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Not 1989. Not 1789. But Egyptians can learn from other revolutions | Timothy Garton Ash

Ecstatic crowds in Cairo prove there is no clash of civilisations – everyone wants freedom. The question is, how to get it?

'No one predicted this, but everyone could explain it afterwards." Said of another revolution, as true of this one. "To be honest, we thought we'd last about five minutes,"one of the organisers of the original 25 January protest which began this Egyptian revolution told the BBC. "We thought we'd get arrested straight away." If they had been, if Hosni Mubarak's security forces had once again murdered the foetus in the womb, the world wide web would now be filled with articles by experts explaining why "Egypt is not Tunisia". Instead, the web is abuzz with instant, confident explanations of what nobody anticipated. Such are the illusions of retrospective determinism.

So before we go any further, let us make two deep bows. First and deepest to those who started this, at great personal risk, with no support from the professedly freedom-loving west, and against a regime that habitually uses torture. Honour and respect to you. Second, hats off to Lady Luck, contingency, fortuna – which, as Machiavelli observed, accounts for half of everything that happens in human affairs. No revolution has ever got anywhere without brave individuals and good luck.

One leathery old victim of this revolution, at whose death we should rejoice, is the fallacy of cultural determinism – and specifically the notion that Arabs and/or Muslims are not really up for freedom, dignity and human rights. Their "culture", so we were assured by Samuel Huntington and others, programmed them otherwise. Tell that to the people dancing on Tahrir Square.

This is not to deny that the religious-political patterns of both radical and conservative Islam, and specific legacies of modern Arab history, will make a transition to consolidated liberal democracy more difficult than it was in, say, the Czech Republic. They will. Maybe the whole thing will still go horribly wrong. But the profoundly condescending idea that "this could never happen there" has been refuted on the streets of Tunis and Cairo.

While we are talking determinisms, let's dispense with another one. In tags like "Facebook revolution", "Twitter revolution" and "Al-Jazeera revolution", we meet again the ghost of technological determinism. Talking to friends in Cairo, I am left in no doubt that these media did play a major role in organising and multiplying the popular protests that began on 25 January. As I have been writing this column, I have been watching the growth of the Facebook page set up by Egyptians to "authorise" Wael Ghonim, the Google executive recently released from prison and newly anointed hero of the revolution, to speak in their name. When I first visited it, at 08:51 on Wednesday morning, it had 213,376 people following it; as this article goes to press (and what a gloriously arcane phrase that is!) it has 236,305. Ghonim had been the pseudonymous organiser of an earlier Facebook page which contributed to the protests, and now has more than 600,000 followers.

As in Tunisia, it is the interaction of online and mobile social networks with the older superpower of television that creates the catalytic effect. Al-Jazeera TV has produced a compelling narrative of liberation struggle, drawing on blogposts and blurry footage from mobile phone cameras. Ghonim became a popular hero because soon after his release from prison he appeared on an Egyptian television programme, thus reaching a wider mass audience for the first time. So these old and new technologies of communication matter enormously – but they did not prevent popular protest movements being crushed in Belarus and Iran, they do not determine the outcome, and the medium is not the message.

Then we have the historical analogies. I have lost count of how many articles I have seen (including, I hasten to add, one by myself) asking whether or not this is the Arab 1989. "The Arab world's Berlin Wall moment," shouts one headline. "This is no 1989 moment," cries another. The comparison may not, in the end, tell us all that much about what is happening in Egypt, Tunisia or Jordan – but it certainly tells us something about 1989. There is no longer any doubt that 1989 has become the early 21st century's default model and metaphor for revolution. Forget 1917, 1848 or 1789.

A close runner-up, in the analogy stakes, is Iran in 1979 – and the prospect of radical, violent Islamists coming out on top. Roger Cohen of the New York Times, who has produced some splendid reported columns from Tunisia and Egypt, follows the first law of journalism ("first simplify, then exaggerate") when he writes that the "core issue" in Egypt is "are we witnessing Tehran 1979 or Berlin 1989?" To which one answer is: what we are witnessing in Cairo in 2011 is Cairo 2011. I mean this not in the trivial sense that every event is unique, but in a deeper one. For what characterises a true revolution is the emergence of something genuinely new, on the one hand, and the return of a suppressed human universal on the other.

New in Cairo 2011 is that it is now Arabs and Muslims standing up in large numbers, with courage and (for the most part) peaceful discipline, for basic human dignity, against corrupt, oppressive rulers. New in 2011 is the degree of decentered, networked animation of the demonstrations, so that even the best-informed observers there struggle to answer the question "who is organising this?". New in 2011 is the extraordinary underlying pressure of demography, with half the population in most of these countries being under 25.

Old in Cairo 2011 – as old as the pyramids, as old as human civilisation – is the cry of oppressed men and women, overcoming the barrier of fear and feeling, however fleetingly, the sense of freedom and dignity. My heart jumped for joy as I watched the footage of the vast, celebrating crowds in central Cairo on Tuesday. But when we have finished humming the prisoners' chorus from Beethoven's Fidelio, we must remind ourselves that these moments are always transient. The hard grind of consolidating liberty is all ahead.

This is where historical comparisons come into their own. They are no substitute for firsthand, informed analysis of the unique circumstances on the spot. What they do offer, however, is an extensive toolkit of experience, showing the many ways in which a revolution can go wrong and the rare combination needed for it to keep going right.

Neither on the opposition nor on the official side do I yet see a vital ingredient for it going right: the organised, credible partners for a negotiated transition. Some proto-organisation has clearly emerged on Tahrir Square.

In Ghonim, the protesters have a symbol who might yet become a leader. But we seem still to be a very long way from any alliance of opposition forces that could funnel popular pressure to the negotiating table. On the official side, Hosni Mubarak and his vice-president must give way to an interim government, headed by someone acceptable to all (or at least, most) sides – someone like the wily old Amr Moussa, secretary-general of the Arab League. Only when those two things happen may we begin to have confidence that the Egyptian revolution is on the right road.

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If this is young Arabs' 1989, Europe must be ready with a bold response | Timothy Garton Ash

What happens across the Mediterranean matters more to the EU than the US. Yet so far its voice has been inaudible

Europe's future is at stake this week on Cairo's Tahrir Square, as it was on Prague's Wenceslas Square in 1989. This time, the reasons are geography and demography. The Arab arc of crisis, from Morocco to Jordan, is Europe's near abroad. As a result of decades of migration, the young Arabs whom you see chanting angrily on the streets of Cairo, Tunis and Amman already have cousins in Madrid, Paris and London.

If these uprisings succeed, and what emerges is not another Islamist dictatorship, these young, often unemployed, frustrated men and women will see life chances at home. The gulf between their life experience in Casablanca and Madrid, Tunis and Paris, will gradually diminish – and with it that cultural cognitive dissonance which can lead to the Moroccan suicide bomber on a Madrid commuter train. As their homelands modernise, young Arabs – and nearly one third of the population of the north African littoral is between the age of 15 and 30 – will circulate across the Mediterranean, contributing to European economies, and to paying the pensions of rapidly ageing European societies. The examples of modernisation and reform will also resonate across the Islamic world.

If these risings fail, and the Arab world sinks back into a slough of autocracy, then tens of millions of these young men and women will carry their pathologies of frustration across the sea, shaking Europe to its foundations. If the risings succeed in deposing the latest round of tyrants, but violent, illiberal Islamist forces gain the upper hand in some of those countries, producing so many new Irans, then heaven help us all. Such are the stakes. If that does not add up to a vital European interest, I don't know what does.

Is this the Arab 1989? We have the same sense of events leaping from country to country, and of many ordinary people spontaneously standing up to say "enough is enough". There is, however, so far little sign of the social self-organisation, led by democratic opposition movements and civil society groups, which in 1989 sustained non-violent discipline, even in the face of provocation, and paved the way to a transition negotiated at round tables.

The trades unions in Tunisia have played a significant part. In Egypt, there is Mohamed ElBaradei, with his National Association for Change, and the once imprisoned opposition leader Ayman Nour, but no effective popular front, civic forum or other large-scale structure has emerged. In Tuesday's large demonstration in Tahrir Square, there were encouraging signs of civic self-organisation. Today, however, they seem to have responded chaotically to violent attacks by pro-Mubarak demonstrators.

For all the mobilising power of the internet and social media, this question of political organisation is crucial. That is why Israelis warn that the right analogy is not with Europe in 1989 but with Iran in 1979. A broad popular uprising, with many secular and leftist elements, is taken over by the Islamists – because they are better organised. The fact that Arab dictators like Hosni Mubarak have been successfully blackmailing the west with this Islamist spectre for 30 years does not mean it does not exist. But you can understand the frustration of Arab democrats who encounter this as the west's first reaction to their once-in-a-lifetime hope of liberation. "This is an Allahu-Akbar-free revolution," protests the Egyptian journalist Yosri Fouda.

Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow – let alone next month or year. Policymakers and long-distance pundits are to revolutions like pedestrians in city shoes following a muddy, hectic steeplechase. They puff along behind. What we need are people on the spot who speak the language, know the history, have been there repeatedly over a number of years, and can evaluate the main players and social forces. The fact that there are so few such correspondents and experts around is proof of Europe's indifference to its own backyard. There are probably more European experts on the politics of California than there are on those of Egypt, let alone of Tunisia or Morocco.

Politically, Europe's reaction has so far been embarrassed silence, followed by very cautious encouragement of peaceful change – as in the statement produced by EU foreign ministers on Monday. Having for decades propped up and worked with the Tunisian dictator Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, France now joins in EU sanctions on him and his family. Oh, so you just found out he's a bad guy? The so-called Union for the Mediterranean has been totally irrelevant. Unlike US secretary of state Hillary Clinton, the EU's high representative for foreign affairs, Catherine Ashton, has been invisible.

Yes, Washington too reacted first with embarrassed silence and then with weasel-worded encouragement of peaceful change. But at least people noticed its confusion. When (if) we get the next lot of WikiLeaks, we may even find that the US played some part in bringing about the Egyptian military's remarkable declaration that it will not use force against the legitimate demands of "our great people". Europe, by contrast, has had no detectable influence on the unfolding of events vital to the future of Europe.

Beyond urgently warning Arab leaders of the economic consequences of a violent crackdown, which Europeans should do through every available channel, there is little we can now do to change the immediate course of events on the ground. Too explicit western endorsement of a particular candidate or opposition movement could backfire. For today, less may be more.

Tomorrow, or the day after, it will be a different story. We in Europe should already be preparing for that day. The Egyptian protesters are very clear about what they don't want: Mubarak. Unlike those on Wenceslas Square in Prague, they have no clear or common vision of what they do want afterwards. Except, of course, that it should be better. If Egypt's new or merely transitional rulers – and those of Tunisia, and other neighbouring countries – are of the kind who would welcome help from Europe, we must be ready to give it.

No one has more experience than Europeans do in difficult transitions from dictatorship to democracy. No region has more instruments at its disposal to affect developments in the Arab Middle East. The US may have special relationships with the Egyptian military and Arab ruling families, but Europe has more trade, gives a lot of aid, and has a thick web of cultural and person-to-person ties across what the Romans called Mare Nostrum, our sea. It has 27 + 1 sets of diplomatic relations. It is the place that most young Arabs want to come – to visit, to study, to work. Their cousins are here already. That nexus is both a problem and an opportunity.

The invisible Ashton should even now be putting together a task force of the new European external action service to work out responses to all the likely interim outcomes in Egypt, Tunisia and wherever else Arabs set out to reclaim ownership of their own destiny. She must identify and work with the national leaders, certainly including those of Spain, Portugal, France and Italy, who have the most direct interest in such an initiative. The EU needs speed, flexibility, boldness, imagination – none of them qualities with which this slow-moving multinational club is traditionally associated. Let Europe prove that by acting boldly abroad it can shape its own future at home.

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The optimists of Davos past now face a world whose script has gone awry | Timothy Garton Ash

Liberal capitalism's crisis has led neither to total collapse nor great reform. But others are beating the west at its own game

Three Davos summits on from the west's Great Crash, we begin to see where we are. This is not the total collapse of liberal democratic capitalism which some feared at the dramatic meeting here in early 2009, but nor is it the great reform of western capitalism, then the devout hope of Davos.

Western capitalism survives, but limping, wounded, carrying a heavy load of debt, inequality, demography, neglected infrastructure, social discontent and unrealistic expectations. Meanwhile, other variants of capitalism – Chinese, Indian, Russian, Brazilian – are surging ahead, exploiting the advantages of backwardness, and their economic dynamism is rapidly being translated into political power. The result? Not a unipolar world, converging on a single model of liberal democratic capitalism, but a no-polar world, diverging towards many different national versions of often illiberal capitalism. Not a new world order, but a new world disorder. An unstable kaleidoscope world – fractured, overheated, germinating future conflicts.

It was not meant to be like this. Remember the liberal triumphalism of the 1990s, when the west's old adversaries all seemed to have been vanquished? Even Russia and China were turning to capitalism, and that must, in time, surely bring them to democracy. Remember this: "The great struggles of the 20th century between liberty and totalitarianism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom – and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise. In the 21st century, only nations that share a commitment to protecting basic human rights and guaranteeing political and economic freedom will be able to unleash the potential of their people and assure their future prosperity." Those are the opening words of the US national security strategy adopted under president George W Bush in 2002.

Maybe in the long run these words will prove to be right. Maybe in 50 years' time we will return to them and say: yes, in the end national prosperity and power could not be divorced from respect for human rights and political freedom. I certainly hope so. But as a liberal internationalist who deeply believes in freedom and human rights, and shared some of the liberal euphoria of the 1990s – though never that hubristic claim for a "single sustainable model" – I must say that it does not look that way in 2011.

On the one side, this is because the west has squandered its late 20th century victory. As so often in history, hubris was followed by nemesis. For all the soaring rhetoric of President Obama's state of the union address this week, the difficulties of pushing the reforms he proposes through America's dysfunctional political system are daunting. To be more optimistic about the prospects of reform in Europe, you would have to be Dr Pangloss on steroids.

On the other side, countries beyond the historic west have discovered combinations undreamed of in the liberal triumphalist philosophy of the 1990s. They combine the dynamism of market economies with rule by one party or one family, state or hybrid ownership of companies, massive corruption and contempt for the rule of law.

A purist of liberal capitalism will say: "But that is not capitalism!", rather as a liberal Muslim might say: "But what al-Qaida preaches is not Islam!" Yet Islam has something to do with it, after all; and capitalism has something to do with the awesome rates of economic growth and capital accumulation which make China already an emerging superpower. Against the received wisdom of the 1990s, it turns out that you can be half-pregnant.

This is a big part of the "new reality" which is the theme for this year's annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. Its programme optimistically proclaims: "Shared Norms for the New Reality." If only. But Yan Xuetong, a bracing Chinese analyst of international relations, argues that emerging powers naturally bring to the table their own norms, and attempt to spread them as best they can. He has a point. Are China and Russia – or even, for that matter, India and Brazil – more or less ready to adopt western norms than they were 10 years ago? Less. Are countries in the global south more torn between western and Chinese norms than they were 10 years ago? More.

As a liberal internationalist, I believe we should still try to work towards "shared norms for the new reality". But let's start by acknowledging that one of the defining features of this new reality is, in fact, that there are divergent norms. China's rulers do not necessarily think that we should do things their way, but they certainly don't think that they should do things our way. In fact, they'd probably be quite happy with a world in which the Americans, the Chinese and the Europeans each conducted their affairs after their own fashion within their own borders, and to some extent – here is where it gets fuzzy and dangerous – within their spheres of influence. That is, incidentally, more or less how Samuel Huntington envisaged avoiding his "clash of civilisations".

The "shared norms" would then be limited to a fairly minimal set of rules for international order, trade, air traffic and so forth, with a strong presumption of respect for national sovereignty – especially that of great powers. So one of the fundamental divergences of our time is precisely about how many or how few shared norms we need.

What follows from this for people in countries that do have more or less liberal, more or less democratic versions of capitalism? (And there are huge variations between them too. Look at Italy or Hungary today. Look at the big, notionally private British banks now owned by the British state. That "single sustainable model" was always a double myth: neither single nor sustainable.) Two things follow above all.

First, we must put our own houses in order. Physician, heal thyself. The most important steps we can take for our influence abroad are those we take at home. We have lived for decades with a paradigm of progress, in which each generation would be better off than the last. Now we will be hard put to ensure that our children are not less prosperous, less secure and less free than we were.

Second, we probably have to scale down – at least for now – our expectations for those "shared norms" of liberal international order. This means making hard choices. Do we put the preservation of peace, in the minimal sense of the absence of major war between states, before all else? Or reversing global warming? Or keeping open the pathways of international trade and finance? Or speaking up for basic human rights? Of course we want all these good things, and all are, in some measure, related to each other. But we have to cut our coat to suit our cloth.

If this seems a depressing prospect, then let me offer one silver lining. Both the hopes and fears of Davos two years ago already look unrealistic. Those of Davos 10 years ago seem like they are from a different world; of 25 years ago, almost from a different universe. History is full of surprises, and no one is more surprised by them than historians.

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Tunisia's revolution isn't a product of Twitter or WikiLeaks. But they do help | Timothy Garton Ash

The internet alone won't set anyone free. Between north Africa and Belarus, we are learning just what it can and can't do

'The Kleenex Revolution"? Somehow I think not. Unless, that is, you follow Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi. In a televised denunciation of the popular uprising that has deposed his friendly neighbouring dictator, he ranted: "Even you, my Tunisian brothers, you may be reading this Kleenex and empty talk on the internet." (Kleenex is how Gaddafi refers to WikiLeaks.) "Any useless person, any liar, any drunkard, anyone under the influence, anyone high on drugs can talk on the internet, and you read what he writes and you believe it. This is talk which is for free. Shall we become the victims of Facebook and Kleenex and YouTube?" To which, since the speaker is another dictator, I devoutly hope that the answer is "Yes". Let Kleenex wipe them away, one after another, like blobs of phlegm.

But will it? What contribution do websites, social networks and mobile phones make to popular protest movements? Is there any justification for labelling the Tunisian events, as some have done, a "Twitter Revolution" or a "WikiLeaks Revolution"?

A remarkable young Belarussian activist-analyst, Evgeny Morozov, has just challenged the lazy assumptions behind such politico-journalistic tags in a book called The Net Delusion, which went to press before the Tunisian rising. The subtitle of the British edition is "How Not to Liberate the World". Morozov has fun deriding and demolishing the naively optimistic visions which, particularly in the United States, seem to accompany the emergence of every new communications technology. (I remember an article a quarter-century ago entitled "The fax will set you free".)

He shows that claims for the contribution of Twitter and Facebook to Iran's green movement were exaggerated. These new technologies can also be used by dictators to watch, entrap and persecute their opponents. Above all, he insists that the internet does not suspend the usual workings of power politics. It is politics that decides whether the dictator will be toppled, as in Tunisia, or the bloggers beaten and locked up, as in Morozov's native Belarus.

His challenge is salutary but, like most revisionists, Morozov exaggerates in the opposite direction. Tunisia offers a timely corrective to his corrective. For it seems that here the internet did play a significant role in spreading news of the suicide which sparked the protests, and then in multiplying those protests. An estimated 18% of the Tunisian population is on Facebook, and the dictator neglected to block it in time.

Among the educated young who came out in force, we can be sure that the level of online (and mobile phone) participation was higher. The scholar Noureddine Miladi quotes an estimate that half the Tunisian television audience watches satellite TV, and he notes: "Al-Jazeera heavily relied on referencing Facebook pages and YouTube in reporting the raw events." So professional satellite TV fed off online citizen journalism.

Moreover, these media leap frontiers. A leading British scholar of the Maghreb showed me his Facebook page, which has many of his Maghrebian former students as Facebook friends. Several of the Moroccans had turned their Facebook icons to the Tunisian flag, or a Tunisia-Morocco love-heart, to show their enthusiasm for the first people-power toppling of an Arab dictator in more than 45 years. That's a tiny group, to be sure – but elites matter, in opposition movements as in everything else.

Before Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali's fall, his regime had struck back against the netizens, mounting "phishing" attacks on Gmail and Facebook accounts, harvesting passwords and email lists of presumed opponents, and then arresting prominent bloggers such as Slim Amamou. This reinforces Morozov's point that the internet is a double-edged sword: yet it is also a back-handed tribute to the importance of these new media. As I write, the formerly imprisoned Amamou has become a member of a new, interim coalition government.

Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow, but thus far the Tunisian rising has been a hugely heartening development – especially because it was an authentic, homegrown, largely spontaneous movement, with little active support from western powers. (Sometimes quite the reverse: France was, until the very last minute, offering its security expertise to keep Tunisia's Louis XVI in power. For shame, Madame Liberté, for shame.)

The transformed information and communications technologies of our time played a role in enabling this rising to succeed. They did not cause it, but they helped. Specialists argue that Tunisia, with its small, relatively homogenous, urban, educated population, and (for now) moderate, peaceful, largely exiled Islamists, can become a beacon of change in the Maghreb. If things go well, the internet and satellite TV will spread that news across the Arab world.

So yes, the internet furnishes weapons for the oppressors as well as the oppressed – but not, as Morozov seems to imply, in equal measure. On balance it offers more weapons to the oppressed. I think Hillary Clinton is therefore right to identify global information freedom in general, and internet freedom in particular, as one of the defining opportunities of our time. But there are also dangers here, which Morozov usefully points out.

If the struggle for internet freedom is too closely identified with US foreign policy, and in turn with US companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter – which in personnel terms are beginning to have something of a "revolving door" relationship with the US government – this can end up damaging the purpose it is meant to serve. Authoritarian regimes everywhere will redouble their efforts to censor and monitor those American platforms that, not accidentally, among the best and most open we have. Instead, these regimes will promote their own, more restricted native alternatives, such as Baidu in China.

The US government as a whole is also deeply inconsistent in its approach to internet freedom. It berates China and Iran for covert monitoring of opponents while doing the same itself against those it defines as threats to national security. It lauds global information freedom while denouncing WikiLeaks as, in Clinton's extraordinary words, "a threat to the international community".

Again, Tunisia is instructive. Talk of a "WikiLeaks revolution" is as absurd as that of a "Twitter revolution", but WikiLeaks revelations about what the US knew of the Ben Ali regime's rampant corruption did contribute something to the pot of misery boiling over. There was even a special website to disseminate and discuss the Tunisia-related US cables (tunileaks.org). Obviously, Tunisians did not need WikiLeaks to tell them that their presidential family was a goon-protected self-enrichment cartel; but having detailed chapter and verse, with the authority of the US state department, and seeing how much the publicly regime-friendly American superpower privately disliked it, and knowing that other Tunisians must know that too, since the American reports were there online for all to see – all this surely had an impact.

So if Clinton wishes to argue, as I believe she legitimately can, that the American-pioneered infrastructure of global information exchange has contributed to the fragile rebirth of freedom in Tunisia, then she should really put in a word of appreciation for WikiLeaks – or for Kleenex, if you prefer the Gaddafi version. But do not hold your breath.

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We've seen America's vitriol. Now let's salute Wikipedia, a US pioneer of global civility | Timothy Garton Ash

For all its shortcomings Wikipedia, now aged 10, is the internet's biggest and best example of not-for-profit idealism

Wikipedia is 10 years old this Saturday. It is the fifth most visited site on the internet. Some 400 million people use it every month. I bet most readers of this column are among them. You want to check something, you Google it; and then, as often as not, you choose the Wikipedia link as the best way in.

What is extraordinary about this free encyclopedia, which now contains more than 17m articles in more than 270 languages, is that it is almost entirely written, edited and self-regulated by unpaid volunteers. All the other most visited sites are multibillion-dollar businesses. Facebook, with just 100 million more users, has now been valued at $50bn.

Visit Google in Silicon Valley and you find yourself in a vast complex of modern office buildings, like a superpower capital. There may still be some trademark playful bits of Lego in the foyer, but you have to sign a non-disclosure agreement before you even get through the office door. The language of Google executives veers strangely between that of a UN secretary general and that of a car salesman. One moment we're talking universal human rights, the next "rolling out a new product".

Wikipedia, by contrast, is overseen by a not-for-profit foundation. The Wikimedia Foundation occupies one floor in an anonymous office building in downtown San Francisco. You have to knock hard on the door to gain admission. (I think they might buy a buzzer, to celebrate the 10th anniversary.) Inside it feels exactly like what it is: a modest, international NGO.

If Wikipedia's principal architect, Jimmy Wales, had chosen to commercialise the enterprise, he could now be worth billions – like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg. Putting it all under the not-for-profit umbrella was, Wales quipped to me, at once the stupidest and the cleverest thing he ever did. More than any other major global site, Wikipedia still breathes the utopian idealism of the internet's heroic early days. Wikipedians, as they style themselves, are men and women with a mission. That mission, upon which they boldly go, is summed up in this almost Lennonist (that's John, not Vladimir) sentence from the man they all refer to as Jimmy: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge."

To suggest that this utopian goal could be achieved by a world wide web of volunteers – working for nothing, editing anything and everything, with the words they type immediately visible for the whole world to see – was of course a totally barmy idea. Yet this barmy army has come a remarkably long way in just 10 years.

Wikipedia still has major shortcomings. The articles vary widely in quality, both from topic to topic and language to language. Many entries on individuals are patchy and unbalanced. So much depends on whether there happen to be one or two Wikipedians genuinely knowledgeable in a particular field and language. It can be stunningly good on obscure corners of popular culture, and strikingly weak on mainstream matters. On the most mature versions the volunteer editorial communities, backed by the foundation's tiny staff, have gone a long way to improve standards of reliability and verifiability, especially by insisting on footnotes with source links.

I find that you still always need to double-check before quoting any information you find there. A piece about Wikipedia in the New Yorker cited an intriguing distinction between useful knowledge and reliable knowledge. One of the free encylopedia's biggest challenges over the next decade is to keep narrowing the useful-reliable gap.

Another big challenge is to take this enterprise beyond the post-Enlightenment west, where it was born and remains most at home. An expert told me that some 80% of all its edits originate in the OECD world. The foundation aims to have 680 million users by 2015, and hopes that most of that growth will be in places like India, Brazil and the Middle East.

Yet the puzzle is not why it still has obvious shortcomings, but why it has worked so well. Wikipedians offer several explanations: it arrived relatively early, when there were not countless sites for fledgling netizens to spend time on; an encyclopedia deals (mainly) with verifiable facts rather than mere opinions, the common currency and curse of the blogosphere; above all, Wikipedia struck lucky with its communities of contributor-editors.

Given the scale of the thing, the corps of regular editors is amazingly small. Some 100,000 people contribute more than five edits a month, but the big, mature Wikipedias, such as those in English, German, French or Polish, are sustained by a tiny band of perhaps 15,000 people, who each make more than 100 contributions a month. Overwhelmingly they are young, single, well educated men. Sue Gardner, the Wikimedia Foundation's executive director, says she can spot a typical Wikipedian at a hundred yards. They are the Trekkies of cyberspace.

Like many of the best-known global sites, Wikipedia benefits from being based in what Mike Godwin, until October Wikimedia's general counsel, describes as "a free speech haven called the United States". All its different language encylopedias, wherever their editors live and work, are physically hosted on the foundation's servers in the US. They enjoy the legal protections of America's great tradition of free speech.

Yet Wikipedia has been remarkably free of the kind of downward spirals of abuse famously captured by Godwin's Law (coined by that same Mike Godwin) which states that "as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1". Partly this is because an encylopedia deals in facts, but it is also because dedicated Wikipedians spend a huge amount of time defending standards of civility against waves of attempted vandalism.

Civility – translated as savoir-vivre in the French version – is one of the five "pillars" of Wikipedia. From the outset Wales argued that it must be possible to combine honesty with politeness. A whole school of online etiquette – sorry, wikiquette – has grown around this, with abbreviations such as AGF (Assume Good Faith). Uncivil persons are engaged and courteously argued with and then warned, before, if they persist, being banned. I'm not in a position to judge if this holds true in its Dolnoserbski, Gagauz and Gagana Samoa versions. Wikipedia may have its own long tail of incivility. But if a language community persistently goes ape, the foundation does ultimately have the power to take its rantings off the server. (Wikipedia is a legally protected label, whereas Wiki-somethingelse is not; hence Wikileaks, which has nothing to do with Wikipedia and is not even a wiki – a collaborat ively edited site.)

We do not yet know if the shooting in Tucson, Arizona, was a direct product of the vitriolic incivility of American political discourse, as heard on talk radio and cable channels such as Fox News. A crazy man may just be crazy. But America's daily political vitriol is an undeniable fact. Against that depressing background, it is good to be able to celebrate an American invention which, for all its faults, tries to spread around the world a combination of unpaid idealism, knowledge and stubborn civility.

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Belarus may seem a far away country, but we have to confront Europe's Mugabe | Timothy Garton Ash

A brutal KGB crackdown in the continent's last dictatorship confronts us with the limits and illusions of EU power

Happy Christmas? Not for Belarus. Grandfather Frost, the Russosphere version of Santa Claus, came early to Minsk this year, and the presents he brought were election fraud, police beatings, mass arrests, Soviet-style lies and, for the European Union, a special Christmas card saying "screw you".

Natalia Koliada of the Belarus Free Theatre was among those rounded up last Sunday, after she and others protested against president Alexander Lukashenko's shameless stealing of yet another presidential election. She told Index on Censorship that she was held for 14 hours and not allowed water, food or sleep. Detainees of both sexes were kept in freezing prison corridors, abused by guards ("You are animals ... Our dream is to kill you"), and obliged to defecate in front of each other.

One of the opposition presidential candidates, Vladimir Neklyaev, was beaten senseless even before the protest demo began. Later he was hauled out of a hospital bed to be thrown into prison. More than 600 people, including leading figures in the independent media and the arts, have been detained by the KGB (as it's still called in Belarus). In some cases their families don't know where they are being held. Some face prosecution for "instigating mass disorder", an offence that carries a maximum prison sentence of 15 years. A young aide to Neklyaev appeared on state television, looking worn and fearful, to make a partial recantation. President Lukashenko told a press conference there would be no more "senseless democracy".

There is a word for all this. That word is terror. Not full-dress, 1930s-style Stalinist terror, to be sure, but still something qualitatively different – let me anticipate the objections of a few Guardian readers – from police violence in a west European democracy. Unless, that is, you believe that British police batons in Parliament Square were being wielded to defend a criminal authoritarian regime.

There is also a puzzle here, though not an insoluble one. In the short term, Lukashenko did not need to crack down so brutally to stay in power – as this Robert Mugabe of eastern Europe has done since 1994. Having opened up state television to opposition candidates, and made a show of meeting the EU's demands for a free and fair election, he could have rigged the vote just enough to get back in. He could have let the weak and divided opposition go on protesting for a few days in a freezing Minsk, and then quietly cleared away the remaining protesters from Independence Square while western leaders were celebrating their Christmas.

Why be so brutal? Why rub their faces in it? One answer, which invariably pops up in such circumstances, is divisions within the ruling apparatus. Hardliners got the upper hand. There may be some truth in this; but another, simpler explanation was given to me by Andrey Dynko, editor of the leading Belarussian weekly, Nasha Niva. Lukashenko, reverting to what Dynko calls "Russian autocratic tradition", simply wanted to get the levels of fear back up to a healthy (for the autocrat) level. National fear standards had fallen alarmingly over the last few years of relative liberalisation and opening to the west. Better teach his people a lesson again. National fear must be kept higher than national debt.

What is clear is that repression had been planned irrespective of the scale and course of the planned opposition demonstration. Neklyaev was beaten up before it. I have been in touch with independent observers who were present at the demo. They testify that men who had all the hallmarks of provocateurs smashed windows in government buildings, giving a pretext for the pre-positioned special forces to move in. One should always beware of conspiracy theories, but sometimes there are conspiracies.

Yet Europe's Mugabe only dared to act in this way because, 10 days before the election, he unexpectedly secured a deal with Russia. This once again gives him subsidised oil, which he can sell on at a profit. For his part, he agreed the terms of a "single economic space" with Russia and Kazakhstan.

Before that, the boot had been on the other foot. Russia seemed to have had enough of Lukashenko: a Russian TV channel owned by Gazprom even aired a four-part series attacking him as a corrupt godfather. Meanwhile, the Polish and German foreign ministers had flown to Minsk with a bold offer. If Lukashenko held a reasonably fair election, his country could be set on a glide path back to European civilisation – and the EU would aid him down that path with a package of grants and loans worth more than €3bn.

This offer was always a gamble, but one worth taking in the circumstances prevailing at the time. Now, however, with Russia apparently back on side, and having made a cold neo-Leninist assessment of the foundations of his own power, Lukashenko has decided to beat his own people over the head with a stick – and tell the EU exactly where it can put its carrot.

Belarus is a far-away country of which most west Europeans know little. All the more reason to open our eyes to what is happening there. This is a bad end to a bad year for Europe. The still unresolved crisis of the eurozone is, of course, a much larger threat to the whole Whig narrative of recent European history, seen as a story of progress towards more freedom, prosperity and integration. But if the EU can no longer exert its magnetic powers of attraction over a small impoverished country on its very doorstep, that is a blow too. In recent columns I have lamented India's failure to influence things for the better in Burma. In Belarus we have our own European Burma.

Immediately, we must do everything in our power to have those political prisoners released, so that they can spend the festive season with their families and a more genial version of Grandfather Frost. Then, early next year, the European Union needs to take a long, cool look at its own face, as it appears in the Belarussian mirror. It may not be a pretty sight.

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Technology lets us peer inside the Burmese cage, but not unlock its door | Timothy Garton Ash

To talk via video link to Aung San Suu Kyi was inspiring. Yet liberation is unlikely for Burma if its neighbours will not act

There is nothing to compare with being there. Failing that, get a video-link. And suddenly here's Aung San Suu Kyi on a screen in front of us, live from 54 University Avenue, Rangoon. She sits upright, composed, elegant in a white blouse, and quietly amused, after more than seven years of isolation, by the unfamiliar new technologies of long-distance communication. "I'm very glad to be able to communicate with you," she says, "that for me is great progress" - and the satellite link goes down.

Later, she is reconnected to the LSE lecture theatre, packed with students and specialists, through a terrible phone connection. Half the time she can't make out what we are asking, the other half we can't make out what she is answering as her distorted voice booms from a loudspeaker. After a student has tried several times with a slightly complicated question, Aung San Suu Kyi says: "Just give me one keyword." "Multinational companies!" we shout. "Investing in Burma!" She laughs, we laugh, at the almost slapstick quality of the long-distance exchanges. "We have years of practice at talking and getting no response," she comments at one point, after thinking she had been cut off. Talking to the generals who are ruining her country, that is.

I don't think any of those students will forget the day they were able to put a question directly to Aung San Suu Kyi. For all the technical difficulties, both her personality and her message shine through. The message is resolute, but also conciliatory. She reiterates how she hopes to work with, not against, the military authorities. So far as we can acoustically decipher her answer, she gives a cautious welcome to the idea of an international commission of inquiry into conditions inside Burma, but emphasises that it must not be seen as "a trial of the generals".

After seven and a half years under house arrest, getting news of her own country only from intensive listening to international radio broadcasts, she clearly wants to take some time to get her bearings. Can she revive her own emasculated National League for Democracy? Can she rejoin forces with those who have fallen away from it or formed a new party in the (vain) hope of gaining a significant number of seats in the recent election? How about the Buddhist monks, who imparted such disciplined energy to the peaceful protest movement in 2007? Not least: can she forge ties with representatives of the ethnic minorities that comprise about a third of the country's population? That is what her father, Aung San, did in 1947, in the Panglong conference that helped pave the way for an independent Burma. Now she tells us that she is hoping for a "second Panglong".

Asked to identify her sources of inspiration, she says "in the first place, my parents". Then she mentions Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Later, when the conversation comes back to the idea of a truth and reconciliation commission, like the one chaired by Tutu in South Africa, she reflects that things are more complicated in Burma. "If only we were all black," she sometimes thinks to herself, then the ordinary Burmese and the ethnic minorities would recognise that they are all, together, an oppressed majority. As the Burma specialist Maung Zarni points out, in Burma's version of apartheid it's the military who are the whites.

This is an inspiring conversation, across all the barriers placed in our way. All my instincts are to frame it in a narrative of liberation – gradual, often frustrated, but eventually triumphant. "For Freedom's battle once begun … though baffled oft is ever won" – these great words of the 19th century English poet Byron were pinned to a wooden cross outside the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, at the birth of Poland's Solidarity movement 30 years ago. Now freedom's battle is being fought, and baffled, with the weapons of the internet, the satellite and the mobile phone. Sometimes these are described as "liberation technologies".

Tutu himself has an upbeat reflection on his own "wonderful" phone conversation with Aung San Suu Kyi ("She constantly seemed to be on the verge of bursting into laughter") earlier this month: "When I think back to the situation in South Africa, I remember that there were many times when it felt like we would never see freedom in our country, when those who oppressed us seemed invincible. As I always say though: this is a moral universe, injustice and oppression will lose out in the end."

A sober analysis, however, shows a constellation of forces in and around Burma less favourable than those in South Africa, or Poland, or the Philippines, or Chile, or the many other stories of eventually triumphant self-liberation over the last three decades. This is not just because of the weakness and divisions of the internal opposition movement, after decades of brutal oppression and the regime's "divide and rule". That can change, with time, hard work on the ground and inspired leadership.

Above all, it's because of the external context. Some readers will recall that a month ago I asked on these pages whether the world's largest democracy, India, could be more true to its own values when it came to its small, suffering eastern neighbour. President Barack Obama, no less, posed a similar question on his official visit to India. I gather that so far the answer has been a resounding silence. India is barely prepared to talk about the issue with the world's other leading democracies, let alone to act differently. So long as Burma's Asian neighbours, including Thailand and, of course, China, continue to behave in this way, putting their own commercial and strategic interests before the lives of the long-suffering peoples of Burma – and before their own long-term enlightened self-interest in having a stable and prosperous neighbour – the Burmese generals will be laughing all the way to the bank.

Burma is not the only example of such an unfavourable external setting. Welcome to the post-western world. If this continues to be the case, the internet, satellites and mobile phones will enable us to peer inside the cage, but not to unlock its door. We may see the embattled friends of freedom more clearly but will not necessarily be able to help them more effectively. When Liu Xiaobo, this year's Nobel peace prize winner, is finally released, we may have a chance to talk to him on a video link, though at the moment even his wife's mobile phone is blocked. We can watch the unjustly imprisoned Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky behind his bars. He remains locked up.

What we have here is a political version of the drama of the Chilean miners. We saw them on video camera when still trapped underground, but if their own self-help, and the physical drilling through the rock, had not been successful, then that video link would merely have allowed us to watch them die.

This is not a counsel of despair, just of realism. In Burma, as everywhere else, communication technologies do not, of themselves, set anyone free. People set people free.

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The foreign correspondent is dead. Long live the foreign correspondent | Timothy Garton Ash

The de luxe life satirised in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop has gone for good, but we can still preserve the best of a necessary craft

'I still have a suitcase in Berlin," Marlene Dietrich used to sing. Well, I still have four petrol cans in Skopje. I bought them to drive a rented 4x4 from Macedonia into Kosovo, immediately after the Nato invasion of the devastated province in 1999, when petrol stations could not be relied on to have petrol.

I drove that hard-sprung Lada around for several days, talking to Kosovar Albanians who had fled in fear of Serbian genocide and were now returning home, their tractor-drawn trailers piled high with mattresses and children; to the melancholy Serbian Father Theodosius, in his lovely, isolated monastery in the foothills of the Accursed Mountains; and to a ruthless commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army, Ramush Haradinaj, who unforgettably confided in me, in his weirdly Finnish Brummie-accented English: "Me, oih couldn't be no Mother Teresa." (Having briefly been prime minister of independent Kosovo, he is now in The Hague, facing a retrial for war crimes.)

This trip was expensive. As most foreign correspondents did, I used a fixer, a local journalist who sets up appointments, makes travel arrangements and gives local background, and an interpreter. A newspaper paid. I learned the kinds of thing that you can only learn by being on the spot. And I was not alone. Some 2,700 media people went into Kosovo with or immediately after the invading/liberating forces: roughly one journalist for every 800 inhabitants.

A decade later, how many would there be? At such a big, dramatic and warlike moment, probably still quite a lot. ("If it bleeds, it leads.") But as a general rule, and even for very important countries and stories: fewer, ever fewer. The foreign correspondent, a type incomparably satirised by Evelyn Waugh in his novel Scoop, and celebrated by Alfred Hitchcock in his film Foreign Correspondent, is an endangered species. Only a few major news organisations, such as the BBC and the New York Times, still have worldwide networks of resident correspondents, in what are traditionally called foreign bureaux (or bureaus, according to taste).

There is absolutely no point in sitting around moaning about this, over many a whisky in a now deserted press bar. Rather, we need to establish how what was of real value in the work of the 20th-century foreign correspondent can be preserved, and how we can use some wonderful new opportunities that did not exist in the age of the telegraph and telex. This is what the former director of global news at the BBC, Richard Sambrook, attempts to do in a new, closely researched analysis for the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism at Oxford University, titled "Are Foreign Correspondents Redundant?" He quotes one American television producer saying that to hark back to the traditional foreign bureaux is like asking "why don't we still use clay tablets?"

It seems to me that there are three features of the work of the foreign correspondent that we should want to preserve, and enhance, in new forms of news gathering and delivery. They are: independent, honest and, so far as possible, accurate and impartial witnessing of events, people and circumstances; deciphering and setting them in local context, explaining who's who, what's what, and a bit of why; and, last but not least, interpreting what is going on in this particular place, at this particular time, in a broader comparative and historical frame. Witnessing, deciphering, interpreting.

So far as witnessing goes, there are now fantastic new ways of doing it – by video, phone camera, and so on – which have not been available for most of human history. Of course, the camera often lies, so it's always good to know who is behind that camera. But a multiplicity of eyewitness reports, video and audio clips, and blogs, many of them by local people who actually (unlike many foreign correspondents) speak the language, can produce a fine collage of first-hand evidence.

If we had relied only on foreign correspondents, our accounts of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, the young woman killed during the Green movement demonstrations in Tehran last year, would probably all have been secondhand – and without those unforgettable images. Websites like Global Voices and GlobalPost show what can be achieved by a multiplicity of local and visiting reporters.

Nor is the local deciphering necessarily best done by a foreigner. I have often observed how foreign correspondents rely for this deciphering on fixers, interpreters, local journalists and a few trusted sources – while themselves adding only a few dashes of colour, a brace of all-purpose interpretative cliches (edge of the abyss, hawks and doves) and, of course, the hyberbole. Why not have the local voices speak to you direct, supplemented by those of outside academic specialists on the countries concerned? This requires careful, skilled editing, to be sure, but will certainly be cheaper than a full-dress foreign correspondent's office.

As for today's slimmed-down, age-of-austerity foreign bureau, with a single, multitasking correspondent dashing around like a mad hatter, desperately trying to meet multiple deadlines every day for online, print, video, audio, tweet and blog: the trouble here is the poor journalist has very little time to research any story in depth, let alone to stop and think. It's no accident that some of the best foreign corresponding we have today is in magazines like the New Yorker, written by journalists who have months to pull together a single long report.

That brings us to the third dimension: the interpreting. For this, it does help to have someone who has been around a bit, seen stuff happen in different places and times, read and thought about the how and why. She or he can therefore compare, weigh and evaluate, restoring the sense of proportion and historical significance (or lack of it) that easily gets lost if you are spending all your time in the thick of a single story. Now I hear people say: well, there is the future of newspapers. A vast surfeit of information, "news" in the broadest sense, is dumped on us every day. We have a problem of profusion. The quality newspaper's job will be to sift, set in context, follow up, as the Guardian and New York Times did with the WikiLeaks trove.

There is something to be said for this, and it may be how things develop, but the danger lies in making too sharp a separation between the interpreter and the witness. For all my experience cries out to me: there is nothing to compare with being there. However many thousands of fantastic clips, blogs and online transcripts you have, there is nothing to compare with being there. Only by buying those petrol cans, driving around in that bone-shaking 4x4, seeing the suffering with my own eyes, could I truly understand, and therefore less inadequately interpret, what happened in Kosovo. You can't do it only from an armchair.

The unique value added by the 20th-century foreign correspondent consisted, at best, in the combination in one person's experience over time, the considered throughput in a single mind and sensibility, of all three elements: witnessing, deciphering, interpreting. If we can somehow preserve that, in the journalism of our day, then we may yet achieve both more and better foreign news.

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Lords reform: Britain needs a better upper house – and not just a second Commons | Timothy Garton Ash

Packing the Lords with donors and cronies is a disgrace. Reform must keep the good, but strip away the bad and ugly

Name me the country in which more than 50 new members of parliament have just been appointed for life. Most of them have been nominated by a political party, without any vote. No secret is made of the fact that for several of the appointees, as has long been the custom in that country, this life membership of the legislature is a reward for their generous financial contributions to one or other party. And, unlike for prisoners, "life" means until they die. As a result, one in three members of the existing chamber is over 75 years old.

Turkmenistan? Zimbabwe? Transnistria? No, that country is Britain, one of the oldest parliamentary democracies in the world. For all its talk of a "new politics", the coalition government last month announced the appointment of more than 50 new members of the Lords. The Conservatives' list included such luminaries as Robert Edmiston, described in a BBC report as "a multimillionaire car salesman, who gave £2m to the party before the 2005 election". According to BBC research, the donors now being paid back with Conservative peerages have helped the party to electoral success with a total of £4,678,636.

The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, showed his dedication to the new politics by only putting on his list one major donor, Sir Gulam Noon – a candidate previously rejected by the House of Lords appointments commission, an independent body that vets these appointments.

The Liberal Democrats, second to none in their demands for reform of the upper house, have nonetheless made their share of nominations. A senior Lib Dem adviser told me they were careful to choose nominees who had "relatively clean hands". I asked him if I could quote that phrase, and he said it would be fine. "Relatively clean hands": think of the implication. His justification of this manoeuvre was that the Lib Dems needed all the lords they could get, in order to reform the Lords "and at least make it fit for the 20th century, if not the 21st".

"If the presidents of Zimbabwe or Afghanistan unilaterally increased their strength in one house of parliament by 30 votes," protests Roy Hattersley, a former deputy leader of the Labour party, "there would be an international outcry." But is this not the same Hattersley, aka Baron Hattersley of Sparkbrook in the County of West Midlands, who has himself been a party appointee to the Lords since 1993? Yes, he explains in the same article, "I joined the Lords, in the words of Donald Dewar, then the Labour chief whip, 'to help to get rid of the place'. Roll on the day." Meanwhile it's a jolly nice place to take your friends for lunch.

You couldn't make it up, could you? Any more than you could make up the Lords of the Blog website (lordsoftheblog.net), intended to connect their lordships with the public, which recently carried a sprightly "quiz" asking you to guess the identity of four new peers. A sample: "2. I shall shortly join the Lords. My father-in-law is already a member. My husband is an MP. Who am I?" Ah, that's what they call a "people's peer", is it?

"Ever since I arrived here," writes Paul Tyler, a Lib Dem ennobled in 2005, "I have been appalled and embarrassed by the number of peers, even including a few former cabinet ministers, who use the place as a convenient private club, with good parking and subsidised catering. They never speak or even ask a question, let alone contribute to a debate. Whether they draw a daily allowance for turning up I do not know." And he points to a recent Lords report which shows that, in the 2009-10 session, 214 out of 741 peers attended less than one in four sittings of the upper house – and 79 attended none at all.

We are assured, however, that reform is finally on its way. That report was itself examining ways in which useless lords might be prevailed upon to leave the upper house, other than feet first. According to the coalition agreement, draft proposals for "a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation" should be brought forward "by December 2010". I understand that has now slipped to early 2011. This will make it a mere 100 years since the preamble to the Parliament Act 1911 declared that "it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis".

Now I will say something that may surprise you. If you conclude from the above that I want Britain's upper house to be rapidly and radically reformed, you will be right. But if you think it automatically follows that we need a wholly elected upper house, with lords – or senators – chosen at general elections from party lists, then I will disagree. I once thought that, but I have changed my mind.

For the very British irony of the last decade is that this undemocratic, antiquated, anachronistic institution has also been a bulwark against the populist-authoritarian tendencies of an elected government. Again and again, we have had the Lords to thank: whether it was defending free speech or blocking 42 days' detention without trial. Select committees of the upper house give expert scrutiny to legislation, and often improve it. Some of their published reports are first rate. I could easily name a score of peers who have made superb contributions to public policy debates. Among the very best of them are the least democratically selected of all: the non-party crossbenchers.

Indefensible in theory, the Lords has much to be said for it in practice. Yet that defensible practice is largely the work of perhaps two to three hundred active peers, of all parties and especially of none.

If, after 100 years of prevarication, we now lurch to a 100% elected house, we risk throwing out the baby with the bathwater. The constitutional expert Vernon Bogdanor points out that the besetting problem of second chambers, in non-federal states, is to find a principle of representation different from that of the first chamber. The last thing we want is a worse version of the Commons, with retread party hacks chosen from lists.

What Britain needs is a senate, with perhaps 300 members. Two thirds of them would be elected for 10-year terms, with a strong geographical basis. Though not a federal state, Britain is a nation composed of four nations or nationalities, with many devolved powers, and historic counties. So: the senator for North Wales, the senator for Yorkshire, and so on. The other third would be appointed, also for 10-year terms, but by a more transparent and rigorous selection procedure than that which produces today's crossbenchers.

Being a senator would be a proper job. (The title of Lord would fade away with its current bearers, surviving only among the historic and ornamental hereditaries.) Any senator who attended less than a specified proportion of sittings or committees would be challenged and, in the last resort, recalled. Then Britain could again be proud to call itself one of the world's great parliamentary democracies.

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US embassy cables: A banquet of secrets | Timothy Garton Ash

A diplomat's nightmare is a historian's dream – a feast of data that deepens our understanding

It is the historian's dream. It is the diplomat's nightmare. Here, for all to see, are the confidences of friends, allies and rivals, garnished with American diplomats' frank, sometimes excoriating assessments of them. Over the next couple of weeks, you, the readers of the Guardian, will enjoy a multi-course banquet from the history of the present.

The historian usually has to wait 20 or 30 years to find such treasures. Here, the most recent dispatches are little more than 30 weeks old. And what a trove this is. It contains more than 250,000 documents. Most of those I have seen, on my dives into a vast ocean, are well over 1,000 words long. If my sample is at all representative, there must be a total at least 250m words – and perhaps up to half a billion. As all archival researchers know, there is a special quality of understanding that comes from exposure to a large body of sources, be it a novelist's letters, a ministry's papers or diplomatic traffic – even though much of the material is routine. With prolonged immersion, you get a deep sense of priorities, character, thought patterns.

Most of this material is medium-and high-level political reporting from around the world, plus instructions from Washington. It is important to remember that we do not have the top categories of secrecy here – Nodis (president, secretary of state, head of mission only), Roger, Exdis, Docklamp (between defence attaches and the defense intelligence agency only). What we have is still a royal banquet.

Small wonder the state department is crying blue murder. Yet, from what I have seen, the professional members of the US foreign service have very little to be ashamed of. Yes, there are echoes of skulduggery at the margins, especially in relation to the conduct of "the war on terror" in the Bush years. Specific questions must be asked and answered. For the most part, however, what we see here is diplomats doing their proper job: finding out what is happening in the places to which they are posted, working to advance their nation's interests and their government's policies.

In fact, my personal opinion of the state department has gone up several notches. In recent years, I have found the American foreign service to be somewhat underwhelming, reach-me-down, dandruffy, especially when compared with other, more confident arms of US government, such as the Pentagon and the treasury. But what we find here is often first rate.

As readers will discover, the man who is now America's top-ranking professional diplomat, William Burns, contributed from Russia a highly entertaining account – almost worthy of Evelyn Waugh – of a wild Dagestani wedding attended by the gangsterish president of Chechnya, who danced clumsily "with his gold-plated automatic stuck down the back of his jeans".

Burns's analyses of Russian politics are astute. So are his colleagues' reports from Berlin, Paris and London. In a 2008 dispatch from Berlin, the then grand coalition government of Christian and Social democrats in Germany is compared to "the proverbial couple that hated each other but stay together for the sake of the children". From Paris, there is a hilarious pen portrait of the antics of Nicolas (and Carla) Sarkozy. And we the British would do well to take a look at our neurotic obsession with our so-called "special relationship" with Washington, as it appears in the unsentimental mirror of confidential dispatches from the US embassy in London.

Reassuringly, we also find occasional signs of the British Foreign Office standing up for our values. According to a report from 2008, one senior British diplomat, Mariot Leslie, "was very frank that HMG did object to some of what the USG [government] does (eg, renditions) and therefore does have some redlines".

It is very disturbing to find telegrams signed off by Hillary Clinton which seem to suggest that regular American diplomats are being asked to do stuff you would normally expect of low-level spooks – such as grubbing around for top UN officials' credit card and biometric details. Clarification is now urgently needed from Foggy Bottom (the seat of the state department) of who exactly was expected to do what under these human intelligence directives.

More broadly, what you see in this diplomatic traffic is how security and counter-terrorism concerns have pervaded every aspect of American foreign policy. But you also see how serious the threats are, and how little the west is in control of them. There is devastating stuff here about the Iranian nuclear programme and the extent not merely of Israeli but Arab fears of it ("cut off the head of the snake", a Saudi ambassador reports his king urging the Americans); the vulnerability of Pakistan's nuclear stockpile to rogue Islamists; anarchy and corruption on a massive scale in Afghanistan; al-Qaida in Yemen; and tales of the power of the Russian mafia gangs, that make John le Carré's latest novel look almost understated.

There is a genuine public interest in knowing these things. The Guardian, like the New York Times and other responsible news media, has tried to ensure that nothing we publish puts anyone at risk. We should all demand of WikiLeaks that it does the same.

Yet one question remains. How can diplomacy be conducted under these conditions? A state department spokesman is surely right to say that the revelations are "going to create tension in relationships between our diplomats and our friends around the world". The conduct of government is already hampered by fear of leaks. An academic friend of mine who worked in the state department under Condoleezza Rice told me that he had once suggested writing a memo posing fundamental questions about US policy in Iraq. "Don't even think of it," he was warned – because it would be sure to appear in the next day's New York Times.

There is a public interest in understanding how the world works and what is done in our name. There is a public interest in the confidential conduct of foreign policy. The two public interests conflict.

One thing I'd bet on, though: the US government must surely be ruing, and urgently reviewing, its weird decision to place a whole library of recent diplomatic correspondence on to a computer system so brilliantly secure that a 22-year-old could download it on to a Lady Gaga CD. Gaga, or what?

WikiLeaksThe US embassy cablesTimothy Garton Ash
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