Timothy Garton Ash's Blog, page 8
May 21, 2020
Britain's pride in its past is not matched by any vision for its future | Timothy Garton Ash
There have been times over the last few weeks when it has felt as if we were living through a looped replay of Dad’s Army
Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all? The Covid-19 crisis is a mirror held up to each nation. Some, such as Jacinda Ardern’s New Zealand, look very good indeed. Many have celebrated an unfamiliar unity, solidarity and selflessness, praising as distinctively Spanish, Italian or Danish the very same qualities that just across the frontier are being lauded as Portuguese, French or Swedish. Others, such as the United States and Poland, are tragically revealed as incapable of achieving national solidarity even when faced with such an external threat. Instead they appear more politically polarised than ever, like a man whose right arm is fully engaged in wrestling with his own left arm while a tiger mauls his back.
Related: Britain was led by Churchill then – it’s led by a Churchill tribute act now
Related: Once again a battle-scarred Britain must find a new role in the world
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May 6, 2020
A better world can emerge after coronavirus. Or a much worse one | Timothy Garton Ash
Most Europeans support a universal basic income, yet young people doubt democracy’s capacity to deliver change
The coronavirus crisis seems to be encouraging belief in radical change. An astonishing 71% of Europeans are now in favour of introducing a universal basic income, according to an opinion poll designed by my research team at Oxford university and published today. In Britain, the figure is 68%. Less encouraging, at least to anyone who believes in liberal democracy, is another startling finding in the survey: no less than 53% of young Europeans place more confidence in authoritarian states than in democracies to tackle the climate crisis. The poll was conducted by eupinions in March, as most of Europe was locking down against the virus, but the questions had been formulated earlier. It would be fascinating now to ask Europeans which political system they think has proved better at combating a pandemic, as the United States and China, the world’s leading democracy and the world’s leading dictatorship, spray viral accusations at each other.
Those two contrasting but equally striking survey results show how high the stakes will be as we emerge from the immediate medical emergency, and face the subsequent economic pandemic and its political fallout. What kind of historical moment will this turn out to be, for Europe and the world? It could lead us to the best of times. It could lead us to the worst of times.
Related: The coronavirus is leading to a whole new way of economic thinking | Larry Elliott
Continue reading...April 6, 2020
The EU can emerge stronger from the pandemic if Merkel seizes the moment | Timothy Garton Ash
One member state has become a dictatorship as others spiral into debt. Germany must lead through the coronavirus crisis
Coronavirus – latest updatesSee all our coronavirus coverage“Europe will be forged in crises,” said Jean Monnet, one of the founding fathers of the European Union, “and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.” What kind of Europe emerges from the coronavirus crisis will depend on the answers given to three tests.
First, the Hungarian test: can a dictatorship be a member of the EU? Even before this year, Viktor Orbán and his Fidesz party had so far eroded democracy in Hungary that the country would not qualify for admission to the EU if it were a candidate for membership. He has now used the coronavirus pandemic as justification to take sweeping emergency powers, allowing him to rule by decree for an unlimited period. Hungary is – for the duration of these powers – a dictatorship. Monnet also said a dictatorship cannot be a member of the European Community (which subsequently became the EU). Today, one is.
Timothy Garton Ash is a Guardian columnist
Continue reading...March 1, 2020
Europe (and yes, that includes Britain) can still be a superpower | Timothy Garton Ash
As a European leader once remarked, Europe should be a superpower, not a superstate. Faced with an increasingly powerful and authoritarian China, global heating, the challenge of AI, not to mention an aggressive Russia, chaotic Middle East and Trumpian United States, this argument is more compelling than ever. In a world of giants, you need to be a giant yourself. If we Europeans don’t hang together, we will hang separately.
Most Europeans agree with this simple proposition. Indeed, this is one of the big things they want the European Union to do. But is Europe up to the job? The answer is not a simple yes or no. It depends what dimension of power we are talking about. In trade negotiations, the EU, which represents the biggest and richest multinational single market in the world through a single negotiator, is already a superpower. It has made trade deals with major economies, such as Canada and Japan, of which Brexit Britain can only dream.
I don’t think it’s likely Europe will get its act together in this way. My point is that it is still possible
Related: What has the EU been up to in the run-up to Brexit? | Q&A
Continue reading...January 30, 2020
We remainers must now aim for Britain to do well – and the EU even better | Timothy Garton Ash
Hard though it is to accept, as patriots we must wish Brexit a (partial) success
Britain has not left Europe; it has just stepped into another room. Its European role has always been complex and ambivalent. “The desire for isolation, the knowledge that it is impossible – these are the two poles between which the needle of the British compass continues to waver.” The words of the historian RW Seton-Watson in a history of Britain in Europe published in 1937. True then, even more true now.
We ex-remainers have consistently argued that Brexit will leave the UK weaker, poorer, more divided, less influential, less attractive to the rest of the world. Some evidence is already in. According to Bloomberg Economics, by the end of this year Brexit will have cost Britain some £200bn in lost economic growth – nearly as much (adjusted for inflation) as the country has paid in to the EU budget over the entire period of its membership since 1973.
Related: Is uncertainty lifting now Brexit is finally happening? Experts debate the data
Related: Scottish government wins vote to keep EU flag flying over Holyrood
Continue reading...December 14, 2019
The battle for EU membership is lost, but a European England is still possible | Timothy Garton Ash
With Brexit now a certainty, we can still champion the values we share with millions of other Europeans
“History to the defeated / May say Alas but cannot help or pardon.” WH Auden’s lines from the Spanish civil war now apply to the British Europeans. We fought to keep our country in the European Union and we lost. The half of Britain that wants to leave the EU was united around Boris Johnson while the half that still wants to remain in the EU was divided against itself, and weighed down by the electoral liability called Jeremy Corbyn.
If the deceptive but effective three-word slogan “take back control” won the 2016 referendum, so the equally effective and deceptive three-word slogan “get Brexit done” won this election. Even if voters knew somewhere in the back of their minds that it was too good to be true, in their hearts they wanted it to be. And let’s be honest: even the most passionate of us remainers had some hidden “get Brexit done” corner of our souls.
Related: This was a stunning victory for the bullshit-industrial complex | Marina Hyde
Related: Out of this darkness we must find the will to fight back | George Monbiot
Continue reading...December 8, 2019
On the streets of a marginal seat, I’ve seen how remain disunity could seal Brexit | Timothy Garton Ash
Will you be voting for us?” asks the Liberal Democrat canvasser on the doorstep of an expensive-looking house in Putney. “No,” replies the middle-aged man standing in the doorway, “I’ll be voting for democracy.” We all understand what he means: Conservative, to fulfil the promise of the 2016 referendum and not simply to revoke Brexit, as the Lib Dems propose to do. My father, who lived most of his life just up the road from here, might well have given the same answer.
Related: To hold back the Tory wave, progressives will have to join forces | Polly Toynbee
Continue reading...November 21, 2019
Angela Merkel must go – for Germany’s sake, and for Europe’s | Timothy Garton Ash
If Germany is the heart of Europe, then it is currently the slow-beating heart of a well-fed businessman resting on his office couch after an ample lunch. For Europe’s sake, and for Germany’s own, that heart needs to beat a little faster.
It’s not that German elites don’t intellectually recognise the problems gathering all around them. Berlin, which is beginning to rival London as a thinktank hub, is pullulating with clever people who can tell you exactly why, faced with the challenges of Brexit, populism, Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, climate change and AI – to name but a few – Europe needs more strategic autonomy, digital innovation and sustainable growth. What is missing is a sense of urgency and the ability to translate these abstract goals into dynamic policies that German voters will actually support. For now, Germany is effectively willing the ends but not the means.
Beneath the surface of the country’s success story, there is a growing drumbeat of anxiety. Has it wasted the fat years?
Related: Merkel's CDU could 'tear itself apart' after call for AfD coalition
Related: The Guardian view on political turbulence in Germany: can the centre hold? | Editorial
Continue reading...October 30, 2019
Democracy is under attack in post-Wall Europe – but the spirit of 1989 is fighting back | Timothy Garton Ash
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and Europe’s velvet revolutions, a new generation is standing up to the populists
Imagine someone who had witnessed the liberation of western Europe in 1945 returning in 1975, only to find the dictators coming back. That’s ratherhow it feels revisiting central Europe 30 years after the velvet revolutions of 1989.
Earlier this year, I sat in a hotel bar in Budapest with an old anti-communist dissident friend, János Kis, who calmly described the regime of prime minister Viktor Orbán to me as an autocracy. Yet it was Kis who first introduced me to Orbán, back in 1988, presenting the then 25-year-old student as a bright light of a new generation of young liberal democrats. At a rally in Gdańsk in June, I heard European council president Donald Tusk call on his fellow Poles to learn from the example of the Solidarity movement of the 1980s in opposing the country’s nationalist populist Law and Justice party government. Yet Law and Justice triumphed again this month in a general election.
The future triumph of anti-liberal authoritarianism is no more inevitable than was the future triumph of liberal democracy
Related: Election results give hope to opposition in Poland and Hungary
Continue reading...October 20, 2019
Europe is fed up with Brexit, but it’s still best for all if Britain stays in | Timothy Garton Ash
Macron may have doubts, but if the deal isn’t approved the EU must grant the UK an extension – for its own sake as well as ours
Granted, Brexit is driving everyone mad. We Brits owe all our European friends a sincere apology, a bottle of whisky and complimentary tickets to a Royal Shakespeare Company performance of Hamlet. For Britain is now Hamlet, forever agonising over whether Brexit is to be or not to be.
So I can perfectly understand why Europeans such as French president Emmanuel Macron just want to be shot of us, so as to push ahead with an important, ambitious agenda for the whole European Union. Nonetheless, it remains in Europe’s own enlightened, long-term interest to go the extra kilometre. This means, concretely, that if the British parliament does not approve Boris Johnson’s new deal this week, the EU should offer an article 50 extension, as formally requested in the letter sent (though childishly not signed) by Johnson.
Related: Why the EU should stick to the Brexit deadline and rule out any extensions | Cas Mudde
Related: Brexit: government to seek meaningful vote on deal on Monday – live news
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