Europe: up from barbarism

Human beings have never succeeded in building heaven on earth, even – perhaps especially – when they have tried. But they have repeatedly built hell on earth. In the first half of the twentieth century, that is what Europeans did to their own continent, as they had in earlier centuries to other people’s continents. No one else did it for us. This was European barbarism, done by Europeans to Europeans – and often in Europe’s name. You cannot begin to understand what Europe has tried to do since 1945 unless you know about this hell.

This sweeping, ponderous, pretentious, and perhaps perspicacious declaration introduces Homelands: A Personal History of Europe by Timothy Garton Ash. The book/memoir compiles very short pieces from this journalist cum historian cum wannabe statesman from five periods of modern European experience: Destroyed (1945); Divided (1961-1979); Rising (1980-1989); Triumphing (1990-2007); and Faltering (2008-2022).

Ash took himself to central and eastern Europe in the days when, for most English speakers (Ash is a Brit), the Soviet-dominated states and their adjacent neighbors were pretty much a blank. He visited the German town his father occupied in 1945.

For an Englishman like my father, England stood for freedom and Europe was a threat to it.

In the mid-1970s he met trade union leader Lech Wałęsa at Poland's Gdansk Shipyards where Wałęsa was leading one of the most significant protests against Soviet domination during the Iron Current era.  

Dashing, dancing, bubbling, bouncing through it all was the skinny figure of an unemployed thirty-eight-year-old electrician with the long moustaches of a seventeenth-century Polish nobleman. His facial expressions were as vivid and rapidly changing as Charlie Chaplin’s. The only time this Lech Wałęsa seemed to sit still was when he was taking communion. There is a photograph of the local priest, Father Henryk Jankowski, putting a communion wafer into his mouth, while behind the priest’s head, instead of a gilded baroque altarpiece with angels and archangels, we see a battery of cameras jostling to capture what press photographers call ‘the money shot’. After mass, Lech -– all the strikers referred to him by his first name –- would deliver his ‘vespers’. Standing on a van so he could be seen above the flower-garlanded gate, he would report to the crowd outside, in his fast-talking, joking, ungrammatical but irresistible colloquial style. Lech was a laugh a minute. No one then imagined that Wałęsa would go on to be the leader of an entire nationwide movement, receive the Nobel Peace Prize in 1983 and become the first president of a free Poland in 1990.

This sort of vivid on the spot reporting won Ash a steady position reporting from Eastern Europe. By the time the Russian domination crumbled in 1989, he knew every insurgent who mattered. He also knew or had at least interviewed the great players.

... Gorbachev’s story is rich in unintended consequences. The Soviet patriot whose policies ended up destroying the Soviet Union. The reformer who unleashed revolution. The communist who opened the door to democracy. Without him, freedom would certainly not have come so quickly and peacefully to half of Europe, nor such a rapid, decisive end to the Cold War across the world. ...

... The old movie actor [Ronald Reagan] well understood that the soft power of a narrative can be every bit as important as economic and military power. Hollywood complemented the Pentagon and Wall Street, making three-dimensional American power. Reagan was jeered at by many west Europeans, who dismissed him as a ‘cowboy’ and ‘B-movie actor’. (I may even have done a little jeering myself.) Yet his personal role was almost as important as Gorbachev’s when it came to ending the Cold War.

These two passages illustrate a recurring theme in Ash's story: individual actors -- leaders and/or criminals -- matter in shaping events. Not for him the idea of grinding impersonal forces working out our the human fates -- he sees and records people making their history. I'm not sure this sort of record is enough on its own to explain our collective inventions and follies, but it certainly is more readable than dry economic or sociological accounts.

Ash just missed being there for the momentous day the Berlin Wall dividing West and East Germany opened up.

By the early hours of Friday 10 November [1989], tens of thousands of East Germans had put their feet on the moon. When I got to Berlin the next day, it felt like Pentecost. The whole city was on the move. ... We watched the crowds of excited people walking to and fro, East to West, West to East, and it seemed in that moment that all would be well, and all manner of things would be well. With its internal rhyme in English and its Biblical echo of trumpeters bringing down the walls of Jericho, this phrase would establish itself as the received standard description of the event. It went back into German as a single word: Mauerfall.  … Like the moon landing, the fall of the Wall had become part of the shared historical mythology of humankind.

And then Ash reported on the new European Union that enfolded the east into European freedoms and European capitalism up to the borders of the diminished Russia. For most Europeans, the 1990s were the best of times.

In the 1980s, when my sons were born in England, their life chances were incomparably better than those of my Polish friends’ children. By the 2010s, especially with the freedom of movement offered by the EU, they had similar prospects. The same is true for a whole generation of central and east European students who have come through my door.

In conclusion, Ash looks at the Europe of the present which endured a terrible economic crisis in the 2010s, which has trouble distinguishing an actual violent domestic Islamism from a flood of desperate Muslim refugees from the collapsing states of its Near East such as Syria, and which faces Putin's resurgent imperial Russia in Ukraine. This section of the book skips the blithe philosophizing and bon mots which frame his accounts of the past in order to lay out starkly the challenges of Europe's future.

Timothy Garton Ash has lived at the center of events and relished his proximity to history in the making. He's not a neutral observer; he believes in a humane liberal order, albeit a capitalist one. For an American reader, he comes across as a bit full of himself, but I heartily enjoyed this book -- knowing Ash's account is never all there is to say.