By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

When Europe Fell Apart

89 was a year of miracles—not just for Garton Ash, the distinguished British historian and journalist who identifies “Europe” and “freedom” as the causes closest to his heart. Today, as the continent sees the rise of anti-liberal populism and its largest land war since World War II, that moment of triumph has become a distant memory.

The downward turn of recent years serves as a reminder that the democratization of European states is a much more recent and fragile process than many Europeans realize. Garton Ash was born in 1955 into a Europe of dictatorships. In his youth, 289 million Europeans lived in democracies, while 389 million suffered under authoritarian regimes—not just the ones beyond the Iron Curtain but those in Southern Europe as well. Francoists would still raise their right arm with a fascist salute; the Greek colonels who came to power in 1967 would not only torture and kill but also ban “long hair, mini-skirts and the study of sociology,” he writes.

It was the collective memory of war and authoritarianism, in Garton Ash’s telling, that drove postwar European peace and integration. Yet, after two decades that consolidated a free way of life on the continent, Garton Ash writes, this “memory engine” appears to be sputtering. No country has joined the European Union since 2013; Britons voted to leave the bloc; war and the entrenchment of autocratic figures such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban have threatened the EU’s eastern flank.

Homelands deftly traces the transformations of the European project. It is a deeply moving journey through the past 50 years, as well as a reckoning with liberalism that holds lessons for what Garton Ash sees as a new era beginning with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. It is also a meditation on the nature of history itself and what it means to write its first draft—an art that Garton Ash, straddling journalism and academia, has been refining for half a century.

Garton Ash is the most European of Englishmen but also the most English among Europeans. Fluent in many languages, a tireless traveler on the continent where he considers many countries “homelands,” he has long sought to explain to the British the people they regard as funny foreigners. (He and other historians convinced former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that German unification posed no perils. In the end, he writes, the Iron Lady decided to “be very nice to the Germans.”) He has also been an essential voice in foreign policy elsewhere: Former U.S. President George W. Bush, before his first trip to Europe, asked him innocently whether the United States should want the EU to succeed; generations of German politicians, especially when post-1989 insecurities about a new global role for the country became acute, have sought Garton Ash’s counsel.

In Homelands—a personal, but not intimate, book—Garton Ash recounts his youthful travels around the continent when it was still a world of borders and different currencies scarcely imaginable to today’s youth, used to the euro and low-budget airlines. He settled in East Berlin to work on a doctorate in German history but was drawn into writing about current affairs. After writing a book on the dictatorship in East Germany, he witnessed the beginnings of Solidarity, the Polish trade union striving for freedom, in the early 1980s.

Garton Ash shows brilliantly how different factors aligned for Europe to triumph in 1989. The ’80s were the age of Eurosclerosis when the project of integration was stalling and fears of nuclear war and environmental catastrophe dominated public debates across the continent. (Garton Ash noted in his diary on Dec. 31, 1980, in all capital letters: “We will see a nuclear war in this decade.”) In his account, individuals made the difference: Thatcher, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, and U.S. President Ronald Reagan, obviously, but also German Chancellor Helmut Kohl and European Commission President Jacques Delors.

The prospect of completing the single European market by 1992, along with plans to introduce the euro—which preexisted the fall of the Wall—made Europe look attractive again. Even Gorbachev saw what he called a “giant rising” next to the decaying Soviet empire—an impression that strengthened his resolve to create a “common European home” (one of the many expressions in the book one cannot help but read with bitterness after Russia invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022).

Leaders came to trust one another, and leadership changes were fortunate: Gorbachev preferred the sober George H.W. Bush—who wisely refrained from any triumphalist talk when the Soviet Union crumbled—to his predecessor. Leaders also came to trust different European peoples: Gorbachev, for instance, was moved by his enthusiastic reception in West Germany in the spring of 1989, not least among steelworkers in Dortmund, where chants of “Gorbi, Gorbi” gave rise to the neologism “Gorbimania.” The Soviet leader left convinced that the two German states might be allowed to unify without threatening European peace.

The danger was that, in retrospect, reaching political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history”—or the triumph of liberal democracy—could seem inevitable. Garton Ash writes it was a “one-in-a-million piece of historical luck.” Contingency always matters; sometimes stars, and human courage and luck, align in what Garton Ash calls the “struggle for freedom”—and often, they don’t.

The years between the fall of the Wall and the financial crisis feature in the book under the somewhat deceptive heading “Triumphing.” As we know now—and as Garton Ash makes abundantly clear—they are better described as decades of hubris and disillusionment. Freedom no doubt advanced as Central and Eastern European countries, in fits and starts, established democracies and markets, and prepared to join NATO and the EU. As the Polish dissident Adam Michnik once said, Central Europeans wanted “Liberty, Fraternity, Normality.” Yet, Garton Ash writes, “getting to that non-experimental normality would require a huge experiment,” often in shock therapies, as liberal democracy and capitalist economies were created simultaneously. That experiment was not always unsuccessful: While it may have seemed that Poles were getting only shocks and no therapy, the average Polish family may have a higher standard of living than the average British one by the end of this decade. Still, moving quickly created many injustices. In the felicitous phrase of the social theorist Ernest Gellner, the “price of velvet”—that is, velvet, nonviolent revolutions—was that the nomenklatura retained privileges and had a head start in the quest for economic and political power.

The transition exacted a significant cost on social cohesion. Workers in Poland once chanted, “There’s no freedom without Solidarity”; by the early 2000s, the slogan had become, “There’s no solidarity in freedom.” The Gdansk shipyard, where the Solidarity movement had begun in 1980, went bankrupt in 1996. But freedom, understood as some essential control over one’s everyday life, also suffered: As Garton Ash puts it, “The locus of unfreedom moved from the state to the workplace.” The story of freedom in Europe did not proceed in a single straight line.

This was not the only disillusionment: Heroes of dissident movements in Central and Eastern Europe turned into ordinary politicians—which, in some cases, meant corrupt politicians. Even Czechs eventually tired of such a towering figure as Vaclav Havel (whom Garton Ash knew well); by the end, they no longer saw exemplary courage and integrity but only, Garton Ash writes, “theatrical gestures and moralistic preaching.”

Meanwhile, their self-restraint gave way to the hubris of his son’s America, where the financialization of everything and the trust in so-called self-regulating markets rightly discredited Western versions of capitalism after the 2008 crisis and where the belief in spreading democracy through military conquest, sorely disappointed in Iraq and Afghanistan, made Western freedom rhetoric ring hollow. The global war on terrorism turned out to be a colossal failure of political judgment; Garton Ash thinks Beijing should posthumously award al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden its highest honors for leading Washington into a decade of “strategic distraction.”

And so the downward turn began and, arguably, continues today. Anti-liberal populists started to score victories across Europe. 2016 saw the greatest political defeat of Garton Ash’s life: Brexit. Garton Ash tells a familiar story about Britain’s decision to leave the EU, appearing contrite in the face of the supposed rebellion of those “left behind” by liberal elites. But he also offers a more exciting narrative—one that underlines his more significant point about the role of individuals (and contingency) in history. Figures such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, he writes, did not dare to make the case for the EU to the British people. Blair would never fail to say he was a “passionate European,” but he would only do so in Strasbourg. As a result, arguably, it was not just the economically deprived who voted for Brexit. Garton Ash reports that an old friend of his voted Leave; his father, he’s sure, would have done the same. Today, the British are paying the price for a failure of politicians—and intellectuals—to transform people’s mental map of where Britain truly belongs.

 

 

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