I first encountered Timothy Garton Ash last month on the Charlie Rose show. Charlie was talking to three British writer/reporters about the U.S. relationship to the rest of the world, and Ash was the one who seemed closest to my own views, not foolishly positive, but realistically hopeful that things would change. [Note: I know the normal pattern with British names would be to refer to him as Garton Ash, but I really don't want to type that every time, so I'll go with just plain Ash.]
What really grabbed me was when he said that Washington in 2008 is very much like London in 1908, in that they're both at the edge of a precipice of power that few people are seeing. Charlie seemed to disagree with him, apparently feeling that a lot of people in Washington do see that, but he didn't press the point. (Good thing, too, because no one in Washington, no matter what they're saying, is actually doing anything.)
Anyway, I headed out to the local library to find what I could of Ash's work, and I came up with his 2004 book,
Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West. Ash is an author and a columnist who has written extensively on Europe, but he is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, so he's got some American experience.
I'll say upfront that I know very little about European politics; it is one of the great paradoxes that we Americans understand Europe so poorly, but think, because of our roots, that we know them well. One of the leading embarrassments to me is the knee-jerk reaction to France's lack of supine involvement in the war in Iraq. Whether we believe (or believed at the time) that France should have thrown in their lot with us, we never should have ignored France's right to evaluate their own self-interest and act accordingly (and Jay Leno's continual jokes were facile and, in the main, unfunny).
Because of my own ignorance, it's impossible for me to evaluate the sections of Ash's book that discuss the current political climate of Britain and Europe; I don't even know if anything has changed there in the four years since this book was written (and isn't it shocking to realize how little things have changed in the U.S. We're still in Iraq, facing essentially the same issues, we haven't dealt with any of the problems that have been deemed #1 priority in the meantime, like immigration or social security, and now our government has been pretty much shut down for two years as we all watch the presidential campaign. At a time of extreme world change, we have been in extreme stasis.).
That being said, I found Free World an excellent job of reporting, with a few curious omissions, but with the usual bunch of hopes and dreams masquerading as solutions. Ash is an entertaining writer, drawing on his own reporting and popular culture to inform his judgment and ours. At times he casts his rhetorical net a bit wide; on facing pages (34 and 35) he offers a great insight ("Self-censorship is the political writer's appeasement") and too-cute wordplay ("an Atlanticist Atlantis"). For the most part, though, Ash keeps down the cutesiness, and offers what seems to be a solid primer on national and transnational identity in the first years of the 21st century.
And this, I think, is the heart of this book; not the usual program recommendations (though Ash's suggestion of keeping ourselves to a 20-year timeframe is one of his best), but urging us in the Western world to question our own identity - what does our nation mean? As I read history, I find that this question used to be in the forefront, what should the United States be? Apparently, today we've answered that question, as it never seems to be posed any more. (The answer is, we are what we are, the acme of human development, why question that?)
Ash sees Britain as poised at a crossroads, uncertain where to throw its lot. Should they retreat or embrace the world? Should they look east, toward Europe, or west, toward America? I'll let the reader go through the history and the current arguments - it's all very well presented - and cut to the end: Britain should march out into the world, hand in hand with both its West and its East, playing a pivotal role. He allows that it won't always be comfortable, and that Britain can't always insist on being the "bridge" of Tony Blair, but that they can engage with both sides to solve problems but belong to neither.
As for Europe, they too stand at a fork, not certain of what they have created in the European Union. They are slowly working their way toward a reconciliation of national sovereignty with transnational strength and unity, but have complicated it by adding countries that are, historically, barely European. They can continue to define themselves using America as a reference point, but that will ultimately be self-defeating. Europe should figure out what it wants to be, allow those countries to join who are capable of being that, and march forward as a self-confident equal to the U.S. (though their world roles may be different).
One thing Ash understands about America, as many foreigners do not, is that we are unlikely ever to be truly unilateralist because of our internal divisions. The Bush administration notwithstanding, we do have built-in corrective measures to pull us back from certain brinks. However, it is our common beliefs, most having to do with American exceptionalism and our belief that ours is the one true way, that cause the most conflicts with nations we need to treat as partners. However off mainstream belief Bush is, a lot of people would agree with his, "a decisive victory for the forces of freedom and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise." As Ash says, "What titanic hubris."
Along those lines, he tells the story of Paul Wolfowitz going to the E.U. to insist that Turkey be made a member (you recall, our good friends the Saudis didn't want to host an attack on the Muslim world, not again, so we wanted to use Turkey as our staging area). Ash states, correctly, "imagine a European politician traveling to Washington to tell the United States it must accept Mexico as the fifty-first state, so that Mexico would support a European invasion of Guatemala."
Ash goes on to discuss the rest of the world, more as a series of problems to be solved by the West than in the sense of their trying to develop their own identities. That may sound like a weakness of the book, but it really isn't. For a British writer to climb inside the heads of four billion people or so is not, in theory, any more impossible than doing so for the U.S. But Free World would be a much bigger book, and a different one, and not as valuable, perhaps. He never says he's anything other than a Westerner writing about the West.
The reader has a pretty good sense of where Ash is going before he gets there. He drops hints, such as how freer trade would allow potential immigrants to stay in their own countries; they'd probably prefer that anyway, and it would help the West avoid a host of problems. So the recommendations for freer trade and more direct assistance from the billion "wealthy" people are predictable.
He alludes to the growth of the larger Asian countries, but, I think, understates its potential impact. While we expend resources over the next twenty years helping the Near East and Africa, the Far East can be building themselves even faster without taking responsibility for global problems (yes, I know that China should have the same opportunity to build themselves on cheap oil as we did, but that isn't today's reality). That's in large part why the U.S. pulled out of Kyoto, because of that sense that others would profit in a way that was closed to us. Morally, you can argue it; politically, it's a hard sell. Ash acknowledges that: "[America would have to put] the wider international interest before the narrowly conceived national one; and the long-term before the short-term...such an outcome looks woefully unlikely." Apparently, this intractable problem is such that Ash does not return to it.
One real problem with Free World is that Ash doesn't fully grasp the extent to which, at least in the U.S., the citizenry has adopted corporate goals as "our" goals. I don't understand our slack-jawed adoration of offshoring corporate "leaders," but any discussion of the identity of this country has to include it. We have become so wrapped up in our worship of "free enterprise" that we have created gods out of its masters. Look at the number of books and articles that proclaim the answers to the world's problems will come from private concerns, despite their unsuitability for such work - but you have to go where the money is.
Few things are more contentious than the concept of a true world government. The United Nations often seems to be nothing better than a multi-ethnic debate society. Ash talks about world problems, talks about how current institutions may have to expand (growing E.U., Russia in NATO but not the E.U.), but never quite advocates more than happy free nations all working together, including some currently non-free nations to help (even working, no matter how sub rosa, to help them become free), to solve those problems. He may see this as a non-starter in the twenty years he's giving us to work on these things.
I have not, almost certainly, given you the full flavor of this book. The tone is one I favor, that of positive pessimism, a belief that we have some chance to make a dent in the world's challenges, but not blind to how difficult that path will be to walk. But it will take more than this or a hundred books (or a thousand blogs) to make a dent in the American torpor. We can't even advocate our own best interests well, how can we possibly meld that with the best interests of the world as a whole?
I despair in how far we are from taking even the first hesitant steps. Ash wants the West to, "[define] these universal minima of inalienable human dignity, on which there can be no compromise." I doubt, reluctantly doubt, that 20 years will even allow us to take a first crack at that, and that's an early step. I hope, tremulously hope, that I am wrong.
