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Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West Hardcover – November 2, 2004
by
Timothy Garton Ash
(Author)
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At the start of the 21st century, the West has plunged into crisis. Europe tries to define itself in opposition to America; America increasingly regards Europe as troublesome and irrelevant; and Britain is split down the middle. What’s to become of what we used to call “the free world”?
No contemporary thinker writes with the combination of passion, historical insight, and reportorial brilliance of Timothy Garton Ash, and here he assesses the causes and implications of our current geopolitical quandary–which dates back to the end of the Cold War and is not merely political but existential. The question is not just “What should we do?” It’s “Who should we be?”
In Free World, Garton Ash draws on an extraordinary range of sources: from unique, personal conversations with Bush, Blair, and Schröder to encounters with farmers in Kansas and British soldiers in rural England; from history, memoirs, opinion polls, and sociological research to personal observations based on a quarter century of traveling in Europe and the United States.
The result is a book that explains why Washington can never rule today’s interconnected world alone, why the new enlarged Europe can only realize its aspirations in a larger, transatlantic community, and how the torments of the Middle East and the world’s poor can only be addressed by free people working together. To remain true to itself, the West must go beyond itself. As Garton Ash shows, Americans and Europeans have at hand a unique opportunity to advance from “the free world” of the cold war to a radically new international order of liberty.
And he urges us, with passion that comes from a lifetime of reflection on these issues, to seize that chance. Defying conventional wisdom and eschewing easy answers, this incisive book should be read not just by all those who purport to lead and and inform us but by everyone who wishes to be a citizen of a truly free world.
“Free World is a model of common-sense reasoning based on strong empirical evidence. Mr. Garton Ash has given us a readable and worthy argument, rooted in a sense of what is important and what is not and based on as informed and accessible a tour of the global situation as we're likely to have.”
–THE NEW YORK TIMES
A compelling manifesto for the enlargement of freedom and a new era of world politics."
--VACLAV HAVEL
“Timothy Garton Ash has long been among the world’s wisest writers on Europe and America. Now, at a pivotal moment in relations across the Atlantic, he offers us a brilliant analysis–practical, without illusions, original, sparklingly well-written, and, above all, inspiring.”
–MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT
“This is an important book, refreshingly positive yet without pulling any punches. Free World demonstrates that the Transatlantic West remains the key to a better world for all–but that much will depend upon whether the EU defines itself as a partner, or as a frustrator, of America. Learn and be stimulated. You will enjoy the reading.”
–GEORGE P. SHULTZ
“Not content with offering a brilliant analysis of today’s world, Timothy Garton Ash shows us what we must do to make the world a better place. He also tells us why it is reasonable to believe that this much-needed change is possible. This is a book that will inform, encourage, and even inspire readers everywhere.”
–PETER SINGER, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University
“Timothy Garton Ash is one of the most astute observers of Europe and its relationship with the United States. In this important book, he dissects the currently troubled Atlantic relationship, places it in a broader global context, and provides a sense of hope for the future. He writes with grace, wit, and lucidity.”
–JOSEPH S. NYE, JR., author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics
No contemporary thinker writes with the combination of passion, historical insight, and reportorial brilliance of Timothy Garton Ash, and here he assesses the causes and implications of our current geopolitical quandary–which dates back to the end of the Cold War and is not merely political but existential. The question is not just “What should we do?” It’s “Who should we be?”
In Free World, Garton Ash draws on an extraordinary range of sources: from unique, personal conversations with Bush, Blair, and Schröder to encounters with farmers in Kansas and British soldiers in rural England; from history, memoirs, opinion polls, and sociological research to personal observations based on a quarter century of traveling in Europe and the United States.
The result is a book that explains why Washington can never rule today’s interconnected world alone, why the new enlarged Europe can only realize its aspirations in a larger, transatlantic community, and how the torments of the Middle East and the world’s poor can only be addressed by free people working together. To remain true to itself, the West must go beyond itself. As Garton Ash shows, Americans and Europeans have at hand a unique opportunity to advance from “the free world” of the cold war to a radically new international order of liberty.
And he urges us, with passion that comes from a lifetime of reflection on these issues, to seize that chance. Defying conventional wisdom and eschewing easy answers, this incisive book should be read not just by all those who purport to lead and and inform us but by everyone who wishes to be a citizen of a truly free world.
“Free World is a model of common-sense reasoning based on strong empirical evidence. Mr. Garton Ash has given us a readable and worthy argument, rooted in a sense of what is important and what is not and based on as informed and accessible a tour of the global situation as we're likely to have.”
–THE NEW YORK TIMES
A compelling manifesto for the enlargement of freedom and a new era of world politics."
--VACLAV HAVEL
“Timothy Garton Ash has long been among the world’s wisest writers on Europe and America. Now, at a pivotal moment in relations across the Atlantic, he offers us a brilliant analysis–practical, without illusions, original, sparklingly well-written, and, above all, inspiring.”
–MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT
“This is an important book, refreshingly positive yet without pulling any punches. Free World demonstrates that the Transatlantic West remains the key to a better world for all–but that much will depend upon whether the EU defines itself as a partner, or as a frustrator, of America. Learn and be stimulated. You will enjoy the reading.”
–GEORGE P. SHULTZ
“Not content with offering a brilliant analysis of today’s world, Timothy Garton Ash shows us what we must do to make the world a better place. He also tells us why it is reasonable to believe that this much-needed change is possible. This is a book that will inform, encourage, and even inspire readers everywhere.”
–PETER SINGER, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University
“Timothy Garton Ash is one of the most astute observers of Europe and its relationship with the United States. In this important book, he dissects the currently troubled Atlantic relationship, places it in a broader global context, and provides a sense of hope for the future. He writes with grace, wit, and lucidity.”
–JOSEPH S. NYE, JR., author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics
- Print length304 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherRandom House
- Publication dateNovember 2, 2004
- Dimensions6.36 x 1.09 x 9.5 inches
- ISBN-101400062195
- ISBN-13978-1400062195
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Colossal events such as the fall of France during World War II or the dismantling of the Berlin Wall create seismic shifts in geopolitics. Alliances are broken or forged. Power and influence are redistributed. According to Timothy Garton Ash, author of Free World: Why a Crisis in the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time, the September 11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent war in Iraq have produced such a crisis in the West. French and German opposition to America's war have signaled a severe rift between these one-time staunch allies and have raised questions about European identity, the role of Britain in this struggle, the direction of U.S. foreign policy, and most important, the spread of freedom and democracy to the poor and voiceless millions in the developing world.
France's attempt to become the voice of the European Union and to defy the will of the U.S. marks a departure from an age-old power structure. Or does it? In clear and engaging prose, Ash, an expert on European-American relations, places the crisis in a historical context dating back to the Second World War. Ash maintains that the future of the West depends on the EU's choice between Gaullism (Europe as "not-America"), or Churchill-style Atlanticism (Europe as a partner of the U.S. with England providing the bridge between the two). At the same time, the world's hyperpower, the U.S., must decide if it will continue to pursue unilaterally its foreign policy of self-interest combined with a Wilsonian edict to spread democracy, or embrace the kind of transatlantic interdependence that already exists in the business world. Wisely, Ash cautions against oversimplification and effectively deflates the myth that there is one America or one Europe. He shows that "There are not two separate sets of values, European and American, but several intersecting sets of values." Therefore, he urges cooperation between these two great powers. Only then, says Ash, can the West reverse its potential decline and spread its legacy of democracy and freedom to the "unfree" world. --Silvana Tropea
From Publishers Weekly
A Great Britain caught between America and its Continental neighbors—on Iraq and much else—commences Ash's look at the 21st-century's strains on relations in the West. As the eminent British scholar and journalist (The File) moves on to the Continent, he echoes several recent critiques of the call for a unified Europe to act as an alternative superpower, citing the "uneven development" of the European Union. He suggests, however, that the European community still has a vital role to play in advocating the spread of freedom around the world, and looks forward to the day when America treats Europeans as "full partners in a common enterprise" in doing so. For Ash, that enterprise is largely economic. He calls for a global "war on want" and urges Western nations to open their borders to trade from developing neighbors; emigrants from undeveloped countries in the Arab world will turn to Europe, he argues, for homes and jobs. He also points to the imminent threat of global warming, which inspires his harshest criticisms of the current American government. The combination of sweeping historical insight with journalistic immediacy, related in Ash's own conversational style, should help this incisive commentary on world affairs stand apart from its competitors.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Ash's demonstrated forte is analyzing, often from the front lines, the dramatic pivot points of recent European history. Previous works The Magic Lantern (1990)and The Polish Revolution (1984), both stirring close-range snapshots of the fall of communism in central Europe, practically drip with awareness of their historical gravity. In his latest book, Ash swaps in the wide-angle lens and aims at the new decade's "crisis of the West," the subject of several recent studies in European-American contrast. But Ash's is not just another clash-of-civilizations book, for two reasons. The first is its commitment to nuance--no, it's not as simple as different values--and commendable resistance to overstatement. The second reason is that Ash's lens frequently aims at Janus Britain, precariously straddling the intercontinental chasm yet perhaps the only nation capable of bringing together quibbling siblings to build a world free of both oppression and want. An Anglocentric solution, to be sure, yoking together British and world destiny, but probably the most perceptive portrait thus far. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
“Free World is a model of common-sense reasoning based on strong empirical evidence. Mr. Garton Ash has given us a readable and worthy argument, rooted in a sense of what is important and what is not and based on as informed and accessible a tour of the global situation as we're likely to have.”
–THE NEW YORK TIMES
"A compelling manifesto for the enlargement of freedom and a new era of world politics."
--VACLAV HAVEL
“Timothy Garton Ash has long been among the world’s wisest writers on Europe and America. Now, at a pivotal moment in relations across the Atlantic, he offers us a brilliant analysis–practical, without illusions, original, sparklingly well-written, and, above all, inspiring.”
–MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT
“This is an important book, refreshingly positive yet without pulling any punches. Free World demonstrates that the Transatlantic West remains the key to a better world for all–but that much will depend upon whether the EU defines itself as a partner, or as a frustrator, of America. Learn and be stimulated. You will enjoy the reading.”
–GEORGE P. SHULTZ
“Not content with offering a brilliant analysis of today’s world, Timothy Garton Ash shows us what we must do to make the world a better place. He also tells us why it is reasonable to believe that this much-needed change is possible. This is a book that will inform, encourage, and even inspire readers everywhere.”
–PETER SINGER, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University
“Timothy Garton Ash is one of the most astute observers of Europe and its relationship with the United States. In this important book, he dissects the currently troubled Atlantic relationship, places it in a broader global context, and provides a sense of hope for the future. He writes with grace, wit, and lucidity.”
–JOSEPH S. NYE, JR., author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics
–THE NEW YORK TIMES
"A compelling manifesto for the enlargement of freedom and a new era of world politics."
--VACLAV HAVEL
“Timothy Garton Ash has long been among the world’s wisest writers on Europe and America. Now, at a pivotal moment in relations across the Atlantic, he offers us a brilliant analysis–practical, without illusions, original, sparklingly well-written, and, above all, inspiring.”
–MADELEINE K. ALBRIGHT
“This is an important book, refreshingly positive yet without pulling any punches. Free World demonstrates that the Transatlantic West remains the key to a better world for all–but that much will depend upon whether the EU defines itself as a partner, or as a frustrator, of America. Learn and be stimulated. You will enjoy the reading.”
–GEORGE P. SHULTZ
“Not content with offering a brilliant analysis of today’s world, Timothy Garton Ash shows us what we must do to make the world a better place. He also tells us why it is reasonable to believe that this much-needed change is possible. This is a book that will inform, encourage, and even inspire readers everywhere.”
–PETER SINGER, Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, University Center for Human Values, Princeton University
“Timothy Garton Ash is one of the most astute observers of Europe and its relationship with the United States. In this important book, he dissects the currently troubled Atlantic relationship, places it in a broader global context, and provides a sense of hope for the future. He writes with grace, wit, and lucidity.”
–JOSEPH S. NYE, JR., author of Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics
From the Inside Flap
History/Current Affairs
At the start of the 21st century, the West has plunged into crisis. Europe tries to define itself in opposition to America; America increasingly regards Europe as troublesome and irrelevant; and Britain is split down the middle. What’s to become of what we used to call “the free world”?
No contemporary thinker writes with the combination of passion, historical insight, and reportorial brilliance of Timothy Garton Ash, and here he assesses the causes and implications of our current geopolitical quandary–which dates back to the end of the Cold War and is not merely political but existential. The question is not just “What should we do?” It’s “Who should we be?”
In Free World, Garton Ash draws on an extraordinary range of sources: from unique, personal conversations with Bush, Blair, and Schröder to encounters with farmers in Kansas and British soldiers in rural England; from history, memoirs, opinion polls, and sociological research to personal observations based on a quarter century of traveling in Europe and the United States. The result is a book that explains why Washington can never rule today’s interconnected world alone, why the new enlarged Europe can only realize its aspirations in a larger, transatlantic community, and how the torments of the Middle East and the world’s poor can only be addressed by free people working together. To remain true to itself, the West must go beyond itself. As Garton Ash shows, Americans and Europeans have at hand a unique opportunity to advance from “the free world” of the cold war to a radically new international order of liberty. And he urges us, with passion that comes from a lifetime of reflection on these issues, to seize that chance.
Defying conventional wisdom and eschewing easy answers, this incisive book should be read not just by all those who purport to lead and
At the start of the 21st century, the West has plunged into crisis. Europe tries to define itself in opposition to America; America increasingly regards Europe as troublesome and irrelevant; and Britain is split down the middle. What’s to become of what we used to call “the free world”?
No contemporary thinker writes with the combination of passion, historical insight, and reportorial brilliance of Timothy Garton Ash, and here he assesses the causes and implications of our current geopolitical quandary–which dates back to the end of the Cold War and is not merely political but existential. The question is not just “What should we do?” It’s “Who should we be?”
In Free World, Garton Ash draws on an extraordinary range of sources: from unique, personal conversations with Bush, Blair, and Schröder to encounters with farmers in Kansas and British soldiers in rural England; from history, memoirs, opinion polls, and sociological research to personal observations based on a quarter century of traveling in Europe and the United States. The result is a book that explains why Washington can never rule today’s interconnected world alone, why the new enlarged Europe can only realize its aspirations in a larger, transatlantic community, and how the torments of the Middle East and the world’s poor can only be addressed by free people working together. To remain true to itself, the West must go beyond itself. As Garton Ash shows, Americans and Europeans have at hand a unique opportunity to advance from “the free world” of the cold war to a radically new international order of liberty. And he urges us, with passion that comes from a lifetime of reflection on these issues, to seize that chance.
Defying conventional wisdom and eschewing easy answers, this incisive book should be read not just by all those who purport to lead and
About the Author
TIMOTHY GARTON ASH is the author of seven previous books of political writing and the “history of the present,” which have charted the transformation of Europe over the last quarter century. They include The Polish Revolution, The Uses of Adversity, The Magic Lantern, The File, and History of the Present. He is currently director of the European Studies Centre at St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His essays appear regularly in The New York Review of Books and he writes a column in the Guardian that is syndicated across Europe and the Americas.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
A Crisis of the West
When you say “we,” who do you mean?
Many of us would start the answer with our family and our friends. Widening the circle, we might think of our town or region, supporters of the same football team, our nation or state, a sexual orientation, a political affiliation (“we on the Left,” “we Republicans”), or those who profess the same religion—world-straddling fraternities these, with more than 1.3 billion Muslims and nearly 2 billion Christians, though fraternities scarred by deep internal divisions. Beyond this, most of us have a strong sense of “we” meaning all our fellow human beings. Some would add other living creatures.
Yet these largest senses of “we” are seldom what people really have in mind when they say “we must do this” or “we cannot allow that.” The moral “we” of all humankind is today more important than ever, but it’s not the same as our operational “we.” So let us pose the question more precisely: What’s the widest political community of which you spontaneously say “we” or “us”? In our answer to that question lies the key to our future.
For me, an Englishman born into the Cold War, that widest political community used to be something called “the West.” My friends and I didn’t spend much time worrying about its boundaries. If you had asked us, we could not have said exactly where it ended. Was Turkey part of the West? Japan? Mexico? But we had no doubt that it existed, as Europe existed, or communism. At its core, we felt, were the free countries on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in Western Europe and North America. This Cold War West faced a hostile power that we called “the East.” The East meant, in the first place, the Soviet Union, its Red Army, its nuclear missiles, and its satellite states in what was then labeled Eastern Europe.
Occasionally, Western politicians or propagandists tried to persuade us that noncommunist countries everywhere should be described as “the free world”—even if their governments were torturing critics at home, gagging the press, and rigging elections. My friends and I never accepted that claim. We did not think Chile under General Pinochet was a free country. Altogether, this tag “the free world,” with its strident definite article, implying that all inside are free, all outside unfree, has seldom been used in public without pathos or in private without irony. “We’re the most hated cops in the whole of the free world,” boasts a Los Angeles Police Department officer in the Jackie Chan film Rush Hour.
But the West—yes, that was real. Anyone who traveled regularly behind the Iron Curtain, to countries like Poland, was confirmed in this belief. My friends there talked all the time about the West. They believed more passionately than most Western Europeans did in its fundamental unity and its shared values; they feared it might be weak and decadent. “We,” they said, “are the West trapped in the East.” At the time, I felt these Polish, Czech, and Hungarian friends were, so to speak, individual members of the West far more than I felt Turkey or Japan were collectively part of it. Others, with varying personal experiences, saw things differently. Where you stand depends on where you sit. Everyone had his or her own West, just as everyone today has his or her own America,* France, or Islam. There are as many Italys as there are Italians. Nonetheless, Italy exists.
This political community of the West was, like all political communities, both real and imagined. At its military front line, it was as real as real can be. On a cold winter morning, Dutch, Belgian, British, German, Canadian, and American soldiers stood shivering all the way down the frontier between West and East Germany, ready to die together—“all for one and one for all”—in the event of an armed attack from the East. The community was imagined in the sense that behind these men and women prepared to die together in battle there stood another army of assumptions made by the people who put the soldiers there, but perhaps also by the soldiers themselves; assumptions about what united “us” and what made “us” different from the people on the other side of the barbed wire—a mental army of the West.
* I hope other inhabitants of the Americas will forgive me for using “America” throughout this book as shorthand for the United States of America. It’s what we usually say in Europe, and it is shorter.
Many believed, for example, in what they called “Western values.” The West stood for freedom, human rights, democracy, the rule of law. These good things, they thought, had grown mainly in the West and distinguished us from others. The (hi)stories we tell ourselves are also the history of our own times—and a sometimes unintentional account of our intentions. During the Cold War, generations of American school and university students were taught an inspiring story of Western Civilization, marching onward and generally upward from ancient Greece and Rome, through the spread of Christianity in Europe, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the English, American, and French Revolutions, the development of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, and universal suffrage, two World Wars and the Cold War, to the sunlit uplands of an American-led “Atlantic Community.” In the grand narrative of “Western Civ,” the West began in Europe and ended in the hands of America. It went from Plato to NATO.
On a dusty bottom shelf in the library of Stanford University in California I once found an example of this story told at its most confident and simplistic. Life’s Picture History of Western Man, published in 1951, began by asking: “Western Man—who is he and where did he come from?”1 The identity of this “most wonderfully dynamic creature ever to walk the earth” apparently became clear in Europe “about 800 ad (earlier in some places, later in others) and he was ready to set out on his bright-starred mission of creating a new civilization for the world.” In those good old days, Western Man—always capitalized—was “fair of skin, hardy of limb, brave of heart, and he believed in the eternal salvation of his soul.” Darker-skinned persons, not to mention women, hardly featured. Western Man “worked toward freedom, first for his own person, then for his own mind and spirit, and finally for others in equal measure.” Life’s handsomely illustrated picture history followed Western Man’s progress “from his first emergence in the Middle Ages to his contemporary position of world leadership in the United States of America. . . . A new vehicle called the Atlantic Community,” it concluded, “now carries Western Man on his way.”
At once fed by and feeding these assumptions about a shared future written in the past, there developed in the second half of the twentieth century an immense, intricate, close-knit web of special relationships between government and government, military and military, company and company, university and university, intelligence service and intelligence service, city and city, bank and bank, newspaper and newspaper, and above all, between millions of individual men and women, aided by the rapid growth in the speed and volume of air travel and telecommunications. On this teeming worldwide web, each kind of thread had a hundred bi- and multilateral variants, French-American, French-German, British-American, American- Polish, Portuguese-Spanish, Slovenian-Italian, New Zealand–Europe, Australia-America, the European Community, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and so on and on. Ever more people met, telephoned, wrote, or faxed each other ever more often for ever more purposes. And that was before e-mail. Start drawing these links in different colors on a map and it would soon disappear entirely beneath the inky tangle. There was a proliferation of such ties all around the world—people had begun to speak of “globalization”—but no strands were thicker than those between Western Europe and North America.
If I close my eyes and try to conjure a visual image of this West, I come up with something so mind-numbingly conventional that I immediately open them again. What I see are those endlessly familiar newspaper photographs of our leaders meeting each other, which they now do constantly, unlike leaders in most of recorded history, who met only on very rare occasions, if at all. Turning the pages of this mental album, I come first to the group portrait of a dozen or more heads of government on the steps of some palace or grand hotel, almost all of them middle-aged white men in dark suits (Western Man in his Native Dress). Next come those demonstratively bonhomous, back- patting, elbow-clutching bonding displays between French president and German chancellor. Here’s a grainy old snapshot of four men in tropical wear sitting under a beach umbrella in Guadeloupe, talking nuclear missiles; then a newer, digital image of an open-shirt and jeans encounter at some country retreat, with the American president and British prime minister serving as unpaid fashion models for Levi’s, Gap, or Banana Republic. And finally there’s the perennial buggy scene—in which, somewhere in America, two middle-aged men, grinning boyishly, snuggle close together in the front seat of a golf cart. The closeness is the message.
“Friendship” is the name diplomatically given to these relations between statesmen or stateswomen and, by two-way symbolic extension, to relations between the states they represent. If the states are friends, their leaders had better be; if the leaders become friends, that helps relations between their states. These ...
When you say “we,” who do you mean?
Many of us would start the answer with our family and our friends. Widening the circle, we might think of our town or region, supporters of the same football team, our nation or state, a sexual orientation, a political affiliation (“we on the Left,” “we Republicans”), or those who profess the same religion—world-straddling fraternities these, with more than 1.3 billion Muslims and nearly 2 billion Christians, though fraternities scarred by deep internal divisions. Beyond this, most of us have a strong sense of “we” meaning all our fellow human beings. Some would add other living creatures.
Yet these largest senses of “we” are seldom what people really have in mind when they say “we must do this” or “we cannot allow that.” The moral “we” of all humankind is today more important than ever, but it’s not the same as our operational “we.” So let us pose the question more precisely: What’s the widest political community of which you spontaneously say “we” or “us”? In our answer to that question lies the key to our future.
For me, an Englishman born into the Cold War, that widest political community used to be something called “the West.” My friends and I didn’t spend much time worrying about its boundaries. If you had asked us, we could not have said exactly where it ended. Was Turkey part of the West? Japan? Mexico? But we had no doubt that it existed, as Europe existed, or communism. At its core, we felt, were the free countries on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in Western Europe and North America. This Cold War West faced a hostile power that we called “the East.” The East meant, in the first place, the Soviet Union, its Red Army, its nuclear missiles, and its satellite states in what was then labeled Eastern Europe.
Occasionally, Western politicians or propagandists tried to persuade us that noncommunist countries everywhere should be described as “the free world”—even if their governments were torturing critics at home, gagging the press, and rigging elections. My friends and I never accepted that claim. We did not think Chile under General Pinochet was a free country. Altogether, this tag “the free world,” with its strident definite article, implying that all inside are free, all outside unfree, has seldom been used in public without pathos or in private without irony. “We’re the most hated cops in the whole of the free world,” boasts a Los Angeles Police Department officer in the Jackie Chan film Rush Hour.
But the West—yes, that was real. Anyone who traveled regularly behind the Iron Curtain, to countries like Poland, was confirmed in this belief. My friends there talked all the time about the West. They believed more passionately than most Western Europeans did in its fundamental unity and its shared values; they feared it might be weak and decadent. “We,” they said, “are the West trapped in the East.” At the time, I felt these Polish, Czech, and Hungarian friends were, so to speak, individual members of the West far more than I felt Turkey or Japan were collectively part of it. Others, with varying personal experiences, saw things differently. Where you stand depends on where you sit. Everyone had his or her own West, just as everyone today has his or her own America,* France, or Islam. There are as many Italys as there are Italians. Nonetheless, Italy exists.
This political community of the West was, like all political communities, both real and imagined. At its military front line, it was as real as real can be. On a cold winter morning, Dutch, Belgian, British, German, Canadian, and American soldiers stood shivering all the way down the frontier between West and East Germany, ready to die together—“all for one and one for all”—in the event of an armed attack from the East. The community was imagined in the sense that behind these men and women prepared to die together in battle there stood another army of assumptions made by the people who put the soldiers there, but perhaps also by the soldiers themselves; assumptions about what united “us” and what made “us” different from the people on the other side of the barbed wire—a mental army of the West.
* I hope other inhabitants of the Americas will forgive me for using “America” throughout this book as shorthand for the United States of America. It’s what we usually say in Europe, and it is shorter.
Many believed, for example, in what they called “Western values.” The West stood for freedom, human rights, democracy, the rule of law. These good things, they thought, had grown mainly in the West and distinguished us from others. The (hi)stories we tell ourselves are also the history of our own times—and a sometimes unintentional account of our intentions. During the Cold War, generations of American school and university students were taught an inspiring story of Western Civilization, marching onward and generally upward from ancient Greece and Rome, through the spread of Christianity in Europe, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the English, American, and French Revolutions, the development of capitalism, the bourgeoisie, and universal suffrage, two World Wars and the Cold War, to the sunlit uplands of an American-led “Atlantic Community.” In the grand narrative of “Western Civ,” the West began in Europe and ended in the hands of America. It went from Plato to NATO.
On a dusty bottom shelf in the library of Stanford University in California I once found an example of this story told at its most confident and simplistic. Life’s Picture History of Western Man, published in 1951, began by asking: “Western Man—who is he and where did he come from?”1 The identity of this “most wonderfully dynamic creature ever to walk the earth” apparently became clear in Europe “about 800 ad (earlier in some places, later in others) and he was ready to set out on his bright-starred mission of creating a new civilization for the world.” In those good old days, Western Man—always capitalized—was “fair of skin, hardy of limb, brave of heart, and he believed in the eternal salvation of his soul.” Darker-skinned persons, not to mention women, hardly featured. Western Man “worked toward freedom, first for his own person, then for his own mind and spirit, and finally for others in equal measure.” Life’s handsomely illustrated picture history followed Western Man’s progress “from his first emergence in the Middle Ages to his contemporary position of world leadership in the United States of America. . . . A new vehicle called the Atlantic Community,” it concluded, “now carries Western Man on his way.”
At once fed by and feeding these assumptions about a shared future written in the past, there developed in the second half of the twentieth century an immense, intricate, close-knit web of special relationships between government and government, military and military, company and company, university and university, intelligence service and intelligence service, city and city, bank and bank, newspaper and newspaper, and above all, between millions of individual men and women, aided by the rapid growth in the speed and volume of air travel and telecommunications. On this teeming worldwide web, each kind of thread had a hundred bi- and multilateral variants, French-American, French-German, British-American, American- Polish, Portuguese-Spanish, Slovenian-Italian, New Zealand–Europe, Australia-America, the European Community, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and so on and on. Ever more people met, telephoned, wrote, or faxed each other ever more often for ever more purposes. And that was before e-mail. Start drawing these links in different colors on a map and it would soon disappear entirely beneath the inky tangle. There was a proliferation of such ties all around the world—people had begun to speak of “globalization”—but no strands were thicker than those between Western Europe and North America.
If I close my eyes and try to conjure a visual image of this West, I come up with something so mind-numbingly conventional that I immediately open them again. What I see are those endlessly familiar newspaper photographs of our leaders meeting each other, which they now do constantly, unlike leaders in most of recorded history, who met only on very rare occasions, if at all. Turning the pages of this mental album, I come first to the group portrait of a dozen or more heads of government on the steps of some palace or grand hotel, almost all of them middle-aged white men in dark suits (Western Man in his Native Dress). Next come those demonstratively bonhomous, back- patting, elbow-clutching bonding displays between French president and German chancellor. Here’s a grainy old snapshot of four men in tropical wear sitting under a beach umbrella in Guadeloupe, talking nuclear missiles; then a newer, digital image of an open-shirt and jeans encounter at some country retreat, with the American president and British prime minister serving as unpaid fashion models for Levi’s, Gap, or Banana Republic. And finally there’s the perennial buggy scene—in which, somewhere in America, two middle-aged men, grinning boyishly, snuggle close together in the front seat of a golf cart. The closeness is the message.
“Friendship” is the name diplomatically given to these relations between statesmen or stateswomen and, by two-way symbolic extension, to relations between the states they represent. If the states are friends, their leaders had better be; if the leaders become friends, that helps relations between their states. These ...
Product details
- Publisher : Random House; First Edition (November 2, 2004)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 304 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1400062195
- ISBN-13 : 978-1400062195
- Item Weight : 1.17 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.36 x 1.09 x 9.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #5,209,257 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #51,730 in International & World Politics (Books)
- #131,164 in World History (Books)
- #225,626 in American History
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on November 14, 2004
Given the current world climate it is hard to find a balanced voice. Free World is that. Timothy Garton Ash has the experience needed to write such a work. His books on Europe in the late Eighties and Nineties are essential reading if you wish to understand the European epoch since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This time around he covers more ambitious territory: America vs. Europe and the place of Britain in this new post September 11th world. This is quite readable and more importantly quite wise. Ash shows clearly that propagandistic hysteria in the face of the present moment is probably the worst of all responses. He emphasizes what is crucially needed in this polarized world: Dialogue. His recommendations are keen and genuine. Buy several copies of this book and give them to friends of ANY political persuasion. Let's not talk about 'them' in superior tones. Let's realize that our differences will never disappear and talk nonetheless.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on July 20, 2015
Pg 115 Paragraph # 3 sums up the USA errors in judgement so? Mission just beginning I said way back and Southeast Asia N C BUT Respect for Buddhism in Thailand MIGHT Help some 76 BKK
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 21, 2005
"At the finishing line, the diplomacy of the Iraq crisis came down to a clash of two old European strategies, Gaullism and Churchillism." Mr. Garton Ash further posits that "1940 was the fulcrum of the 20th century. For Churchill, the traumatic fall of France meant launching Britain on the only path that remained available to preserve its greatness: conjuring a special relationship with the US. For de Gaulle, it meant launching a crusade to restore the greatness of France from the ashes of total defeat." So while it may be argued that "America is divided by a great argument about itself, Europe is divided by a great argument about America, which is, however, also a symptom of Europe trying to make sense of its own transformation." A condominium of sorts between France & Britain is what is called for, consequently, Mr. Garton Ash, a Brit, argues. Otherwise the French will continue their (increasingly) rearguard action to promote France in the name of European integration. (In Frenchman Jean Monnet's words: "If you have a problem you cannot solve, enlarge the context.") And the only way he sees it coming together in sincere form would be by way of "a historic compromise" between Britain & its ancient enemy France. I have to say that this book is rather informative and interesting up until around this point. He doesn't, however, offer any ideas how such can be effected, nor does he see (what I think may be) the more likely outcome; namely, that Gaullism will wither to some extent once its generational proponents are ecclipsed by new modes of instinct and realism. (A leading condender to be the next president of France, for instance---N. Sarkozy, is not 1/4 as viscerally resentful of America as Chirac.) This is a balanced book, I will admit. Mr. Garton Ash makes pointed criticisms (justifiable ones at times) of the USA, Britain, as well as France, but this book suffers from the same thing that many Europeans suffer from (as well as some liberal American democrats): the seeming inability or unwillingness to trust common ordinary people with not only the great issues of the day, but also the very fundamental ones as well. Just look at the proposed (70,000 word!) EU constitution & EU governments only---if at all---begrudgingly letting their citizens having an up-or-down vote on it; most EU governments having their parliaments decide on this. (Can you imagine even a single constitutional AMENDMENT being passed simply on a vote in the US Senate without the states having a say?) Relevent to my point herein, Garton Ash in addition wonders whether the EU ought be "encouraging the formation of an Arab Union, as the American's encouraged the formation of a European Union after 1945." But what would a union of dictatorships accomplish? Wouldn't promoting democracy in Morocco, for instance, be a more accomplishable and desired end, first? Why not make some incremental linkages with such countries in exchange for access to EU markets? How about laying off the grandiose designs for a minute and doing something to lay the requisite foundations for such instead? Another quote: "The recipe for human happiness is mysterious and cannot be purchased at Wal-Mart." Sounds dismissive of ordinary folk does it not? Furthermore, he calls the habit of America changing most of its top civil servants every four years "peculiar"; as if having entrenched bureaucracies unresponsive to electoral developements are apparently more rational. How would anything in America ever even have a chance at changing were a new president not able to place its people in positions of influence? God forbid the "people" elect someone responsive to them. Oh, excuse me, I forgot, elitist Europeans are offended by any mention of anything of a spiritual nature---Man IS God, being their rejoinder; or rather, those men at the pinnacles of European society are: they have our interests at heart, let's listen to them. And folks wonder why the USA & Europe don't see things similarly. Cheers! ****************************/
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 13, 2004
If you have read T.R. Reid's recently published "The United States of Europe" (strongly recommended), you will know that the European Union is certainly evolving into a formidable power. Unfortunately the U.S. has not paid much heed, much to our detriment given the lack of support for recent U.S. actions in Iraq. Author Timothy Garton Ash, a fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, has written a perceptive and ultimately reassuring book about the current rift between the United States and Europe. Citing the Iraqi conflict as a touchstone, he convincingly argues that the West has always been in turmoil and that the current struggles only show the resonance of the democratic process on a more global plain. First, he accounts for the more fundamental differences in lucid terms marked by the governing administrations. He observes Americans are more religious than Europeans, which seems apt given the recent election results. Americans are more distrustful of government and tolerate greater economic inequality in return for greater individual freedom. Americans place more emphasis on economic growth than on protection of the environment. Americans are more jealous of national sovereignty and have strong feelings on issues anathema to Europeans like the death penalty and gun ownership.
From this Atlantic division, Ash recognizes sharper differences within the U.S. and Europe. Europeans are divided into "Euro-Atlanticists", who want political ties with the U.S. and worry about the sovereign tendencies of the European Union, and "Euro-Gaullists", who see the EU as an essential counterweight to the U.S. and support a consolidated welfare state. For their part, Americans are divided between what have come to be called red-state and blue-state voters. The blue side corresponds to the "Euro-Atlanticist" side, while the red side encompasses traditionally conservative issues such as gun ownership and resistant hostility toward international institutions like the EU. What results is an overlap in what the U.S. sees as the Democratic Party since Europe does not have a red-state equivalent resembling the republicans and the U.S. has no organized socialist party on movement with the two major parties. This overlap is where Ash sees the future of true partnership where he believes the U.S. can move toward greater multi-lateralism and Europe toward improved trans-Atlantic cooperation.
Clearly there is a great amount of optimism in Ash's viewpoint. He wholeheartedly feels that what divides the West is less significant than what unites it, even though he acknowledges the erosion in shared causes and memories due to both the "Euro-Gaullist" mindset shaped by French President Jacques Chirac and the unilateralism forced by the Bush administration. It is really this divisiveness that makes it difficult to believe Ash's vision of trans-Atlantic unity will come to fruition any time soon. One fundamental difference is the war on terrorism. Americans view 9/11 as the beginning of a new age of nihilistic, mass-casualty terrorism, while Europeans, used to random bombings, tend to think of it as a single lucky shot. Moreover, the perception of American credibility has been sorely tested given the lack of resolution in the Iraq conflict. But Ash gives one faith with his well-written arguments about the joint mission toward spreading freedom globally, even if there have been communication breakdowns on the death penalty and global warming. Highly recommended reading for those who realize we must face up to our responsibilities beyond our borders.
From this Atlantic division, Ash recognizes sharper differences within the U.S. and Europe. Europeans are divided into "Euro-Atlanticists", who want political ties with the U.S. and worry about the sovereign tendencies of the European Union, and "Euro-Gaullists", who see the EU as an essential counterweight to the U.S. and support a consolidated welfare state. For their part, Americans are divided between what have come to be called red-state and blue-state voters. The blue side corresponds to the "Euro-Atlanticist" side, while the red side encompasses traditionally conservative issues such as gun ownership and resistant hostility toward international institutions like the EU. What results is an overlap in what the U.S. sees as the Democratic Party since Europe does not have a red-state equivalent resembling the republicans and the U.S. has no organized socialist party on movement with the two major parties. This overlap is where Ash sees the future of true partnership where he believes the U.S. can move toward greater multi-lateralism and Europe toward improved trans-Atlantic cooperation.
Clearly there is a great amount of optimism in Ash's viewpoint. He wholeheartedly feels that what divides the West is less significant than what unites it, even though he acknowledges the erosion in shared causes and memories due to both the "Euro-Gaullist" mindset shaped by French President Jacques Chirac and the unilateralism forced by the Bush administration. It is really this divisiveness that makes it difficult to believe Ash's vision of trans-Atlantic unity will come to fruition any time soon. One fundamental difference is the war on terrorism. Americans view 9/11 as the beginning of a new age of nihilistic, mass-casualty terrorism, while Europeans, used to random bombings, tend to think of it as a single lucky shot. Moreover, the perception of American credibility has been sorely tested given the lack of resolution in the Iraq conflict. But Ash gives one faith with his well-written arguments about the joint mission toward spreading freedom globally, even if there have been communication breakdowns on the death penalty and global warming. Highly recommended reading for those who realize we must face up to our responsibilities beyond our borders.
