Twenty years after chronicling the collapse of communism, Timothy Garton Ash still writes about the European project with invigorating freshness
ALTHOUGH TRITE cliche and impenetrable jargon so often dominate discussions on the EU, Timothy Garton Ash somehow makes it all sound fresh, new and exciting.
His vision of Europe is as far from the “begging bowl” as it is possible to get. “Increasingly, what Europe does is about the world beyond its borders,” he says. “A world of rising great powers and huge global challenges.”
He was in Dublin recently to lecture on the Lisbon Treaty, which he regards as a modest but necessary measure for the better administration of the EU. He sees the EU as vital to our survival in a world where we would otherwise be crushed between the superpowers of the US and China.
It’s not so much as an advocate of the EU that Garton Ash is known, however, but as the writer and journalist who brought us in lucid prose the dramatic political and human story of the collapse of Soviet communism in central and Eastern Europe, which came to a head 20 years ago in 1989.
As well as being the author of nine books, Ash is professor of European studies and Isaiah Berlin professorial fellow at St Antony’s College, Oxford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He writes regularly in the New York Review of Books and his weekly column for the Guardian is syndicated worldwide.
Few will question his description of 1989 as “one of the most extraordinary years in European history” and he has spent much of the current year commemorating those fateful and historic changes.
Does he feel any disillusionment with the way things have turned out in, say, Poland, where he spent so much time observing and chronicling events? “No, absolutely not,” he says. His basic criterion is to look at the life-chances and opportunities of a 20-year-old Pole or Slovak today, which Garton Ash maintains are “altogether comparable” with the openings available to someone of the same age in, for example, Ireland or Spain.
But he concedes that the shipyard workers, the driving-force of the Polish Solidarity movement, have had “a really rough time” and that a lot of the older generation have suffered in the transition to democracy. “But I think it was worth it.” These and other issues are mulled over in his latest book of essays and reportage, Facts are Subversive, although some will be equally interested in the re-issue of The File: A Personal History after 12 years, with a new postscript (both published by Atlantic Books, London).
The File contains the remarkable story of how the author, having arrived in the then divided city of Berlin in 1978, came to the attention of the notorious Stasi, the secret police service of East Germany’s totalitarian regime. In 1992, three years after the removal of the Berlin Wall, Garton Ash went to the ministry that now stores the records of the Stasi and asked if there was a file on him. Indeed there was, a buff-coloured binder marked “Romeo”; it contained no less than 325 pages.
He conducted a series of interviews with those who reported on his innocuous activities, even including casual conversations. “I want to puke,” said one of the informers, an art-museum director from Weimar who explained she had to inform because of her position. He also met a former major, Klaus Risse, who headed the section that monitored him and, surprisingly, found the former police spy “an intelligent, fundamentally decent man . . . who did not have the courage to get out”.
Subsequently, he had a “surreal conversation” with a senior MI5 official at home and asked if there was a file on him. He was told there was but, when he asked to see it, he was refused, “because it’s the property of the Crown”.
NOW HE IS worried about Stasi-like tendencies in Britain itself. “I’m very, very worried about the expansion of the database state,” he says. In 1996, the head of MI5 told him that the number of citizens who were on security files was “in the low hundreds of thousands”. That was 13 years ago: “I wonder how many there are now.”
Following the Daily Telegraph revelations about MPs milking their expenses, he says: “We should take this as an occasion to reform the whole British political system.” That, for Garton Ash, would include a written constitution, a bill of rights and much stronger local government. “What worries me is that we will just make a few small changes to the way parliament works.”
He’s still in touch with Polish reformer Lech Walesa and his Czech counterpart Vaclav Havel. “Basically Havel feels enormous satisfaction at what’s been done over the last 20 years, and what is more he has managed to write a play again.”
More than five months after Barack Obama’s inauguration in Washington, Garton Ash continues to admire the US president, whose performance he describes as “one of the most encouraging and inspiring things I’ve seen”.
In contrast with the bitter transatlantic divisions of the Bush years, “Obama is almost more European than we are, certainly than the British are”. But will Obama have the staying power to make his expansive programme, including universal healthcare, respect for international law, multilateralism and social justice, a reality? “I think he needs two terms.”
Back to 1989, which Garton Ash sees as “the baptism of a new model of revolution”. This wasn’t the old 1789-style approach of overthrowing the established order by violence. Civil resistance has brought about regime-change in places such as Czechoslovakia (as it then was), Serbia under Milosevic, and the Ukraine, with its Orange revolution.
“You may be defeated, it usually takes longer because the other guys have the guns, but you get to a better place in the end.” Even Northern Ireland conforms in some respects to this model, despite the years of violence.
He says he is “hugely inspired” by the mass protests in Iran. “These young people in Iran are now developing the model.”
But is there a model for resolving, say, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?
“Everybody knows what has to happen, and at the end of the Clinton administration we got very close to it. But nobody knows quite how to do it. The problem seems to be that the movement on the ground among Israelis and Palestinians is actually making it more difficult.”
