Ideas - Historian uses Canadian prize money to buy drones for Ukraine

Episode Date: August 7, 2024

For Timothy Garton Ash, Europe is an idea — and an ideal — worth celebrating and preserving, even against all the forces acting against it right now. The historian, who won the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize, is using his prize money to buy drones for Ukraine in the war against Russia. *This episode originally aired on May 15, 2024.

Hey there, I'm Kathleen Goltar and I have a confession to make. I am a true crime fanatic. I devour books and films and most of all true crime podcasts. But sometimes I just want to know more. I want to go deeper. And that's where my podcast Crime Story comes in. Every week I go behind the scenes with the creators of the best in true crime. I chat with the host of Scamanda, Teacher's Pet, Bone Valley, the list goes on. For the insider scoop, find Crime Story in your podcast app. This is a CBC Podcast. Well, ladies and gentlemen, let me welcome you all here to the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. My name is Peter Lowen. I have the great pleasure of being the director of the school and of welcoming you here today for this great event.

And welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Today we join the audience at the award ceremony for the Lionel Gelber Prize in Toronto. And I'm not going to say much because I'm going to introduce someone who's going to introduce everyone else, which gives you a sense of how important this is. But for the Munk School to be the home and the steward of the Lionel Gilbert Prize, which recognizes the most important book in international affairs

published in the previous year, is a real honour. It's something that has brought esteem to our school for a long time and has given us the great pleasure of being able to welcome really intellectual bright lights like Timothy Garton Ash. Timothy Garton Ash won the 2024 Gelber Prize for Homelands, a personal history of Europe. Ash is a British journalist and historian and teaches at the University of Oxford. He's also a frequent columnist for the

Guardian newspaper. As for Lionel Gelber, he was a Canadian diplomat. He founded this annual prize in 1989. At the ceremony, Lionel's niece, Judith Gelber, spoke about her uncle's vision for the award. Lionel emphasized that the book must be judged to deepen public debate on significant international issues. Importantly, it had to be written in a style that could be easily read and enjoyed by the general public, as well as the scholarly crowd.

You'll hear the acceptance speech given by Timothy Garton Nash, as well as the conversation I had with him later, once he was back in Oxford, and after he decided exactly how to spend his $50,000 prize. But first, here's the founding director of the Munk School, Janice Gross Stein, introducing Professor Ash and his prize-winning book, Homelands. This is a love letter to the Europe that Timothy saw as a young man when he first began his career and traveled through Europe, even as a young man, which is so important. To the Europe that Timothy saw become, and then the sadness that is in this book. As again, Timothy walked through so much of this, always traveling, always speaking to people. There is a genuine liberal openness to Timothy as he listens to arguments, and he actively listens to arguments that he disagrees with. And I think more than anything else, that's what makes Timothy Garton Nash the scholar and the writer that he is. This is a lyrical love story to a liberal Europe

that embodied so many of our hopes. Timothy, over to you. Well, thank you both so much for those introductions. What a build-up. It's going to be hard to live up to. Thank you so much to the Gelber family for the prize. Thank you to Janice and the jurors for awarding it to me. It's a great pleasure to be back at the Munk School, where I've been many, many times, Peter. You can't keep me away.

To be back in Canada. I actually have more Canadian cousins, nephews and nieces, and I have British ones. And it's wonderful to have several of them here to be with us today. Also, my oldest son lives in Vancouver and is becoming a Canadian citizen, so Canada is well on the way to becoming another of my homelands.

And, of course, Canada, I mean, you have a few problems, but nonetheless, a prosperous, peaceful, stable, liberal democracy dedicated to the rule of law, a tolerant, decent, multicultural society, and with two official languages, English and French, your perfect member state of the EU. By the way, that's a compliment, in case you were wondering, coming from me. It's also, of course, a joke, but it's a joke that has a point to it, because one of the fascinating things about Europe is that it's so complicated. There are all these different Europe's,

geographical, historical, cultural, political, philosophical. And Europe doesn't end at any clear line, except possibly the North Pole, where it ends at a point. But otherwise, Europe doesn't end, it just fades away. It fades away across the vast expanse of Eurasia, across Russia, across Turkey. It fades away to the south across the Mediterranean, the Mare Nostrum of the ancient Romans and Greeks. If you told them that the line between Europe and not Europe ran through the middle of the Mediterranean, they wouldn't have believed what you were saying. And across the Atlantic, by the way, what you were saying, and across the Atlantic, by the way, both North and South,

English-speaking and Spanish and Portuguese-speaking. I mean, Canada is in so many ways part of the same family of countries, and the United States too. When Bill Clinton received the Charlemagne Prize, which is the leading European political prize, he said, because Europe is not just a place but also an idea, the United States too is in a sense part of Europe. So there you have the great complexities of Europe. Now what I'm going to do in the next 30 minutes is first of all say a little bit about the book but I am conscious that some of you have read it and also I did talk about it here last September so I don't want to repeat myself too much. So I'm then going to talk a little bit about some of the issues facing Europe today.

So let me start with a book. This book took me just 50 years to write. 50 years of travelling constantly around Europe, witnessing great events, meeting the major players you mentioned, the Kohls and the Putins and the Merkels and the Thatchers, but also many so-called ordinary people. So congratulations on winning the Lionel Gelber Prize with Homeland. You said in your speech afterwards that the book was 50 years in the making. So I'm wondering if you could take us back 50 years and tell us what happened to start things off.

Well, young undergraduate. Actually, even before that, just about to go up to Oxford. No particular continental European background. My family is very English. But Europe seems this amazing, fascinating place. By the way, filled with dictatorships. People forget that 50 years ago, 1972, you know, even Spain, Portugal and Greece were under dictatorships, everything behind the Iron Curtain. And so I crossed the channel and start traveling there and become absolutely fascinated in this strange place, this exotic place, Europe, which, by the way, of course, written, which is, of course, always in Europe geographically, but at that very moment was just joining what is now the European Union. So it was a kind of interesting moment to start engaging with Europe. Is that why you began engaging with Europe? Is that why you began engaging with Europe?

No, no. It's just because I found the history, the languages, the people, also one of the great themes of this book and of my life, the struggle for freedom, just absolutely fascinating. You know, starting in those South European countries, which threw off their dictatorships almost exactly 50 years ago. We just had the anniversary of the so-called revolution of the carnations in Portugal, which in a way was the first velvet revolution. And then, of course, next year it'll be the end of the Franco dictatorship in Spain.

And so it goes on. So that was the attraction to Europe at the time. I wonder if you could take us to the moment when you became a lover of the idea of Europe. You know, one of the interesting things is going back through all my journals, because I draw on all my journals and notebooks for this book, it's very hard to pin down the particular moment. But I would say somewhere in the late 1970s. And there, you know, the sense of these countries, which had fought each other for millennia, at least in Western Europe, finally coming together. And, you know, the frontier barriers coming down. And of course, Britain being part of it, as I said.

All of that doubtless contributed, although actually the formative experience for me in Europe, apart from living in Germany in the 1970s, was really Eastern Europe. It was meeting the dissidents in Eastern Europe and then the great Solidarity movement in Poland. It's a day after the Berlin Wall has come down on the 9th of November 1989. They've just lifted out two great chunks of the Berlin Wall so that I'm able to walk across the Potsdamer Platz from west to east, across what used to be the death strip, where just a few days before East Germans would still have been shot for trying to escape the other way. An amazing experience.

We're flooding across. I get into East Berlin, and I meet a very excited East Berliner who tells me he's just seen a handwritten poster which says, only today is the war really over. That's not just an anecdote. I think there's a deep sense in which, for most East Europeans and Southeast Europeans, it was only in 1989 that the war was really over. That was only when the Second World War ended. And it started a period which is a large part

of this book, which I argue is a distinctive period, which I call the post-war period. So we all know about the post-war period. My dear friend Tony Jutt wrote a book about it called Post-War, post-1945, after what we used to call the war. But on the 9th of November 1989 starts a new period of European history, the post-war period,

which to some extent overlaps with the post-war period, which to some extent overlaps with the post-1945 period. Many of the institutions are still in place, but I argue is a distinctive new period, and it ends on the 24th of February, 2022, with Vladimir Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, a war, the largest war in Europe since 1945, that is continuing to this day. So that the book is in a way bookended by the end of the Second World War, which I tell through the experience of my father, who landed with the first wave on D-Day, 6th of June, 1944, 7.30 in the morning, Verso-Mare, and then all the way to the full-scale war in Ukraine. You described being in Berlin in 1989 and hearing somebody say the war is finally over, and they were referring to the Second World War. Did you agree with that? Were they correct in

saying that? I think there's a profound truth in that. I think for the whole of Eastern Europe, the Europe behind the Iron Curtain, only in 1989 was the war really over. Because, of course, they were living under Soviet domination. They'd experienced multiple Soviet invasions. They weren't really living at peace. And, of course, the great irony of the book is that now there's war there again. Yeah. Your work is both historical and contemporary in focus. Do you experience a tug of war inside you between the journalist and the historian? So I always like to quote Conor Cruz O'Brien, who was both a historian and journalist,

and he said, I have one foot in each grave, which is a great phrase. But not at all. Not at all a tug of war. I think they're deeply complementary. So for the journalist, for the chronicler, there's nothing to compare with being there. I mean, next week, I will again be in Ukraine, and I will learn things that you could only learn by being there, smelling the air, watching, talking to people. But at the same time, all the perspective of the historian, the longer view, the historical context, the documents, that's equally important. And it's putting the two together that really makes what I do. Having been a foreign correspondent, I couldn't agree more. And Ukraine, of course, is a place that we've been hearing about in the news for far longer than

some think the war has been going on. Could you speak to what it is? You just said that there's nothing comparing to being on the ground and the kinds of things that you would learn. Could you talk about the kinds of things that you do learn being there that adds to your writing, making it richer and more nuanced? Well, you know what it feels like to be there, what people were, what the emotions were at the time, what was important to people at the time, which isn't necessarily what historians see 10 years later. But you know what? Interestingly, perhaps the most important thing is what people didn't

know at the time. Right? So historians explain what actually happened. And that leads you into the temptation to think what actually happened somehow had to happen. Hey, the Berlin Wall had to come down. Hey, Britain had to leave the EU. Hey, the war had to start in Ukraine. Nothing of the kind. Nothing of this was inevitable. The day before the war in Ukraine, the full-scale war, we didn't know it was had to start in Ukraine. Nothing of the kind, nothing of this was inevitable.

The day before the war in Ukraine, the full-scale war, we didn't know it was going to start. The night of Brexit, we didn't know the Brits were going to vote for it. And the day before, in fact, the day of the fall of the Berlin Wall, we didn't know it was going to happen. Many people, my East German friends, thought the war would still be there for decades to come. And there was nothing inevitable about it. So that looking back on history is rather like watching a football match, or even a nice hockey match on a video replay when you already know the result. Yeah, and that's a very powerful effect, of course, as we know. You mentioned your family history and your father's involvement in D-Day

and the fact that we are marking the 80th anniversary this year. Could you speak to the effect of that vast distance between today and that day on the willingness to defend the order that was imposed after that war? That's a great question. In a way, we, at least in Western Europe, have a problem of success, which is you have a lot of young Europeans, now 30 plus years old, who have known nothing but a Europe of peace, of prosperity, of integration. to a world in which at the end of the day, not only your countries have to fight, but maybe sometime even you might have to fight to defend what we have achieved.

So in a curious way, I think it was easier for my father's generation because his father has fought in the First World War. It was still a world in which war was unfortunately part of, you know, European reality. It's easier for people in Estonia or Poland because within living memory, they have the memory of a Soviet invasion, a state of war and so on. So I think particularly for young West Europeans, it's a huge adjustment. Starting with the end of the South European dictatorships, Spain, Portugal and Greece in the mid-1970s, essentially painting with a broad brush,

and Greece in the mid-1970s, essentially painting with a broad brush, you have a long ascending curve across the next 35 years of the spread of freedom in Europe, of the spread of democracy, and of the enlargement of the geopolitical West, of its two great institutions, the European Union and NATO. Think about it. In 1972, the European Economic Community, as it still was, had just six member states. By 2007, the EU, as it has become, has 27. NATO, just 15 member states in 1972, 26 by 2007. An unprecedented spread of freedom, democracy, and the geopolitical west across our continent. Of course, it wasn't simply a straight upward line. That's not how history

happens. There were major setbacks. There was a so-called state of war in Poland imposed in December 1981. There were five terrible wars in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, which I write about at length and witnessed. And there was 9-11. But one of the interesting things I found when working on this book was that while 9-11 was clearly a major turning point in the history of the Middle East and a major turning point in the history of the United States, it isn't the great turning point in European history. In European history, the great turning point is 2008. The combination within a couple of months of each other of the beginning of the global

financial crisis, touched on in one of the other great books by my dear friend Harold James, and Vladimir Putin's seizure of two great chunks of Georgia, roughly one-fifth of the country's territory, in the summer-autumn of 2008 starts a cascade of crises which continues all the way down to the 24th of February 2022. So the global financial crisis in Europe segues into the Great Recession in many countries and the Eurozone crisis, which lasts for many years with terrible suffering,

particularly in Greece and other South European countries. In 2010 already, Viktor Orban, who I knew as a bright young student activist in the late 1980s, starts the demolition of democracy in Hungary. Ladies and gentlemen, Hungary, a full member state of the EU, is no longer a democracy. It's not just an illiberal democracy. It's what political scientists also at this university call an electoral authoritarian regime inside the EU. 2014, of course, you have Putin's seizure of Crimea and the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian war, which, as all Ukrainians always remind us, didn't just start in 2022.

It started in 2014 in eastern Ukraine. 2015, the refugee or migration crisis, Brexit, Donald Trump, Brexit, Donald Trump, the rise of populists in countries like Germany with the AFD, and Marine Le Pen in France, COVID, all the way down to the 24th of February 2022 and the beginning of the largest war in Europe since 1945. Now, there's of course a great deal more to be said about this history but let me just touch on the question why after such a long period when things broadly speaking were going so well in European history we have this sudden downward turn and into this cascade of crisis hubris our own Greek friend is a good part of the answer.

Failing to learn the lessons of history, empires which very suddenly lose a great chunk of their territory, that's the case of the Soviet Russian Empire, don't like it, they strike back. That's what started happening in 2008 in Georgia, in a sense even before then in Chechnya, and then in spades in 2014. But in the most general terms, I would say the biggest mistake we made was a mistake in how we thought about history. To put it most simply, this was the fallacy of extrapolation. We took the way things had gone, namely, broadly speaking, rather well, for liberal Europe, for the liberal West altogether over the last 35 years, and simply thought it would go on doing that way. We took the most non-linear event in modern European history, the fall of the Berlin Wall and

the end of the Cold War, which is a one in a million example of what Machiavelli calls fortuna, historical luck, and we turned it into a linear projection. Or to state it in the most general terms, we took history with a small age, history as it actually happens, which is always the interaction between deep structure and process on the one side and conjuncture, contingency, collective will and individual leadership on the other. That's how history actually happens. And we turned it into history with a capital H. A Hegelian process of the inevitable spread of freedom. But freedom is not a process. Freedom is a struggle.

Always a struggle. Even in the most established liberal democracies like Canada or Britain or the United States or France or Germany. This is what the Ukrainians are reminding us of today. Freedom is a struggle. For me one of the words of this decade is the Ukrainian word Wola and Wola is a word, specifically in the Ukrainian version, because it combines the meanings of freedom and the will to fight for it. Both are contained in that one word, volia, and that's exactly what we need. Volia. On Ideas, you're listening to Timothy Garton Ash, winner of the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize. Ideas is a podcast and it's also a broadcast.

Heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, across North America on US Public Radio and Sirius XM, in Australia on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most

about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401,

check out This is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts. We're at the beginning of a new period of European history. That is the overarching theme of Timothy Garton Ash's acceptance speech after winning the Lionel Gelber Prize for his book Homelands, A Personal History of Europe. That new period of history began in February 2022. That's a descriptive claim, and typical of historians who divide the past into distinct periods. But Timothy Garton Ash

is also a journalist and a writer of opinion columns. And his message about Europe's new era has a prescriptive edge. He believes in Europe. For him, it's an ideal. And his book represents a kind of plea to fellow Europeans not to downplay the seriousness of today's threats to the continent and its liberal democratic ideals. Let me single out a couple of characteristics of this, of such a moment. The first is what I would call

interpretive cacophony, right? So all of us, everybody, above all newspaper columnists, are seeking for some kind of overarching interpretive framework for us to make sense of this, because we feel uncomfortable if we can't make sense of things, right? So Robin Niblett, the former director of Chatham House in London, has just published a book called The New Cold War, right? China, America. Well, yes, but what about all the other great powers? So then Neil Ferguson, the historian, says we're heading towards the Third World War. Well, maybe yes, but are we really saying that the alignment of Russia, China, Iran,

and North Korea, dangerous though it is, is something like the axis in the Second World War? is something like the axis in the Second World War? Are these really becoming such consolidated alliances? What about all the other great powers? What about Turkey? What about India, South Africa, Brazil, Indonesia? So perhaps what we're getting is a world of great power competition, not like late 20th century Europe, but more like late 19th century Europe, writ large on a global scale.

Great powers, empires pursuing their own national interests. Yes, but what about the unprecedented character of the Anthropocene era, that for the first time human beings are fundamentally changing our natural environment, both biodiversity and climate change. Yes, but what about AI, this amazing technological change coming down the road? Yes, but what about what I call in my book, the private superpowers, the Googles, the Amazons, the Microsofts, truly unprecedented actors in international relations, which I think didn't exist in Lionel Gelber's time. Or maybe, as Donald Tusk, the current Polish Prime Minister and former President of the European Council, reassuringly told us, we're living in a pre-war period.

Everybody grasping, looking at history to try and find the interpretive framework because what it's like, it's like rowing across a lake into a fog bank. So you don't know what's ahead of you, but as you're rowing, what you see is what's behind. So you try and take things from history to interpret the present. It's actually quite demanding to say, no, there are going to be elements of these different historical phenomena recurring in this age, but they're coming in a new combination. And our job is to work out what the new combination is

and not just slap an old label on it. Now, connected with that is a second point. The Europe we have today, which with all its faults is the best Europe we've ever had. It's worth remembering that still. Was created essentially by four great generations, all of whom were driven by what I call the memory engine. That is to say, they had a formative experience in their youth which informed their political

commitment and their visions of Europe for an entire lifetime. The 14ers, shaped by their personal experience of the First World War, Churchill, de Gaulle, Adenauer. The 39ers, shaped by their experience of the Second World War, the 68ers and the 89ers. Now, for the first time, we have an entire generation of young Europeans who could be over 30 years old, having basically only known a Europe that was relatively peaceful, prosperous,

free, democratic, and unprecedentedly united, where you could travel pretty much from one end of the continent to the other and still be in the European Union and still be in a liberal democracy, unless you were going to Budapest. If that's been your experience, and of course it's not true for young Ukrainians or young Bosnians, but for most young Europeans, you naturally think it's normal, because what you've grown up with, what you've known, is normal. And our job, as historians or as commentators,

is to say, hey guys, no. Historically speaking, it's profoundly abnormal. We've never had a Europe like this. It's deeply abnormal. And only if you can convey this sense that what feels to you like normal is actually abnormal will people understand how deeply it's threatened and therefore mobilize to defend it. It occurred to me when I was thinking about this talk,

being in Canada, that in a way what this generation is in time, Canada is in space. generation is in time, Canada is in space. That is to say, if you grew up in Canada, you might think having this wonderful, fortunate country of yours is normal. Only when you start traveling, either in space or in time, or preferably both, do you understand just how extraordinary it is, what you have in Canada and what this young generation have particularly in Western Europe? Travel in space, also known as journalism, one of my two professions. Travel in time, that's what we call history. So the challenge is, can you learn from history without having to go through it all yourself again? Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine,

said something very interesting at this year's Munich Security Conference. He was in a conversation basically with Olaf Scholz, who'd spoken just before him. And he said being ready to face someone like Vladimir Putin is not just a matter of how many billion euros you spend on arms or what weapon systems you have. He said, you have to be psychologically prepared. And he said, we in Ukraine, because the war started 10 years ago in 2014,

we're psychologically prepared for the war started 10 years ago in 2014, we're psychologically prepared for the war. You're not. You may be putting up the money, but you're not psychologically prepared for it. So can you learn from history without going through it yourself? And this brings me to the third point, which is beginnings in history, as in romance, are particularly important.

What you do in those first months or years is more important, dare I say, than what you might do in your 27th year of marriage. And it's the same with European orders. Those first years are absolutely crucial when everything is so wide open. So think about it. The first five years after 1945 shaped the liberal international order, certainly for the next 50 years and in many respects to this day. And it was wide open. There were multiple possibilities at that time. The first five years after 1989 shaped the next 30 years in Europe. So what we do in Europe and in the wider West in these years is going to shape Europe and the world for decades to come. Now, there are many issues one could talk about in this respect. I could talk about

Israel, rather than the Middle East. I could talk about the prospect of Donald Trump again being elected president of the United States on the 5th of November. Guy Fawkes Day, by the way. Suitably enough. Structurally, the fact that Trump or no Trump, the United States' interest in Europe has diminished, is diminishing, and will continue to diminish. That's just a structural fact. I could talk about the European elections and the prospect of hard-right nationalist populists, the AFD in Germany, Marine Le Pen in France, doing extremely well. I could talk about China, where Olaf Scholz has just been drumming up more business

for German companies. I could talk about Britain, if you'd like me to, and the prospect of our rapprochement with the EU after the next election or climate change or inequality. I want to spend the last few minutes talking about the subject closest to my heart, which is Ukraine. I've spent roughly half my time now on Ukraine. I've been four times since the beginning of the full-scale war.

Chronologically, the last chapter of the book is about the war in Ukraine. Last year, when I was there in February and again in June there was tremendous optimism. There was high morale, high hopes of the counter-offensive. When I was last there in October people were getting extremely worried that the exhaustion, the traumatization but also the sense that that the counteroffensive wasn't working. I'm going back again next month, and I know that the atmosphere will be much darker, much gloomier, because the counteroffensive failed for reasons we could discuss. Ukraine has had significant successes, it's important to say they've destroyed a large part of the Black Sea fleet

and pushed it away from Crimea that's an amazing achievement but their cities, cities like Kharkiv are being absolutely hammered as the air defenses are overwhelmed and they're gradually being pushed back some of the reasons for this are to be found in Ukraine itself. That's important to say.

It's not all us. But the most important reason is the disparity between what we in the West have done and what Russia and its allies have done. Russia has converted to a war economy rapidly and effectively, and it's got more ammunition from North Korea alone than the entirety of Europe has given to Ukraine. And the Russians have found a particular kind of weapon, improvised, the so-called glide bombs, which are absolutely devastating.

So at the moment ukraine is losing but for me this one is really on europe i hate to say this but even donald trump might have had a point when he said to europeans during his first term in office, why are you still depending on us for your own defence so much than 70, 75 years after the end of the Second World War? Yeah? Why aren't you doing more? You're as rich as us. Why aren't you doing more for your own defence?

Absolutely. I don't think we should, as Europeans, 80 years after d-day 6th of june this year the 80th anniversary of d-day should still be looking to uncle sam to do the bulk of the work there's some things which we still need the u.s, there's no question about that. But I think this is a case where Europe really has to step up to the plate. In commissioning our and building up our defence industry, we have one particular missile type. I mentioned the Russian glide bombs. Germany has a missile called the Taurus.

It's a very sophisticated cruise missile. Germany has 600 of them. In a leaked conversation between German Air Force officers, they said somewhere between 10 and 20 of these missiles could take down the Kerch Bridge, which connects Russia to Crimea. Using those missiles, Ukraine could actually put Russia onto the back foot now, this summer, even while Russian forces are grinding forward in the east, so there's much that we could do now. But what I increasingly hear in Europe and elsewhere is a line of argument which goes,

well, particularly if Donald Trump is elected on the 5th of November, this is how it's going to end. It's going to be a frozen conflict or a semi-frozen conflict with some sort of territorial line of division somewhere through Ukraine. And people argue this can actually be seen as a great success. After all, Ukraine has defended itself. It's still a democracy. It's going to come into the EU and NATO. Let's redefine that as victory. And what I want to say very forcefully to you, and this is my last big point, don't believe it. If this is how it ends, and I'm afraid, I have to say in all honesty, that is now probable,

that is defeat. We may say until we're blue in the face, it's a kind of victory. It's a kind of victory. Every single Ukrainian will see it as a huge defeat. You've suffered so much and you've lost one-fifth of your country, a territory the size of Portugal and most of Slovenia, where millions of Ukrainians lived. I talk to people who tell you about Mariupol or Novokarkovka. They show you their houses on Google Maps, and they're not going to be able to go back there

unless they're going to live under an alien dictatorship. Speaking a language they no longer want to speak. The country, Ukraine, would be defeated. It would be demoralized. It would be further depopulated. There's already been a massive exodus of people. This would continue. Instead of the wives and children who are now outside the country going back to join the husbands,

the husbands would come out to join the wives and children, which would be great for the German labor market, by the way, but not great for Ukraine. And the politics of Ukraine, which are already quite fractious, would then become embittered and rancorous and divided. And there'd be a lot of blame game, both internally and blaming the West. internally, and blaming the West. And that means, and by the way, NATO, the United States, does not even want Ukraine's NATO candidacy to be put on the agenda for the Washington summit this summer. And we talk about Ukraine really becoming a security assurances. I'd love to believe them, but Ukraine has its own experience with security assurances.

And EU, it's just a candidate. That's just the starting line. There are countries in the Western Balkans that have been candidates for nearly 20 years. And if the politics go sour inside Ukraine and you don't get this positive upward spiral of reconstruction and reform, then EU member states who don't want the enlargement anyway will have plenty of reasons for putting it on the never-never. In Russia, Vladimir Putin could declare victory. If he's got Crimea and most of, if not all of, the four oblasts which he has already declared and most of if not all of the four oblasts which he has already declared are part of Russia that's a political victory

I have won back Novorossiya the territory that Catherine the Great got for Russia in the 18th century I have won it back and that means Putin is in power for years to come and so long as Putin is in power

the rest of Europe is not safe. He would regroup, take a year or two and then maybe have a go at Moldova which has a little breakaway region called Transnistria with Russian armed forces on it, try something hybrid on the edge of NATO. So Russia would remain under Putin's rule, Europe be insecure. And last but not least, in the eyes of the rest of the world, this would be a defeat not just for Ukraine, but for the West. My Oxford research project, Europe in a Changing World, did a big global poll with the European Council on Foreign Relations. China, India, Turkey, Russia, US, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, 10 major non-European countries. People there think three things. This is not a

war between Russia and Ukraine. It's a war between Russia and the West, number one. Number two, they think Russia is likely to win. And number three, majorities or pluralities in most of these countries think the EU is likely to fall apart within the next 20 years. And what is more, there's a correlation between those groups. So those who think Russia is likely to win are those who think the EU is likely to fall apart. You couldn't have a more telling demonstration of how our own credibility as Europe and as the West is at stake in the outcome of the war in Ukraine. And so in this crucial beginning period, it is absolutely vital, of course, that Canada and the US, but above all, that we in Europe do more to ensure that

Ukraine gets to somewhere that can credibly be called victory and Russia to something that can only be called defeat. That's up to our states, our leaders, our democracies, but it also involves our own participation as citizens. And there's a nice saying, you've put your money where your mouth is, which I think is a sound principle. And so I have decided that I will dedicate, pass on the very generous prize money from this prize

for the defence of Ukraine, particularly for the... APPLAUSE ..air defences of embattled cities like Kharkiv and Kramatorsk and others in the east. I hope you will feel that that's a good way to use a Canadian prize for a book about our European homelands. Thank you very much.

You decided to donate your prize money from the Gelber Prize to the defense of Ukraine. Could you talk about what you consider the most powerful case for helping Ukraine? Is it the duty to Ukrainians or an instinct for self-interest or self-preservation? Yeah, well, I mean, first of all, I'm actually going to be doing the handover of the equipment from that donation in Kyiv next Wednesday. I know already the particular unit I'm giving to, particularly these very expensive reconnaissance drones, which are absolutely vital to troops at the front line. And to your question, it's both. It's both that in my view, and this is my whole formation, I'm sure

it also comes from my family history. If there's a free country, if there's a country under attack, if there's a country fighting for its freedom, you want to support him. You want to get in there. That's one side. But the other side is, if you look at the deep reasons behind this war, namely, Vladimir Putin wants to get the Russian Empire back, or as much of it as possible, and a hell of a lot of Russians support him in that, then you understand that it's also in our vital self-interest. If he's not stopped in Ukraine, he'll push on. I'm curious how you decided which unit was going to receive the resources that you're providing. Now, there's a great question. And I have a wonderful friend called Natalia Gumenyuk,

who is an incredibly courageous Ukrainian investigative journalist who I've known forever. And she put me onto an NGO called Come Back Alive, which has been going since the beginning of the Russia-Ukrainian war in 2014. And unlike these sort of big, unwieldy charity organizations, they know exactly which unit requires exactly which kit. You know, it's pick up trucks for these guys or reconnaissance drones for these guys. And for me, it was kind of important to know exactly what it was and where it was going. it was going. It's hard to miss the signals coming out of Europe, and particularly from Paris, from Macron, about the need to wean Europe off the assistance or the support of the United States. How popular is that message, do you think, in Europe? So in the elites, in a kind of high-level policy discussion. It's a very widespread view,

but number one, there are two different variants of it. Emmanuel Macron basically has a classic goalist version, which is we want to build up l'Europe puissance, Europe as a superpower independent of both the United States and Russia and China, right? That's a classic goalist view. I have a Euro-Atlanticist view, which is we want to build up Europe as a stronger strategic partner of the United States and Canada. So we need to do more for our own defense, but we also badly need to keep the transatlantic partnership, both because of our shared values and just because of the hard military realities. Does Canada have a different sort of duty to Ukraine than, say, France or Germany, in your view? Germany, in your view? Now, that's a very interesting question. I would say that Canada has a different, so to speak, geopolitical national interest.

That is to say, a defeat for Ukraine is not such a direct threat to Canadian security compared with, say, the Arctic, for example. I mean, that's a direct threat to you. But in terms of values, and of course, also of your very large and active Ukrainian community, of your very large and active Ukrainian community. Krista Freeland, by the way, wonderful Krista Freeland, is our former student here at Oxford at my own college, St. Anthony's. Right. So in terms of the level kind of interest, I think it's altogether comparable and maybe even larger than in, say, Portugal or Greece.

I guess that's the stakes. But what about duty? Is that different for Canada than other places? Or how do you differentiate those two things, maybe? So, stakes lower geopolitically for Canada, duty, about the same in the sense that I think this is about liberal democracies protecting liberal international order more broadly. And Canada is a model liberal democracy and always in the front line of defending liberal international order, with the slight caveat that, of course, we're also in Europe defending the European Union. Although, as I say in the book, Canada would be a perfect member of the EU. Yes. Because actually you're not, alas. Really grateful to talk to you and congratulations again

thank you very much it was a real pleasure you were listening to my conversation with timothy garten ash he's the author of homelands Thank you. can find more than 300 of our past episodes. Technical production, Danielle Duval and Laura Antonelli. Web producer, Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayed. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.