Timothy Garton Ash (London, 1955) has documented live European history of the last four decades from his dual role as historian and journalist. Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, he has outlined in his books a history of the present that he now summarizes in Europe (Taurus in Spanish and Arcàdia in Catalan), a book in which the history of the old continent of the last four decades is mixes with his personal experiences, from his meetings with the people of the towns that have changed their name and country again and again in Eastern Europe to a conversation with Putin in 1994 that shows that his post-imperial ambitions were already early.
We believed that the world was going to end up looking like Europe at the beginning of the 21st century and it has ended up looking like Europe at the end of the 19th century. What happened?
The nineties and the beginning of the millennium were one of the most hopeful periods in all of European history and one of the things that has led us to the cascade of crises that we have had since 2008 is that we fooled ourselves into believing that things were going to continue going in our own way, that history was going to continue going our way. A part of what happened these years is reversible. In the last Polish election it looked like it was going to be very difficult to get rid of an entrenched populist nationalist government and the Poles managed to do it. But in the meantime the world around us has changed. And instead of a world following Europe to become an example of multilateralism and multi-level post-national governance, we are competing with great powers, China, Russia, the US, Turkey, Brazil, India, South Africa. And if you see the way they behave, it is more similar to how the great European powers or empires of the 19th century did than those of the late 20th century.
The game of these great European powers led to two world wars. Should we worry?
It is dangerous. Many of the countries outside Europe have not only maintained good relations with Russia even during the Ukrainian war but believe that they should have nuclear weapons, it is one of the conclusions they have drawn from the Ukrainian war. So it is a more dangerous world and we Europeans are not doing ourselves any favors by closing our eyes to it and maintaining illusory thoughts, Europe has already had too much wishful thinking. We must recognize that this is the world we are in and adapt.
Then that book by Mark Leonard titled ‘Why Europe Will Lead the 21st Century?’ we forget it.
Ha ha ha. My dear friend Mark Leonard… I have two friends who must regret the titles of their books. One is Mark Leonard and the other is Francis Fukuyama with The End of History.
In ‘Europe’ he says that the great problem of the West in recent decades has been arrogance.
Specifically, pride. We convinced ourselves that history was on our side, we became complacent, lazy, we neglected the other half of our own societies. All over Europe.
He says that the belief in free markets as a panacea for everything was a mistake. What should be your role?
What my friends in Eastern Europe concluded from the communist experience is that economic freedom is an indispensable component of freedom. We need it. But a liberalism reduced to only one dimension, to economic liberalism, without political, cultural and social liberalism, is not liberalism at all. And that’s what happened in the nineties and the beginning of the millennium, free markets were going to do everything, and for that mistake we are now paying a very high price.
Where does liberalism have to go then?
My version of liberalism, like that of Dworkin, Rawls or Ralf Dahrendorf, was always an egalitarian liberalism. We believed that you need a significant level of equality to enable individual freedom, what Dahrendorf called the common ground: everyone has to have education, healthcare, housing, opportunities in the labor market. It’s what we lost in the ’90s and ‘2000s and populism came and said: we see you, we hear you, we’re going to do the things you need. So part of pushing back populism is addressing the social needs of the other half of our societies.
Was neoliberalism too extreme a version of liberalism?
Right, but I’m cautious about talking about neoliberalism because I watched it develop these decades and most of the people implementing those policies in the financial sector weren’t reading Hayek or Friedman, they weren’t ideological neoliberals. It was simply the way capitalism developed. I prefer to talk about financialized globalized capitalism. There were these two elements: globalization, very good for many people in China or India but bad for others in poor parts of Spain or France, and financialization, which fueled inequalities and led us to the 2008 crisis. And it is that combination more than simply neoliberal ideology that got us into the mess we are in.
It speaks of a cultural fracture today.
The great irony of the great liberal egalitarian project of taking young people to university is that the unexpected consequence is that countries have been divided in two, between those who have gone to universities, live in cities, speak foreign languages, like globalization and Europe, and those who don’t. The challenge is to find space in the liberal European agenda for the other half of our societies.
Is it the main explanation for populism today?
There is a pointless debate about whether populism is more economic or cultural. Every example, every case of populism, has both components. An inequality of income and wealth but equally of attention and respect. Polish populists spoke of redistribution of respect, as important as that of money.
In the chapter on arrogance he also addresses that of ‘cool Britannia’.
In fact it was quite ‘cool’ in the Blair years. As I tell in the book, I watched the video of the opening of the Olympic Games in London again with tears in my eyes. It was the image of an inclusive society. The mistake was, and Blair did many things right, believing that you could continue to open the economy, the markets, immigration, and not have at some point a reaction against it. The opening was correct, but you had to anticipate the reaction, which unfortunately came in the form of Brexit.
Has Brexit been a disaster?
It has been. Almost all of the negative consequences we warned about have happened. The economic cost, in international reputation, attractiveness, soft power, has been enormous. The good news is that the issue now is to get closer to the EU again, it is with Sunak and it will be even more so with Keir Starmer.
To close the chapter on arrogance: the new Rome, the US and its wars.
Fueled by what happened in Europe in 1989, in which you overthrew the dictator and you got Vaclav Havel, there was a lot of arrogance in the invasion of Iraq. In the book I tell about my meeting with George W. Bush in May 2001 and how he wants to focus on China as a new great geopolitical competitor, but 9/11 arrived and everything was a war on terror. A decade of strategic distraction while China grew. Now they have chaos in the Middle East and China as a superpower. And I’m worried about US democracy. If he puts a gun to my head and asks me who will be the next US president, I’ll tell him Trump. And it will be a disaster for the US, a catastrophe for Ukraine, a great challenge for Europe…
What explains that after what happened in Congress he can still be president?
I can understand that there are some people who like his policies, but how can they vote for such an absolutely and incomprehensibly unpleasant human being? It connects with the frustration of being ignored and not respected, with that accumulated anger that makes them despite everything prepared to vote for him rather than allow the liberal elites to pass.
Was it a mistake to expand NATO to the East, a provocation as Putin says?
On the contrary. It was the right thing to do. Imagine what Estonia would be like today if she were not in NATO and the EU. You wouldn’t sleep peacefully in bed on the border with Russia. It is a mistake to think that this enlargement is a cause of the intervention in Ukraine. In 1994 he was already talking about territories that were historically Russian, and Crimea. The cause has been the empire. The invasion of Ukraine shows that it was a good decision. The mistake was leaving Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova in that limbo of empty promises that they would be members, angering Putin and without giving them any security.
Was Europe wrong in believing that it was enough with Putin that the economies were so interrelated?
The European dream after the Second World War was never again war between European nations. It was not a mistake, but it was a mistake to think that we could ensure peace through purely non-military means. Dialogue, diplomacy, economic interdependence. Being energy dependent on Russia was a good thing. A big mistake. For me, 2014 was the turning point. If we had woken up to the invasion of Crimea and put more sanctions on Russia, armed Ukraine, gone after the dirty money circulating in London and other cities, reduced our energy dependence, sent a strong message to Putin, we wouldn’t be in trouble from today. The old truth works. If you want peace, prepare for war.
You have met Putin. How is he?
The question is what it is like today. Before, he had imperialist ideas but he was cautious and rationally calculating. He did not openly oppose NATO’s expansion to the East. What people explain is that after the covid isolation period he became much more wrapped up in his fantasies of Russian greatness and less calculating. I don’t think he will have a path back to a different relationship with Russia while he is in office.
In the book, written in 2022, he ventures that when it was published something unexpected would surely have happened. Loop?
It is. Not only were the Israelis surprised by what happened on October 7, but Hamas was also surprised by how far they went in their brutal onslaught. Now there is a terrible war. And in that sense, one of the points of the book is that 50 years ago people with immigrant origins in our societies were a small minority. Now they are large minorities. And if something happens anywhere and you have people from all over, it’s going to be a domestic issue too. The Yom Kippur War was a big issue for Europe, but a foreign policy issue. Half a century later, the war between Israel and Hamas is no longer a foreign matter but a domestic one.
What do you think of Israel’s response?
There is no doubt that it is the largest attack on its civilian population since its independence, a total pogrom. Israel has a legitimate right to self-defense. But the way they conduct the campaign… It is a great disgrace for Israel to have Netanyahu as its leader. It clearly violates the international humanitarian laws of war. And what he does is morally, legally and politically very problematic because it is not the way you achieve a long-term solution. I asked Dick Cheney after 9/11 how he thought his war on terror ended. And he said that with the elimination of terrorists. An extremely stupid response. And the danger is that Netanyahu will give the same response to this war. Yes, they are terrorists, you have to go after their military, but that is not going to be the end of Hamas or Palestinian aspirations. In Europe we have to say that they must return to some version of the two-state solution. It is possible that this terrible war will end up driving people back to that solution.
He concludes his book by talking about a feeling of decline in Europe and Stefan Zweig’s ‘The World of Yesterday’.
I wouldn’t say decline but hesitancy. Many people today talk about Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. I feel strongly that we need to avoid fatalism from him. It was written when Europe was burning and his desperation led him to suicide. Much of what we have achieved in Europe since 1945 is still in place, beaten, threatened, but there. There is a lot to defend. The combination we need is pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. Intellectual pessimism to recognize the depth of the problems we have, we must analyze how to help Ukraine win the war, deal with the issue of mass immigration, help fix the war between Israel and Hamas, win back the other half of our own societies, but we must also have the optimism of the will to believe that it is possible.
By the way, he warns that a divided Europe could end up governed remotely by China.
What we have today in Vucic’s Serbia or Orban’s Hungary are countries that understand that they can play both sides. Being in the EU but going to Beijing to see Putin, having big energy deals with Russia, strong economic ties with China. That is the great danger. In the future of the EU as a union the centrifugal and centripetal forces are in competition and it is up to us to decide which wins.
Can China be perceived by many countries as an alternative model?
It already is in Africa and Latin America for many people, what we could politely call developmental authoritarianism. The good thing is that we have already had our crises, China is about to have them, it is on its way. We see less growth, growing frustration among young Chinese because the prospects no longer seem so good, and the tension between the two elements of the system, Leninism and capitalism, are going to be acute. I would be surprised if we don’t see a significant crisis in the Chinese system in the next few years. But it is not going to lead to a wonderful democracy, that is another illusion of the nineties.
In a book in which you talk to so many people, with so many experiences of being European over time, what does it mean to be European in the 21st century?
The living experience of being European is to feel at home abroad, like I do now in Madrid. And millions of Europeans connect with that, especially young people. We live the opposite today than after Italian reunification. So they said “we have made Italy, now we have to make Italians.” We have created Europeans, now we have to make Europe.
