Timothy Garton Ash Timothy Garton Ash is a political writer who has combined journalism with academia. His experiences with the collapse of communism in central Europe convinced him of the importance of freedom and democracy. He has recently articulated these views not only in a rigorous defence of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine but in his book Free World
‘IF YOU CALL me an idealist I plead guilty. In my experience of politics it is sometime the idealists who turn out to be the best realists. However I have always argued for a combination of idealism and realism.
If you look at the map of freedom one does have to say (and this is a purely factual statement) that more people are more free than ever before. That is a remarkable achievement; it is an amazing world to live in. The current generation of young people are naturally internationalist. There has never been a generation in the history of the world for whom the world was their oyster in the same way.
However, we face a number of very big problems – and we may find ourselves hard pushed just to defend the degree of freedom, openness and internationalism that we have at the moment.
I am profoundly convinced that the aspiration to individual freedom and basic human dignity is universal. This doesn’t mean full-package western democracy for everybody, it means the stripped-down, basics of a liberal order with a great deal of cultural difference. The key question for me is not: ‘Are such basic aspirations universal?’ – they certainly are. It is rather: ‘What are the basic common minimum standards on which we can agree and on which we must insist everywhere?’
Europeans – and I include the British very much in this – should do more about liberty and democracy.We shouldn’t leave it to the Americas to define this agenda. It is our agenda and the European story over the last 30 years is the greatest story of the spread of freedom in modern history; there is nothing like it.
The real difficulty for a liberal internationalist like me, who believes in the spread of freedom and of democracy, is that George W. Bush is saying the same thing, but with different meanings. I would say that Bush gives freedom a bad name. For me it is all in the interplay between a free world and the free world. The version from Bush often sounds like the free world – old cold war rhetoric.A free world is very different.
America has never been less popular in the world. However I am struck by the fact that this second-term Bush administration has taken a reality check. Somewhere deep down America is still this puritan community which occasionally goes a bit crazy and goes off on witch hunts. It did it with McCarthyism – under a certain shock from the outside world the country went a bit bonkers, but then it self corrected.
Moreover, the mechanisms of selfcorrection in the US are fantastically strong and they are still there. The fiercest critics of America are Americans.My hope and belief is that America will self correct – that by 2008 it will be a much more reasonable place.
China is the defining issue as far as I can foresee of the next 20 years.Much more than the war on terrorism, this really is the big one. It is fascinating the way in which China – very patiently, untroubled by democracy – exploits every weakness in its opponent’s position.A democratic China would be the biggest prize in the history of freedom.
We are living in this period of a historical shift: since 1500 the western world has been top dog on the international stage. That is now under challenge and I think that we may experience one of these great shifts, where power moves decisively around the globe – and that need not be disastrous for us.
We have to change a lot, we have to go on opening up, we have to try to help others to freedom, we have to make our own society much more pluralistic, variegated, open, and comfortable with difference.
