Timothy Garton Ash is one of the very few people around with the depth and breadth of historical understanding to produce genuine contemorary history.
His new Book, Facts are Subversive, contains short essays, mostly originally written for newspapers, but far too good to let go for tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapping. At this year’s Kirchentag I was struck by the skill, good humour and perspective TGA brought to a shared seminar with
Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel. He knows his way round the issues of the age, and has real critical insight about Europe (“If the EU were to apply to join the EU it would be refused”) without losing his grasp on the positive achievements of the whole project.
These essays range from
big questions of definition and identity (“Islam in Europe”) to
well known flashpoints (“The strange toppling of Slobodan Milosevic”, “9/11”) and
contemporary predicaments (“Beauty and the Beast in Burma”). His main interests, as Oxford professor of European Studies, have been
foreign policy — there is an extraordinary insider’s account of an attempt to brief George W. Bush about Yoorp, and another about Obama’s inauguration.
To every subject he brings deft precision, like a peanuts cartoon — inscape in context.
TGA’s standpoint is classically Liberal. He articulates what the word could and should mean as more than just a hysterical reactionaries’ catch-all ra-ra term of abuse.
Only when we are prepared to allow our own most sacred cows to be poked in the eye can we credibly demand that Islamists, Turks and others do the same. This is a time not for erecting taboos but for dismantling them. We must practise what we preach.
TGA is also highly articulate about the difference between secularism and new model atheism.
I do not believe there is a God and therefore assume that some 2007 years ago a couple called Joseph and Mary just had a baby. But what a man he turned out to be! Like the great Swiss historian Jacob Burckhardt, I can’t get anywhere with Christ as God, but as a human being Jesus Christ seems to me a constant and wonderful inspiration — perhaps even, as Burckhardt put it, “the most beautiful figure in world history.” And some of his later imitators didn’t do so badly, either.
As historians get down to work on Bush foreign policy,
TGA draws up a preliminary balance sheet, measured against the administration’s stated aims at the outset.
He is no knee-jerk anti-Republican, indeed much of his journalism as I remember from the period tried to encourage people to stand back and give Bush what benefit of the doubt they could. As the roll begins to be called up yonder, however, as a former advisor to Bush, he has to conclude:
In every vital area of the wider Middle East, American policy over the last five years has taken a bad situation and made it worse
He then forensically sketches the whole “amazing bloody catastrophe ” —
- Afghanistan worse (more dangerous and hospitable to terrorists),
- Pakistan worse (even more unstable, radical and effective as a clearing station and training camp for terrorists from all over the world)
- Iraq worse (now radicalised and unstable),
- Iran worse (newly prestigious, confident and dabbling in WMD),
- Israel worse (more worried, less secure and self-confident),
- Palestine worse (with a new radical terrorist government)
- Lebanon worse (Bush scored an accidental early goal in the Cedar revolution, but latterly managed to muck it all up by undermining the very government he had supported, so, on balance, less stable).
- Egypt, the Islamists are now scoring at the ballot box as well as with their AK47’s: worse.
The score is 8-1, then. The 1 was Gaddafi. We can credit Bush with a phenomenal performance, especially when his team was the only superteam in the league, with no serious opposition.
Again and again, he played blinders, kicking the ball into his own net, stunning the occasional goalkeeper in the process.
Hucknall Town played Manchester United and after 90 minutes the score is 8-1 to the giantkillers, 7 of them own goals, and the Manchester goal itself is a cracked and wobbling ruin with bigger holes in the net. Such is the trainwreck courageous and innocent young men and women are now dying to try and recover, as, tragically, horribly, the coffins come home.
For me, the jewels in the crown of this collection, however, are TGA’s essays on
Gunther Grass and
George Orwell. Most of the pieces are very short. Keep this book for train journeys and occasional reading. Agree or disagree with his conclusions, it flags up the real issues, remarkably consistently for a collection of occasional pieces.
TGA lays out in historical order the events and alarums of our age in a way nobody else has yet managed, and I salute it as a tremendous and surprisingly readable achievement.
Christianity is a fundamental root of societal values in Germany. Official. I just heard it from the Bundeskanzlerin herself. Speaking in Munich to 6,000 people, the Prime Minister of the largest democracy in Europe acknowledges freely and imaginatively the significance of Christianity as one of the great root of her country’s social values. She is not saying these humanistic concepts could not have been developed in other ways, but the fact is it was from and through Christianity that they have been.
Here in Bavaria there is a refreshing absence of crude secularist rant, along with scare stories got up by the right wing press to suggest that any departure from Victorian morals and dogma means the end of Christianity and ruin of society. Those fears and fantasies are expressed on the margins of society, where they belong.
Neither do I detect the lazy old English idea you “leave morality to the bishops”. Mrs Merkel calls for a dialogue between churches and society, where both engage closely and bless each other and are willing to be changed according to their values and experience — so no crude monopolies of truth, no slippery slope panic, no fear that engagement between churches and society will corrupt the Churches or Confessionalise the State. Freedom is a Christian value, but not egoistical freedom from taking responsibility. Christian freedom is the use of possibilities to follow values as a way of supporting others — another one of Mrs Merkel’s core Christian values.
All she is saying is that there needs to be respect, realism, self-awareness and truthfulness. In this context, Mrs Merkel is just announcing €60Bn of cuts between 2011 and 2015, asking around various possibilities. She isn’t claiming a godlike command of all possible answers, but owning up to a serious problem, addressing pragmatic reality, asking for hep and obviously winning some respect for her candour. How refreshing! How grown-up!
Politicians, even controversial ones with cuts to announce, seem to be held in higher respect in Germany. Wondering why I am told they have a more realistic mandate from a more fully democratic voting system, and that there is a higher value of corporate civic life here. They are not thought to behave that much better, but they are held to account more tightly over their views as well as their expenses. They have to treat people more like grown ups, partly because there is a very direct relationship between how many votes and how much power. There is often a higher degree of historical awareness and pragmatism, with less simple sloganising. By comparison, much UK debate about Church and society, such as it is, simply bears out the old maxim that Clichéd words reveal clichéd thought. There has to be a better way!
