History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  Nonetheless, it is occasionally worth taking up the broad brush to paint what journalists call “the big picture.” I have tried this at a couple of junctures, especially in the essays entitled “Catching the Wrong Bus?” and “The Case for Liberal Order.” Let us revisit this big picture briefly at the end of both decade and book.

  THROUGHOUT MODERN EUROPEAN HISTORY, periods of a given order have alternated with generally shorter ones of violent disorder, during which the political map is redrawn. The last decade of the twentieth century was one of these formative times. A glance at the maps of Europe in 1989 and 1999 will remind you that the political face of Europe changed more between those dates than in any other decade since the hellish one of 1939 to 1949. The disorder of the 1990s was not as violent as its predecessors. Still, in former Yugoslavia it was violent enough to puncture West European leaders’ comforting platitude that “war has been banished from our continent.”

  There is no reason at all why order should descend neatly at the end of an arbitrary division of time. As it happens, the main elements of a new order did seem to be in place by the end of the decade and the millennium. Most of the states of Western Europe, joined together in a slightly larger European Union, had taken the great leap to monetary union. For good or ill, this would determine the shape of West European development for years to come. Germany had absorbed the former East Germany without seriously upsetting its own political system. Its capital moved to Berlin shortly after the Federal Republic’s first-ever complete change of government through the ballot box. The core states of Central Europe had crossed the bottom of the valley on their journey from communist dictatorship to capitalist democracy and from East to West. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic had become members of NATO. Even if joining the EU takes much longer, we know which slope they are climbing. In the Balkans, the former Yugoslavia has been dismembered into a patchwork of small nation-states, together with one or two international protectorates. That process was almost complete.

  There are still long ragged edges and large unanswered questions. Won’t the effects of one interest rate for all create intolerable political strains among the countries participating in monetary union? How will the Berlin republic reconcile the two souls in its Faustian breast: sovereignty regained and sovereignty surrendered, restored Berlin and sacrificed deutsche mark? What about those states on the borderlines between central Europe and the Balkans or Eastern Europe? And all that unfinished business of Kosovo/a, Macedonia, Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, and Serbia itself? But only in the former Soviet Union is the shape of the new order still quite unclear. In these four major parts, Western Europe, Germany, Central Europe, and the Balkans, the basic direction is apparent.

  None of us knew that things would go this way. (Look at the fears expressed early in this book.) The changes for the better experienced by friends in Warsaw, Prague, and Budapest have outstripped all our dreams. What happened to those in Belgrade, Sarajevo, and Priština has been worse than our worst nightmares.

  None of this was inevitable. At every stage, there were other possibilities, paths not taken. In extraordinary times, political leadership is more important than it is in ordinary ones. A large part of the responsibility for two of these four great castings of the die—European monetary union and the shape of German unification—lies with one man: Helmut Kohl. The personal leadership of a Havel or a Göncz was at moments decisive. In the opposite direction, so was that of Mečiar, Tudjman, and Milošević. The received wisdom of the early 1990s had suggested that the economy was the key in both Western Europe and the former Eastern Europe. Instead, we experienced the primacy of politics.

  The new European order has no name as yet. Previous ones have often been known in shorthand by the name of a great international conference. Following the Thirty Years War and the Peace of Westphalia, there was “Westphalia Europe.” After the Napoleonic Wars came the Congress of Vienna and “Vienna Europe”; after the First World War, “Versailles Europe.” Most recently, we had “Yalta Europe,” which was a result of the Second World War but frozen in place for forty years by the cold war. There was no single grand international conference to redraw the map of Europe at the end of the cold war. German politicians, in negotiating their unification, deliberately set out to avoid that. The last thing they wanted was a new Versailles.

  We might think of calling the new order “Paris Europe,” after the November 1990 Paris Charter for a New Europe, signed by all the states of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But the Paris Charter bears as much resemblance to what happened afterward as our personal New Year resolutions do to our subsequent behavior. Contemplating the EU and monetary union, some might say “Brussels Europe.” Those who overdramatize Germany’s return as the great power in the center of Europe might counter with “Berlin Europe.” Then again, if I look at Central Europe or the Balkans, I am tempted to suggest “Washington Europe.” With the enlargement of NATO and the United States’ leading role in the Balkans, the United States is as heavily involved in Europe now as it was in 1989.

  WHATEVER ITS NAME, this is not the order I hoped for. In this respect, I feel a painful contrast with the 1980s. In the 1980s, I argued that the Soviet empire in what was then called Eastern Europe was both illegitimate and fragile. Peaceful change could come only from pressure from below. The West had not just a moral but also a political interest in supporting the so-called dissidents. During the velvet revolutions of 1989, I enjoyed a sense of triumph and vindication. I felt that I had contributed, in a very small way, to a great change for the better.

  Throughout the 1990s, I argued (mainly in newspaper commentaries, lectures, and conference talks not reprinted here) that the West’s top priority should be to seize the opportunity offered by the peaceful ending of the Yalta division of Europe and build a liberal order for the whole of Europe. A “Europe whole and free,” as George Bush put it, in one of his few memorable phrases. So NATO should want to take in the new democracies. The European Union should concentrate on preparing for eastward enlargement and on the close coordination of our national foreign and security policies to meet the challenges that were sure to arise from the upheavals of postcommunism. I wanted Britain to take a lead in this direction.

  The NATO argument was won by the end of the decade, mainly thanks to the advocacy of others, especially in the United States and Germany. The argument about priorities for the European Union was largely lost. We did not prevent war from returning to our continent. We fiddled while former Yugoslavia burned. The United States had once again to step in to sort out Europe’s mess. Preparations for eastward enlargement of the EU were sluggish and niggardly, as if the community’s secret motto was what that French businessmen said to me in January 1996: Il faut toujours en parler, et jamais y penser. If Central Europe is now joining the West, 90 percent of the credit belongs to the Central Europeans themselves, scarcely 10 percent to us. As I feared in my essay of July 1990, we have been Dr. Johnson’s Patron: “One who looks with unconcern on a man struggling for life in the water, and, when he has reached ground, encumbers him with help.” Britain was too hobbled by its own “European debate” to take much of a lead in the direction I had urged.

  This failure of advocacy is hardly surprising. If you think you have influenced policy as a commentator it is usually an illusion anyway. All commentary is a kind of blowing in the wind. When the wind is blowing in the same direction, as it was for me at the end of the 1980s, you may imagine it’s your breath that is bending those trees. When the wind is against you, the spit comes back in your face. Nonetheless, I still have a personal sense of failure.

  The leaders of Western Europe concentrated their energies on the amazing adventure of monetary union. I admire the titanic efforts of statesmanship and political will that made this happen. Only a fool or a bigot could not see potential benefits. But I think it was simply the wrong priority for the 1990s. After the miraculously peaceful end of the cold war, we should have concentrated
our efforts on building that liberal order for the whole of Europe. And I’m afraid that EMU is a bridge too far for Western Europe itself. Some of the countries now in the monetary union are not ready for it. I fear the resulting strains will make Western Europe a very bad-tempered place—perhaps even worse—at some point in the next ten years. The only consolation in making such a guess is that I would be glad to be proved wrong.

  However, the last months of 1999 did bring a rash of developments that I had hoped to see since 1990. European governments, strongly encouraged by a new European Commission under Romano Prodi, resolved to open EU enlargement negotiations with a further six postcommunist states, as well as with Turkey. Together with the already agreed “first wave” of enlargement, this is to lead eventually to a community of twenty-eight rather than fifteen states. The timescale was very unclear, and the devil would be in the details of negotiations, but at least the course had been set. Simultaneously, the new commission identified, for decision at a new intergovernmental conference, the areas in which the EU would have to become more integrated (with a further sharing of sovereignty) if such an enlarged community was to work properly.

  In the same period, the EU appointed its first foreign-policy representative, choosing former NATO secretary-general Javier Solana. Henry Kissinger’s famous question—“I want to talk to Europe, but what telephone number should I call?”—was not yet answered, since on any important issue a U.S. secretary of state would still have to speak to at least three or four major national governments. This was nonetheless a step in the right direction. And European leaders agreed to build up a European rapid-reaction force, as part of more coordinated European defense and security policy.

  So at the end of the decade we started in earnest the work upon which we should have embarked at its beginning. Perhaps advocacy had some effect after all. Yet far more important was the impact of another bloody war in the Balkans—one that directly involved all the major West European powers.

  These developments coincided with celebrations to mark the tenth anniversaries of the velvet revolutions of 1989. As I turned from one to the other, I could not help wondering whether the problem with what happened in 1989 was that it had been too peaceful, velvet, and magical. The great drive for the “construction of Europe” after 1945 came out of the traumatic experience of the Second World War, together with its preceding and succeeding horrors. Have we learned nothing? Are we so complacent and shortsighted that it has taken another war for us to start doing what we should already have done?

  Most of the fragments in this kaleidoscope come from faraway countries of which most American readers know little. The political argument I made in the 1990s, like that of the 1980s, was of course influenced by my personal involvement in Germany, Central Europe, and the Balkans. To be thus deeply engaged in the affairs of other countries brings the danger of being partisan or quixotic—and certainly of being seen as such. Yet to be judged on your arguments rather than your motives is a basic intellectual right, and I maintain that the argument is valid for the whole of Europe. Where, however,does it leave the country in which I live and about which I care still more deeply?

  Although Britain stands a little apart from Europe, the singularity of its apartness and ambivalence is often overstated. For example, it is said that Britain is one of only two European countries in which people talk about Europe as being somewhere else. (“Jim’s just back from Europe.”) The other, we are told, is Russia. Yet I have encountered this way of speaking about Europe in many other European countries, from Portugal to Poland and Sweden to Greece. Swedes, Poles, and Greeks insist their countries are parts of Europe but also worry that there’s a political, economic, or cultural reality to which they might not fully belong.

  In fact, about the only European countries that never question their own belonging to Europe are France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Yet even in those core countries of Western Europe there is ambivalence about the shape that the political project known as “Europe” has assumed in the 1990s. Remember that only a bare majority of French voters approved of the Maastricht treaty in the referendum of September 1992. Until well into 1998, more than half the Germans asked in opinion polls said they were opposed to giving up the deutsche mark for the euro. One of the chronic British fallacies about “Europe” is the notion that over there, on the Continent, three hundred million people are lined up behind a single grand design, like a Napoleonic army.

  Britain also vibrates to some deeper European rhythms, often without knowing it. Take “sleaze,” for example, one of the big themes of British politics in the 1990s. If you look through the chronologies in this book, you will find that the exposure of political corruption was a feature of European politics altogether. In Italy, France, Spain, and Greece, serving or former prime ministers were accused, indicted, imprisoned, or committed suicide as a result. Why did political corruption become a major issue across Europe? Was it because the end of the cold war meant people felt free to expose corruption where previously this would have been seen as playing into the hands of the other side? Because more than forty years of the same system had encouraged the slow erosion of standards? Because, since elections are now won by television and advertising, politicians need ever more money to fund it? Whatever the reasons, Britain had a rather mild bout of an all-European disease.

  Or take devolution. Is it pure accident that Scotland and Wales voted for their own new national assemblies at a time when smaller peoples all over Europe were pressing for greater autonomy or seizing independence? Catalonia and the Basque country, Wallonia and Flanders, Slovakia, Croatia, Slovenia, Moldova, Ruthenia…. Again, the local causes are diverse, but there is a deeper pattern, a dance to the music of Europe.

  That said, in some respects Britain really is different. The most obvious of these include common law, the unwritten constitution, and the sovereignty of Parliament; our deep affinities with what Churchill called “the English-speaking peoples”—Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders; and the Anglo-American version of capitalism, as opposed to the Franco-German or “Rhenish” model that predominates in what is now popularly called “Euroland.” While many European peoples doubt whether they belong fully to Europe, we are one of the few who also doubt whether we want fully to belong. (Who are the others? Russia certainly. Perhaps Ukraine and Serbia. Denmark? Sweden?) So we once again stand aside from a major continental development as we agonize over whether or not to join Euroland.

  Our choice will matter to Europe, since Britain is the fifth-largest economy in the world, politically and militarily one of the EU’s big three states, and home to its most important financial center. If Russia is the great unknown in Europe’s east, Britain is the major unknown in its west. This choice coincides with the incremental disuniting of the United Kingdom, in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Together, these two developments pose fundamental questions about where and what we wish Britain to be—and, for us English, about England. As the historian Geoffrey Hosking has suggested, the English have this in common with the Russians: Our national identity has for centuries been bound up with an imperial one. So the Matter of England is set fair to be one of Europe’s more interesting subjects over the next ten years.

  The trouble with the choice about entering monetary union— shall we call it The Choice?—is that it hinges on economics and on speculative assertions about the political consequences of economic actions. In this it differs from other great foreign-policy choices such as the Suez crisis or Vietnam, where interested citizens could readily grasp the main facts. This is much more complex, impenetrable, and imponderable. (Am I alone in feeling that it is also more boring?)

  As a noneconomist, I can say only three things about The Choice with any confidence. First, if one cares at all about the rest of Europe, one must now hope for the existing monetary union of eleven states to succeed, even if one wishes (as I do) that it had not been tried in this decade. Second, it is possible to be in favor
of the European Union and opposed to Britain joining monetary union. Some British opponents of monetary union really are “anti-European,” but it is quite wrong to disqualify all opponents with that tag. Third and most important: Don’t believe those who maintain that the course they advocate—to go in, to stay out—is without large dangers.

  Both courses are heavy with risk. If Britain goes in, we risk sacrificing some of our hard-won flexibility and competitive advantages, joining an enterprise that is flawed, having an interest rate that may not fit our economic circumstances and diminishing democratic, parliamentary control over vital areas of national policy. If we stay out, we risk loss of influence over European decisions that will directly affect us, long-term decline in the foreign direct investment that has created many jobs in Britain, discrimination against British exports to our largest market, and being downgraded as a political partner of the United States. For us in Britain, the chief legacy of Europe’s nineties is this unenviable choice.

  THE CONTRAST WITH GERMANY could hardly be sharper. Germany’s great decisions were already made in the 1990s. Moreover, it was remarkable to observe how the doubts and fears that surrounded Germany at the beginning of the decade had disappeared almost entirely by its end. If, today, you asked a politician in Rome, Paris, London, or Warsaw, “What are the main problems in Europe?” the chances are that Germany would not even be mentioned in the answer. Here is evidence of an extraordinary achievement.

  The summer of 1999 saw another milestone: the participation of German troops in the liberation and occupation of Kosovo. As an Englishman, I found it moving to watch how, sixty years after the outbreak of the Second World War, British and German soldiers risked their lives together so that the Kosovar Albanians could go home.

  The history of Europe in the twentieth century might be told as a short sequence of unforgettable photographs. The Second World War is that little Polish Jewish boy, hands in the air, bewilderment on his charming, innocent face, as German soldiers drive him out of the Warsaw ghetto. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 is the man standing defiantly in front of a Russian tank on Wenceslaus Square, in the center of Prague. Now I would add a photograph from Prizren, Kosovo, in June 1999. A German officer, unarmed except for the pistol in his holster, resolutely approaches a heavily armed Serbian soldier in order to wrench the gun from his hands. The Serb’s fellow soldiers stand around, angrily, and under their steel helmets they look just like the Germans in the photograph from the Warsaw ghetto. An old story is over, a new one begins.