Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 30

Calling Germany, calling Germany: you alone can keep this eurozone show on the road | Timothy Garton Ash

The eurozone crisis is far from over. If Spain follows Portugal and Ireland, historic acts of statecraft will be required

If the eurozone falls apart, it will be because Germany did not do enough to save it. If the eurozone is saved, it will be thanks to Germany. This is the greatest challenge to German statecraft since the country was peacefully united 20 years ago. At the moment, the leaders of Europe's central power are not rising to the challenge, but they still have a few weeks in which to show that they can. Thereafter, it may be too late.

We are now into act two of the eurozone crisis. Act one was the Greek tragedy, exacerbated by a German chancellor who prevaricated in the face of media and public opinion, furiously hostile to bailing out those feckless heirs of Oedipus, as well as concerns that Germany's constitutional court would declare a bailout illegal. It ended in dramatic negotiations in May, which produced what is, in all but name, a European bailout mechanism.

This temporarily assuaged the wrath of the bond markets, but the underlying problems in the peripheral economies of the eurozone remained. The mechanism was anyway only agreed till 2013. This autumn, still fearful of its own media, public opinion and constitutional court, the German government decided that something more durable is required. Scooping up the support of Nicolas Sarkozy's France, as a burly seaman might lift his floosie off her feet, Germany announced last month that a change to the Lisbon treaty would be needed, to make permanent arrangements for at once supporting and disciplining eurozone governments that got into difficulties on their sovereign debt.

As part of this German cure, investors would have to be prepared to take a loss – either a "haircut" or a debt swap – on those weak government bonds. In substance, and for the longer term, this must be right. One reason some countries on the eurozone periphery have got into such a mess over the last decade is that they could borrow so cheaply, since the markets did not believe there was a serious risk of sovereign default by any eurozone government.

However, the immediate effect of the announcement in October was to frighten investors away from buying more of those dicey government bonds. A haircut? No thanks. The German demarche thus precipitated this drama's second act, which has begun in Ireland. Now Nouriel Roubini's economic consultancy makes this compelling prediction for Portugal: "The script in the next few days and weeks in the markets will follow a similar pattern to Greece and Ireland – denial, more denial, EU confusion, market panic and a bailout." But there's still enough money in the post-May kitties, plus the IMF, to bail out Portugal.

The real crunch comes with Spain. I understand that the Spanish government hopes to borrow nearly €9bn before the end of December, and perhaps around €90bn next year. If the markets make that borrowing too expensive, Spain will be the next emergency. Then we would be in act three. The German Hamlet (an image, incidentally, used long ago by the German poet Ferdinand Freiligrath) would have to make up his mind. To be or not to be, that would be the question.

Since Germany's voters, media and constitutional court will not allow a largescale repeat of May's performance, there would only be two ways forward. The first would be for the eurozone to fall apart, with, one way or another, a Club Med/Celtic periphery and a Germany-centered, north European core ending up in different currency camps. Most Germans I talk to say the collapse of the eurozone is "unthinkable". This reminds me of a famous piece of German light verse about a man called Palmström who gets run over on a street where traffic is not allowed, and concludes that he cannot, therefore, have been run over because nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf (what may not be, cannot be). But the man was run over – and the eurozone can collapse.

German leaders have now begun to warn against this in dramatic terms. Chancellor Angela Merkel recently told her party conference: "If the euro fails, then Europe fails." This is probably the right tone for her to adopt, although the statement is of course strictly untrue. Europe has been going for a good 2,500 years, and will doubtless carry on for a few more. But this would certainly be a grave blow to the European Union, to Europe's position in an increasingly non-European world, and to the German economy, which has benefited from the scale and stability of the euro, and from the fact that Germany's eurozone partners cannot competitively devalue.

The better alternative would be to save the European monetary union, by giving it the underpinning of a minimal form of fiscal union. The German government would contribute its weight to cross-guarantees of other eurozone governments' debts, in return for better fiscal discipline by the others – perhaps through a kind of European monetary fund.

Yet here is another horn of Germany's dilemma. For half a century, German politicians have repeated, like a mantra, Thomas Mann's call for "a European Germany, not a German Europe". It was in this spirit, and in the context of securing German unification, that the Federal Republic agreed to give up the symbol and anchor of its postwar revival – the mighty D-mark. As a wholly unintended result, it is now being driven, not by its own hegemonic ambitions, but by the interplay of the dynamics of a lopsided, incomplete European monetary union, on the one hand, and the pressures of its own increasingly eurosceptic public, on the other, to insist on what is – in effect – a German Europe. Or at least, a more German Europe: that is to say, one having greater fiscal discipline, with member states not piling up mountains of public and private debt.

Now in numerous respects, a more German Europe would be a better Europe. There are many things about Germany's economic model – its productivity, its consensual labour relations, its focus on product quality, its penetration of emerging markets – that other European countries would do well to emulate. However, it is also true that the entire eurozone cannot simply become one big Germany, both because the eurozone is composed of structurally, historically and culturally different countries, and because the rest of the world could not take the imbalance that would result from such a large chunk of the world economy having a German-scale trade surplus. So Germany also has to cut its partners some slack, and do something about lifting its own domestic demand. The right balance may be: 70% other eurozone countries become more "German", 30% Germany becomes less so. (Economists can argue about the proportions.)

In other words, for both economic and political reasons, there has to be a compromise. The challenge for German statecraft is to find this difficult but sustainable compromise, in the most intensive negotiations with all its European partners – and then to sell the result to its own reluctant people. The markets will not leave it much time. The future of the eurozone now depends on this German leadership. Come on, Frau Bundeskanzlerin, history is knocking at your door. And history only knocks once.

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Burma's future will depend on a democratic great power. Guess which one | Timothy Garton Ash

Aung San Suu Kyi's release does not yet mean a negotiated transition. And the west cannot help her on its own

If we want to help Aung San Suu Kyi and the cause of freedom in Burma, we must hope that India rediscovers the spirit of its better self. The world's largest democracy needs urgently to review its approach to one of the world's worst tyrannies, which squats like a toad on India's doorstep. Unless it does, it seems highly unlikely that the weak, divided domestic opposition forces inside Burma, and the combined powers of the west, can generate the leverage needed to help to success the non-violent, negotiated revolution that the liberated heroine has again evoked.

So long as Burma's generals can rely on China's strategic and commercial realpolitik, and on the trade and energy-hungry equivocation of Thailand and other Asean countries, the only external power that can change the balance of forces in and around Burma is India.

I hope I'm wrong. But a cool analysis suggests that the Burmese buck stops in New Delhi. Heavy-handed lectures to India from former colonial powers, or the US, are clearly out of place and may well be counter-productive. This is not a matter of asking India to snap into line with western policy. On the contrary, we in the west should be looking to the regional democratic giant to tell us how change can best be facilitated in the miserable dictatorship next door. That is how things should work in an increasingly post-western world. And who better to point the way, in support of one of the most magnificently non-violent liberation movements of our time, than the country of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru?

Fortunately, there are now a few important Indian voices raising the necessary questions about Indian policy more authoritatively than any western commentator can. In a recent column, Shashi Tharoor, a former Indian minister of state for external affairs and UN undersecretary general, recalled his country's course from perhaps excessive idealism to unprincipled soi-disant realism. Nehru was friends with Suu Kyi's father, Aung San, the leader of Burma's independence struggle. Aung San Suu Kyi herself lived and studied in New Delhi, and a long essay in her book Freedom from Fear is devoted to comparing Indian and Burmese intellectual life under colonial rule. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, India gave her and her National League for Democracy generous support.

But then India's regional rivals, China and Pakistan, began to cosy up to the Burmese regime and take advantage of its large reserves of gas, oil and other natural resources. When Pakistan's president, Pervez Musharraf, travelled to Burma, the Indian foreign minister hastened to follow. "India turned 180 degrees," writes Tharoor. It placed its economic and geostrategic interests before its sympathies and values.

Particularly shocking was the Indian response – or rather non-response – to Burma's supremely Gandhian peaceful protests, led by Buddhist monks, in 2007. The Indian oil minister visited the country to sign oil and gas contracts at the height of the protests. When the too-quickly dubbed "saffron revolution" was brutally suppressed by the military regime, the Indian government contented itself with pathetic statements hoping that "all sides would resolve their issues peacefully".

Even more eloquent is the criticism by the great development economist and political thinker Amartya Sen. In an article composed before Aung San Suu Kyi's release, he recalls his early childhood spent in Mandalay (where his father was a visiting professor) before crying out: "I have to say that as a loyal Indian citizen, it breaks my heart to see the prime minister of my democratic country – and one of the most humane and sympathetic political leaders in the world – engaged in welcoming the butchers from Myanmar."

The problem arises, he suggests, "from a change in the political climate in India in which narrowly defined national interest – or what is taken to be national interest – gets much loyalty, and in which India's past propensity to lecture the world on global political morality is seen as a sad memory of Nehruvian naivety".

Like every other democracy, India has to strike a balance between its interests and its values; or, to be more accurate, between its values and long-term interests on the one hand (for India has a vital long-term interest in a prosperous, open Burma), and its short-term, narrowly conceived interests on the other.

India is, of course, far from the first democracy in history to have got the balance wrong. (Think of the US in Latin America, for example, not to mention Britain in India.) But got it wrong India has. I understand that at a meeting with diplomats last Sunday, Aung San Suu Kyi gently but clearly expressed to the Indian ambassador her hope that commercial interests would not distort the historic friendship between their two countries.

This is not to suggest that India should suddenly join the targeted sanctions policy long adopted by the west – nor, indeed, is it to prescribe any particular policy response. Like Aung San Suu Kyi herself, the friends of freedom in Burma, near and far, need to take a few weeks to work out what is really going on there. Once the initial excitement over her release has passed – and for me, it beats a royal engagement any day – we see clearly that the political context into which she re-emerges is light years away, not just from a Nelson Mandela moment in South Africa or a Václav Havel moment in Czechoslovakia, but even from an Andrei Sakharov moment in the Soviet Union.

Far from paving the way to a liberating election, this release follows an election that the military regime heavy-handedly manipulated and stole, pulling the rug from under those "third force" oppositionists who abandoned the National League for Democracy to try to work for change inside the system.

The reformist, pragmatic and frankly turncoat middle, so essential to a negotiated transition, has been squeezed at the very time when it would be most needed. Moreover, while one political prisoner has been released, more than 2,000 others remain incarcerated. She is the first to insist that no serious process of negotiation and reconciliation can be achieved while they are still locked up.

Even if they are released, the process will only be at the starting-line. The military dominance of every area of national life, the inter-penetration of military and business interests, the gross immiseration of the population, the patchwork of ethnic minorities, drug lords, corruption ... Burma is a challenge that would make a messiah blanch.

So we need to wait and see; and we need a dialogue, not just between the democratic forces inside Burma but also between them and their democratic neighbours – above all, India.

The question whether India can come up with a new Burma policy, worthy of its own traditions and values, as well as its legitimate interests, is a vital one for the future of Aung San Suu Kyi's beautiful, martyred land. It is also important for the shape of the post-western world. We talk all the time about China, but in India's policy towards its unhappy neighbour we shall glimpse the true face of Asia's other emerging great power.

Aung San Suu KyiIndiaBurmaTimothy Garton Ash
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The view from Beijing tells you why we need a European foreign policy | Timothy Garton Ash

The EU's national rivalries comprise a standing invitation for any major world power to divide and rule

If you want to understand why Europe needs a foreign policy, try to imagine how it looks from Zhongnanhai. I suspect China's leaders sit around in that compound next to the Forbidden City, chortling into their tea about the undignified antics of the Europeans who once plundered and humiliated their country. For today the Europeans appear like mendicants before the imperial throne, begging for business to lift their faltering economies. David Cameron for Britain, Nicolas Sarkozy for France, José Sócrates for Portugal.

Each for his own.

And human rights? European values? A Nobel peace prizewinner unjustly imprisoned? Ah yes, they did mention them, didn't they? Over dinner, that is, or in a private meeting. (The spin on this to the European leader's national media invariably oversells the brief, muted, highly diplomatic comments that historians will sooner or later discover in the official records.) Or, as Cameron did yesterday, in a carefully balanced tightrope walk before students at Peking University. (Characteristically, his speech was heavily over-spun to the British media in advance.)

Always speaking politely, of course, for is not politesse also a European value? And so discreetly that the emperor can pretend not to notice. Mentioning human rights is just one of those uncouth habits Europeans have, like picking your nose in public. Perhaps, in time, as China grows in wealth and power, the foreign devils will become more civilised.

Altogether, the conduct of European leaders is a standing invitation for any major world power to divide and rule. Putin's Russia needed no invitation. Obama's America tries to resist the temptation, genuinely looking for the single European number it can call. China is ambivalent. It's so messy and time-consuming for Beijing to deal separately with all these puffed-up, prickly little countries, and the Chinese economy benefits hugely from the existence of a single European market. But Europe's standing invitation to Chinese splittism is hard to resist.

Thus, to take a small but richly symbolic example, China is currently trying to persuade everyone – including EU ambassadors – to boycott the Nobel peace prize ceremony for Liu Xiaobo in Oslo on December 10. When it comes to Tibet or Xinjiang, China insists on the importance of total respect for its sovereignty. Yet now it is telling Europeans they should not attend a European ceremony in Europe. So China's sovereignty is absolute, other people's sovereignty is negotiable. (The United States has a similar double standard.)

This should be an easy call for Europe. The EU's 27 member states should simply announce that all their ambassadors to Norway will attend the ceremony. Basta. But in the runup to president Hu Jintao's imperial visitation to Paris last week, I read that France's foreign ministry "said it would announce before December 10 whether it intended to attend the Nobel prize-giving". Europe splits again. More tittering into the teacups at Zhongnanhai.

In Brussels last week for the annual meeting of the European council on foreign relations, a think-and-advocacy tank (on whose board I serve) devoted to developing a European foreign policy, I caught up with some of those charged with pulling together the threads of the EU's foreign policy. They observed with a mixture of irony and irritation that, in relation to China or Russia, EU member states almost invariably want the EU's collective stance to be tougher than their own individual stances.

Let no one misunderstand me here – and especially not any Chinese readers who have slipped through the great firewall to read this article. I am not for a moment saying that Europe, or the west in general, should try to impose its values on China, as it did in the past with fire and the sword.

(For an Englishman to visit the ruins of the Summer Palace in Beijing, vandalised by British and French troops, is to be filled with shame at our European barbarism.) I am most certainly not suggesting that we Europeans must get our act together because China is an enemy, as the Soviet Union was in the cold war.

No, the future of the planet depends on our having a constructive, stable relationship with this rising world power. And we do have vital economic interests in China, as China does in Europe.

I do, however, plead for a certain consistency, dignity and unity in our approach to the (re)emerging giant. I do argue that we Europeans are more likely to succeed in defending our long-term interests and advancing our values if we hang together rather than hanging separately. I further claim that what we call European values must be understood as a proposal for universal values, and that one can arrive at a belief in very similar values from the very different trajectory of Chinese history. This is exactly what the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei says. He insists that these are universal values.

China and Russia are probably the hardest cases for European foreign policy. Seen from smaller countries around the world, or from the Balkans, the EU looks stronger. A test case is coming shortly with the presidential elections in Belarus, on December 19. Will the EU have a response that is both united and effective if president Alexander Lukashenko declares himself to have won an election that he has in fact lost?

Back in the engine room in Brussels, the machinery of a supposedly single European foreign policy is only now being installed. After endless bureaucratic wrangling, huffing and puffing by the European parliament and heavy national lobbying Catherine Ashton, the EU's new high representative, has appointed four able top officials – a Frenchman, an Irishman, a Pole and a German. Of the EU's more than 130 foreign delegations, 28 have new ambassadors. For next year the new External Action Service will have a modest budget of €435m, but it can help steer the allocation of many billions in funds, notably those for development aid, of which Europe is by far the biggest donor.

A key question for Ashton is how she can bring other dimensions of Europe's economic power to bear for foreign policy purposes. Thus, for instance, China does take the EU seriously when it comes to the granting of market economy status, perhaps in a trade-off for guarantees of better Chinese respect for intellectual property rights.

As usual in the EU, everything goes more slowly and is more complicated than one would wish. At the G20 summit in Seoul there will not be a unified European voice. Next week's US-EU summit feels like a mere appendage to the Nato summit that precedes it. Angela Merkel's call for a change to the EU's Lisbon treaty, to address the problem of sovereign debt in the eurozone, risks generating more years of institutional distraction, which Europe can not afford.

Yet, to adapt the words of a leading Italian scientist, it moves. And Europe must move forward, if it is not to retreat. For even if things go well, what we Europeans achieve in concentrating our power resources will only just compensate for our relative loss of power to the re-emerging old-new giants in the east.

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We feel the absence of Germany's shoulder at the European wheel | Timothy Garton Ash

This country has remade itself as open, liberal and economically ingenious. And the rest of Europe still needs it

'Zweimal Hitler bitte," I requested at the ticket desk for the Hitler exhibition at the German Historical Museum, meaning "two tickets please" but saying literally (and, I confess, as a little experiment) "two times Hitler please". The middle-aged lady on the desk neither batted an eyelid nor missed a beat. "Den gab's aber nur einmal," she replied, in the characteristic Berlin accent: "but he only existed once" or "there was only one of him".

Quite right too. And Gott sei dank. For decades, probably centuries to come, the name of Hitler will remain a worldwide synonym for evil. In a secularised Europe, he is a more frequently encountered personification of evil than the devil. In a Californian swimming pool this summer, I saw an American dad offer himself as the "bad guy" to be shot at by the kids with water-pistols. "Hitler!" they shrieked, as they squirted him with water, "Hitler!"

But there is no justification for viewing the problems of today's Germany, and Europe's occasional difficulties with it, through the prism of Hitler. This is not just a matter of the 65 years that have elapsed since his death. Rather, it is a measure of Germany's own achievement in remaking itself as a liberal, democratic state and open society. One of the ways it has done that is by repeatedly facing up to its own difficult past – most recently in a historical study, commissioned by Joschka Fischer when he was foreign minister, showing just how deeply the gentlemen of the German foreign office were implicated in the Nazi regime. So having an exhibition about Hitler is evidence of how far Germany has come from Hitler.

This is not, it must be said, a great exhibition. Though full of interesting detail, it is rather cluttered and nervous. It keeps feeling the need to remind you that Hitler was a Bad Thing. It doesn't quite dare to draw you into its ostensible theme – why Hitler fascinated and enthused so many Germans. It would have been good, for example, to have a darkened room where the visitor could be exposed to the full force of that fascination through the cinematic eye of Leni Riefenstahl. But everything about it is perfectly sober, and so are the hushed visitors who cram its rather tight spaces.

In one wall-mounted video loop, it rather cleverly pairs the famous scene from Charlie Chaplin's Great Dictator – showing Napaloni, dictator of Bacteria, arriving by train to be greeted by Adenoid Hynkel, dictator of Tomania – with some actual newsreel footage of Mussolini arriving by train to visit Hitler in 1937. (The real leaders do visibly compete in strutting and arm-waving.) Now that Great Dictator scene is, of course, very funny; but my wife and I seemed to be the only people laughing. No laughter please, we're German – and, more to the point, Germans visiting an exhibition about Hitler.

Yes, if you hunt through the guest book at the end you can find one silly graffito, in a childish hand, calling Hitler "cool". But most of the entries, in many languages, are sensibly appreciative of what the exhibition is trying to do.

At one point only did I feel a shudder-inducing connection to current German debates. On display was a Nazi poster showing how people of "inferior race" could overtake healthy Aryans as a proportion of the population, because of their higher birth rates. I have just been reading a hugely controversial book called Germany Abolishes Itself, by a Social Democrat and former Bundesbank director, Thilo Sarrazin. Among a number of perfectly sensible arguments about the insufficient integration of immigrants and the burdens of the welfare state, Sarrazin makes the (stupid) case that Germany is getting more stupid because it has taken in so many uncultured Muslims. I am not for a moment wanting to imply that Sarrazin is some kind of a closet Nazi, but you would think that a German author might display a special sensitivity when it comes to claims about genetic characteristics of ethnic groups.

These side-echoes aside, however, what has come to be called the "Sarrazin debate" is really not that different from the controversies about Muslim immigration in Holland, Spain, Italy or Britain. The German debate is not worse, though, alas, also not better. In this respect, as in others, Germany has become a "normal" European country.

As for soldiers charging around in tanks, the only Europeans who do that seriously today are the British and the French – and even they can only do it, as they have just boldly acknowledged, by sharing their resources. Like most other European armies, the Germany army does many valuable things, but fighting is generally not among them. The Bundeswehr is closer in spirit to the Salvation Army than it is to Hitler's Wehrmacht.

What today's Germans do instead, with fiendish ingenuity, discipline and efficiency, is to make things that people in other countries want to buy. We may envy them, but who can blame them? Absorbing the gobsmacking bill for German unification (about €1.6 trillion), consensually managing down unit labour costs (at a time when these were soaring in countries like Greece), exploiting the advantages given it by the euro (a stable world currency, eurozone neighbours who can't compete by devaluation), seizing new market chances in China and elsewhere – the German economy thrives while others falter.

Its success does, to be sure, rest on a paradox: if everyone else behaved like the Germans (both exporting and saving more), as the Germans say they would like their partners in the eurozone to do, then the Germans themselves could not go on behaving like the Germans. Their export model depends on extravagant others buying their goods.

In Europe and the wider world, Germany is increasingly inclined to pursue its own national interests, on its own account if need be (for example, in its bilateral energy relationship with Russia), and to respond defensively to domestic pressures: whether it be slowing down visa-free travel from the Balkans, to placate a distinctly Sarrazinesque German public opinion; or seeking eurozone-related changes to the Lisbon treaty, not least to fend off its own eurosceptic constitutional court. The British and the French, who have always pursued their own national interests, are the last who have a right to complain.

That said, we do sorely miss the exceptional German engagement in Europe, which was such a salient feature of the federal republic's foreign policy from Konrad Adenauer to Helmut Kohl. The European project is stalled not least because the German motor is no longer driving it forward. It is much clearer today what Germany wants from Europe than what it wants for Europe. The German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle, tried to elucidate this in a recent speech here in Berlin, but the answer somehow got lost in a quivering blancmange of neo-Genscherite waffle.

The truth is that Germany still needs Europe, as Europe needs Germany: not for the old reasons, which had to do with Hitler and the world of 1945, but for new ones, which have much more to do with Hu Jintao and the likely world of 2045.

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To judge Britain's experiment, hold your breath and ignore the slogans | Timothy Garton Ash

An economic gamble, yes. But our cut-back state will still end up as something between Sweden and America

Returning to Britain after three months in the United States, it is nice to come back to a country where a democratically elected government, representing the majority of those who voted at the last election, can get on with doing what it has promised to do. But what if it is doing the wrong thing?

Since Wednesday 20 October, the British are not just living in Britain; we are living the British experiment. This experiment consists in setting out to cut public spending by nearly one fifth over five years, with the probable loss of half a million jobs in the public sector – and hoping that the private sector will take up the slack. Unlike Greece or Ireland, Britain did not absolutely have to make such drastic cuts.

No one knows exactly how much less the omnipotent gods of our time – the bond markets – would have been satisfied with, but the British government has fallen over itself to pile burnt offerings upon their altar. The latest Standard and Poor's rating of British government debt suggests that the deities' wrath is assuaged. For now.

No one knows whether Britain's private sector can lift the economy back to vigorous growth, despite this reduction of public sector demand and jobs. That will depend on factors beyond the government's control, and beyond these shores. If it does not succeed, we shall be in an even worse mess, having experienced much pain for little gain. Then plug in your iPod and listen to Joan Baez singing Heaven Help Us All.

If it does work, our public finances will be back under control. A lot of people, particularly among the poorer sections of society, and those directly dependent on the state, will have had a very rough time. With luck, some distortions, abuses and unfairnesses will have been removed. (It's surely not right that people can be worse off if they choose to work than they would be on welfare; or that people on inflated housing benefits make rented accommodation in some areas unaffordable for the working poor.) Following the universal law of unintended consequences, other unfairnesses will probably be created in their place.

The British state will be a little bit smaller, and a slightly different shape, from what it is today. Public spending will be hovering somewhere around 40% of GDP, plus or minus a few percentage points, as it has for most of the last 60 years. Most of that spending will go on health, education, welfare and pensions. The old will be a greater burden. Britain will be another variant in the extended family of advanced capitalist democracies, perhaps doing a little better than, say, Japan or America, perhaps a little worse than Germany or Sweden; or, more likely, doing better in some respects, worse in others.

Discount the hyperbole. This is the underlying reality of our time. The differences between countries in this extended family of the OECD world are much smaller than it is customary to pretend. In his book The Narcissism of Minor Differences, the historian Peter Baldwin shows with overwhelming empirical detail how this is true even of the much trumpeted contrast between Europe and America.

Forget the party rhetoric. The ideological distance between the British political parties is shorter than they will publicly admit; incomparably shorter than it was between the Conservative party of Margaret Thatcher and the Labour party of Michael Foot – who was elected Labour leader 30 years ago next Thursday.

Take David Cameron's slogan of the "big society", for example. In his speech presenting it this summer, he said: "You can call it liberalism. You can call it empowerment. You can call it freedom. You can call it responsibility. I call it the 'big society'." In its evangelical incoherence, this is a passage worthy of Tony Blair. Liberalism, empowerment, freedom and responsibility are all good things, but they are not the same thing – and none of them are the same as "big society". So this is like saying: "You can call it milk. You can call it cheese. You can call it socks. You can call it internal combustion. I call it baked beans."

Stripped of the Blairish blather, the idea is that people should be empowered at the lowest possible level, in their homes, neighbourhoods, communities, rather than depending on "top-down, top-heavy, controlling" government bureaucracy, sapping local initiative and civic action. As a non-party, "small l" liberal, I agree with that. But then, honestly, who in their right minds would not? Step forward the Labour leader, Ed Miliband, to make the case for top-down, top-heavy, controlling government?

In the social-liberal-conservative mongrel politics of our time, not just in Britain but in most of OECDania, you will get nowhere if you start from these hyperbolic, dichotomising, ideological slogans, which the politicians scarcely believe themselves, and try to analyse reality in terms of them. There is one big, top-level judgment the British coalition government has made, about the scale and speed of public spending cuts. This is a macro-economic managerial judgment more than an ideological one. Beyond that, the ways in which the British state will be reduced and reshaped reflect specific political choices – with no great ideological coherence to them.

Thus, unlike almost all its European partners, Britain has decided to spare defence the worst of the cuts, and proceed with some of the military's most expensive projects. How exactly these help the country to meet the new kinds of security threat that the government itself has just identified in its strategic defence review (terrorism, cyberwar etc) is wholly unclear. When the £1bn submarine HMS Astute farcically beached itself off a Scottish island last week, exposing its propulsion unit for all to see, I found myself asking: "What on earth is this machine for?" I guess the answer is: to satisfy a certain, quite widespread British sense of who we are, and to enable the prime minister to ring up the US president and assure him (with minimal plausibility) that Britain remains a first-rate military power.

That was a choice made by a conservative-liberal British government at a certain moment. I think it was the wrong choice. I think British influence would be better served, in the 21st century, by maintaining and expanding the global presence of the BBC, our universities, the British Council and the Royal Shakespeare Company. (Well, you may object, I would say that, wouldn't I? OK, you make your case, Admiral, and I'll make mine. Mine is better.) But I also think this government was wrong to ringfence spending on the National Health Service, a seemingly "leftwing" choice, since it means that other equally valuable public services have to be cut harder. However, I support its "progressive" choice of increasing foreign aid. The flat-rate pension seems to me an excellent idea. "Free schools" will be good if they increase educational opportunity and quality, bad if they don't.

Ignore the slogans; judge by results. Those will be a mixed bag. Come the next election, by 2015, we will have to judge this mixed bag, comparing it with the mixed bags in other state-trimming countries in OECDania. Such are the real politics of our time.

Liberal-Conservative coalitionSpending review 2010Tax and spendingPublic sector cutsPublic services policyPublic financeMilitaryTimothy Garton Ash
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In its rows about Islam, the US must avoid catching a European disease | Timothy Garton Ash

The planned Islamic centre is not at Ground Zero, nor is the nearby strip club. It's un-American to take such offence

Last Friday, in New York, I discovered a strip club near the site of the planned Islamic centre, described by its opponents as "the mosque at Ground Zero". As pole dancers gyrated with all the sizzling eroticism of a weary Wal-Mart checkout assistant at the end of a long shift, I asked the burly front-of-house man – Scott, from Brooklyn – whether they had faced any protests about this profanation of hallowed ground. Had any Fox News commentators, for example, been beating an angry path to their door? Well, he replied, one or two passers-by had raised objections since the controversy erupted about the Islamic centre. "People are entitled to their opinions," said Scott, but the "New York Dolls" Gentlemen's Club had been here for 30 years and the folks working in it had to make a living.

Now a strip club at the memorial site of the worst terrorist atrocity on American soil would truly be a profanation. Though obviously not comparable to a strip club, planting a large new mosque directly on that site would nonetheless show an acute lack of sensitivity. Nine years on, the place where the twin towers stood is still a building site, but in a nearby exhibition you can see the plans for a commemorative ensemble of pools, trees and a museum, as well as a soaring new "freedom tower". As at the sites of Auschwitz, Katyn, Hiroshima or Ypres, so in the footprint of the World Trade Center, historical tact and commemorative mission should override all other considerations.

But here's the point: the strip club on Murray Street is not "at Ground Zero" any more than the site of the planned Islamic centre, a former Burlington coat factory in Park Place, is "at Ground Zero". They are, respectively, three and two blocks away. Neither would be visible from the World Trade Center memorial site, which may in some important if secular sense be considered hallowed ground. In New York, two blocks is a country mile. By the time you get to Park Place, there is no doubt that you are already somewhere else, amid the city's habitual huggermugger craziness, with the Amish Market on the corner selling Amish BBQ chicken, Amish fettucine and Amish sushi – all of them as authentically Amish as I am Chinese.

Then the critics of the proposed centre in Park Place – sorry, "Ground Zero Mega Mosque" – go on about dubious sources of funding and suspect statements by its principal protagonist, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf. And so, they say, it should be built further away. The leap of illogic is as big as any leap of faith. Were the centre to have terrorist sources of finance, or radical, bloodthirsty Islamist leadership, it should be stopped anyway, whether it is two blocks away from Ground Zero or 200.

In the event, these claims too turn out to be twisted, or absurdly thin. The anti-Islam blogger Pamela Geller, for example, has a characteristic rant on her website, arguing that Rauf was associated with a Malaysian peace group which funded the Gaza aid flotilla. Her headline: "Ground Zero Imam Rauf's 'Charity' Funded Genocide Mission". The Daily Show's Jon Stewart did a fine riff on this kind of guilt by association, pointing out that the second-largest shareholder in Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, which owns Fox News, is Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal – who is associated with the Carlyle Group, which has done business with the Bin Laden family, "one of whose sons – obviously I'm not going to say which one – may be anti-American".

In a clumsy, provocative comment during a television discussion soon after 9/11, Rauf said that US policies had been "an accessory to the crime that happened" and that Osama bin Laden was "made in the USA". That was wrong, and offensive. But it has to be put against the rest of his words and deeds, which have been devoted to promoting a gentle Sufi version of Islam compatible with a free society. I'm not a huge fan of his kind of interfaith waffle, but if the Muslim world were comprised entirely of Raufs, we would not have the problems we face today – and there would have been no 9/11 attacks. That is why the state department has been funding him to travel round the Middle East explaining American Islam.

There is therefore no reasonable objection to this Islamic centre, with its mission to promote peace, love, interfaith dialogue and swimming, being built in Park Place. Yet in the runup to the US mid-term elections on 2 November, senior politicians, pundits and even supposed opponents of religious discrimination are either condemning it or ducking out with weasel words. Newt Gingrich, the Republican former speaker of the House of Representatives, denounced the scheme, saying: "Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington." Fox star Bill O'Reilly says it should not be built because "Muslims killed us on 9/11". Sarah Palin famously tweeted "Peaceful Muslims, please refudiate" (sic). Facing a tough re-election race even Harry Reid, the Democrat majority leader in the Senate, distanced himself from President Obama's cautious endorsement of Muslims' constitutional right to build the centre.

Most grotesquely, Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League insists it should be moved. Talking of the relatives of 9/11 victims who oppose it (though some other relatives support it), Foxman says "their anguish entitles them to positions that others would categorise as irrational or bigoted". An organisation established to combat bigotry thus comes out in defence of ... bigotry. And the upshot of all this is that, in a Pew poll this August, 51% of Americans asked said they opposed the building of the centre near the World Trade Center site.

There is now no good way forward. If it goes ahead, it will be a constant bone of contention. If it is moved, more Muslims will believe radical Islamists when they say: "You see, we told you so – America is Islamophobic." Either way, America is doing something extremely stupid. As if it did not have enough problems of its own, it is conspiring to give itself a problem which, up to now, it has not had – or at least, has had much less than most European countries.

Yes, there have been a few home-grown American jihadists, but there is a lot of evidence that American Muslims are generally better integrated, and more supportive of the state in which they live than most of their European counterparts. There are several reasons for this, but one of the biggest is the First Amendment tradition of free speech and freedom of religion, which is now at issue in those blocks just up the road from, but not at, Ground Zero.

That great tradition, which Scott, the doorman at "New York Dolls", seems to have understood better than Foxman, Gingrich or Reid, says: this is America, where Geller can rant, strippers can grind, Christians, Jews and Muslims can pray – and Stewart can make fun of them all. This is America, where no one has the right not to be offended. For God's sake, America, don't catch our European disease.

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This Nobel prize was bold and right – but hits China's most sensitive nerve | Timothy Garton Ash

We can honour Liu and the great achievements of the Chinese state. Let real dialogue about universal values continue

Norway's Nobel peace prize committee has done the right thing in awarding this year's prize to Liu Xiaobo. The furious reaction of the Chinese state shows just how complicated doing the right thing will become as we advance into an increasingly post-western world.

Liu Xiaobo is exactly the kind of person who deserves this prize, alongside Andrei Sakharov, Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. For more than 20 years, he has consistently advocated nonviolent change in China, always in the direction of more respect for human rights, the rule of law and democracy. He has paid for this peaceful advocacy with years of imprisonment and harassment. Unlike last year's winner, Barack Obama, who got the prize just for what he had promised to do, Liu gets it for what he has actually done.

The Chinese government tried hard to prevent him getting it. They directly threatened the Nobel committee with negative consequences for Chinese-Norwegian relations . They have since described the award as an "obscenity", forbidden any mention of it in the censored Chinese media, placed Liu's wife under house arrest, detained other critical intellectuals, cancelled talks about Norwegian fishery exports to China – and are now doubtless debating, at the highest level, how to play it from here. Will they, for instance, allow his wife, the photographer Liu Xia, to travel to Oslo to receive the prize on behalf of her imprisoned husband?

Meanwhile, in the capitals of the west, many are quietly questioning whether this really was such a good decision. These questions are important and need to be addressed, but one hypocritical or self-deceiving argument must be demolished at once. This is the claim that it will not be good even for the dissidents if a leading dissident receives the Nobel prize. One used to hear a similar case made by western politicians who, for example, declined to meet Sakharov, Lech Walesa or Václav Havel. Commenting on an American elder statesman's visit to Moscow, one Russian writer told me: "He says it would not be good for Sakharov if they met, but what he really means is that it would not be good for him if he met Sakharov."

It is for the dissidents to decide what is good for the dissidents. All the evidence we have so far suggests that Chinese dissidents are thrilled with the award, even though it means, predictably enough, that they face another crackdown. It's not as if the Chinese Communist party was treating them very gently before. Liu was sent to jail for 11 years last year despite all the "quiet diplomacy" of western and other politicians. By his wife's account, he was deeply moved when he heard the news of his award in prison, and dedicated it to the "lost souls" of Tiananmen Square.

It is not for us to tell brave campaigners for human rights what is good for them. That is to treat them as authoritarian and totalitarian regimes treat their own people – namely, as children. "We know best what is good for you."

At the moment Liu and his colleagues constitute a tiny minority of Chinese citizens. Most of their compatriots have accepted the deal proposed to them by the Communist party since the late 1970s, and more particularly since 1989: extraordinary economic freedom and very considerable social, cultural and even intellectual freedom, so long as you do not challenge the central political pillars of the party-state. In this sense Liu is not comparable with Mandela or Suu Kyi, leaders of oppressed mass movements.

One must acknowledge, as the Nobel committee does in its citation, that China's unprecedented hybrid version of authoritarian capitalism has lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, and is delivering for many of its citizens in many ways. Unlike Burma or apartheid South Africa, the Chinese state enjoys a great deal of support from its people. The test will come, of course, when economic growth slows down.

We simply cannot know how Liu's compatriots will regard him in, say, 20 years' time. It seems almost unthinkable that things will turn upside down, as they did in Czechoslovakia, so an isolated dissident like Václav Havel suddenly becomes the elected president. President Liu? Surely not. It is slightly more imaginable that Liu becomes a litmus test for the boldness of a reformist leader. As Mikhail Gorbachev's telephone call to Nobel prizewinner Sakharov, lifting his sentence of banishment, marked a turning point in the history of the Soviet Union, could a phone call to Nobel prizewinner Liu from, say, the next or next but one Chinese leader, mark another stage in China's political modernisation?

Tuesday's publication of an open letter from former senior Communist party officials, demanding more freedom of expression, is an indication that the hopes of reformists inside the party and dissidents outside it are not necessarily miles apart. It is, however, entirely possible that Liu and his colleagues will remain a small minority, representing an authentic but never predominant tradition in modern Chinese history – the tradition of liberal, constitutionalist modernisation that they evoke at length in the Charter 08 manifesto which earned Liu both prison and prize.

The fearful, offended reaction of the Chinese party-state testifies to its own insecurity, and its still fundamentally Leninist inability to tolerate any genuinely autonomous sources of social and political authority – be they Liu and his tiny band, Falun Gong or the Dalai Lama. It also speaks of a deep and more widely shared sense of national humiliation at the hands of the west. How they would love to have the international recognition of a Nobel prize. But who are the three Chinese, or China-related, Nobel prizewinners? Gao Xingjian, a Chinese novelist who emigrated to France and holds French citizenship; the Dalai Lama; and now Liu Xiaobo. Slap, slap, slap.

The Nobel citation talks of "universal" human rights. Charter 08 talks of "universal values". But Chinese leaders hear only "western" values, and the west's post-imperial but still imperialist quest to impose them on China.

Over the next decade there are three approaches the old west can take in response: capitulation, Huntingtonism, or a real dialogue about universal values. Capitulation would mean bowing to Chinese blackmail, so that, for instance, western leaders would no longer receive the Dalai Lama. By Huntingtonism I mean the way Samuel Huntington envisaged us avoiding the "clash of civilisations". This was to say, "all right, you do it your way over there and we'll do it our way over here". As China's power grows, that is where we may end up. But it is definitely too soon to give up on the hope of reaching a deeper understanding of what are genuinely universal values, as opposed to merely western ones.

In this conversation we have to be prepared to listen, not merely to speak. We cannot act as if the west has found all the answers, for everyone, for ever – an assumption that looks more implausible by the minute. If, instead of closing up defensively like a hedgehog, China were prepared to engage confidently and even offensively in an argument about universal values, we should welcome that with open arms. The alternatives are more likely, but worse.

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Enjoy the film. Then try Facebook's real challenge: restoring your privacy | Timothy Garton Ash

New technologies allow firms and governments to crawl all over our private lives. They also empower us to fight back

A couple of days after watching The Social Network, the new film about Facebook, I was visiting two senior people at Facebook's headquarters in Palo Alto, just off the Stanford campus. "How did you like the movie?" I asked, knowing that they had bussed the whole company down to see it the day it was released. "I found it rather dry," said one, and "a little slow". "Rather boring," said the other. Do I detect a company line emerging here? Facebook says that a film about Facebook is, er, boring.

Well, don't you believe it. The Social Network is a hoot, and definitely worth seeing. Just don't imagine it's a serious film about social networking, the internet, and the possibilities for good and ill they open up. This is an entertainment about Harvard, American lawyers, and being 19. It exaggerates gloriously, hilariously.

Realistic it is not. All these Harvard students keep delivering brilliant one-liners, like so many fledgling Woody Allens. They don't punctuate their sentences with a fumbling "like", let alone "fuck". Yet, as it romps along, the satire does touch on one issue that Facebook raises in real life: our loss of privacy. Early in the film, the fictionalised undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg drunkenly uses his blog to slag off a girlfriend who has just dumped him, and then takes revenge on the whole female race by posting, without their knowledge or consent, photos of Harvard undergraduettes for male students to rate.

That minor infringement of privacy is child's play compared to what we have experienced over the last decade. In the week the film was released, news broke of a terrible incident at Rutgers University. An 18-year-old undergraduate, Tyler Clementi, had been covertly filmed having a sexual encounter with another man. His roommate, whom Clementi had asked to vacate the room for a few hours, had activated his computer's webcam and then streamed the video online, for all to see. Clementi leapt off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson river and killed himself. His farewell message on Facebook read: "jumping off the gw bridge, sorry".

Now obviously this is not a story about, let alone against, Facebook – although I find the offhand agony of that six-word lower-case Facebook farewell strangely haunting. But it is a story about the way in which all the new communication technologies make invasions of privacy so easy.

The people at Facebook protest that their social networking site gives you more control over your privacy than many other corners of this brave new world. They have a point. Compared to the British tabloid journalists who hacked into people's mobile phone messages and then exposed their intimate secrets simply to sell more newspapers, Facebook is a virtuous priest guarding the secrets of the confessional. Yet its own past practices – combined with the way people used it – have contributed to the erosion of privacy, and its present ones still leave something to be desired.

An already stale cliche has it that "the Facebook generation doesn't care about privacy any more". Of course norms change with generations, but what really seems to have happened here is that people threw themselves with enthusiasm into this amazing new experience, and now, a few years on, are sometimes horrified by the consequences. In his new book, The Facebook Effect, David Kirkpatrick reports a 2009 poll of American employers which found that 35% of companies had rejected job applicants because of information they found on social networks. One in three! No one is going to persuade me that "the Facebook generation" is cool with that.

Facebook says its privacy controls are now better, and you can set your own level. It's your choice. This is clearly the right principle, but how about the practice? I just tried setting up a new account from scratch, and I don't think the privacy setup is half as good as it should be. The default settings are almost all for sharing – including an automatic search of your email address book (to find potential Friends) on signing up. It takes quite a time to customise all the many tabs down to a more restrictive setting. It's very easy to miss small-print items such as the "instant personalization" which gives access to "some select partner sites ... as soon as you arrive" – and you have to go to a different page (Applications and Websites) to turn that one off.

Even after I'd unclicked the automatic search of my address book, Facebook instantly came up with a long list of suggested friends and "people you know", many of whom I do know (one of my sons, for instance; how kind of you to introduce us) but some I've never heard of.

The opt-out rather than opt-in bias of these settings has been criticised by a former chief privacy officer of Facebook, no less, now a candidate for attorney general of California. I'd be interested in other people's experiences – do please come on the Comment is free thread to share them.

The larger point here is the erosion of privacy on many fronts over the last decade. This is driven by three great forces. There is the technology itself, which already makes it possible to track a whole life, and follow anyone anywhere, with an instantaneous precision that would have a Stasi general salivating. There is the quest for profit, which leads companies to ever more detailed surveillance of their customers' tastes and habits, the better to customise advertising. And there are governments, which find ways of getting their hands on much of this data, as well as collecting server-loads of their own.

Thus, for example, detailed photographic images of your home are up on Google Earth and Google Street View for anyone – voyeur, stalker, thief, terrorist – to examine at leisure. Your smartphone is tracking you. Your Google search record is the intimate history of your life. Your complete credit history is routinely accessed by banks and building societies. And the British and American governments have quietly arrogated to themselves, in the name of "security", the power to monitor all this, including your emails and mobile phone calls.

I suppose we could just roll over and accept that this is the way the world is going. "Privacy is dead. Get over it," as Scott McNealy, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems, reportedly once advised. Or we can fight back, to restore some of our lost privacy. We can do this by setting our own standards and sharing them. We can do it by working directly on companies like Facebook, whose ultimate sources of revenue we are. You can use Facebook to shape Facebook.

We can also try to push our governments in at least three ways: to curb their own incursions into our privacy; to regulate overintrusive companies better; and to punish private violations, like the one that drove Tyler Clementi to take his life. The very networking technologies that reduce our privacy can also empower us in the fight back. Unlike the movie, this is genuinely dry, slow and boring stuff; but our future liberties will depend on it.

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US politics is angry, polarised, and gridlocked. Can it be reformed? | Timothy Garton Ash

Washington moves at the pace of Brezhnev's Soviet Union. It needs to be more like Silicon Valley if it is to compete with China

If I were a conspiracy theorist, I would say that Osama bin Laden was a Chinese agent. And maybe America's banks, credit card companies, advertising agencies and government have been secretly working for China too. For while the United States has spent more than $1 trillion on foreign wars since the 9/11 attacks, and piled up a Mount Everest of debt at home, China has spent the last decade quietly growing, saving, investing and rising. If the winner of the war in Iraq was Iran, the winner of America's decade-long struggle against violent Islamism may be China.

The good news is that America is waking up to its predicament. President Obama talks of the need for nation-building at home. Richard Haass, head of the Council on Foreign Relations and once a member of the Bush administration, reflects on "a decade of strategic distraction". A veteran Republican observes that the US is building more infrastructure in Afghanistan than in America. (The road surface of the interstate highways seems to get worse every year I come back.) Every second newspaper column now points up the contrast between China's high-speed intercity rail links and America's lack of them. Former national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski calls for a programme of "national renewal". Everyone acknowledges that performance in the lower half of America's school system is dismal.

And that's before we even mention the alarmingly sluggish recovery of the economy, the loss of jobs, the scale of the soaring deficits. Looking at the Congressional budget office's projections, Republican Senator John Ensign says that if they don't do something about it, "this country is going to become Greece, except we don't have the European Union to bail us out". One of the country's most senior military figures was asked, not so long ago, what he considered to be the greatest single national security threat to the US. His answer: our national debt.

This does not mean that the danger from Islamist terrorists, or a nuclear-threshold Iran sparking a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, or the festering sore of the unresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict, are not real or important. They are. But if you ask what will be the biggest geopolitical story of the 2010s, my best guess is "rising China and struggling America". Where that competition has got to by 2020 will depend crucially on America's ability to put its house in order. Physician, heal thyself.

If you want to feel optimistic about America's chances of renewal, go to Silicon Valley. For a downer, look to Washington. The struggle for America's recovery is the battle of the iPad against the filibuster. In Silicon Valley, just down the road from where I write this, you see everything that is still inspiring about American society: innovation rooted in science and intellectual freedom; entrepreneurs and risk-taking venture capital exploiting that innovation commercially; a dynamic, open society that attracts the brightest from everywhere – Indians, Chinese, Europeans. If you ask people around the world what they most admire about the US, their shortlist is likely to include, beside George Clooney and Julia Roberts, the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter or Google.

But switch on your television, or turn to the politics pages of your newspaper, and your heart sinks. What is it that makes American politics so depressing? They are both polarised and gridlocked. Change in Silicon Valley happens at the speed of science fiction; in Washington, at the pace of Brezhnev's Soviet Union.

For instance, a bill to help out America's job-generating small businesses with modest government-backed loans was stuck in the Senate for months – a victim of the procedural rule which means that the minority (currently Republican) can block legislation by the threat of filibuster unless the other side can garner a 60-vote "supermajority". Only when two Republican senators supported it could the small business bill come to President Obama for signature. He was finally able to start the job-promoting loans flowing this week. As the outstanding conservative commentator David Brooks observes, a growing number of Americans believe that their political system is dysfunctional.

There are several aspects to this dysfunctionality. There is what I call the politics of cultural distraction. Millions of air hours are devoted to arguments about gay marriage, abortion, homosexuality or, most recently, the planned Islamic centre two blocks from Ground Zero in New York. Increasingly, these resemble arguments about which tune the band should play on the deck of the Titanic. ("Let the good times roll"? "Nearer my God to thee?" Glug, glug, glug.) Although the Tea Party movement adds to the craziness, at least it spends more of its time talking about problems in the engine room.

Then there is the strident, partisan polarisation of the cable news networks, with Fox News roaring from the right, MSNBC shouting back from the left, and CNN flailing in the middle.

There is the way in which money howls through American politics. To get re-elected is hugely expensive, and members of the House of Representatives have to do it every two years, so they are constantly beholden to their donors. Following a perverse recent ruling by the supreme court, corporations can now effectively throw unlimited money at political advertising.

There is the shameless gerrymandering, politely called "redistricting". At a recent event organised by Google, a former chair of the Republican national committee, Ed Gillespie, calmly explained that winning control of local houses of representatives in individual states is also important, because it helps when it comes to "being able to draw the district lines in a way that is more favourable toward your party". Not even the pretence that democracy is meant to have a level playing field.

All these exacerbate the dysfunctionality. But the most immediate, pressing problem is the combination of institutional gridlock and the lack of cross-party co-operation, each reinforcing the other. The comedian Stephen Colbert was recently, and controversially, invited to testify to a Congressional committee on the position of immigrant farm workers. In his peroration, he said: "I trust that, following my testimony, both sides will work together on this issue in the best interests of the American people – as you always do." That got the biggest laugh of the day.

Current projections suggest that in the midterm elections on 2 November, Republicans will take control of the House of Representatives but not quite win a majority in the Senate. On present form that would mean still more gridlock and Brezhnevite delay. But the US can no longer afford that. It cannot go on like this. Or rather it can, but if it does, it must continue its relative decline – and China will be laughing all the way to the bank.

These are not huge changes of the whole political system that are called for. Cross-party co-operation to simplify the country's absurdly complicated tax code, redirect the budget to the needs of nation-building at home, limit the power of money in American politics, and change the rules of procedure in the Senate – that would already get you a long way. But in 2010, one of the questions of this decade is plainly posed: can the United States be reformed?

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Obama must wish he were Cameron. You reach out and get things done | Timothy Garton Ash

A growing centre ground is not reflected in the strident partisanship of Congress and the media. The US is the loser

When "David" and "Barack" reported to the press on their cordial meeting at the White House earlier this week, they did not reveal whether they had discussed their respective domestic politics. If they did, Obama must have been green with envy. For at home, the British prime minister has the politics that the American president both wants and needs.

Obama, like Cameron, is a...