Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 28

Believe in liberty, equality, fraternity? This time, don't follow the French | Timothy Garton Ash

There are deep failures of civic liberal integration across Europe, but a burqa ban is the wrong way to address them

I believe people should be free to publish cartoons of Muhammad. I believe people should be free to wear the burqa. In a free society, men and women should be able to do, say, write, depict or wear what they like, so long as it does no significant harm to others. Those who support a burqa ban, like the one that comes into force in France next Monday, must therefore show us the harm that comes from women walking around with their faces covered. So far, the supporters of a ban have advanced three main arguments.

First, they say the full-face veil is a threat to public safety. Jean-François Copé – the leader of Nicolas Sarkozy's party, the Union for a Popular Movement – has cited an armed robbery conducted "in the Paris suburbs by criminals dressed in burqas". Others point to would-be suicide bombers hiding under burqas. But how many such incidents have there been? For the London and Madrid bombers, a backpack was an easier hiding-place for a bomb.

Meanwhile, violent street demonstrators have for decades hidden their faces behind balaclavas, while a stocking (or modern equivalent) over the head has long been the native dress of the armed robber. It is ridiculous to suggest that the fewer than 2,000 women who are thought to wear the burqa in France, or the fewer than 500 in the Netherlands, suddenly constitute a security threat worse than those muffled and hooded men of violence who have been at work for decades.

This takes us to the second argument: an open society is one in which we can see each other's faces. I have much sympathy with this view. Most free societies have some rules about how we appear in public: no full frontal nudity, for example, except in designated locations. If for the last 50 years the uncovering of the face in public had been the settled legal norm of European societies, as is the covering of the pudenda, it would be reasonable to insist that those who choose to live here should abide by it. But while the French law is now presented in an egalitarian, universalist way, this is so obviously not what it really is.

In 2009 Sarkozy took up with a vengeance the demand specifically to ban burqas. It is being implemented in the context of his party's fierce defence of French-style secularism (laïcité) against the encroachments specifically of "Islam", reaffirmed at a controversial meeting this week. And that is now very much about attracting voters back from Marine Le Pen and the xenophobic far right. This is a highly politicised burqa ban hiding behind a thin universalist veil.

Finally, it is argued that the unacceptable harm is to the veiled women themselves. Silvana Koch-Mehrin, a vice-president of the European parliament, says the burqa is "a mobile prison". And the claim is often made that women only walk around in these mobile prisons because they are compelled to do so by fathers or husbands.

Again, I start with sympathy for this view. When, on a hot day in London, I see a woman wrapped in a black sack tagging along beside a guy in light T-shirt, jeans and sneakers, my first reaction is: "How bloody unfair!" John Stuart Mill, who enunciated the liberal's classic harm principle, was himself passionate against "the almost despotic power of husbands over wives". But before we leap to this conclusion, shouldn't we ask the women themselves? Or do we paternalistically (or maternalistically) assume they don't know what is good for them, and must be forced to be free?

A study by the At Home in Europe project of the Open Society Foundations, to be released on Monday, reports in-depth interviews with 32 women who wear the full-face veil in France. All but two say they are the first members of their family to do so, and almost all insist this was a matter of free personal choice. Several chose to wear it against the initial resistance of husbands, fathers and mothers. (The families often feared hostility on the streets, with some reason. In a tragicomic parody of French reactions, one of these women – Omera, 31, from the south of France – was threatened by an old Frenchman wielding pétanque balls.)

They often describe donning the niqab or burqa as part of a spiritual journey, very much in the terms in which devout Christian and Jewish women of old might have explained their decision to "take the veil". Some also explain it as a protest and defence against a highly sexualised, voyeuristic public space: "For us it's a way of saying that we are not a piece of meat in a stall, we are not a commodity" (Vivi, 39, south of France). Nearer my God to thee – and further from Joe Leering Public.

We may not like their choice. We may find it disturbing and offensive. But it is, in its way, as much a form of free expression as cartoons of Muhammad – which these women, in turn, will find disturbing and offensive. And that's the deal in a free society: the burqa-wearer has to put up with the cartoons; the cartoonist has to put up with the burqas.

How will these women feel on Monday? Listen to Camile from Paris: "Why should I remove my niqab? … I'm not a terrorist. I'm not a criminal. I'm not a thief. I, who today respect all the laws, the laws of God and the laws of the republic, will become an outlaw."

Yes, there surely are also cases of women – much less easy to reach – who wear the niqab or burqa out of fear of their menfolk. Every possible resource must be put at their disposal: anonymous helplines, community support, safe houses, relocation and fresh start chances. They, too, must be free to choose. But how will a burqa ban help them? Will not the reaction of such tyrannical men be to keep them even more tightly locked up at home?

Because one is so liable to be maliciously misinterpreted on this subject, I want to be very clear about where I stand. I think there are huge problems with the integration of people of migrant background and Muslim faith into most west European societies. I think we have made bad mistakes of omission and commission in this regard over the last 40 years, some of them in the name of a misconceived, morally relativist "multiculturalism". I think we need a muscular liberalism fit for what are in reality already multicultural societies.

But let us, in the name of reason and common sense, concentrate on what is really vital. Let us defend free speech against violent Islamist intimidation. Let us ensure that children of migrant background get a good education in the language, history and politics of the European country in which they live, and are then equipped to do useful work and contribute fully as citizens. Let us not be distracted by a facile gesture politics, which legitimises far-right xenophobic parties even as it attempts to claw back votes.

The burqa ban is illiberal and unnecessary, and will most likely be counterproductive. No one else should follow the French example, and France itself should reverse it.

IslamFranceEuropeNicolas SarkozyThe far rightTimothy Garton Ash
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Poland: a country getting to grips with being normal at last

It still feels apart from 'the west' and is struggling with poverty, but it offers an optimistic example for Egypt and others

"Rutinoscorbin is like the sixth member of our family!" an implausibly gleaming model mother chirps from the television, in one of many American-style commercials for health products.

Outside, in the spring sunshine, BMWs and Mercedes glide past freshly painted facades and smart coffee shops. Young Poles send text messages using neo-Polish words such as trendi, seksi and kul. Half the old friends I want to meet up with are abroad: in the European parliament, in Paris, on the Canary Islands.

Being in Warsaw these days is like being in Madrid or Rome. It's normal. Except that for Poland, this normal is profoundly abnormal; the ordinary, extraordinary.

Less than a lifetime ago, the whole city centre was razed to the ground by Hitler's troops after the heroic, doomed Warsaw rising of 1944. Those handsome facades you see in the famous Old Town have all been reconstructed. A writer of my acquaintance used to say, with some poetic exaggeration, that the oldest things in Warsaw are the trees in the Lazienki park.

Less than 30 years ago, I stood on what was then called Victory Square (now Pilsudski Square) and watched angry protesters from the Solidarity movement defying the communist riot police. "Why are they chanting 'Gestapo'?" exclaimed an elderly bystander. "It should be 'SS'!" But now, incredibly, when teenage Poles want to text "Send me an SMS", they tap out "Send me an esesman".

This new Poland has just joined the "pact for the euro". If the euro survives, and things go on as they are, Poland will be in the eurozone long before Britain is. Its economy had a growth rate of 3.8% in 2010, one of the best in Europe. It takes the rotating presidency of the EU in the second half of this year. It is a member of Nato, and has troops in Afghanistan. On the surface, it looks more and more like a western consumer society, with mortgages, private insurance schemes, television celebrities and entertainment culture. The new cults of health and fitness – as propagated in all those TV commercials – increasingly supplant the old ones of church and nation.

Yet neither the Poles nor outsiders can quite believe the transformation is for real – and some don't like it even if it is. A few years ago, a British branding consultancy was asked by the Polish chamber of commerce to come up with a suggested new brand for Poland's national identity. This is itself a sign of the times. In the past, Poland created its brand by mounting an armed insurrection against Russian rule, and then having romantic poets such as Adam Mickiewicz immortalise the martrydom of this "Christ among nations". Now it hires a branding consultant.

I have Saffron Brand Consultants' 2005 report before me as I write. It suggests that the "core idea" of Poland's national brand should be "creative tension". Cognitive dissonance would be another way of putting it. There is the "normal" of contemporary Europe: the consumer society you see on the streets of central Warsaw and the TV screen. And there is the "normal" of most of modern Polish history: partition, occupation, unfreedom, ethnic conflict, economic distress, the blending of patriotism, romanticism and religion. As recently as 1983, Britain's leading historian of modern Poland, Norman Davies, could write that his second homeland was "back in its usual condition of political defeat and economic chaos".

Apart from historical unfamiliarity, there are several other reasons why many Poles can't quite accept that this new normal is really it. The most important is that for many of them, everyday life in today's Poland is light years away from the images conveyed in Polish TV commercials, or the prosperous scenes you see in central Warsaw. This is still a poor country by European standards. Income per head is about £11,600, less than in Barbados or the Seychelles, and only just above half the EU average. Unemployment last year was 11.8%, and youth unemployment is even higher. Most of my former Polish students say that they will not go back to Poland in the foreseeable future. There are so many better opportunities in what they still call "the west".

My friends from years back, members of what used to be known as the intelligentsia (a class that is rapidly ceasing to exist), may be doing well, but many Poles are not. They have had a tough time over the years of transition since the end of communism in 1989. Talk to the former shipyard workers in Gdansk, who started the Solidarity revolution in 1980, and some spit blood at what they see as the injustice and hardship of the last two decades. Among other scapegoats, they blame backroom deals between former communists and left-leaning leaders of the anti-communist opposition, corruption, conspiracy, and sinister outside powers.

The political scientist Richard Hofstadter famously wrote about The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Polish politics are no stranger to the paranoid style. In the last decade this was cultivated particularly by the Law and Justice party (PiS), led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski and his twin brother Lech – who was, until his death in a plane crash near Smolensk last April, the country's president. The paranoid style will be on full display next Sunday, when Poland marks the first anniversary of that crash, which killed not only Kaczynski and his wife, but also 94 others, including top commanders of the country's armed forces and the head of the national bank.

The fact that they died in the fog at a poorly equipped Russian airport, on their way to a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre of Polish officers by Stalin's thugs, has fed old-style patriotic-religious martyrology. And Russia's chronic inability to deliver a full, fair and frank account of the circumstances of the crash has also nourished conspiracy theories. A woman I know only slightly approached me in the cafe of the Hotel Bristol to ask if I thought the plane could have been downed in "artificial fog", deliberately created by the Russians. I received an email from someone saying he could prove that everyone on the plane had been killed before it even took off from Warsaw.

Of course, most Poles don't succumb to such craziness. A survey conducted for Polish Radio last month found that a large majority of those asked wanted the anniversary to be a day of national unity in shared grief. At the moment, though, it looks as if there will be rival commemorations and even demonstrations by different groups.

Beyond Sunday, however, and beyond this special case, there is a larger question about the story Poland wants to tell to itself and the world. For much of modern history, Poland's central narrative was a heroic-tragic story of struggles for freedom. The white eagle, pierced by Russian and German arrows, bled red blood – producing the national colours of red and white. Then, after the negotiated revolution of 1989, there was the "return to Europe". For 15 years, domestic arguments were subordinated to the overarching national purpose of returning to Europe and the west. But now Poland has got there, having joined Nato in 1999 and the EU in 2004, the question is: what next? Where now?

We don't know how Poland will answer, but it's a fair bet that somewhere in the mix will be stubbornness, enterprise, individualism, a distrust of authority and a love of freedom.

Already, Poland tries to apply its experience of struggles for freedom, and the transition to democracy, for the benefit of others. It is one of the strongest European supporters of freedom for Belarus and EU membership for Ukraine. Its calm, pragmatic prime minister, Donald Tusk, and energetic, Oxford-educated foreign minister, Radek Sikorski, want to use the Polish presidency of the EU, starting in July, to apply lessons learned from the EU's eastern neighbourhood to help the EU's southern neighbourhood, in the Arab lands across the Mediterranean.

The country's avuncular president, Bronislaw Komorowski, points out that they still have, in a side wing of the presidential palace where we met, the large, specially made round table at which Poland's transition from communist rule was negotiated. He would, he added half-jokingly, be happy to lend it to some Arab country struggling to emerge from the shadow of dictatorship.

Thirty years ago, few would have believed that Poland could be the "normal" country it is today. Egypt, take hope.

PolandEuropeTimothy Garton Ash
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

WikiLeaks has altered the leaking game for good. Now they must be fewer, but better kept | Timothy Garton Ash

For whistleblowers, government and press, the age of digileaks cries out for new rules on what to hide – and reveal

Suppose you know a secret that you think should be made public. How do you go about it? Suppose your organisation has secrets you believe must be guarded. What should you do? Suppose you are an editor, blogger or activist, with the whistleblower huffing in your left ear and a government or company puffing in your right. Where do you draw the line?

One answer to the first question comes from Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former member of the WikiLeaks team. His OpenLeaks initiative aims to provide an untraceable "digital dropbox" in which would-be whistleblowers can deposit their digital troves. However, OpenLeaks would not itself select and publish material, as WikiLeaks did when it edited – and titled Collateral Murder – a video taken from an American helicopter gunship in Iraq as it killed 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two children.

As Domscheit-Berg explained it to me when we met earlier this year, the leaker would decide which from a select list of media and NGO partners he or she would like the material to go to. So, for example, an environmentalist whistleblower might say: "I like Greenpeace, and I trust them to use my documents in the right spirit." Someone in the German defence ministry might say: "I trust Der Spiegel to publish this responsibly." And so on. All the editorial judgments would lie with the participating news organisation or NGO. OpenLeaks would be a neutral, technical transmission mechanism – the guardian of secrecy in the cause of openness.

Domscheit-Berg is a tall, thin, intense, almost painfully idealistic young German. Passionate about the value of freedom of information, he wishes everyone to have the chance of their "five minutes of courage". This, as he points out, can be all it takes to press the button and transfer mountains of dirt. If he wants to be really scrupulous about this, maybe he should also give them five hours of reflection afterwards, in case they think better of it.

I shall be interested to see how OpenLeaks fares. In a phone conversation yesterday, Domscheit-Berg told me that they hope to launch in the late spring or early summer, probably with a modest initial slate of three media and three NGO partners. The technical difficulties of ensuring cast-iron anonymity for the source, especially against a powerful opponent such as the US or Chinese government, remain considerable. Even though OpenLeaks will argue that it does not have any legal responsibility for publication, it will surely face legal challenges. Meanwhile, leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Guardian are also considering setting up their own "leak here" facilities.

In whatever way this process unfolds, every government, company, university and other organisation must assume that there will be more anonymised digital leaking – or digileaks, for short. The next question is therefore to the potentially leaked-against, rather than the would-be leaker. How do you strike the balance between transparency and secrecy? Even secret services and Swiss banks now nod towards openness. Yet I know of no organisation in the world that is 100% transparent. Everyone has something they want to hide – and some things they can reasonably argue that they are justified in hiding. Often the two do not exactly coincide. Witness, for example, the hilarious spectacle of Julian Assange protesting furiously at leaks from inside WikiLeaks.

Newspapers, dedicated to openness, fight to keep secret their sources' identity. So do human rights organisations, arguing that otherwise their informants might be in danger from repressive and corrupt regimes. The anti-corruption movement Transparency International can't be wholly transparent. There is, if you will, a dialectic here. But there can also be hypocrisy: demanding of others what you are not prepared to do or have done to yourself. (The private lives of tabloid editors spring to mind.) There is a fine line between ethical dialectics and rank hypocrisy.

So what should an organisation do? I suggest two guiding principles. First, be open about your grounds for secrecy, transparent about your non-transparency. Have clear criteria and be ready to defend them. They should be able to withstand the following, somewhat paradoxical test: if this piece of information became public, could you credibly explain why it should not have become public?

Thus, for example, there is absolutely no good defence for keeping secret the American helicopter gunship video. What it showed was at best a terrible blunder in the fog of war, at worst a war crime. It should have been investigated and published. On the other hand, when it comes to the details of secret peace negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli representatives, leaked to al-Jazeera and published in the Guardian, you could argue that there was a genuine public interest in keeping those secret. How else can negotiators have the confidence to explore the publicly unsayable, in the pursuit of peace? By the time you get to foreign correspondents being taken hostage, you find newspapers themselves being active practitioners of concealment.

My second guiding principle is: protect less, but protect it better. There is a vast amount of stuff that governments and organisations keep secret for no good reason. That was the premise behind the campaigns for more freedom of information, now conceded by many democratic governments – and it has been proved right. Daylight was let in to dusty rooms, and the business of government did not collapse. Reading the US state department cables in the database that the Guardian made from the Wikileaks trove, I found reports classified as secret that could easily have appeared as news analysis pieces in a newspaper.

So: decide what you really do need to keep secret, on consistent, defensible criteria, and then do your damnedest to keep it secret. Don't, for example, upload it to a database accessible to hundreds of thousands of people. If following this second commandment results in a reduction in the amount of printed paper and emails in circulation, that will itself be a service to the rainforests and everyday sanity.

But what if something radioactive still leaks out from the smaller secret core, whether via the OpenLeaks mechanism or in other ways? Should Ms Ethical Journalist blushingly avert her eyes and hand it back unread, exclaiming "Deary me, I really shouldn't be seeing this"? The hell she should. It is the business of government to keep its secrets. It is the business of the press to find them out.

The press – here used in the broadest sense, to include citizen bloggers and activist NGOs – then makes its own judgment calls about what is in the public interest and what will be unacceptably damaging. The law sets the outer boundaries for this age-old game of hide-and-seek. The calls made by the journalist will not be the same as those made by the minister – or the company director, or the hospital boss, or the university vice-chancellor. Each plays their part, and the result is one of democracy's most important sets of checks and balances.

Digileaks change democracy as graphite rackets changed tennis. Whether they make it better or worse will depend on the rules, the umpires and the players.

WikiLeaksEthicsJulian AssangeTimothy Garton Ash
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

WikiLeaks has altered the leaking game for good. Secrets must be fewer, but better kept | Timothy Garton Ash

For whistleblowers, government and press, the age of digileaks cries out for new rules on what to hide – and reveal

Suppose you know a secret that you think should be made public. How do you go about it? Suppose your organisation has secrets you believe must be guarded. What should you do? Suppose you are an editor, blogger or activist, with the whistleblower huffing in your left ear and a government or company puffing in your right. Where do you draw the line?

One answer to the first question comes from Daniel Domscheit-Berg, a former member of the WikiLeaks team. His OpenLeaks initiative aims to provide an untraceable "digital dropbox" in which would-be whistleblowers can deposit their digital troves. However, OpenLeaks would not itself select and publish material, as WikiLeaks did when it edited – and titled Collateral Murder – a video taken from an American helicopter gunship in Iraq as it killed 12 people, including two Reuters journalists, and wounded two children.

As Domscheit-Berg explained it to me when we met earlier this year, the leaker would decide which from a select list of media and NGO partners he or she would like the material to go to. So, for example, an environmentalist whistleblower might say: "I like Greenpeace, and I trust them to use my documents in the right spirit." Someone in the German defence ministry might say: "I trust Der Spiegel to publish this responsibly." And so on. All the editorial judgments would lie with the participating news organisation or NGO. OpenLeaks would be a neutral, technical transmission mechanism – the guardian of secrecy in the cause of openness.

Domscheit-Berg is a tall, thin, intense, almost painfully idealistic young German. Passionate about the value of freedom of information, he wishes everyone to have the chance of their "five minutes of courage". This, as he points out, can be all it takes to press the button and transfer mountains of dirt. If he wants to be really scrupulous about this, maybe he should also give them five hours of reflection afterwards, in case they think better of it.

I shall be interested to see how OpenLeaks fares. In a phone conversation yesterday, Domscheit-Berg told me that they hope to launch in the late spring or early summer, probably with a modest initial slate of three media and three NGO partners. The technical difficulties of ensuring cast-iron anonymity for the source, especially against a powerful opponent such as the US or Chinese government, remain considerable. Even though OpenLeaks will argue that it does not have any legal responsibility for publication, it will surely face legal challenges. Meanwhile, leading newspapers such as the New York Times and the Guardian are also considering setting up their own "leak here" facilities.

In whatever way this process unfolds, every government, company, university and other organisation must assume that there will be more anonymised digital leaking – or digileaks, for short. The next question is therefore to the potentially leaked-against, rather than the would-be leaker. How do you strike the balance between transparency and secrecy? Even secret services and Swiss banks now nod towards openness. Yet I know of no organisation in the world that is 100% transparent. Everyone has something they want to hide – and some things they can reasonably argue that they are justified in hiding. Often the two do not exactly coincide. Witness, for example, the hilarious spectacle of Julian Assange protesting furiously at leaks from inside WikiLeaks.

Newspapers, dedicated to openness, fight to keep secret their sources' identity. So do human rights organisations, arguing that otherwise their informants might be in danger from repressive and corrupt regimes. The anti-corruption movement Transparency International can't be wholly transparent. There is, if you will, a dialectic here. But there can also be hypocrisy: demanding of others what you are not prepared to do or have done to yourself. (The private lives of tabloid editors spring to mind.) There is a fine line between ethical dialectics and rank hypocrisy.

So what should an organisation do? I suggest two guiding principles. First, be open about your grounds for secrecy, transparent about your non-transparency. Have clear criteria and be ready to defend them. They should be able to withstand the following, somewhat paradoxical test: if this piece of information became public, could you credibly explain why it should not have become public?

Thus, for example, there is absolutely no good defence for keeping secret the American helicopter gunship video. What it showed was at best a terrible blunder in the fog of war, at worst a war crime. It should have been investigated and published. On the other hand, when it comes to the details of secret peace negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli representatives, leaked to al-Jazeera and published in the Guardian, you could argue that there was a genuine public interest in keeping those secret. How else can negotiators have the confidence to explore the publicly unsayable, in the pursuit of peace? By the time you get to foreign correspondents being taken hostage, you find newspapers themselves being active practitioners of concealment.

My second guiding principle is: protect less, but protect it better. There is a vast amount of stuff that governments and organisations keep secret for no good reason. That was the premise behind the campaigns for more freedom of information, now conceded by many democratic governments – and it has been proved right. Daylight was let in to dusty rooms, and the business of government did not collapse. Reading the US state department cables in the database that the Guardian made from the Wikileaks trove, I found reports classified as secret that could easily have appeared as news analysis pieces in a newspaper.

So: decide what you really do need to keep secret, on consistent, defensible criteria, and then do your damnedest to keep it secret. Don't, for example, upload it to a database accessible to hundreds of thousands of people. If following this second commandment results in a reduction in the amount of printed paper and emails in circulation, that will itself be a service to the rainforests and everyday sanity.

But what if something radioactive still leaks out from the smaller secret core, whether via the OpenLeaks mechanism or in other ways? Should Ms Ethical Journalist blushingly avert her eyes and hand it back unread, exclaiming "Deary me, I really shouldn't be seeing this"? The hell she should. It is the business of government to keep its secrets. It is the business of the press to find them out.

The press – here used in the broadest sense, to include citizen bloggers and activist NGOs – then makes its own judgment calls about what is in the public interest and what will be unacceptably damaging. The law sets the outer boundaries for this age-old game of hide-and-seek. The calls made by the journalist will not be the same as those made by the minister – or the company director, or the hospital boss, or the university vice-chancellor. Each plays their part, and the result is one of democracy's most important sets of checks and balances.

Digileaks change democracy as graphite rackets changed tennis. Whether they make it better or worse will depend on the rules, the umpires and the players.

WikiLeaksEthicsJulian AssangeTimothy Garton Ash
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

France plays hawk, Germany demurs. Libya has exposed Europe's fault lines | Timothy Garton Ash

With the west at sixes and sevens, Gaddafi may yet get away with murder. And this in the year of EU unity

So Europeans are from Mars and Americans are from Venus. Those "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" – the French – have led the military charge into Libya. The hamburger-munching crusader eagles have dithered in the rear.

Except that such crude stereotypes are as misleading today as they were at the time of the Iraq war. Now as then, Americans are divided – and Europeans even more so. France and Britain have led the campaign for a no-fly zone and for "all necessary measures" to protect civilians in Libya. Germany has demonstratively dissociated itself from them. The Obama administration initially showed almost German levels of reluctance to get involved with any form of military intervention, but shifted its position in response to Gaddafi's brutal campaign to restore his own power, the remarkable pro-intervention stance of the Arab League, and pressures from many Americans. Among the American voices pressing for action was Robert Kagan, the neocon who popularised the original bon mot: "Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus."

So far as France is concerned, we need have no illusions about the personal motives of Nicolas Sarkozy. He surely hopes that cutting a dash on the international scene will boost his ratings and give him a better chance of being re-elected next year. Decisive action in defence of Arab human rights is supposed to cover up his administration's appalling record in cosying up to Arab leaders who trampled on those rights, including Hosni Mubarak, until recently Sarkozy's co-chair of the Union for the Mediterranean, Tunisia's Zine El Abidine ben-Ali and, yes, Muammar Gaddafi.

The British prime minister David Cameron is in a quite different political position; yet he came to a similar conclusion. People's motives are always mixed. What matters is the rights and wrongs of the case, and the realities on the ground.

It is not Sarkozy's illusions of grandeur that persuaded the Arab League to support, let alone the UN security council to sanction, such action. Gaddafi killing his own people, and threatening to eliminate many more – that changed minds. Dr Saif al-Islam Gaddafi (PhD, LSE) ranting on a tank – that changed minds. Benghazi seemingly about to fall to Gaddafi's forces – that changed minds. The decision to intervene, made soberly and without illusions, rests on a single proposition: it would very soon have been worse, fatally worse for many, if we had not intervened.

That was the logic that convinced a majority of the UN security council to vote for resolution 1973 (and, incidentally, led the president of Rwanda to support it). But not Russia, China, Brazil and India; and not Germany. For me, one of the defining pictures of this crisis was that of Germany's ambassador to the UN, Peter Wittig, sitting with folded hands and a pained expression on his face, while next to him, the ambassador of Gabon, Emmanuel Issoze-Ngondet, raised his arm to vote for a resolution to save innocent civilians from a marauding dictator. I wonder what Wittig, a thoroughly decent man, felt at that moment. Mere awkwardness? Or something a little closer to shame?

So much for France and Germany as the inseparable couple at the heart of Europe. Instead, the French and German foreign ministers, Alain Juppé and Guido Westerwelle, are in open disagreement. "I say what I think and he says what he thinks," Juppé snapped after sharp exchanges between them in Brussels this Monday. And Le Monde reports Juppé passing this devastating judgment: "The common security and defence policy of Europe? It is dead." The issue here is not direct German military participation. Everyone would have understood if that was not possible. But how could Germany not support a UN resolution backed by its principal European partners, the United States and the Arab League? Worse still, Westerwelle recently cited doubts expressed about the extent of the military action by the Arab League to defend the German abstention: "We calculated the risk. If we see that three days after this intervention began, the Arab League already criticises [it], I think we had good reasons." While French and British pilots risk their lives in action, the German foreign minister is virtually encouraging the Arab League to make further criticism. A word that springs unbidden to my mind is Dolchstoss (stab in the back).

There are several reasons for this German attitude. Westerwelle is one of the weakest foreign ministers Germany has had for a long time. As the leader of the Free Democrats (Germany's Lib Dems), he is running scared of some important provincial elections – as is Angela Merkel. Like so many contemporary European politicians, they follow rather than lead public opinion. Having gingerly advanced in the 1990s towards taking broader international responsibilities, including military ones, German opinion seems to have sunk back into an attitude of "leave us alone". Let Germany be a Greater Switzerland! And the dynamism of its extraordinary export growth is increasingly outside the old west, in trade with countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China – the very Brics with which it sided at the UN.

Even if you think the German approach to the specific question of the no-fly zone was right, and France's wrong, you must acknowledge that these divisions make a mockery of Europe's pretensions to have a foreign policy. And remember this was supposed to be the year in which the EU finally got its foreign policy act together. "Today's meeting," Catherine Ashton, the EU's high representative for foreign and security policy, said after Monday's punch-up, "showed the EU's determination to react quickly and decisively and with one voice to the events in Libya." She deserves a prize for managing to say that with a straight face.

Don't get me wrong: my criticism of the German stance does not mean I have no doubts about this operation. I have grave doubts about it, like almost everyone I know. I am persuaded that the almost certain result of continued inaction would have been terrible for those civilians being attacked by Gaddafi's forces. Things would have got worse had we not acted. But now we have to prove that things will get better because we have.

Here we are caught in the gap between the clear limits of the UN mandate – to protect civilians – and the necessary condition for securing that end with any confidence: the fall of Gaddafi. The only good outcome is for carefully targeted, limited, UN-sanctioned military action to allow the Libyans to get rid of Gaddafi. For that, the operational compromise towards which this coalition of the willing seems to be edging – Nato command-and-control expertise in a broader political wrapping – is probably the best way forward. Then everything will depend on the people on the ground.

However, many worse outcomes are entirely possible, including an ugly, protracted partition of the country. A divided Europe increases the likelihood of a divided Libya.

LibyaGermanyFranceEuropeMuammar GaddafiForeign policyMiddle EastTimothy Garton Ash
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Germany can show reborn Arab nations the art of overcoming a difficult past | Timothy Garton Ash

The purges and trials of Nazis and the opening of Stasi files have lessons for Arab countries struggling out of dictatorship

Like it or not, Germany still provides the global benchmark for political evil. Hitler is the devil of a secularised Europe. Nazism and the Holocaust are comparisons people reach for everywhere. Godwin's Law, named after the American free speech lawyer Mike Godwin, famously states that "as an online discussion continues, the probability of a reference or comparison to Hitler or to Nazis approaches 1".

That is something today's Germans have to live with. But there is a brighter side to this coin. For out of the experience of dealing with two dictatorships – one fascist, one communist – contemporary Germany offers the gold standard for dealing with a difficult past. Modern German has characteristically long words such as Geschichtsaufarbeitung and Vergangenheitsbewältigung to describe this complex process of dealing with, working through and even (the latter implies) "overcoming" the past. Using skills and methods developed to deal with the Nazi legacy, and honed on the Stasi one, no one has done it better. Just as there are the famous DIN standards – German industrial norms for many manufactured products – so there are DIN standards for past-beating.

Arab nations, struggling to emerge from years of darkness under their own dictators, can therefore learn from Germany. Besides the important business of restitution and compensation to victims, past-beating usually takes three main forms: trials, purges and history lessons.

Our contemporary ideas about putting leaders on trial for "crimes against humanity" can be traced back to the Nuremberg trials of Nazi leaders. While Nuremberg set an important precedent, it had two big flaws: the "crimes against humanity" for which people were being tried had not explicitly been offences in international law at the time they were committed; and the judges included representatives of the Soviet Union – itself guilty of crimes against humanity in the same period. So Nuremberg could be accused of being retrospective, and imposing selective, victors' justice.

Fortunately, today's international criminal court, before which Arab leaders may come if they commit crimes against humanity, largely avoids those flaws. The international laws are firmly in place, and this is a properly established international court – though still, shamefully, without the participation of the US, China and Russia. Lebanon's special tribunal on the assassination of prime minister Rafik Hariri is an interesting application of the general principle, with all the accompanying political difficulties.

If international trials are tricky, those conducted under national laws and jurisdictions can be even trickier. This is one area in which Germany has not done better than anyone else. The trials of former east German leaders such as Erich Honecker, on contorted criminal charges relating to killings at the Berlin Wall were deeply unsatisfactory and often ended in fiasco. Since most totalitarian or authoritarian regimes involve large numbers of people being complicit to different degrees, you are almost sure to be inconsistent. Either you punish some of the little fish, but let the big ones swim free, or you make an example of a few big fish, but let others, and the smaller sharks, go free.

Last month, three henchmen of the Mubarak regime – the steel tycoon Ahmed Ezz and the former housing and tourism ministers – arrived at a Cairo court in police cars, which were pelted with stones, to face trial on corruption charges. Dressed in white jail uniforms, they were forced to stand in a metal cage. These men may be very corrupt; but how much more so than some of the Egyptian generals now tossing them as sacrificial offerings to an angry populace?

In such circumstances, a rapid administrative purge can be more effective, and even in some ways fairer, than selective show trials. A country emerging from a dictatorship simply says: there are some people so closely implicated in the evils of the old regime that to have them still active in senior positions in public life will utterly compromise the new political order. Such measures, too, have German precedents – and a chequered history. "De-Baathification" in Iraq and "de-communisation" in post-1989 eastern Europe built on the precedent of "de-nazification" in post-1945 Germany. But de-nazification was also selective, and stopped abruptly soon after West Germany became a largely independent state in 1949.

A better example may be the systematic vetting of people for connections to the Stasi, the East German secret police. Following German unification in 1990 this was done by an extraordinary ministry set up to oversee the Stasi files. It came to be known as "the Gauck authority", after its first head, Joachim Gauck. Colloquially, people described being vetted for Stasi connections as "being Gaucked". In my view, the vetting net was cast far too wide. Did every postman really have to be checked for secret police connections? But the vetting procedure itself was rigorous, fair and appealable.

Germany excels in what I call history lessons. Following a period of hushing-up and repressing the Nazi past in the 1950s and early 1960s, west Germany scrupulously researched, documented and taught this difficult history. Learning from the mistakes of the 1950s, united Germany did even better with the legacy of communist East Germany. There was a kind of truth commission, called the Enquete Kommission. Archives were opened; studies made; lessons learned.

Also central to this master class in past-beating was the "Gauck authority", which enabled everyone adversely affected by the evils of the Stasi, as well as scholars and journalists, to have access to the files. At the last count it had received a staggering 2.7m applications from private individuals to read or get information from Stasi files. This week the authority got its third head, Roland Jahn – another former East German dissident. So it is now "the Jahn authority". There is talk of its work continuing beyond the planned closure in 2019.

It is, of course, unlikely that any Arab post-dictatorship will do anything of this scale and quality. Quite apart from the highly developed legal, scholarly, journalistic and administrative cultures needed to sustain a German-style ministry of the files, it is also very expensive. Unemployed young Arabs, with no homes of their own, may feel their governments have more urgent things to spend their money on. But having decided to close down its own dreaded state security service, Egypt could do worse than fly in Joachim Gauck to advise on how best to open its files.

We should be careful here. Many times over the last few weeks I have heard well-intentioned but slightly self-congratulatory Europeans say: "We have all this rich experience of transitions from dictatorship to democracy, and should offer it to our Arab friends."

We must start by listening to the people on the ground in North Africa and the Middle East. Their priorities and needs may be different. And one lesson of Europe's own transitions from communism after 1989 is that you cannot simply apply a western template. That mistake was also made in the often inflexible west German incorporation of east Germany.

So what we should offer our friends across the Mediterranean is not a template, but a toolbox. They can then choose which implements to use, when, where and how. In that toolbox for transition, there should certainly be a set of shiny DIN-standard past-beating wrenches. And those wrenches, like so many other European exports, will be stamped "Made in Germany".

GermanyWar crimesMiddle EastEuropeTimothy Garton Ash
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

At 150, Italy gives the lie to the stories we tell the world about Europe | Timothy Garton Ash

There are eight uncomfortable truths that Berlusconi's kingdom reveals about an ancient and modern European project

The 15th-century pope Pius II, who really initiated the modern discourse on "Europe", wrote a famous letter to Sultan Mohammad II, the conqueror of Constantinople, in which he celebrated the manifold powers of the old continent: "Spain so steadfast, France so warlike, Germany so populous, Britain so strong, Poland so daring, Hungary so active and Italy so rich, high-spirited and experienced in the art of war."

Now as then, Europe is unthinkable without its nations. To see Europe only as the European Union and its Brussels institutions is like describing a beautiful old house by reading out the instruction books for its plumbing, electrical system and central heating. To be sure, Europe is much more than the sum of its nations – but without them, it is nothing. So it is appropriate that when the Guardian launches a month of special European coverage on Monday, it will do so by looking in depth, week by week, at four nations mentioned by Pius II more than five centuries ago: Germany, France, Spain and Poland.

Meanwhile, let us consider Pius II's own nation, Italy, which celebrates the 150th anniversary of its supposed unification into a modern nation-state next Thursday – the Kingdom of Italy having been proclaimed on 17 March 1861. Italy is the ur-European country. Nowhere else can you find so many closely piled layers of European history. Only in Rome can you have lunch near the place where Julius Caesar was murdered, then pop over to hear St Peter's heir proclaim his 2,000-year-old message to the city and the world. Most of what made the traditional, early modern identity of Europe – especially the heritage of ancient Greece and Christianity – came to us through ancient Rome. Europe: from Julius Caesar to Silvio Berlusconi.

Every European country is unique, yet they all have much in common with each other and each part tells us something about the whole. Here are eight things that I think today's Italy tells us about today's Europe.

1. Italy, like Europe, Europe like Italy, does not know what story it wants to tell. A celebration of the 150th anniversary of "Italian unity" that I recently attended at its embassy in London was devoted almost entirely to two closely related themes: women and love. The evening was delightful, with Greta Scacchi reading some luminous verses from Dante's Divine Comedy (Amor, ch'a nullo amato amar perdona) and a tenor singing Neapolitan love songs till he seemed fit to burst. But it was a slightly odd way for a modern European country to present itself to its friends. As for the European Union, it can't even give us the songs.

2. Instead of a story, Europe presents a lifestyle. Italy is the most glorious exemplar of that lifestyle – food, wine, fashion, sun, "social" working hours and long holidays, bella figura, dolce vita and all that. The trouble is that this lifestyle is enjoyed only by a dwindling number of Italians and Europeans. It is unsustainable without radical economic and welfare state reform, and the successful liberal integration of men and women of migrant origin, many of them Muslims. (Pius II must be turning in his grave.)

3. Most Europeans, and many outside Europe, probably know more about Berlusconi than they do about any other European politician. He is the closest thing we have to a pan-European political figure. Unfortunately, what everyone knows about him is mainly baroque, salacious or unpleasant – to put it no more strongly. So instead of a proper drama of European politics as part of a well-functioning European public sphere, we have this tawdry operetta.

4. The range of what actually happens in countries inside the European Union is far wider and less attractive than the nice stories that we tell ourselves and the rest of the world. Berlusconism is not fascism, but it is also a long way from the ideal type of a well-functioning social liberal democracy that Europeans routinely claim is characteristic of Europe.

Italy is by no means alone in this. Viktor Orbán's Hungary – to take another old European country mentioned by Pius II – is chasing hard on its heels. If you were to combine in one imaginary country all the worst features of the 27 individual European Union member states, you'd have a pretty nasty place.

5. The moment when European countries have to be on their best liberal democratic law-abiding behaviour is in the year or two before they join the European Union. Once you are in, you can get away with murder. (I use the phrase in its loose, colloquial English sense.) If Berlusconi's Italy had to apply to join the union today, it might not be admitted.

6. One must never conflate the current government of a country with the country it claims to govern. All European countries have different elements within them, and Italy is more disparate than any. There are large areas of its national life – including many run by people who have supported Berlusconi – which are modern, effective, civilised and admirable. The same country that gives us the Emperor Silvio also gives us by far the most credible of the current candidates for governor of the European Central Bank. I mean, of course, Mario Draghi, Governor of the Bank of Italy.

7. We must not confuse enduring, historic nations with stable, united nation states. In The Pursuit of Italy, a book published to coincide with this anniversary, David Gilmour argues that Italy has spent 150 years precisely not becoming an effective, united nation state. He reminds us that supporters of Umberto Bossi's Northern League would jibe that "Garibaldi did not unite Italy; he divided Africa". If the political weakening of Berlusconi now means the strengthening of Bossi, this hardly bodes well for a more integrated Italy.

And there's a broader European point here. It's precisely the integration of the European Union that allows the self-indulgence of national disintegration. You only have to look at Belgium – without a government now for 270 days because of apparently irreconcilable differences between northern (Flemish, Dutch-speaking) and southern (Walloon, French-speaking) politicians.

8. Talking of Africa: you would hope that Italy, one of the major European Mediterranean powers, would lead the way, along with France and Spain, in crafting a bold, imaginative European response to the Arab spring. Instead we have pictures of Berlusconi hugging Gaddafi, the Italian state-controlled energy company ENI apparently keeping some of the Libyan dictator's oil and gas revenues flowing, and panic about Tunisian refugees on the Italian island of Lampedusa. Again, Italy is but an extreme version of Europe's confusion. This we can no longer afford.

So, happy 150th birthday, (dis)united Italy. We love you. We feel for you, especially under your present leadership. And we urgently need you back in the vanguard of the great ancient and modern project that we call Europe. After all, you invented it.

ItalyEuropeSilvio BerlusconiEuropean UnionMiddle EastTimothy Garton Ash
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Libya's escalating drama reopens the case for liberal intervention | Timothy Garton Ash

Iraq gave it a bad name. Blair nearly killed it. But there are responsible versions of a much abused doctrine

To intervene or not to intervene? That is the question. The readiness of the delusional dictator Muammar Gaddafi to kill the Libyans who he says all "love" him – but who have unusual ways of showing it – returns us to a pivotal argument of our time.

I defy anyone to watch Gaddafi's planes attacking besieged towns and not accept that there is at least a legitimate question whether outside powers should intervene in some way to prevent him killing more of his own people. Some Libyans obviously think so too. In a piece on the Guardian website, a blogger from Tripoli, writing under the pseudonym Muhammad min Libya, argues eloquently against "any military intervention on the ground by any foreign force", but comes out in favour of a no-fly zone. The fact that western countries like Britain and Italy were until very recently sucking up to Gaddafi in the most craven fashion, and selling him weapons that he can now turn against his own people, makes it more, not less, vital to pose this question.

The whole debate about so-called "liberal interventionism" is bedevilled by two big distortions. First, intervention is usually reduced to armed intervention. That ignores a panoply of ways in which states can intervene in the internal affairs of other states. Even to offer humanitarian aid to the victims of what is beginning to look like a civil war in Libya is, in some important sense, to intervene.

Starting with this almost universally accepted work of humanitarian aid agencies, there is then a whole range of forms of intervention – from economic carrots and sticks, through diplomatic pressure, all the way to often controversial forms of overt or covert assistance to independent media and opposition groups, training in forms of non-violent action, and so on. Many of the most genuinely liberal forms of intervention – those which help people help themselves to be free – are to be found somewhere along this spectrum, but well short of armed force. We used them far too little in the Middle East over the last 30 years.

The other massive distortion in the debate about liberal interventionism is that the military actions now most closely associated with the term (Afghanistan, Iraq) were not really liberal at all – or, at least, they were not primarily liberal. Some of the justifications of them used liberal arguments, and some liberals supported these actions, but the core of the case was not liberal in the way that the west's military interventions in Bosnia (far too late), Sierra Leone and Kosovo genuinely were.

Motives are always mixed, but the main reason western forces invaded Afghanistan was because al-Qaida, then based in Afghanistan, had attacked the US. The mission there soon crept to, or became mixed with, that of building a society in which, for example, women would not be treated as hooded slaves and chattels – a good liberal purpose from which the west is now quietly and shamefacedly retreating. But it is a safe bet that George Bush had not spared many thoughts for the oppressed women of Afghanistan before 9/11.

Iraq is a more complicated story. Here, motives such as frustration at the failure to catch Osama bin Laden, the desire to use US military superiority to overwhelming effect ("shock and awe"), and interest in Iraqi oil – were mixed from the outset with a neocon agenda of spreading democracy, as an example to the whole region. Even the bogus argument over weapons of mass destruction was connected to earlier cases of liberal intervention, inasmuch as it was suggested that a Saddam Hussein with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons could be another Slobodan Milosevic. (As a matter of fact, he already had been – towards the Iraqi Kurds – a Milosevic before Milosevic, while the west blithely supported him against Iran.)

Only a fool would fail to acknowledge that the invasion of Iraq gave liberal interventionism a bad name. No one contributed more to this than Tony Blair. In fact Blair, whose early Gladstonism in Sierra Leone and Kosovo I strongly supported, looks especially bad today. For he not only hijacked the arguments of liberal interventionism to justify invading Iraq; he then went on personally to embrace Gaddafi, the Saddam of north Africa. Wrong both ways! (Yes, Britain and America persuaded Gaddafi to renounce most of his weapons of mass destruction, so at least he does not have nuclear bombs to use against his own people, but the subsequent cosying up to him, and business deals with him, were not required to achieve that end.)

Yet alongside these perversions of liberal interventionism, a much more careful, law-abiding and genuinely liberal version of it has quietly continued to develop. Building on the post-1945 tradition of human rights promotion and international humanitarian law, and working with and through the UN, this has brought us the international criminal court and the doctrine of a "responsibility to protect", also endorsed by the UN. To be sure, it is rank hypocrisy for the US, Russia and China to threaten Gaddafi with being arraigned before an ICC whose authority they do not themselves accept. But that's an argument for the US, Russia and China to join the ICC, not for that court to be abolished. If the threat of prosecution persuades some more of Gaddafi's henchmen to defect, this must be a good thing.

And do we not have some responsibility to protect the people who have risen against him, if only in the form of the no-fly zone supported by Libyans such as Muhammad min Libya, and especially if this is to protect them against weapons we sold to their oppressor?

A decade ago an independent international commission that elaborated on the idea of "responsibility to protect" spelled out six criteria for deciding whether military action is justified. Essentially a modernised version of centuries-old Catholic standards for "just war", these criteria are: right authority, just cause, right intention, last resort, proportional means, and reasonable prospects. Bitter experience, from Kosovo to Afghanistan, has taught us that "reasonable prospects" (ie of success) may be the most difficult to judge and achieve.

Applying these criteria, I remain unconvinced that a no-fly zone over Libya is justified – at the time of writing. If it turns out that Gaddafi does still have a secret stock of chemical weapons, and can drop them from the sky, this judgment could change overnight. We should prepare contingency plans. But we have not yet exhausted all other avenues, including trying to pry Gaddafi's cronies away from him by fair means and foul. A no-fly zone would be very difficult to enforce, and might not have anything more than a marginal impact on the ground.

Above all, any form of armed intervention by the west – and the US military says a no-fly zone would require initial bombing of Libyan radar and anti-aircraft facilities – would spoil the greatest pristine glory of these events, which is that they are all about brave men and women liberating themselves.

LibyaMuammar GaddafiForeign policyMiddle EastInsurance industryGenderCourt of justice of the European UnionTimothy Garton AshZoe Williams
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

This tortured Polish-Russian story is something we can all learn from | Timothy Garton Ash

The fog of controversy around the death of a Polish president threatens to engulf a promising new beginning

Adam Daniel Rotfeld, a former Polish foreign minister, has on his visiting card one of the world's more extraordinary titles. It reads: Plenipotentiary for Difficult Matters. What a wonderful idea. Every country, every company, every family should have one.

The difficult matters Rotfeld is tasked to address are in the field of Polish-Russian relations. This is definitely a strong contender in the "world's most difficult matters" stakes, although the global competition is fierce: China-Japan, Britain-Ireland, Hutu-Tutsi, Sunni-Shia. Together with his Russian counterpart, Rotfeld chairs a Polish-Russian Group for Difficult Matters, which recently produced a remarkable book.

The size and weight of a granite slab, this analyses most of the big issues between the countries, from the Polish-Soviet war following the Bolshevik revolution, through the Soviet occupation of eastern Poland in September 1939 ("the 4th partition of Poland", says the chapter subtitle), the mass murder of thousands of Polish officers by Soviet security forces at Katyn in 1940 ("the Katyn crime"), all the way to relations between Putin's Russia and today's Poland, a leading member of Nato and the EU.

What is so remarkable about this is that for decades the truth about these events was systematically concealed. All across Europe, the corpses of murdered men, women and children were wrapped in a shroud of lies. To the original crime was added the insult of totalitarian and nationalist mendacity.

For the Poles, Katyn was the epitome of this all-European disease. For almost half a century, Soviet leaders insisted that the Polish officers had been killed by the Nazis, following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 – and not by the Soviets themselves, executing, as we now know, a Politburo decision of 5 March 1940. Soviet historians looked one straight in the eye and lied through their teeth.

When I first came to Warsaw more than 30 years ago, I found in the cloister of St Antony's church a memorial tablet which defied that big lie by means of a single digit: 0 instead of 1. "Katyn 1940", it said, noting the true date and place of a Polish captain's death. A Franciscan monk showed me another. Since I did not then speak Polish, I struggled to communicate my thoughts. Finally I hit on the Latin motto of the city of Oxford, "Fortis est veritas," I said, "et praevalebit": "Truth is strong and will prevail". His face broke into a broad grin.

Well, the truth is strong, and did eventually prevail. To mark a broader sense of closure and the opening of a new chapter, the Polish and Russian governments agreed to hold a joint ceremony at the scene of the crime in April last year, on the 70th anniversary. Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, said "the truth purifies" (a principle that his government does not otherwise generally observe); and Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, quoted a Russian proverb made famous by Alexander Solzhenitsyn: "One word of truth shall outweigh the whole world."

Three days later, as if the devil had had enough of all this truth, love and light, tragedy struck. Hurrying to a separate Katyn memorial ceremony, the plane of the Polish president, Lech Kaczynski, crashed in the fog at a rather basic airport near Smolensk. All 96 people on board were killed. They included, beside the president and his wife, many leading figures in Poland's public life, and the top commanders of its armed forces.

The initial Russian reaction was generous, understanding, and in one respect, little short of amazing. The Polish director Andrzej Wajda's film on Katyn, which clearly shows Soviet collaboration with the Nazis, thus stabbing at the heart of modern Russia's central patriotic myth, was shown in primetime on Russian television.

But old habits die hard. As the crash was investigated with painful polit-bureaucratic slowness, doubts, recriminations and conspiracy theories began to spread. Personally devastated, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the twin brother of the dead president and a dominant figure in the rightwing Law and Justice party that they created together, accused the Tusk government of being craven towards a Russia that was once again covering up its own misdeeds. For months, the Polish media seemed to cover no other story.

This year a Russian investigative committee finally published its report. It showed what all reasonable observers had long since concluded: that the plane should never have attempted to land in the fog and probably only did so because of pressure on the pilot from the head of the Polish air force, who was in the cabin for some of the time, and ultimately from the real or assumed wishes of President Kaczynski himself. "There isn't yet a decision from the president what to do next," it reports a voice saying on the black box recorder – and, a bit later: "He'll be angry, if again ..."

What the Russian report fails to address, however, is the condition of the Smolensk airport, the role of the people in its control tower, and their communications with higher Russian authorities. This failure is less surprising when you realise that the commission responsible for the report is also responsible for overseeing the state of such airports.

Controversy and speculation have again erupted in Poland. A long-awaited Polish report on the crash is due to be published in the next few weeks.

More horrible details may emerge. The first anniversary of the tragedy is fast approaching. A representative of Kaczynski's Law and Justice party says they won't join official commemorations since they don't want to stand beside "people who hide the truth from the Polish people". Just as it seemed that a whole century of difficult matters was being put to bed, relations are haunted by a new difficult matter. Worst of all: the relatives of the victims will still not be allowed to mourn in peace.

Sitting in a cafe here on Tuesday, reading the tome that plenipotentiary Rotfeld had kindly given me, I was approached by a Polish woman who is an editor on an English language monthly. She inquired what I thought of all this. I replied that, deeply unsatisfactory though the Russian report is, I have no doubt that what happened at the Smolensk airport was a tragic accident. To which she responded: "But don't you think it could have been artificial fog?" An American general had apparently said that it is perfectly possible to make such artificial fogs. And so it goes on.

This is a specific Polish-Russian story, but we all have our difficult matters – whether in a country, a community, a company or a family. As in this example, the search for historical truth is both cause and symptom of better political understanding. If both are present, they are mutually reinforcing. If either is lacking, the other will be weakened. In every case, merely to identify the most sensitive areas already reveals a great deal. Tell me your difficult matters and I will tell you who you are.

RussiaEuropePolandSecond world warTimothy Garton Ash
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Listen to this message of hope from Europe's Arabs – and the warning | Timothy Garton Ash

Spain is closer to the Arab world than any other European country, but it has no better response than the rest of the EU

I thought I should see for myself the impact of these revolutions on the Arab street. The Arab street in Europe, that is. So I have come back to the Calle de Tribulete in Madrid. Along this one narrow street, with its seedy bars and phone-and-internet locutorios, where immigrants talk to their convulsed homelands, you meet Moroccans, Tunisians, Algerians – and, in a dusty little shop called the House of Pharaoh, a young Egyptian, Safy. He came here three years ago from the Mediterranean port of Rashid, or Rosetta, where Napoleon's troops found the famous Rosetta stone.

What Safy tells me, and Mokhtar, and Muhammad (several Muhammads) is this: at last there is some hope at home. And if those hopes are realised, if what an Algerian migrant worker calls his "mafia government" also goes, if there is a real prospect of jobs, housing and yes, more freedom, they will go home. They are here in Spain to make a better life for themselves and their children. There is much they like about being here, although they say anti-Muslim prejudice has got worse since the Madrid bombings of 2004. But given the chance, they will go back. For now there is "how do you say – l'espoir?".

This is not just any European Arab street, though you can find the likes of it in every larger city in western Europe. No, this is the very street from which some of the Madrid bombers came. They used to meet in La Alhambra, a quiet cafe-restaurant. A man called Jamal Zougam worked in one of those talk-to-home locutorios. He prepared the mobile phones that detonated the bombs which killed so many innocent Spanish commuters on the trains into the nearby Atocha station on 11 March 2004. When I was here six years ago, I met young men who had pictures of Osama bin Laden on their mobile phones. They spoke of their fear, anger about the Iraq war, and desperation.

Today those locutorios and mobile phones are alive with better tidings. In the House of Pharaoh, Safy and Ibrahim rejoice at his fall. And the man behind the bar at La Alhambra, a thoughtful Moroccan who once studied medieval history, talks warily of possible change for the better in the kingdom of his birth. In free elections, he says, Moroccan Islamists could do well, but they would be peaceful, law-abiding, democracy-respecting Islamists like those in Turkey, "only even more moderate".

Well, as Herodotus says, my business is to record what people say – but I am by no means bound to believe it. I am the last person to overstate the significance of an afternoon's vox pop on one Arab street. Only a fool would fail to recognise that this is a moment of danger, as well as opportunity. The path forward for Tunisia and Egypt is far less clear than it was for east European countries – and there is no warm, safe house of EU membership beckoning at the end of the road.

In the long run what I heard on Tribulete street might mean that some migrants go back to their countries of origin. For now there are more than 5,000 Arab boat people on the Italian island of Lampedusa, most of them from Tunisia. "The revolution has changed nothing," they tell Le Monde – and they want Europe to give them work.

In the confusion of a new semi-freedom, some very nasty old worms will come out of the woodwork. I got a small taste of this from a young Moroccan sitting at a bus stop here. Apropos nothing in particular, he started telling me that "all the problems in the world are the fault of the Jews". The prophet Muhammad had a problem with the Jews, he explained, and ever since the Jews have been making trouble for the Muslims. He worships at a mosque where the chief imam is from – how did you guess? – Saudi Arabia.

Trying to jam the lid back on young Arabs' manifest discontents by propping up corrupt Arab autocracies – including the Wahabi Imam-funding Saudi Arabia – as America and Europe have done for far too long, is merely to trade bad trouble today for worse tomorrow. We must now seize the chance, take the risk, and concentrate our best minds on working out how with the limited means at our disposal we can help freedom-hungry Arabs to reach the best possible destination.

But how? That is a question to which I hoped to hear some answers in Spain. For no European country is closer to the Arab world: just 13km across the Mediterranean, at the nearest point to Morocco. This is the place where Europe and North Africa are joined at the hip.

What I have so far heard from Spanish policymakers and analysts is disappointing. Yes, this country has expert knowledge of the Maghreb, and especially of Morocco, but its policy is constrained by fears of a wave of immigration across those narrow straits (which the Moroccan authorities currently help it to limit) as well as Islamist terrorism, drugs and crime; security concerns about Spain's north African exclaves of Ceuta and Mellila; and close ties with the Moroccan monarchy. Should Sunday's planned demonstration in Morocco be the beginning of something big, they really don't know what they'll do.

If Spain has no strategy, France has had something worse: a bad one. In the pursuit of a shortsighted, soi-disant realism, its political and business elites have been as thick as thieves with the rulers of North Africa. And, as WikiLeaks has helped a wider public to understand, when we say thieves, in the context of north African Arab rulers, we mean thieves.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has also saddled Europe with a worse than useless outfit called the Union for the Mediterranean. Its founding co-president, alongside Sarkozy himself, was none other than Hosni Mubarak. This 43-country waffle shop has an array of cumbersome, dysfunctional committees and projects, wholly unfit for purpose. Now that we do need a union for the Mediterranean, we should really start by abolishing the Union for the Mediterranean.

As for Europe's other major Mediterranean power, Italy, its prime minister's deep personal interest in Arab affairs has just landed him in court – to stand trial for allegedly paying to have sex with a then under-aged Arab nightclub dancer called Karima el-Mahroug.

More seriously, all of Europe's leaders are preoccupied with failing banks, public spending cuts and the existential crisis of the eurozone. A farsighted Spanish policymaker tells me that what we need to offer across the Mediterranean is "a Marshall Plan with a strong political component".

That will be about as attractive to hard-pressed, belt-tightening Europeans as the prospect of handing their jobs to those Tunisians on Lampedusa.

So on a cold-eyed analysis, you can end up as sceptical about the likely European response to the "Arab 1989" as about the outcome of the thing itself. But if the EU does not now come up with a generous, imaginative and strategic response to what is happening on the Mediterranean's southern shore, then that failure will one day come back to haunt us on all the Arab streets of Europe.

Middle EastSpainEuropeSilvio BerlusconiNicolas SarkozyMoroccoTunisiaMadrid train bombsEgyptGlobal terrorismTimothy Garton Ash
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2011 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds