Free World:

America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West

Timothy Garton Ash (Random House, 2004)

Crisis, drama, destruction and catastrophe have always been with us. Disaster is probably less prevalent today than it was fifty or five-hundred years ago, yet there will always be more than enough to fuel our anxieties and inspire our altruistic deeds. One great service provided by the news media is to direct our attention on a daily basis to wherever things are especially bad at the moment. Yet it may be worthwhile, from time to time, to take a step back from the action, and attempt to gain a degree of perspective with respect to it all. Lacking the background to draw anything approaching a complete picture of current affairs, we turn to experts like Timothy Garton Ash.

Ash, a British journalist, made a name for himself covering the rise of Solidarity in Poland and other events in eastern Europe for the New Yorker . He continues to write for liberal magazines—his analysis of the Orange revolution in Ukraine appeared in a recent issue of the New York Review of Books . Last fall he published a detailed and broad-ranging analysis of world-trends in a book entitled Free World .

Coming from a different source, the title might raise suspicions that we were going to be presented with an anodyne depiction of the rosy future in store for liberal democracy once things settle down in the Middle East and nations everywhere learn to enjoy the warmth and protection of the world's last remaining superpower. Ash is smarter than that, and also less obsessed than most Americans are, whether liberal or conservative, with America's role in world affairs. On page one he reminds us that there are two 9/11s. The American one of which we are all familiar, and the European one signifying the day in November of 1989 when citizens began to hack away at the concrete of the Berlin Wall. (Europeans write the month before the day, hence November 9 is 9/11.) We have cause for concern and cause for hope, and Ash spells them both out in the course of his lengthy and largely well-balanced description of how the world has changed in the last fifteen years. The question he focuses on is how the world will reform itself now that the Cold War is over. “Is the world now divided between the West and the rest?” he asks. “Is the West now divided between Europe and America? Can the West be put together again, and if it can be, should it be?”

Ash is able to frame and explore these issues by means of both insider diplomatic scuttlebutt and the information he has gathered from personal friends throughout Europe and the wider world in the course of his travels. He tends to place undo emphasis on the role of Britain as a “bridge” between American and European concerns, perhaps, but his analysis is full of that common sense that is almost entirely lacking in the apocalyptic analyses that appear in partisan magazines. Of the various blunders associated with the decision to invade Iraq he comments at one point, “The democratic politics of our time are full of career politicians in early middle age, who come to office as experts in all the techniques of winning power at home—but complete amateurs in the exercise of power abroad.” Three examples: Bush, Blair, and German chancellor Gerhard Schröder. He analyses the low-brow Kagan slogan, “Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus,” and also the varied European responses from Derrida, Habermas, and other European intellectuals, while observing that it would require forty books to do the subject justice. The upshot is clear enough, however: “The whole of the new, enlarged Europe is engaged in a great argument between the forces of Euro-Gaullism and Euroatlanticism. This is the argument of the decade. On its outcome will depend the future of the West.”

Returning to specific events, Ash reminds us that it was Blair's Britain, not Bush's America, which insisted on the second resolution which Chirac blocked. “At the finishing line, the diplomacy of the Iraq crisis came down to a clash of two European strategies, Gaullism and Churchillism. In the French case, as in the British, an overall approach to international relations was inexorably bound up with a national diplomatic strategy to preserve as much as possible of a former world power's dwindling status and influence.”

A little further on Ash converts this specific remark to a more general thesis: “The British are incapable of identifying themselves with Europe and the French are incapable of distinguishing themselves from it.”

Most Americans, of course, couldn't care less about what France or Britain think about anything. To them America is single-handedly saving (or destroying) the world, and all the rest is window-dressing. The great pleasure of reading Ash's book is in gaining the perspective of a very knowledgeable individual who can place America's actions in a broader perspective of world geo-politics.

I could go on at length about the wealth of interesting analysis and detail contained in Ash's book. He has the statistics, the anecdotes, and the detachment to keep us enthralled. For example, against Donald Rumsfeld's contention that one part of Europe was entirely behind the invasion of Iraq, with another firmly opposed, he points out that in all European countries, the public was firmly opposed to invasion. Many governments were also deeply divided. “ Tony Blair and José Maria Anzar may have been convinced of the case for war against Iraq, but many of their ministerial colleagues were not,” he writes. “Silvio Berlusconi of Italy told Bush he thought the war was ill-advised but said he would support it out of solidarity with the United States. A change in governments in Italy or Spain could rapidly produce a difference stance: as it might have done in Germany, but in the other direction.”

Since these words were written, Spain has had such a change in government, with the expected result. And if Angela Merkel becomes the next leader of Germany, as many experts predict, Bush will suddenly have himself another ally.

Among the one-liners that contribute to the appeal of any work of political science, Ash has come up with his share:

“Cold War Europe was divided into two halves: the West, which had Europe, and the East, which believed in it.”

“Europeans spend far more time talking about America than they do talking about Europe.”

“Europeans don't like to think of themselves as America's nephew, let alone its son—are they not, after all, its parents?—but some such dependent relationship is implicit when they talk of ‘emancipation.' Parents do not usually seek ‘emancipation' from their children.”

“The emotional leitmotif of European anti-Americanism is resentment mingled with envy; that of American anti-Europeanism is irritation mixed with contempt.”

“In international relations, as in life, problems are often not solved, just overtaken by other problems.”

“Men and women who have reached the top in politics often possess an impressive combination of qualities, amongst which being lucky is merely the most important one.”

“When you get a few glimpses into the way major foreign policy decisions are made, you are left with a sense of mild incredulity that this is how the world is run. It is vital that we all appreciate this simple truth about our rulers: half the time they really don't know what they are doing.”

“The U.S has enterprise but not fairness. Europe has fairness but not enterprise.”

"...what we habitually call Western values are only a few of the values historically embraced by the West, even into very recent times. To associate the West contrantly and exclusively with them is, at best, the highly selective claim of a wider Western patriotism. At worst, it's Western nationalism..."

 

The last section of Ash's book, “What Can We Do?” is the least interesting, but it is also the shortest. He favors liberty, opposes regime change, and advocates the eradication of hunger worldwide and the wise use of natural resources. (Well, who doesn't?) He opposes the nationalistic export of “Western” values—after all, Hitler was a Westerner too—but endorses every effort, following the advice of Confucius, to avoid imposing on others what we do not wish for ourselves. The world he envisions is one in which various nations and peoples can exercise their freedom to become more fully themselves, the result being a diverse and peaceful community of healthy, happy, sovereign entities. (Johann Gottfried von Herder expressed the same attractive vision in 1784.) It's devilishly difficult to achieve any of this by means of a single convenient formula, of course. Fortunately, there are many insights, but few formulas in Free World. And this explains why Ash's description of the tangled mess we have got ourselves into currently is so interesting.