Europe is the book of a contemporary historian like Timothy Garton Ash (London, 1955), but it is also the history of a journalist with his foot still in the stirrup, told from a personal perspective and in vignettes: a fluent account of the Old. A continent full of testimonial sequences and heroism from the Second World War. The book begins with a description of his father, who later became a Eurosceptic, as he landed in Normandy with British troops and fought his way into Germany alongside Allied forces, liberating the continent. The son, on the other hand, is passionately pro-European. With the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, he shared the spontaneous and joyful spirit of the popular government at that time. The realization of Brexit, in which Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin wanted to weaken the EU, was a bitter defeat for someone who, as a journalist and academic, lived up to European ideals.
What he describes as the enigma of unity and at the same time diversity finds here disturbing dissonances. If you push too hard for unity, forced unity will begin to disintegrate. If there is too much pressure on diversity, Europeans will start fighting among themselves. Crisis after crisis, the forces of convergence and divergence collide. The EU, the most reluctant empire in history, is gaining deeper roots and wider borders as it confronts enemies seeking separation. While the fall of the Wall brought about spectacular expansion, manipulations and regulations since the birth of the euro have left much of the Union stuck at the uncomfortable in-between point of a single currency without a common strategy.
The author sees Brexit not just as an anti-European anomaly, but as an example of extreme anger against the ruling class. The same thing happens with the populist challenge that uses the inequalities of the crisis as an excuse. But the gains of increased freedom overshadow any obstacles. Of course, the war in Ukraine is, as in the Balkan conflict before it, without losing sight of the fact that violence still threatens the basis of the 1945 European peace. According to him, the most serious thing is that they fail to learn the history of declining empires and do not bow down in the face of decline. When the Russian-Soviet empire disappeared within three years, Western powers should not have assumed that was the end of the story. They should have suspected that the Empire might strike back.
This approach brings together science and journalism. The book is arranged chronologically, with a variety of vivid images and engaging personal anecdotes that convey the feeling of being in the time and place where the story takes place. It reached its peak with the collapse of the USSR in 1989, when intellectual commitment, pragmatic politics and moral legitimacy converged in a just cause. But it didn’t last long. In many countries, communist systems have given way to democratically questionable governments. Already in the autumn of 1998, during a trip to the former Yugoslavia, Garton Ash shouted to Slovenian President Milan Kucan that even Slobodan Milosevic would not dare to ethnically cleanse 1.8 million Albanians in Kosovo and replied: ” “I know he’s not doing that.”
The EU, although strong and stable, has given up its desire to become the United States of Europe. Immigration makes societies more culturally diverse and economically stronger, but it also gives rise to populist protests. Borders are more open than ever, but liberal democracies are on the defensive. He believes that it is necessary to defend, develop and expand the ideal of a free, whole and diverse Europe. But after years of intellectual effort, no one knows how to do this. Progress until 2008 was cut short by a series of crises that culminated in the invasion of Ukraine. He insists that Ukraine’s victory would allow for a renewal of those efforts.