History of the Present

by Timothy Garton Ash

  We meet at a restaurant that is called, promisingly, Der Zauberberg, but turns out to be Chinese. Soros says he has always thought of himself as first and foremost a philosopher, not a moneyman. When he was still a poor exile, he took several years of his life to write a philosophical work called The Burden of Consciousness. But nobody really wanted to know. Then he went off and made his billions. Now everyone is eager to hear his lectures on philosophy; great universities and institutions vie to offer him a platform. Yet he can never quite be sure whether it is his philosophy that they are interested in or his money. In a way, his personal experience is an illustration of his own central philosophical principle, which he calls “reflexivity.”

  With its human and philosophical ironies, this seems to me a tale worthy of Mann’s magic mountain.

  LATE JANUARY. Russia claims victory in Chechnya.

  7 FEBRUARY. Polish prime minister Waldemar Pawlak resigns. He is succeeded by the postcommunist Józef Oleksy, heading the same coalition of the postcommunist Democratic Left Alliance and the Polish Peasant Party.

  21 FEBRUARY. Belarus president Alexander Lukashenka signs comprehensive cooperation treaties with President Yeltsin. Substantial reintegration of Belarus with Russia.

  22 FEBRUARY. Irish prime minister John Bruton and British prime minister John Major present a framework document for all-party constitutional talks on Northern Ireland, including proposals for a cross-border body.

  12 MARCH. The Hungarian government proposes drastic new austerity measures.

  20–21 MARCH. A pan-European “Stability Pact” is signed in Paris.

  26 MARCH. The Schengen agreement comes into effect, abolishing border controls between France, Germany, Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal. “Schengenland” is born.

  7 APRIL. In Poland, General Wojciech Jaruzelski is charged with involvement in the shooting of protesting workers in 1970.

  29 APRIL. The British Labour Party votes to replace clause four of the party’s constitution, which had advocated “common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.”

  1 MAY. Heavy fighting erupts in Grozny, capital of Chechnya, after Chechen forces return to the city.

  1–2 MAY. Croat forces recapture the Serb-controlled enclave in eastern Slavonia.

  7 MAY. Jacques Chirac wins the runoff election for the presidency of France. Alain Juppé is named prime minister, heading a center-right coalition government. In Bosnia, another attack on a marketplace in Sarajevo

  CATCHING THE WRONG BUS?

  FIVE YEARS AGO, IN THE EUPHORIA AT THE END OF THE COLD WAR, it looked as if we could discern the shape of the twentieth century in Europe. That shape seemed to be a V. The line descended from the first and second Balkan wars before 1914, through what Churchill called Europe’s second Thirty Years War, to the depths of Auschwitz and the Gulag, but then gradually rose again from mid-century, through the reconstruction of Western Europe to the liberation of Eastern Europe in 1989. For Poland, V-E Day came only in the summer of 1989—just forty-four years late. And for Germany, that autumn. “Only today is the war really over,” said an improvised poster in East Berlin as the Berlin Wall came down. So in 1989 the shape of the century looked like a V for Victory. But since then, the upward line has faltered, perhaps even turned downward, as we once again witness a Balkan war.

  Fifty years on, we remember Britain’s unique contribution to the Victory in Europe with wholly justified pride. But we had to fight that war partly because of an earlier British policy based on the mistaken belief that Britain could, by a diplomacy of detachment, insulate itself from those European quarrels in faraway countries of which Chamberlain knew nothing. Wrong then; even more wrong now.

  So, fifty years after the end of what we still call the war in Europe and five years after the end of the cold war, what has Europe come to, and where, if anywhere, is it going? And is there, could there be, a British way of “thinking Europe”?

  Most contemporary British discussion of “Europe” is not about Europe at all. At best, it is about EU-rope—that is, some aspects of the collective political and economic life of the western, northern, and southern European states now organized in something rather misleadingly called the European Union. But mainly it is about Britain. Our so-called European debate is part of a tortured national self-examination, an English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish agonizing about self. In this debate, “Europe” appears as a threat to the very existence of Britain for (mainly English) “Euro-skeptics” of the right; as a chance to transform the very nature of Britain for (often Scottish or Welsh) “Euro-enthusiasts” of the left; as both opportunity and problem for the large center, but for all sides as something basically external. There is “Europe” over there and “Britain” here, and the argument is about the relationship between them and us.

  Penser l’Europe is a French book title, inconceivable as a British one. Thinking Europe is an un-British activity. Those who do it, even as consenting adults in private, risk being stigmatized as “Euro-intellectuals”—a neologism that neatly combines two things the British deeply distrust.

  In the circumstances, it is not surprising that most of our Continental partners regard the very notion of “a British idea of Europe” as a contradiction in terms. This is a pity. It is a pity for Britain: We lose influence because we are seen on the Continent to be opposed or at best marginal to the mainstream of European development. But it may also be a pity for Europe, since Europe, and especially EU-rope, could perhaps use a little more British thinking at the moment—with “British” here meant in the deeper sense of our particular intellectual tradition: skeptical, empirical, and pragmatic.

  For “Continental” ways of thinking about Europe also have their problems. To use a simple dichotomy of “British versus Continental” would, of course, be to make precisely the British mistake. There is a huge variety of different ways of thinking about Europe across the Continent. Yet certainly there are some common characteristics of the main French and German approaches that have had a formative influence on the development of EU-rope over the past half century.

  Where British politicians make an artificial separation of the national and the European, ignoring the degree to which the two are already intertwined, French and German politicians utterly conflate the national and the European, so it is almost impossible to distinguish when they are talking about Europe and when about their own nations. Now the instrumentalization of “Europe” for the pursuit of national ends is an old European habit. Bismarck famously observed that he had always found the word Europe in the mouths of those politicians who wanted from other powers something they did not dare demand in their own name. His conclusion was “Qui parle Europe a tort. Notion géographique.” British Euro-skeptics applaud Bismarck.

  Yet in truth things are now a little more complicated. For in the half century since 1945, there has also been a great deal of genuinely idealistic commitment to Europe among French and German politicians and opinion-formers—a commitment born from personal experience of revolution, war, genocide, defeat, and occupation. The trouble is that the conflation of national and European—part instrumental, part idealistic—has become so habitual that they themselves sometimes don’t quite know when they are talking about Europe and when about France or Germany.

  Idealism in a different though related sense—the tendency to represent things in an ideal form rather than as they are: idealism as opposed to empiricism—is the other salient common characteristic of this French and German Euro-thinking. The “Europe” of which they have spoken for the past half century is an idea and an ideal, a dream, a vision, or a grand design; this is faire l’Europe, Europa bauen, Europe as project, process, progress toward some finalité européenne; Europe as telos. At its most vertiginous, this comes as dialectical idealism. “Europa der Gegensätze auf dem Wege zu sich selbst,” proclaims a German publication: “The Europe of contradictions on the way to itself.” Which, in English, makes about as much sen
se as “The London of traffic jams on the way to itself.”

  The difference between the teleological-idealistic and the empirical-skeptical approaches leads to profound misunderstandings. For the former, the great end justifies the often unsatisfactory means. Eurocratic nonsense from Brussels is a price worth paying for the larger political sense. But the teleologists are in trouble. In the Continental elites’ building plans for EU-rope, from Messina to Maastricht, the telos was a substitute for the absent demos—with the hope of eventually contributing to the creation of a new European demos from above, by education and example. But it has not happened. There is still no European people, or demos. And, after the signature of the Maastricht Treaty, the peoples of the very heartlands of EU-rope turned to question what was being dished up in their name. “For we are the peoples of Europe, that never have spoken yet,” as Chesterton might have written.

  In this sense, EU-rope is perhaps now ready for a more (intellectually) “British” approach. But is any constructive “British” approach on offer? An approach, that is, which cares about Europe as Europe and not just as a threat or opportunity for a greater or lesser Britain. What follows is an attempt to “think Europe” in English: to see Europe plain and to see it whole.

  FOR A START, does Europe exist? This most ill-defined of continents has, after all, been open for long stretches of its history not just on one but on three sides: to the south across the Mediterranean, throughout most of what we call “ancient history” and in some ways again today; to the east, where Europe does not end but merely fades away, into Asia; and to the west, across the Atlantic, especially in our post-1945 “West.” The “globalization” caused by the technological developments of the past half century further calls into question the coherence or validity of the unit “Europe” as compared with smaller entities (state, region, firm) or larger ones (Eur-atlantic, OECD, world).

  And what of its internal makeup? What are Europe’s essential constituent parts? Its hundreds of millions of individual people who more or less—mainly less—identify themselves as “Europeans”? Its regions? Classes? Societies? Nations and states? But to say “nation-states,” as most British politicians do, obscures the huge diversity of European combinations of nation and state, from the national state, with citizenship rights conditional on membership of one dominant ethnic Volk, or the classic east European variant of ethnic nations distributed between several states, through the French civic étatnation, to Britain itself: a nation-state containing several nations.

  Nonetheless, in most of western, southern, and now also northern Europe, these individuals, regions, societies, nations, but above all states are now organized in something new—EU-rope—that differs qualitatively both from any previous arrangement of states and from any current arrangement of states on any other continent. The nature of this arrangement is, however, very hard to define. The German Constitutional Court has described it as a Staatenverbund. In English, we might call it a thing. This thing is less than a federal superstate but more than an alliance: an unprecedented, unique, and horribly complex combination of the supranational and the intergovernmental, of economic integration and political cooperation.

  This thing evolved in the cold war, like NATO and with NATO, as the western half of a European order that we called in shorthand “Yalta.” Its development was directly and indirectly influenced, to a degree many devoted advocates of European integration find hard to acknowledge, by that of the cold war—and of détente, the Siamese twin of cold war. But, five years ago, this “Yalta” order ended in a way quite different from that in which previous European orders, whether of “Versailles,” “Vienna,” or “Westphalia,” had ended. Essentially, its eastern half just fell away, with the largely peaceful death of communism in Eastern Europe and the rather less peaceful dissolution of the Soviet Union. The western half remained intact—or at least apparently so.

  So today this now slightly expanded western part, this EU-rope, with its fifteen states and some 370 million people, faces the other Europe from which it was so long insulated by the Iron Curtain. (For we lived, as the Hungarian writer György Konrád put it, with our backs to the Berlin Wall.) This other Europe may itself be subdivided very crudely into a second and a third Europe. The second Europe has in all some twenty states, of which fifteen have only recently been liberated from communism, and some 140 million people. The states of this second Europe, among which I do not include Turkey, are mainly small. Except for Poland and Romania, none has more inhabitants than Greater London, and most have far fewer. Most of them, or at least most of their political elites, more or less clearly want to join the Europe of the EU and NATO; to “return to Europe,” in the slogan of 1989. More important, their theoretical claim to belong, sooner or later, is more or less accepted by the political leaders of the EU—although with the emphasis in practice often on the less and later.

  Clearly, this is to paint with a very broad brush. Having spent much of the past fifteen years trying to explain to Western readers that Prague, Budapest, and Warsaw belong to Central and not to Eastern Europe, I am the last person to need reminding of the immense differences between Poland and Albania. But to suggest that there is some absolutely clear historical dividing line between the Central European democracies in the so-called Visegrád group and, say, the Baltic states or Slovenia would be to service a new myth.

  The third Europe comprises two much larger states, Russia and Ukraine, together with Belarus, and perhaps also Serbia. They have a very large combined population of more than 210 million—or 220 million if one includes Serbia. These states are themselves, especially in the case of Russia, somewhat more ambivalent than the second Europe about their own historical belonging to Europe and their current desire to join the first Europe of EU and NATO. But, more important, the political leaders of the EU and NATO do not agree even on the long-term principle of these states’ claim to membership.

  Again, the division between the second and third Europes is crude, probably unfair to Ukraine, and may understate the long-term possibility of a democratic Serbia reoriented toward Europe. But, wherever the exact lines fall at any given moment, for the foreseeable future this other Europe will certainly be subdivided between states that are recognizably set on a course toward EU-rope and those that are not—with, no doubt, a number straggling in between.

  The central political question about the composition of Europe today is therefore whether and how EU-rope can gradually include an ever larger part of the second Europe, while itself continuing to “work” in the unique, complex, unsatisfactory, but nonetheless real way it does; and how this process will both affect and be affected by relations with the third Europe, above all with Russia.

  At issue right across the other Europe is the choice not just between democracy and dictatorship but also between war and peace. Banishing the specter of war between European states and peoples was, of course, the first great purpose of EU-rope’s founding fathers. Economic integration was the indirect means chosen to achieve that end, especially after a more direct approach—the European Defense Community—was voted down in the French National Assembly. Now it is a fair question how far it really was the (then still) EEC/EC that kept the peace in Europe, inasmuch as it was kept, up to 1990, and how far NATO and the East—West nuclear standoff in the cold war. But certainly the habits and institutions of peaceful conflict-resolution and permanent cooperation in the EC made a contribution.

  Yet, while our leaders still mouth the platitude that “war has become unthinkable” in Europe, war not only has again become thinkable across much of postcommunist Europe but is, even as they speak, actually being waged, bloodily and brutally and—with almost too crude an irony—in a place called Sarajevo.

  One lesson of the short twentieth century is that political ends are not separable from the means used to attain them. Today, EU-rope’s means are threatening its ends. The process of “making Europe” proceeds pars pro toto. The elites negotiate for the people and ask them o
nly afterward, if at all, whether they agree. In this sense, as process, what is happening now is already “a second Maastricht.” EU-rope also decides for Europe, and future members have to accept the given shape. The Poles send up their old cry, “Nic o nas bez nas”—“Nothing about us without us!”—but, as usual, the West hardly listens.

  Within the EU, a number of states—and crucially France and Germany—are contemplating “going ahead”: pars pro toto again. Following German unification, France’s political leaders feel it to be more urgent than ever to bind Germany into Europe and—curious but true!—Germany’s political leaders want their own country to be bound in, so they are not left alone to face the temptations of the past in the center of Europe. True to the functionalist tradition of proceeding through economic means to political ends, the chosen path is monetary union. This, with its desired political consequences, is to make the process of integration “irreversible.” The Franco-German avant-garde will form a “magnetic core” of a uniting Europe, with monetary union as the hard core of the hard core. But where they lead, other states, including Britain, are to follow, as they have done throughout the previous history of the EEC/EC/EU. EU-rope after Maastricht (1 and 2) will be “multispeed” but still moving in one direction.

  Here, stripped to essentials, is the bold—even breathtaking—Franco-German project for EU-rope in the closing years of the century and the immediate European challenge for Britain. The trouble is that this project is very likely to fail. Monetary union itself might fail, obviously, at the first or second fences, because even the core economies are not close enough to stand the strains, or because either French or German political opinion turns against it. Monetary union might also fail after the event. Nothing except death is irreversible, and European history offers several examples of failed monetary unions.