it.

Thompson, who specialises in employment discrimination and sexual harassment cases, relentlessly detailed what he claimed were the indubitable facts of the assault: the violence that had torn a ligament in the woman's shoulder (the advocate touched his own shoulder to reinforce the point); the bruising of her vagina; the ripped stockings. Then this: "The next thing I want to tell you is that when she was fighting to get away, when she was on her knees and he was sexually assaulting her, after he finished, she got up and started to run for that door and started spitting Dominique Strauss-Kahn's semen out of her mouth in disgust all over that hotel room.

"So when you hear about the forensic evidence, the DNA evidence, she spit his semen on the wall, she spit it on the floor – and guess what? As soon as her supervisor came upstairs, she saw that. The security staff at the Sofitel, they saw that. The detectives at NYPD, they saw that. And there was a prosecutor from the Manhattan District Attorney's office who went into that hotel room on the day it happened, and she showed him where the semen was."

If the woman and her lawyer are telling the truth, then this was a glimpse of what a violent sexual assault by a powerful man on a vulnerable woman looks like. Everyone should face up to the sickening reality of it. If, however, they are not telling the truth, then this was the assassination of a man's character, in broad daylight, on a New York sidewalk. Nothing the man who might have been president of France can do now will bring his reputation back to him. Whenever his name is mentioned, the first thing anyone will think of is this affair.

As the case against DSK is put in question, and may even be dismissed within a few weeks, so the Franco-American recriminations heat up. "Whether or not DSK goes free," writes the American journalist Peter Beinart in the Daily Beast, "his case reflects well on American justice. We can hold our heads high." This was a "downright inspiring" example of equality before the law. In the other corner, the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy rails against "the cannibalisation of Justice by the Sideshow", referring to Thompson's sidewalk press conference, and says that his friend DSK must be granted "not only his freedom but – even more importantly – restoration of his honour".

What we have here are echoes of a deep difference between French and American attitudes to matters of privacy and reputation. The Yale legal scholar James Q Whitman has argued that the essence of the American tradition is levelling down while the French (and German) tradition is about levelling up. "We are all aristocrats now," says the spirit of Paris. Even the poorest woman of immigrant origin should be entitled to civility, respect and, yes, honour, as if she were a nobleman of yore. (Note the unexpected reappearance of that old-fashioned word "honour" in BHL's plaidoyer for DSK.) "There are no more aristocrats," cries the spirit of New York, and everyone should be treated with an equal lack of respect. The king and the pauper, the petty thief and the mighty banker: all are liable to humiliation by perp walk.

It's a brilliant analysis by Whitman but, looking at both sides of the Atlantic, I am bound to exclaim: if only!

If only it were true that the poor immigrant or Roma woman were treated in continental Europe with the respect and civility that was once reserved for great gentlemen. That may be the ideal type underlying French and German law, as Whitman persuasively argues – but the reality on the ground is that a poor woman from, for example, Guinea, is as likely to be oppressed, exploited and abused in Paris as she is in New York. As we are learning in more detail from this scandal, powerful men expect (invite? seduce? extort?) sexual favours from less powerful women in France as much as – perhaps more than – anywhere else.

If only it were true that the powerful and the powerless were truly equal before the law in the United States. That is the symbolic message sent by the unforgettable New York perp walk of the man who might otherwise have become the president of France. (Perp, by the way, is short for perpetrator.) But the message is doubly deceptive. First, it is just not true that the humiliation is meted out equally to all. Rich, powerful and well-connected people can often avoid the perp walk, and spend a lot of time and money making sure that they do. The history of the perp walk in New York is also the history of the political ambitions of district attorneys such as Rudy Giuliani. Second, in today's media world, where pictures are so much more powerful than words, it amounts to a conviction without trial. And a conviction in the court of YouTube allows of no appeal.

When he initially defended the fact that DSK was forced to walk the walk – unshaven, dishevelled, handcuffed – the New York mayor, Michael Bloomberg, told reporters: "If you don't want to do the perp walk, don't do the crime." But what if it turns out you didn't do the crime? Ah, mused Bloomberg, "then society really should look in the mirror and say we should be more careful next time". More recently Bloomberg has changed his tune, saying that he has "always thought that the perp walks were outrageous". Now he tells us.

Meanwhile, the damage to Strauss-Kahn's reputation has been done, irreparably. Joining the Beinart song of American self-congratulation, Joe Nocera of the New York Times writes breezily: "If the worst he [DSK] suffers is a perp walk, a few days in Rikers Island and some nasty headlines, one's heart ought not to bleed." OK, wait till it happens to you, Joe. Then we'll inspect your heart for signs of bleeding.

One good thing will probably come of this affair. Powerful men everywhere, not just in France, will be put on notice. Behave in certain ways, and this might happen to you.

Beyond that, however, there is little cause either for French or American satisfaction. Sexual mores at the very top of French society are revealed in a dark light. The perp walk is a travesty of what justice should be. The American eagle should look to the mote in his eye and the French cock to the beam in his.

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The new Rome is not the new Greece yet, but the US must look to its laurels | Timothy Garton Ash

It's encouraging to see Americans acknowledge the hole they are in. Pity they can't agree how to get out of it

We are approaching the anniversary of America's Independence Day. As we all know, 15 years ago an alien invasion, deploying giant saucer-shaped warships hovering over earth, was repulsed by the ingenuity, true grit and heroism of US forces, leading a worldwide coalition of the willing. President Thomas J Whitmore declared that 4 July would henceforward be celebrated as Independence Day not just for the US but for the entire world. His speech was described by one reviewer as "the most jaw-droppingly pompous soliloquy ever delivered in a mainstream Hollywood movie" – which, given the competition, is saying a lot.

It's just a movie, of course, but the 1996 blockbuster is also a document of its time. It returns us to a moment when America seemed to rule supreme, all-powerful, irresistible, in life as in the movies. The new Rome, Prometheus unbound, boasting the mightiest military the world has ever seen: here was the hyperpower at the heart of a unipolar world.

What a difference 15 years make. The mightiest military the world has ever seen has since fought two major wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither of them can be said to have ended in resounding victories. Iraq, which dominated US debate for so many years, is largely forgotten in the media here. It's history – in the American usage of the phrase.

Afghanistan is not over yet. The suicide attack on the Kabul Intercontinental this week showed how far that country still is from basic security, let alone liberal democracy. But, despite mutterings from his military commanders, Barack Obama has declared that American troops will be pulling out according to his preordained timetable. The US, he says, needs to concentrate on nation-building at home. Most Americans seem to agree. The latest Pew poll has 56% of them saying US troops should be brought home from Afghanistan as soon as possible. A recent blog compares Obama with another leader who pulled out of Afghanistan after a decade of military action so as to concentrate on economic and social reconstruction at home. It describes the US president as "Barack Gorbachev".

Well, hang on. To compare the US in 2011 with the Soviet Union in 1988 is to highlight the huge differences between them. Maybe a comparison with Britain in 1911 would be nearer the mark. Yet clearly the US is wrestling with its own version of the kind of economic, social and political problems that tend to accumulate whenever a country has been a great power for some time.

I sometimes think that the only trouble with the historian Paul Kennedy's famous book The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers is that it was published a quarter-century too early, and picked the wrong rising power. Appearing in 1987, shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed and Japan went into a decade of stagnation, it could be dismissed by bullish Americans as scaremongering. But imagine it being first published this year, and identifying China as the rising power.

The US carries some of the burdens of strategic overstretch that Kennedy described. The cost to the US of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and other post-9/11 operations, has been calculated at nearly four times that of the cost to the US of the second world war, in today's dollars. Because of the tremendous growth of the American economy this translates into a much smaller proportion of GDP: an estimated 1.2% in 2008, as against 35.8% in 1945. But the decade of worldwide armed struggle – initially forced on the US by Osama bin Laden but then followed by a war of choice in Iraq – has devoured a much larger percentage of Americans' time, attention and energies. Even when Washington tries to leave a conflict to others, as with Libya, it keeps getting dragged in as, so to speak, the military lender of last resort.

Beside strategic overstretch, the US suffers from welfare overstretch. In this respect the differences between Europe and the US are smaller than most people on both sides of the Atlantic imagine. Our self-images differ more than the realities. According to Peter Orszag – a former director of the White House Office of Management and Budget – Medicare, Medicaid and social security will account for almost half of American government spending by 2015. The other half is mostly interest payments on the country's soaring debt and discretionary spending, with about half of the latter going on defence. In some individual states, such as California, the fiscal picture is even more grim.

So public spending has to be cut, yet the country's own infrastructure shows all the marks of long neglect. Every time I come back to the US, I am struck by the signs of visible decay.

Beyond the potholes there are much deeper issues, such as the shortfalls in primary and secondary education. Far from leading the world in the rankings of OECD's programme for international student assessment, the US hovers around the middle. Only its universities are still second to none.

To address these deep structural problems America needs decisive political action across party lines. On this, most agree. This is what Obama promised in the brief, unforgettable dawn of 2008-09. This is what he has so far failed to deliver, in part through shortcomings of his own but mainly because it will require something close to an American Gorbachev on steroids to break through this country's polarised politics and gridlocked political system.

In a press conference today the president vented his frustration at the latest example: partisan cliffhanging about lifting the country's debt ceiling. The obstacles lie both in Washington, where the heart of the problem is the supermajority hurdle in the Senate, and in many individual states. A magnificent constitutional framework of checks and balances, designed to prevent the return of British tyranny, has atrophied into a system that makes reform almost more difficult than revolution.

And this, too, is familiar from history. Over time, superpowers acquire dysfunctionalities which they can carry because of their sheer plenitude of wealth and power, rather as a super-strong athlete can carry deficiencies in technique. When your strength wanes you suddenly need the technique; but it may be too late to get it back. Beside technique, there is the all-important confidence. But the old American can-do optimism is shaken. Even those who most loudly proclaim American exceptionalism strike a note of cultural pessimism. "It's breaking my heart," emotes Glenn Beck, "to see this nation basically going down the tubes."

Of course others are still worse off. The new Rome has not yet become the new Greece. But between the EU and the US it may now be a case of competitive decadence. America definitely still has the edge, but it was a Republican not a Democrat senator I heard say last year "this country is going to become Greece, except we don't have the European Union to bail us out". That Americans have obviously now woken up to the hole they're in is a sign of hope. Less encouraging is the fact that they cannot agree how to get out of it.

US economyUnited StatesEconomicsUS foreign policyAfghanistanIraqUS militaryTimothy Garton Ash
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