"We live in a more dangerous world and Europeans cannot close our eyes"

Timothy Garton Ash (London, 1955) has documented live European history in recent decades as a historian and journalist. Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, he has traced in his books a history of the present that encompassed Europe (Arcàdia in Catalan and Taurus in Spanish), in which the history of the Old Continent of the last four decades is mixed with their personal experiences.

We believe that the world would end up similar to Europe at the beginning of the 21st century and it resembles that of the end of the 19th. What happened?

The 1990s and the beginning of the millennium were one of the most hopeful periods in European history and one of the things that has led us to the avalanche of crises that we have experienced since 2008. It is that we deceived ourselves into believing that things would continue to go our way, that history would follow our path. Part of what has happened these years is reversible. In the last Polish elections, it seemed very difficult to get rid of an entrenched populist nationalist government, and the Poles succeeded. But in the meantime, the world around us has changed. And instead of following Europe to become an example of multilateralism and multi-level post-national governance, we compete with great powers, China, Russia, the USA, Turkey, Brazil, India, South Africa. And if you see how they behave, it is more like how the great European powers of the 19th century did it than those of the end of the 20th century.

That led to world wars. Should we be worried?

It is dangerous. Many countries outside Europe have not only maintained good relations with Russia even during the war in Ukraine, but believe that they must have nuclear weapons, is one of the conclusions they have drawn from the conflict. In other words, it is a more dangerous world and Europeans are not doing ourselves any favors by closing our eyes, Europe has already had too much wishful thinking. We must recognize the world we are in and adapt.

He says that the great problem of the West in recent decades has been arrogance.

The pride We thought history was on our side, we became complacent, lazy, neglected the other half of our own societies. All over Europe.

He believes that the belief in free markets as a panacea was a mistake. What should be its role?

My friends from Eastern Europe concluded after the communist experience that economic freedom is an indispensable component of freedom. But a liberalism reduced to only one dimension, 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 had to do it all. And now we pay a very high price. I have always believed in egalitarian liberalism. You need a significant level of equality to enable individual freedom, what Ralf Dahrendorf called the common ground, everyone must have education, health, housing, opportunities in the labor market. It’s what we lost in the nineties and two thousand and populism arrived and said: we see you, we listen to you, we’ll do the things you need. Polish populists spoke of redistribution of respect, as important as that of money.

In the chapter on arrogance, he addresses cool Britannia.

It was actually pretty cool in the Blair years. The mistake was, and Blair did a lot of things right, to believe that you could continue to open the economy, the markets, immigration, and not have at some point a reaction against it. The opening was right, but you had to anticipate the backlash, which came in the form of Brexit.

To close the chapter of arrogance: USA and its wars.

Fueled by what happened in Europe in 1989, when you overthrow the dictator and you get Vaclav Havel, in Iraq they had a lot of pride. In May 2001, George W. Bush wanted to focus on China as a new major competitor, but 9/11 arrived and everything was a war on terror. Now they have chaos in the Middle East and China as a superpower. And I hate the democracy of the United States. If he puts a gun to my head and asks me who will be the next president of the country, I will tell him Trump. It will be a disaster for the United States, a great challenge for Europe and a catastrophe for Ukraine.

Was it a provocation to expand NATO to the East?

It was the right thing. Imagine what Estonia would be like today if it were not in NATO and the EU. You wouldn’t sleep peacefully in bed being on the border with Russia. It is a mistake to think that that expansion is the cause of the invasion of Ukraine. In 1994, Putin was already talking about territories that were historically Russian, Crimea. The mistake was to leave Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova in those limbos of empty promises saying they would be members, angering Putin and giving them no security.

Was Europe wrong with Putin believing that it was enough for the economies to be linked?

The European dream after World War II was that there would be no more war between European nations. It was not a mistake, but it was to think that we could secure peace by non-military means. Dialogue, diplomacy, economic interdependence. 2014 was the turning point. If we had woken up when the invasion of Crimea and put more sanctions on Russia, armed Ukraine, gone after the dirty money that was in London, reduced energy dependence, we would not be in the mess we are in today. If you want peace, prepare for war.

He met Putin. How is it?

The question is how it is today. He used to have imperialist ideas, but he was cautious and calculating. After the covid isolation he was much more muddled in his fantasies of Russian grandeur. I don’t think there can be a different relationship with Russia while he is in charge.

In the book he ventured that by the time it was published some unexpected event would have happened. Like Gaza?

it is It wasn’t just the Israelis who were surprised by October 7, Hamas too, because of how far they came in their brutal venture. Now there is a terrible war. And if 50 years ago people with origins in emigration were a small minority in Europe, now they are large minorities. The Yom Kippur War was a big issue for Europe, but a foreign policy affair. Half a century later, the war between Israel and Hamas is no longer a foreign affair, but a domestic one.

How do you see Israel’s response?

It is the worst attack on its civilian population since independence, a total pogrom. He has the right to self-defense. But how they conduct the campaign… It is a great misfortune for Israel to have Netanyahu as a leader. They violate international humanitarian law and what they do is morally, legally and politically very problematic. So you don’t get a long-term solution. Europe must say that they must return to some version of the two-state solution.

He concludes the book by talking about a sense of decline in Europe and Zweig’s The World of Yesterday.

I wouldn’t say decline but hesitation. Many people today talk about Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. We need to avoid their fatalism. He wrote it when Europe was burning and his despair drove him to commit suicide. Much of what we have achieved in Europe since 1945 is still in place, damaged, threatened, but it endures. There is so much to defend. We need pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will. Recognize the depth of the problems, but believe that it is possible to solve them.

In the book he shows experiences of being European over time. What is being European in the 21st century?

The living experience of being European is to feel at home abroad, as I do now in Madrid. And millions of Europeans connect with it, especially young people. We live the opposite today than after the Italian reunification. Then they said “we have made Italy, now we have to make Italians”. We have created Europeans, now we have to make Europe.