History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  I don’t speak lightly of “normalization” or “a new normality,” since for Germany, as for Poland, normality is historically abnormal. Certainly, there are still large questions in and for Germany. The question, for example, of the depth of its commitment to the eastward enlargement of the European Union, not just in words but in deeds that require paying a short-term cost in order to secure a long-term benefit. Or the question of its ability to reform a once exemplary “social market economy” so that it remains globally competitive. And, closely linked to that, awkward questions about the lasting acceptance of the Euro.

  Yet for now one must record, with wonder, the most startling outcome of this formative decade: There is no longer a German Question. Instead, we have an English Question.

  WHAT, finally, of the United States and Europe? As I have noted already, the United States was no less involved in European affairs at the end of the decade than it was at the beginning. On a moment’s reflection, this is quite surprising. Most alliances in history have collapsed after the common enemy was vanquished. Having abruptly departed Europe after the end of the First World War, the United States was brought back into Europe during the Second World War by one common enemy, the “Axis” of Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and imperial Japan, and then kept there for the duration of the cold war by another: Soviet communism and its allies. When the cold war ended, some foresaw the demise not just of NATO but of “the West” altogether: “The political ‘West’ was not a natural construct but a highly artificial one,” wrote Owen Harries in 1993. “It took the presence of a life-threatening, overtly hostile ‘East’ to bring it into existence. It is extremely doubtful whether it can survive the disappearance of that enemy.”1

  But it has—thus far, anyway. Why? Partly, no doubt, because of the deep substrata of shared history, culture, and values. In a world at once more globalized and more consciously multicultural, such commonalities are accentuated. The formerly dominant Western culture is more widespread but also more contested. The strange survival of the West also has to do with the habits of cooperation, built up over at least fifty years—sixty in the case of the United States and Britain—and institutionalized as never before, whether in secret intelligence sharing, the formal organizations of political, military, and economic coordination, or the countless nongovernmental, transatlantic talking shops.

  Another small contributing cause was the enthusiasm of the new arrivals from Central Europe. Poland, in particular, is one of the most pro-American countries in Europe. Polish, Czech, and Hungarian politicians irk the French by constantly describing what they want to join as “the Euratlantic structures.” The enlargement of NATO also reinvigorated the alliance. As I write, a brigade of Poland’s King Jan Sobieski Armored Cavalry has just taken over from Italy’s San Marco Battalion in the unruly divided city of Kosovska Mitrovica. Last but not least, there were still common enemies in the wider world: rogue states, terrorists, the international drug traders. And there were common challenges, such as the new Asian great powers in the making—and China above all.

  None of this means that the transatlantic alliance, which has defined the modern “West,” is eternally secured. Nor will any of this prevent the U.S.-European relationship from being racked by discord. In 2000, a major row seems to be brewing over Washington’s plans for a national missile-defense system and European fears of a consequent “decoupling.” But this row feels so familiar. In every decade of NATO’s history there has been at least one major transatlantic disagreement. Can there be a family without family arguments?

  What is qualitatively new is the extent of European integration and the possibility of gradually extending it to embrace the whole continent. The United States is now called upon to define its attitude to processes about which it has sometimes seemed ambivalent. As an English European, my view is that the United States should unequivocally welcome the general direction of these two historical developments—for Europe’s sake but also out of enlightened American self-interest. Without “interfering in internal affairs,” it can also legitimately support certain priorities. Thus, for example, it should surely encourage the development of a European rapid-reaction force, particularly if—as we saw in the Kosovo war—the United States itself is not prepared to risk the life of a single U.S. soldier in order to make peace or remedy gross violations of human rights in Europe. Similarly, the United States is obviously crucial to the balancing act between the essential enlargement of NATO and the European Union and the equally vital relationship with Russia. The latter, in particular, is too large for Europe to handle on its own.

  As for the further integration that may be catalyzed by monetary union; there is, to be sure, a Gallic vision of “Euroland” that envisages it as a rival to the United States. But there is also an alternative conception that sees the European Union as a “partner in leadership” with the United States—to recall another helpful phrase of George H. W Bush. Altogether, there is a struggle going on for Europe’s soul. Crudely stated, this is a new version of the old argument between the Atlanticist, liberal, global free-trading and the Gaullist, etatist, protectionist orientations. Obviously, a victory for the former is in the American interest (and, I believe, in Europe’s own). More difficult is the question of how the United States might help to bring it about. It is not for me to design such a strategy. The starting point, however, must be to see Europe plain and to see it whole.

  NOTES

  INTRODUCTION

  1. See Reinhart Koselleck, “Sprachwandel und Ereignisgeschichte,” Merkur 8/43, August 1989.

  2. E. J. Hobsbawm, “The Historian between the Quest for the Universal and the Quest for Identity,” Diogenes 42/4, no. 168.

  3. Neal Ascherson, “Fellow-Travelling,” London Review of Books, 8 February 1996.

  4. On this, see my “Orwell in 1998,” in The New York Review of Books, 22 October 1998.

  5. The don was Harry Willetts—an otherwise lovable, wry, and learned historian of Russia and Poland and translator of both the pope and Solzhenitsyn.

  THE SOLUTION

  1. Armin Mitter and Stefan Wolle, eds., Ich liebe Euch doch alle! Befehle und Lageberichte des MfS, January—November 1989 [Rut I love you all! Orders and situation reports of the Ministry for State Security, January—November 1989] (Berlin: BasisDruck Verlagsgesellschaft, 1990). But see note 3 below.

  2. See the chapter on Germany in my The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw, Budapest, Berlin, and Prague, new ed. (New York: Vintage, 1999).

  3. Like many of the most famous quotations in history, this is generally misquoted. It is usually given as “Ich liebe Euch doch alle,” as in the book title cited in note 1. Rut in the televised record of the People’s Chamber session he says just, “Ich liebe doch alle … alle Menschen.”

  INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICIANS

  1. See my account in The Magic Lantern.

  2. Václav Klaus, Proč jsem konzervativcem? (Why am I a conservative?) (Prague: TOP Agency, 1992).

  3. A very useful exploration of this subject, partly inspired by Havel’s earlier writings, is Ian MacLean, Alan Montefiore, and Peter Winch, eds., The Political Responsibility of Intellectuals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

  4. I first used this phrase in my essay “Après le Déluge, Nous,” see above, p. 24.

  5. Published in English as George Konrád and Ivan Szelényi, The Intellectuals on the Road to Class Power (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1979). Szelényi notes in his introduction that the manuscript was completed in 1974.

  6. The full title of the English-language volume is Toward a Civil Society: Selected Speeches and Writings, 1990—1994 (Prague: Lidové Noviny, 1994). A note on the copyright page indicates that this volume is edited by Paul Wilson, with the translations by Paul Wilson and others. A slightly different edition has now been published as The Art of the Impossible: Politics as Morality in Practice: Speeches and Writings, 1990—1996 (New York: Knopf, 1997). The Czech collections are Václav Havel,
Projevy leden-červen 1990 (Speeches: January—June 1990) (Prague: Vyšehrad, 1990); Václav Havel, Váženi občané, Projevy červenec 1990—červenec 1992 (Dear citizens: Speeches, July 1990—July 1992) (Prague: Lidové Noviny, 1992); and Václav Havel 1992 & 1993 (Prague: Paseka, 1994).

  7. The Czech original is even more emphatic, saying literally, “All lie who tell us that politics is a dirty business.”

  8. Václav Havel, Váženi občané, pp. 198—99.

  9. The sequel is amusing. After being instrumental in reactivating the PEN club, Klíma was summoned for interrogation by the security police. Their main concern was that Václav Havel should not become president of Czech PEN. Three months later, he was president of Czechoslovakia.

  BOSNIA IN OUR FUTURE

  1. This and many other details come from the superb documentary series The Death of Yugoslavia (made for BBC Television by Brian Lapping Associates, series producer Norma Percy) and the book that accompanies the series, Laura Silber and Alan Little, The Death of Yugoslavia (London: Penguin/BBC, 1995). See also Misha Glenny The Fall of Yugoslavia, rev. ed. (London: Penguin, 1993).

  2. The decision to adopt the term Bosniak as the name of the nation previously described as the Bosnian Muslims was taken by the Second Bosnian Assembly in 1993 and reaffirmed in the Dayton agreement and constitution. (I am most grateful to Robert Donia for this information.) I use the term not only because it is the correct one, but also because, in my experience, many Bosnian “Muslims” are not at all muslim in the sense that, say, an Iranian or a Saudi would recognize.

  3. In fact, it was the linguist Max Weinreich who observed in 1945, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” I am most grateful to Tim Snyder for this information. Perhaps one could also say that a state is a language with an army.

  FORTY YEARS ON

  1. The excellent English-language edition is György Litván, ed., The Hungarian Revolution of 1956: Reform, Revolt, and Repression, 1953—1963, ed. and trans. János M. Bak and Lyman H. Legters (London: Longman, 1996).

  2. Entitled “Hungary and the World 1956: The New Archival Evidence,” the conference was organized by the Institute for the History of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, in Budapest, and the National Security Archive and the Cold War International History Project, both of Washington, D.C.

  3. The Malin notes are translated and expertly annotated by Mark Kramer, a Harvard specialist on Soviet—Eastern European relations, in a compendium of declassified documents prepared for the conference by the 1956 Institute and the National Security Archive. A larger collection of documents is due to be published by Central European University Press.

  4. The memorandum is included in ibid.

  5. See my review essay “From World War to Cold War,” The New York Review of Books, 11 June 1987.

  6. Victoire d’une défaite is the title of the original French edition (Fayard, 1968). The English edition is entitled Budapest 1956: A History of the Hungarian Revolution (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971).

  7. Suitably enough, Miklós Haraszti’s book on the position of artists under Kádárism was entitled The Velvet Prison (New York: Basic Books, 1987). See also my “The Hungarian Lesson” in The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe, new ed. (London: Penguin, 1999).

  8. See István Bibó, Democracy, Revolution, Self-Determination: Selected Writings, ed. Károly Nagy (Boulder, Colo.: Social Science Monographs, 1991).

  9. “Refolution in Hungary and Poland,” The New York Review of Books, 17 August 1989.

  10. János Kenedi, Kis Állambiztonsági Olvasókönyv a Kádár-korszakban (A small reader on the state security services in the Kádár period) (Budapest: Magvetö, 1996).

  TRIALS, PURGES, AND HISTORY LESSONS

  1. I am grateful to Priscilla Hayner for confirming this tally. Her book about truth commissions is due to be published as Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity (New York: Routledge, forthcoming).

  2. I look at the work of the South African truth commission in “True Confessions,” The New York Review of Books, 17July 1997.

  CRY, THE DISMEMBERED COUNTRY

  1. I put “muslims” in quotes in both cases, because Islamic observance seems to be even more lax in the Kosovar case—certainly in the towns—than in the Bosnian one. There is also a small but significant community of Kosovar Albanian Catholics.

  2. “Dervishes” is no mere figure of speech. Although the dervish orders were officially closed down in 1952, I was shown a mosque in Orahovac where the dervish rites are now again observed.

  3. This and much other invaluable information is to be found in two excellent reports by the International Crisis Group, Kosovo Spring and Kosovo’s Long Hot Summer, both available from www.crisisweb.org.

  4. See “The Serbian Tragedy,” above, p. 195.

  5. It is striking that the few references to Kosovo in Richard Holbrooke’s To End a War (New York: Random House, 1998) concern the time before or after he was active in the Bosnia negotiations. The only mention of Kosovo that I can find in his account of the actual Dayton negotiations is this: “Once, as Milošević and I were taking a walk, about one hundred local Albanian Americans came to the outer fence of Wright-Patterson with megaphones to plead the case for Kosovo. I suggested we walk over to chat with them, but he refused, saying testily that they were obviously being paid by a foreign power.”

  6. Mr. Ademi told me he has not seen a copy of this document, although “Mr. Rugova must have one in his drawer.” In her Between Serb and Albanian: A History of Kosovo (London: Hurst, 1998), p. 253, Miranda Vickers quotes an October 1991 statement by the “Coordinating Committee of Albanian Political Parties in Yugoslavia”—presumably the same body—which canvases more radical options, including an Albanian Republic embracing all the Albanian-settled parts of Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Serbia proper, or, in the event of a change to the external frontiers of former Yugoslavia, territorial unification with Albania “within the boundaries proclaimed by the First Prizren League in 1878.” However, the only source she gives is a study by a Serb scholar in good standing with the Milošević regime, and one would wish to be sure that the text and context of the Albanian original are fairly given.

  7. For a scholarly and acerbic dissection of these myths, see Noel Malcolm, Kosovo: A Short History (London: Macmillan, 1998).

  8. The claim would be that, contrary to what President Kučan of Slovenia told me (see above, p. 255), Kosovo, as an “autonomous province,” was a constituent part of former Yugoslavia and therefore has the same right to secede as all other constituent parts. Malcolm, Kosovo, pp. 264—65, argues with fiendish ingenuity that, when Kosovo was taken from the Ottoman empire by the Serbs in 1912—1913, it was never properly, legally incorporated into Serbia at all.

  9. I owe this insight, as I owe many others, to Pierre Hassner.

  WHERE IS CENTRAL EUROPE NOW?

  1. “Does Central Europe Exist?” The New York Review of Books, 9 October 1986. The essay is reprinted in my The Uses of Adversity.

  2. “Nato Enlargement: Build a Europe Whole and Free,” International Herald Tribune, 30 April 1988.

  3. Karl A. Sinnhuber, “Central Europe—Mitteleuropa—Europe Centrale: An Analysis of a Geographical Term,” Institute of British Geographers Transactions and Papers (1954).

  4. Milan Kundera, “The Tragedy of Central Europe,” The New York Review of Books, 26 April 1984. The version of this essay published in Granta 11 (1984) bore Kundera’s own title: “A Kidnapped West or Culture Bows Out.”

  5. Vesna Goldsworthy explores the literary-political past and present of these negative images of the Balkans in her Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), as does Maria Todorova in her provocative Imagining the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).

  6. See his The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (London: Touchstone Books, 1997). His original articl
e on “the clash of civilizations” was published in Foreign Affairs in summer 1993.

  7. On Milošević’s and Tudjman’s demokraturas, see “Cry, the Dismembered Country,” above, p. 318.

  8. See the forthcoming book by Milada Vachudova, Revolution, Democracy, and Integration: The Domestic and International Politics of East Central Europe since 1989 (Oxford: Oxford University Press). The argument in this essay is also indebted to the article by Tim Snyder and Milada Vachudova, “Are Transitions Transitory? Two Types of Political Change in Eastern Europe since 1989,” East European Politics and Societies 11 (1), and to comments by Tim Snyder, Vladimir Tismaneanu, and Charles King.

  ENVOI

  1. Owen Harries, “The Collapse of ‘The West,’” Foreign Affairs (September/October 1993), quoted in Christopher Coker’s stimulating Twilight of the West (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1998).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I am most grateful to my outstanding editors: Robert Silvers of The New York Review of Books, Bill Buford, first at Granta and now at The New Yorker, Ian Birrell at the restored Independent, Ferdinand Mount at The Times Literary Supplement, Fareed Zakaria at Foreign Affairs, and, last but not least, Stuart Proffitt at Penguin Books and Jason Epstein at Random House. They have improved these texts by asking the quintessential editor’s question, “What do you really mean?”