Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 7
January 13, 2021
The UK and EU are heading for bad-tempered rivalry, unless we can avert it | Timothy Garton Ash
For all the ‘sovereignty’ it has gained, post-Brexit Britain will be trapped in a future of permanent negotiation
After Brexit, Britain and the EU face the Gore Vidal trap. As the waspish American writer once said: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” There is now a powerful political logic pushing both sides to make the relative failure of the other the measure of their own success.
We have seen it already over Covid-19 vaccinations, with Boris Johnson boasting that Britain has done more than all the rest of Europe together. Gavin Williamson, Britain’s education secretary, took it to a juvenile extreme, claiming this is because “we’re a much better country than every single one of them”. What we might call “Vidalism” is baked into the Brexiteers’ project. After all, the whole point of the exercise is supposed to be that Britain will be “better off out”.
Related: We may have avoided no-deal, but this is still Brexit tier 3
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The UK and EU are headed for bad-tempered rivalry, unless we can avert it | Timothy Garton Ash
For all the ‘sovereignty’ it has gained, post-Brexit Britain will be trapped in a future of permanent negotiation
After Brexit, Britain and the EU face the Gore Vidal trap. As the waspish American writer once said: “It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.” There is now a powerful political logic pushing both sides to make the relative failure of the other the measure of their own success.
We have seen it already over Covid-19 vaccinations, with Boris Johnson boasting that Britain has done more than all the rest of Europe together. Gavin Williamson, Britain’s education secretary, took it to a juvenile extreme, claiming this is because “we’re a much better country than every single one of them”. What we might call “Vidalism” is baked into the Brexiteers’ project. After all, the whole point of the exercise is supposed to be that Britain will be “better off out”.
Related: We may have avoided no-deal, but this is still Brexit tier 3
Continue reading...December 9, 2020
For Europe, losing Britain is bad. Keeping Hungary and Poland could be worse | Timothy Garton Ash
The populists of Budapest and Warsaw are blackmailing the EU over the rule of law. They cannot be allowed to succeed
“Brexit means Brexit” – the mantra of the former British prime minister Theresa May – deserves a place in philosophy textbooks as the most meaningless sentence ever to contain the word “means”. But let’s not fool ourselves that when we finally discover if there is to be a minimal UK-EU trade deal, or no deal, we will then know what Brexit means. It will be five years at least, and probably 10, before we see a clear outline of the new relationship between the offshore islands and the continent. By then the EU may be a very different community, and the UK may not exist.
In a further referendum that is likely to happen in the next few years, the Scots will decide whether they want to leave the 300-year-old union with England and rejoin the European one. If they vote for independence, despite the attendant economic difficulties, then the UK will effectively cease to be. Any British politician who wants the Scots to stick with the English must soon present a different, federal model of the British union as the alternative to independence. So the choice will be the end of the UK or a new Federal Kingdom of Britain. (Federal United Kingdom produces an unfortunate acronym.)
Continue reading...For Europe, losing Britain is bad. Keeping Hungary and Poland could be worse
The populists of Budapest and Warsaw are blackmailing the EU over the rule of law. They cannot be allowed to succeed
“Brexit means Brexit” – the mantra of the former British prime minister Theresa May – deserves a place in philosophy textbooks as the most meaningless sentence ever to contain the word “means”. But let’s not fool ourselves that when we finally discover if there is to be a minimal UK-EU trade deal, or no deal, we will then know what Brexit means. It will be five years at least, and probably 10, before we see a clear outline of the new relationship between the offshore islands and the continent. By then the EU may be a very different community, and the UK may not exist.
In a further referendum that is likely to happen in the next few years, the Scots will decide whether they want to leave the 300-year-old union with England and rejoin the European one. If they vote for independence, despite the attendant economic difficulties, then the UK will effectively cease to be. Any British politician who wants the Scots to stick with the English must soon present a different, federal model of the British union as the alternative to independence. So the choice will be the end of the UK or a new Federal Kingdom of Britain. (Federal United Kingdom produces an unfortunate acronym.)
Continue reading...November 7, 2020
What will President Biden's United States look like to the rest of the world? | Timothy Garton Ash
The future of a diminished superpower now lies in being part of a wider network of democracies
US election 2020 live: follow the latest news, results and reactionTrump v Biden – full results as they come inWhat is the best the world can now hope for from the United States under President Joe Biden, now that the election has been called for him? My answer: that the US will be a leading country in a post-hegemonic network of democracies.
Yes, that’s a, not the leading country. Quite a contrast to the beginning of this century, when the “hyperpower” US seemed to bestride the globe like a colossus. The downsizing has two causes: the US’s decline, and others’ rise. Even if Biden had won a landslide victory and the Democrats controlled the Senate, the United States’ power in the world would be much diminished. President Donald Trump has done untold damage to its international reputation. His disastrous record on handling Covid confirmed a widespread sense of a society with deep structural problems, from healthcare, race and infrastructure to media-fuelled hyper-polarisation and a dysfunctional political system.
Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist
September 27, 2020
Since reunification, Germany has had its best 30 years. The next 30 will be harder | Timothy Garton Ash
The EU is in the country’s DNA. But global threats mean a strong transatlantic western alliance has never been more vital
Happy birthday, Germany: 30 years old on 3 October, the anniversary of German unification in 1990. But hang on a minute, isn’t Germany 71? Counting, that is, from the foundation of the Federal Republic in 1949. Or 149, if we go back to the first unification of Germany, in 1871? Or 1,220 years old, if we take the coronation of Charlemagne, in 800, to be the beginning of what Germans call the Reich, more widely known as the Holy Roman Empire? Or some 2,000 years, if we detect in the brilliant former FC Bayern Munich midfielder Bastian Schweinsteiger a remote descendant of those warlike but also proto-democratic tribesmen that Tacitus described in his Germania?
Answering the apparently simple question “How old is Germany?” is far from simple. But let me venture this bold claim: the last three decades have been the best in all that long and complicated history. If you can think of a better period for the majority of Germans, and their relations with most of their neighbours, I’d be glad to learn of it. In today’s world, roiled by populism, fanaticism and authoritarianism, the Federal Republic is a beacon of stability, civility and moderation – qualities personified by Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Related: 'Mr Brexit to Mr U-turn': German commentators befuddled by Johnson's zig-zagging
Related: 'Germany looks like it's still divided': stark gaps persist 30 years after reunification
Continue reading...August 20, 2020
Belarus's struggle is a powerful reminder of the value of freedom | Timothy Garton Ash
However uncertain the road ahead, these protests show how authoritarianism ultimately subverts itself
Of all the moving scenes from Belarus, one sticks in my mind. A man, probably in his 30s, holds his child on his arm. “The election was … ” he says to the camera, pauses nervously for a long moment, glances sideways at his child, and then concludes explosively, “falsified!” There you have the exact moment, crucial for any protest movement against any dictatorship, when the individual breaks through the barrier of fear. Yesterday, he would not have dared to complete that sentence in public. Today, he will find himself among tens of thousands who are shouting the same thing at the top of their voices, waving the red and white flag that stands for a better Belarus. Speak out for the future of the child on your arm.
Events in Belarus now join a long line of anti-Soviet and anti-post-Soviet protest movements – some of which succeeded, some of which failed. “Colour revolutions” is a flimsy, politically compromised term that offers much too short a perspective. Since Belarus is the most Soviet of all the post-Soviet states, you can reach back even as far as the East German protests in 1953. When you see workers in large state factories confronting Alexander Lukashenko face to face, and reportedly forming an inter-factory strike committee, you are in Poland in 1980. Or perhaps it’s more like Armenia in 2018? Or Ukraine in 2014? Or – the unavoidable reference – the central European revolutions of 1989? And don’t forget that Belarusians themselves have tried several times before. This is not the first election Lukashenko has falsified.
Related: Belarusians are speaking as one: Alexander Lukashenko's time is up | David Kurkovskiy
Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist.
Continue reading...July 30, 2020
Can Germany now hold the European team together? | Timothy Garton Ash
Angela Merkel’s triumph in brokering an EU Covid-19 recovery package could mark the resurgence of a shared political dream
The other day, I had a dream. I dreamed that I was sitting on a beach in the summer of 2030 and looking back on how Germany had saved Europe.
The German chancellor had brokered a European recovery package after the Covid-19 crisis of 2020, with large grants and loans to help hard-hit south European economies, drawing on shared European borrowing. It had maintained constructive relations between the EU and post-Brexit Britain, helped the citizens of Poland and Hungary to defend liberal democracy, confounded Vladimir Putin by seriously committing to a common European energy policy, used the regulatory power of the EU to curb Facebook, shaped a common strategy towards China and made a world-leading example of Europe’s green new deal.
Related: US to pull 12,000 troops out of Germany as Trump blasts 'delinquent' Berlin
Continue reading...June 25, 2020
For a bitter taste of Polish populism, just watch the evening news | Timothy Garton Ash
Poland’s public broadcaster has entered the paranoid realm of the far right. A presidential election shows what is at stake
As Poland approaches the climax of a presidential election campaign on which the future of its democracy depends, and Donald Trump gives his fellow populist Andrzej Duda electoral help by receiving him in the White House, come with me on a tour through the magical world of the evening News programme on Polish state television (TVP).
We start on Sunday 14 June. The first item marks the 80th anniversary of the first deportation of Poles to Auschwitz in 1940. This is indeed a moment worthy of the most solemn remembrance. Too many people around the world forget that innocent and sometimes heroic Poles were the first prisoners in Auschwitz. But in the entire news item, lasting more than four minutes, the words ‘Jewish victims’ do not appear once. Instead, the head of the Institute of National Remembrance tells viewers: “That was the purpose of Auschwitz – that there would never be an independent Poland; to murder it.” No other groups of victims are mentioned until the footage of a memorial ceremony in Berlin, where the Polish ambassador to Germany says that from the moment of the creation of Auschwitz “we talk of the Holocaust”.
Related: It's been four years since the Brexit vote: everything and nothing has changed | Anand Menon
Continue reading...June 19, 2020
The US and China are entering a new cold war. Where does that leave the rest of us? | Timothy Garton Ash
Liberal democracies must learn the lessons of the past by thinking long term, applying a strong moral code – and avoiding hubris
Let’s be honest: there is a new cold war between China and the United States. The coronavirus crisis has only heightened the antagonism. There are few, if any, countries in Africa or Latin America where the two superpowers do not loom large as rivals. When Chinese and Indian soldiers clash with brutal hand-to-hand fighting on a disputed frontier, US secretary of state Mike Pompeo hastens to take the Indians’ side. British MPs have formed a China Research Group – with the word research meaning “opposition research”, as in the European Research Group. The question of whether Huawei is a security threat is being asked almost everywhere.
Related: Post-coronavirus, the UK must find some friends to stand up to China | Martin Kettle
Related: Bolton's book makes it clear: Trump is the amoral charlatan we knew he was
Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist
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