Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 5
June 17, 2022
Ukraine deserves its place in the EU. It’s right for the country – and right for Europe | Timothy Garton Ash
Today’s decision by the European Commission is just a start. A larger EU would be better able to stand up to China and Russia
What a difference a war makes. Four months ago, the leaders of France, Germany and Italy would not have dreamed of supporting Ukraine’s candidacy for EU membership. But this Thursday, there they were in a sunny Kyiv, all emphatically endorsing it. If next week’s EU summit agrees, following the positive opinion just given by the European Commission, this really could be, as President Volodymyr Zelenskiy put it after meeting his visitors from luckier parts of Europe, “one of the key European decisions of the first third of the 21st century”. It could mark the beginning of a further round of eastern enlargement of the EU, as significant as the first big post-cold war round in the 2000s, which in two waves took in countries from Estonia to Bulgaria. The ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus scores again: “war is the father of all things”.
There are two good reasons for accepting Ukraine as a candidate for membership of the EU: because Ukraine has earned it, and because this is in the long-term strategic interest of all Europeans. The second is even more important than the first.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
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April 25, 2022
Macron wants to turn Europe into a global giant. But he can’t do it alone | Timothy Garton Ash
The newly re-elected French president is determined to transform the EU, but the obstacles are enormous
“We did it. We turned the European Union into a giant, able to hold its own in a world of giants such as China and the United States.” In summer 2027, as the French president, Emmanuel Macron, looks back on his recently completed decade in office, will he be able to say this? A lot will depend on who he means by “we”.
“European sovereignty” is Macron’s term for being a giant in a world of giants. Strategic sovereignty involves not being dependent on Russia for your energy, the US for your security or China for your corporate profits. It’s having a European foreign and security policy muscular enough to deter aggressors such as Vladimir Putin, even if the US has re-elected Donald Trump in 2024. It’s also not relying entirely on others for your microchips, AI and digital platforms. In short, it’s a very long way from where Europe is today.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
Continue reading...April 4, 2022
Orbán’s victory in Hungary adds to the darkness engulfing Europe | Timothy Garton Ash
The pro-Putin nationalist managed to turn the war in Ukraine to his advantage in a win that deepens the EU’s troubles
As I stood in a cold, disconsolate crowd in central Budapest late on Sunday night, listening to Hungarian opposition leader Péter Márki-Zay concede defeat in the country’s election, the Twitter feed on my phone filled with images of murdered Ukrainian civilians in the town of Bucha. Some of them had their hands tied behind their backs. Beside one murdered woman lay a keychain with a pendant showing the yellow stars on blue background of the European flag. The Ukrainian horrors are clearly far worse than the Hungarian miseries, but the two are fatefully connected.
It is a bitter irony that, just as we learn of some of the worst atrocities in Russian president Vladimir Putin’s war of terror against Ukraine, Putin’s closest ally among EU leaders, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, is re-elected partly because he turned that very war to his own political benefit. As well as exploiting all the advantages he has already built in to a heavily rigged political system, such as gerrymandered constituencies and overwhelming media dominance, Orbán won by telling Hungarians that he would keep them out of this war – and that their heating bills would stay low due to his sweet gas deals with Putin.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
Continue reading...March 22, 2022
The horrors of Mariupol should remind us of a new danger to Sarajevo | Daniel Cohn-Bendit and others
Peace in the Balkans is again under threat. EU governments must confront the Serb government before it is too late
The recent European summit in Versailles missed a great opportunity: to launch, in a symbolic place, a new postwar order for Europe. We are not dreamers; we know that joining the European Union is no walk in the park and thatthe same procedures apply, in principle, to Ukraine as to the candidate countries in the Balkans. But there was an opportunity to establish a political union that would bridge the gap between a looser association and full membership. Instead, European leaders proceeded as if regular peacetime EU procedures are still appropriate in the extreme case of war in Europe. The freedom and peace project gave way to the EU of bureaucrats and officials.
But the EU is no longer the economic union of recent years; Vladimir Putin has unintentionally turned it back into the normative and institutional alliance of its founding years. It should become that again, since the task now is not only to protect Ukraine against Russian aggression, but also to strengthen the protection of its newer members, especially the Baltic states, and to include all those states that want to join the EU in that protection. What is needed is an “expanded Weimar Triangle” (which since 1991 has linked Germany, France and Poland). This would pay particular attention to the regional expansion of the security dimension within the EU. Germany, France, Poland and the Baltic states must enter into stronger security policy cooperation, if necessary also in the field of nuclear deterrence.
Continue reading...March 4, 2022
In this moment of crisis, opening the door to Ukraine is one thing the EU can do | Timothy Garton Ash
Zelenskiy and his people are fighting for their lives to defend European values. They have earned the prospect of EU membership once this brutal war is over
For 77 years since 1945, people have compared this or that European figure to Adolf Hitler. For 77 years, this has been indefensible hyperbole. Even the genocidal war crimes in former Yugoslavia, although comparable in quality to the Nazis’, did not have the same scale or consequences. Now, when applied to Vladimir Putin, this seems for the first time an appropriate comparison – not yet to the Hitler of the Holocaust, but to the Hitler of 1939, invading Poland.
Every hour we see, as live video clips on our mobile phones, scenes from the second world war. The rubble of bombarded cities. Killed and orphaned children. The treks of refugees. All this is justified by a big lie that turns history on its head. An attack on a Jewish president of Ukraine, whose grandfather fought in the Red Army against Hitler, is described by Putin as “denazification”. So is a missile landing on the site of the Nazis’ 1941 Babyn Yar massacres. All the while, Ukrainians tell us on the radio, in fluent English, how they face death to defend their homeland, freedom and Europe. Yes, Europe, they keep saying that word.
Continue reading...February 24, 2022
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine will change the face of Europe for ever | Timothy Garton Ash
It will take years for the consequences of 24 February to play out, but there is still much the west can do to help Ukrainians
Why do we always make the same mistake? Oh, that’s only trouble in the Balkans, we say – and then an assassination in Sarajevo sparks the first world war. Oh, Adolf Hitler’s threat to Czechoslovakia is “a quarrel in a faraway country, between people of whom we know nothing” – and then we find ourselves in the second world war. Oh, Joseph Stalin’s takeover of distant Poland after 1945 is none of our business – and soon enough we have the cold war. Now we have done it again, not waking up until it is too late to the full implications of Vladimir Putin’s seizure of Crimea in 2014. And so, on Thursday 24 February 2022, we stand here again, clothed in nothing but the shreds of our lost illusions.
At such moments we need courage and resolution but also wisdom. That includes care in our use of words. This is not the third world war. It is, however, already something much more serious than the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. The five wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s were terrible, but the larger international dangers that flowed from them were not on this scale. There were brave resistance fighters in Budapest in 1956, but in Ukraine today we have an entire independent, sovereign state with a large army and a people who declare themselves determined to resist. If they don’t resist, at scale, this will be an occupation. If they do, this could be the largest war in Europe since 1945.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
Continue reading...February 21, 2022
Is it still possible to avoid a major war in Europe? | Timothy Garton Ash
The west is more united than it has been since the cold war – but the future of Ukraine hangs in the balance
“I think Putin will invest Kyiv,” the Nato general told me. For a moment, I thought I had misheard. Then I realised he was using the verb “invest” in the old military sense of surrounding a city without actually occupying it. That single word measures how far we have gone backwards in Europe over the last 15 years: from a world where invest means investing money in a place – to a world where invest means besieging it with an army.
Russian president Vladimir Putin declared his personal war on the west 15 years ago, in his 2007 speech to the Munich security conference. At this year’s conference, from which I have just returned, everyone was struggling to understand how we have come to the verge of what might be the largest war in Europe since 1945 – and whether we can still prevent it. For all the last-minute diplomacy, Russia continues to advance towards major military action. Its propaganda claim of a Ukrainian attack across its border and a theatrically televised evacuation of women and children from the separatist para-statelets of Donetsk and Luhansk are obviously designed to provide a fraudulent justification for Russian aggression. At time of writing, we don’t know exactly what form the next aggression will take, but as German president Frank-Walter Steinmeier said the other day, Russia already has a noose around the neck of Ukraine.
Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
Continue reading...January 31, 2022
Putin knows exactly what he wants in eastern Europe – unlike the west | Timothy Garton Ash
Until we stop dithering and commit to all European states being independent and free, Russia will have the upper hand
As Russian troops mass on the frontiers of Ukraine, threatening the largest war in Europe since 1945, the whole world is trying to guess Vladimir Putin’s intentions. But the strategic question the democracies of Europe and North America need to ask is: what are our intentions?
Putin’s long-term goal in eastern Europe is, in fact, perfectly clear. He wants to restore as much as possible of the empire, great power status and sphere of influence that Russia lost so dramatically 30 years ago, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It is only his tactics that keep us guessing. Since 2008, when he secured two secessionist chunks of Georgia by force, and most certainly since his seizure of Crimea in 2014, it has been evident that he is ready to use any and all means, from diplomacy and disinformation to cyber-attacks and outright war.
Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist
Guardian Newsroom: Will Russia invade Ukraine? Join Mark Rice-Oxley, Andrew Roth, Luke Harding, Nataliya Gumenyuk and Orysia Lutsevych discussing the developments with Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday 8 February, 8pm GMT | 9pm CET | midday PDT | 3pm EDT. Book tickets here
Continue reading...Unlike Putin's Russia, the west doesn’t know what it wants in eastern Europe | Timothy Garton Ash
The west must stop dithering and reaffirm that all European states – including Ukraine – should be independent and free
As Russian troops mass on the frontiers of Ukraine, threatening the largest war in Europe since 1945, the whole world is trying to guess Vladimir Putin’s intentions. But the strategic question the democracies of Europe and North America need to ask is: what are our intentions?
Putin’s long-term goal in eastern Europe is, in fact, perfectly clear. He wants to restore as much as possible of the empire, great power status and sphere of influence that Russia lost so dramatically 30 years ago, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December 1991. It is only his tactics that keep us guessing. Since 2008, when he secured two secessionist chunks of Georgia by force, and most certainly since his seizure of Crimea in 2014, it has been evident that he is ready to use any and all means, from diplomacy and disinformation to cyber-attacks and outright war.
Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist
Guardian Newsroom: Will Russia invade Ukraine? Join Mark Rice-Oxley, Andrew Roth, Luke Harding, Nataliya Gumenyuk and Orysia Lutsevych discussing the developments with Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday 8 February, 8pm GMT | 9pm CET | midday PDT | 3pm EDT. Book tickets here
Continue reading...December 10, 2021
From Hungary to China, Germany's toughest challenges lie to the east | Timothy Garton Ash
The new government headed by Chancellor Olaf Scholz has a plan – and it is already being put to the test
The Lufthansa stewardess on the flight from London to Munich handed me one very small, yellow-wrapped bar of chocolate: the usual ration. When she saw that I was working my way through a long German document she gave me one more, exclaimingm Sie sind so fleissig! (”You’re so hard-working!”) I explained that this was actually the 177-page coalition agreement between the three parties forming her new government. Excitedly, she showered me with a whole handful of the miniature chocolate bars, followed by yet another handful. Most of them I offered to my neighbour, who had young children, but I slipped a couple into my pocket. A few days later, I presented one to a key minister in the “traffic light” government of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats that formally took office in Berlin on Wednesday. He accepted it with appropriate ceremonial gravity.
Some chocolate is called for. Given the difficulty of reaching common ground between three parties, the coalition agreement is remarkably coherent, substantial and ambitious. Parts of it are even well-written, with echoes of the inspirational rhetoric of the great chancellor of West German Ostpolitik, Willy Brandt. As befits a democracy now more widely respected than that of the US, it proposes a mixture of continuity and change. Yet the government headed by chancellor Olaf Scholz faces huge challenges from its very first day. As often before in German history, many of these lie in the east. They are Germany’s new Eastern Questions.
Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist
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