October 31, 2004

TIMOTHY Garton Ash is an optimist. The transatlantic relationship is in crisis, with diplomats and policy wonks on both sides of the Atlantic fearing that the intensive post-Iraq marriage counselling will fail. Robert Kagan, the most articulate of America’s neocons, has gone so far as to declare that we live on different planets — Americans from Mars and Europeans from Venus, a beguiling thesis that some have seemed determined to turn into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Garton Ash doesn’t buy it. Well established as Britain’s leading thinker on contemporary European affairs (albeit in a sadly under-crowded field), he is able to bring a wider-angled lens to these familiar, entrenched controversies. Here, conversations with both statesmen and citizens across Europe and North America see him challenge most of the generalizations that dominate the current debate.

For Garton Ash, both Europe and America inevitably contradict themselves — because both contain multitudes. Garton Ash wants not just a renewal of vows but a new shared mission. He also wants to see the end of ‘the West’ but only when the billion of us who live in free societies create a new ‘post-West’ by spreading security and freedom globally. He thus thinks the current transatlantic rift a rather parochial spat, arguing that Europeans may have only another two decades in which they can hope to play a shaping role in global affairs while the scope and limits of America’s military power have also become clearer in postwar Iraq.

Still, starting from here will be difficult. The book’s critique of the Bush administration is a familiar one, though the author is always at pains to distinguish this from anti-Americanism. Indeed, there is a growing awareness within a highly polarized United States of the self-defeating damage done to America’s ‘soft power’ (the worldwide appeal of the Statue of Liberty and its open and prosperous society and the good life). The mistakes America made following September 11, 2001 wasted much of the global sympathy the attacks had brought it.

Yet Garton Ash is no less skeptical about the grandstanding of European statesmen, when the EU’s aspirations to an effective foreign policy remain largely rhetorical. He believes that Blair made a major blunder over Iraq but is fundamentally sympathetic to the project of seeking to ‘bridge’ the Atlantic, arguing that much of the new Europe finds it as impossible as Britain does to choose between loyalty to Europe and America.

Garton Ash believes we can find causes for optimism if our responses to the current international crisis draw as much on Europe’s ‘9/11 of hope’ (the fall of the Berlin wall on November 9, 1989) as America’s 9/11. Just as stereotypes and mutual antagonism saw divisions over Iraq deepen, a virtuous spiral could make his free world possible, Garton Ash suggests. A fully committed European Britain could make a Franco-British-German rapprochement possible, creating a more outward-looking Europe.

Such a Europe could encourage a better America to believe that effective multilateral institutions are possible, this being the only way that emerging powers such as China might cooperate on global warming and so on. These debates are interdependent but, of course, this seems a rather long-odds accumulator bet.

Britain’s deep ambivalence about the European Union and its new constitution and the reaction of Jacques Chirac to the new Europe of 25 — suggesting that ex-Iron Curtain countries might best keep quiet in the EU — hardly augur well.

Garton Ash does not just make an eloquent appeal to the better America and the better Europe. He also insists, unfashionably, on our ability as citizens to exert pressure for change. Here is where his decades talking to Czechs, Poles and Hungarians are most telling. Sometimes, the citizens’ action proposed is direct and tangible: we should pressure governments to meet the much-neglected target to increase aid to 0.7 per cent of GDP and also give 1 per cent of our personal incomes to support development. But how citizens will make their voices count for more in a constructive way, especially when the key decisions are taken in labyrinth of multilateral international institutions, is less clear.

Garton Ash’s ‘free world’ project is unfashionably optimistic, too, despite the spread and entrenchment of democracy over the decades from 1945 to 1975 to 1989 and beyond. Europe’s liberal left, despite its Enlightenment roots, balks from such language, for fear of being associated with an aggressive neocon project. Yet Europe’s left risks becoming a ‘status quo’ force if it tries to turn an effective critique of the botched Iraq intervention into an essentially conservative argument which accepts the premise of a ‘clash of civilizations’ and the belief that the Arabs are incapable of democracy.

The debate about intervention in failed states has become muddied by Iraq, but it would be a mistake to forget the distance travelled over the 1990s because of the failures to intervene in Rwanda or, for too long, in Bosnia, because these ‘ancient ethnic hatreds’ were none of our business. Whether over the current genocide in Sudan or elsewhere, these debates will soon return. But we may be considerably further from finding an effective response to them.

Garton Ash rightly sees a victory for John Kerry in America’s presidential election this November as vital to any fresh start. But a Kerry victory would also re-expose the faultiness of many of the most important and unresolved debates of the past decade. If Europeans could respond to the current crisis in the spirit of this book, it might do something to tilt the balance towards the better America we need. And in asserting the importance of those of us in democratic societies seeking to be authors of our own fate, Garton Ash has produced a humane, democratic manifesto for our times. It is worth recalling the lesson of the fall of the Berlin wall — politics sometimes needs to be the art of the impossible, too. — Dawn/ Observer News Service

 

Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals an Opportunity of our Times

By Timothy Garton Ash

Allen Lane

ISBN 0713997648

256pp. £17.00

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