The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - A First-Hand History of Europe

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Over the years, Timothy Garton Ash has seen a lot of European history, and now the Oxford University professor has written a book on his first-hand travels through Europe's history, some of which was apparently subversive enough that the Stasi - the East German spy service - had a file on him. The book is called "Homelands: A Personal History of Europe," and it's won the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on foreign affairs.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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The Oxford University professor has written a terrific book on his firsthand travels through Europe's history, some of which was apparently subversive enough that the Stasi, the East German spy service, had a file on him. The book is called Homelands, A Personal History of Europe, and it's won the 2024 Lionel Gelber Prize for the best book on foreign affairs. And Timothy Garton Ash joins us now here in the studio. It's great to see you again. Pleasure to be back. You were here with, yes, indeed back. You were here seven years ago with your last book. And I want to start with, I want to start with a quote. Close to 90 million people were either killed or displaced in Europe between 1939 and 1948. This means that roughly one out of every six Europeans was either killed or displaced.

That is before we even get to the further millions who were merely starved, stricken by disease, raped, tortured, crippled, poppered, frozen, reduced to prostitution, orphaned, humiliated, degraded, poppered, frozen, reduced to prostitution, orphaned, humiliated, degraded, widowed, psychologically scarred for life, let alone the long-term effects on their children and children's children. Okay, why does Europe have this whole cradle of civilization, everything's wonderful going for it, when it has such an appalling history? Listen, if you're writing a history of contemporary Europe, you have to start in hell. And Europe in that decade was hell, a hell we ourselves made. And so if we're going to talk about European civilization, we also need to talk about European barbarism. And I think that's really important to understand. But of course, the story of this book is the story of how we Europeans said

never again. We were never again going back to that hell. And here we are nearly 80 years later, and we're back in it. We have the largest war in Europe since 1945 in Ukraine. You're back in it, and not for the first time. Let's not forget the Balkans of the 1990s. That's exactly right. And, you know, after Bosnia, after the horrors of former Yugoslavia, we said, never again, again. And here we are again. In Europe, you write, zero is a recurring number. What do you mean by that? So let me explain. Europeans talk about year zero, or the Germans say Stunde null, the hour zero, which is where everything began. The ruins and you start again. But as we've just been saying, zero is a recurring number. For Bosnians, I've never forgotten, I say in the book, sitting in a

newspaper office in Sarajevo in 1995, towards the end of the Bosnian war, and it's freezing cold. The guy is feeding the office furniture into a stove because there's no heating. First one leg, then another chair leg. Soon the whole chair is gone. And he says, as we're talking, you know, after the war, and instinctively, I thought he meant after 1945. And then I realized what he actually meant was after 1995. And when Ukrainians say after the war, they're not going to mean after 1945, they're going to mean, let's hope and pray after 2024, 2025. They're going to mean let's hope and pray after 2024, 2025.

But I presume for a guy like you, whose father was at D-Day in 1944, I presume that's year zero for you and your family. I suppose so. I mean, it's really interesting because this is a personal history of Europe. And so I've been, I like to joke this book took me just 50 years to write 50 years of traveling around the continent but obviously I wasn't there in 1944 I was minus 10 years old but fortunately my father was he landed with the first wave on D-Day 930 a.m. on the Normandy beaches at Versailles, along with some Canadians, of course, and the Americans, obviously, and fought his way all the way through Northern Europe until he ended up occupying a village in Northern Germany. So certainly I grew up with D-Day

and that last year of the Second World War as a defining experience in my own family. And so I can describe that moment through his own experience. For a guy born in Wimbledon, England, you speak English, you speak what else? Polish, German, French, and then a passable knowledge of a few others. So do you feel more European because you can speak more than one language? Undoubtedly. I mean, this is, of course, one of the great things.

It's one of the many ways in which Canada is, in a way, a kind of European country. You said that, actually. You said we make a pretty good EU member. It's a joke, of course, but it's perfectly true. You would be the perfect EU member state. member. It's a joke, of course, but it's perfectly true. You would be the perfect EU member state. Model liberal democracy, great respect of international humanitarian law, civilized, multicultural, and bilingual, English and French. What could be better? We will swap you for Hungary. But no, no, absolutely. So this is, in a way, the point of the title of the book, Homelands.

The great thing about being a European is that you can be at home abroad. I'm in Paris, I'm in Berlin, I'm in Warsaw, I'm clearly abroad because they're speaking a different language, but in an important way, I'm still at home. The European Union's motto is, and I'm going to give my grade 12 Latin a workout here, In Veritate Concordia, united in diversity. And here's what you say about that. Unity and diversity are Europe's yin and yang, its thesis and antithesis, forever seeking their elusive synthesis.

Push too hard for unity and the forced union starts to fall apart. Push too hard for diversity and Europeans end up fighting each other. Could you evaluate Europe's yin and yang today? How much diversity, how much unity? Well, let me start by saying that this is the key to understanding European history since the fall of the Roman Empire. For these 2,000 years we've been pushing for unity, it gets too much unity, there's a Brexit or a war. Or there's too much diversity and then we all fall apart and there's a war again. So we've been doing this to-ing and fro-ing for 2,000 years. I would say this European Union is the best stab we've had at it in 2,000 years. But we've got to understand

that it's not about just constantly going for unity. We're not going to have a United States of Europe. It's not going to be a federal Europe. It's about finding that elusive balance between unity and diversity. And as we now set out to expand the European Union yet again to take in Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, the Western Balkans, that's the challenge again. You wrote something in the book that I am delighted you were wrong about. In 1980, on the last day of the year, you wrote in your diary,

there will be a nuclear war in the next decade. And then you rewrote the same line in all caps. Why at that moment were you so pessimistic about our future? Well, you know, people have forgotten that in the so-called Second Cold War, which was this period of extreme tension between the United States and the Soviet Union in the early 1980s, we actually came closer than we've ever done since 1945 to a nuclear exchange. I mean, the chief of the Soviet General Staff actually went to his bunker underneath Moscow because he was so worried that the so-called Able Archer NATO exercise was actually serious

preparation for nuclear war under Ronald Reagan. So there was some reason for being worried. But, you know, the truth is, Steve, I would say the danger is greater today. Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons voluntarily in 1994 in return for security assurances from Russia, the United States and Britain. Look what happened to Ukraine. It got hammered.

Imagine if they'd had a nuclear weapon to threaten retaliation against Russia. You'd have to assume Putin would have thought twice. Exactly. Exactly. So that actually, I think what's happened to Ukraine has given a huge push to nuclear proliferation. And then now look at what's happening in the Middle East, and then now look at what's happening in the Middle East, Israel, Iran. So I'm afraid we're probably entering another period where the risk of nuclear war is going to go up, this time not between two superpowers, but by nuclear proliferation. Well, having said all that, let's focus for a moment

on one of the more joyous moments of your travels through your homelands, and that is you drove for seven weeks in 1978 through the entire Soviet bloc, as you tell us, from East Berlin to Sofia, Bulgaria. Could you ever have imagined that about a decade later, that evil empire would simply end? So it's a great question, and I'm going to give a kind of nuanced answer to it because you were inviting the answer no. In German they say ja in which means yes and no together ja und nein because coming at it as a someone trained in the study of history and coming at it with fresh eyes as a young guy and as a reporter traveling around I could see that this was an empire in decline.

So I think I had the basic insight, this is an empire in decay. What I could never imagine was, A, it would only take 10 years, 11 years, and B, it would happen entirely or almost entirely peacefully. I mean, the pivot of the story of the last 50 years in the book is, of course, 1989, the Velvet Revolutions. And the fact that this enormous, the last great European empire, nuclear-armed empire, could softly and suddenly vanish away with hardly a shot fired in anger,

seemed a miracle at the time and actually was a miracle. I'm trying to imagine the Berlin Wall has come down. East and West Germany are reunited in a single German country. And you are sitting opposite the former Chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl,

and he says to you, do you realize that you are sitting opposite the direct successor to Adolf Hitler? I don't like it, but that's the fact, he says to you, do you realize that you are sitting opposite the direct successor to Adolf Hitler? I don't like it, but that's the fact, he says to you. How did you react when he said that? Helmut Kohl, I have to tell you, was the largest human being I have ever met. He was an enormous man, both in height and in girth. So he was towering over me.

And when he says this really shocking thing, I mean, what does one say? over me and when he says this really shocking thing I mean what does one say and what I should have said was actually her Bundeskanzler there was Grand Admiral Dönitz between Hitler and you because if you remember at the very end of the third right Dönitz was kept briefly but so I was so gobsmacked I I didn't couldn't say anything. But of course, it's a very telling story because Helmut Kohl had a great sense of history. And what he was saying to me was, I am conscious of my historical responsibility. Basically, I'm the first Chancellor of United Germany since Hitler. Hitler tried to put a German roof over Europe. I'm going to do

everything differently and put a European roof over Germany, which, by the way, is actually what he did. He made sure that German unification was accompanied by major steps of European unification, notably the single European currency, the euro. So it was an amazing moment, but also an amazing historical figure, Helmut Kohl. And yet you also quote a former political prisoner who turned out to be the president of Hungary, who said he survived 40 years of communism, but he wasn't sure he could survive one year of capitalism. Now, what do you mean by that? This is my dear friend, Arpad Gönz, who was a veteran of the 1956 revolution, had been imprisoned afterwards,

you know, years of oppression. You know, ironically, capitalism turned out to be a more revolutionary force in Eastern Europe than communism. Communism, because it was kind of so slow and inefficient, actually had a kind of conservative effect. So I used to say, if you want to go and find the old Europe, you'll find it behind the Iron Curtain in Eastern Europe. Capitalism has transformed everything in those societies, not just what you have in the shops,

but the way people work, time. Time is speeded up and divided up into little half-hour segments, like a television program. The political system, what you see on television, how people dress, how they live. So that's what my friend Arpad Gantz was saying.

It's capitalism which is the revolutionary force. I'm trying to imagine this other moment where you're sitting with George W. Bush, then president of the United States. You're in the White House, and he asks your view on which countries from the former East Bloc ought to be admitted to NATO. What did you tell him? So this was an amazing moment, I have to tell you. When I initially got the telephone call in my office in Oxford, and a very sort of girlish voice said, could you come for a meeting with the President of the United States next Thursday at 2 p.m.?

I thought it was a joke. I thought my students were playing a joke. Five of us to brief President George W. Bush before his first official visit to Europe and to meet Vladimir Putin. They were all there, Dick Cheney and Laring in the corner, Condi Rice and everybody, two and a half hours. And the big question on the table was,

should the United States, should we the West, support NATO enlargement and how far? And the particular issue was the Baltic states, question mark. And I and my good friend Michael McFaul, subsequently US ambassador to Moscow under Barack Obama, very strongly urged him to take in the Baltic states. And I have to tell you, I am so glad that we did. Imagine that you were Estonian today and you were living in the city of Narva, right on the Russian frontier, 90% ethnic Russian. You're sleeping easily in your bed today because Estonia is a member of NATO.

So thank God we did. Having said that, I don't know if it was on this occasion or another occasion, you're talking to George W. Bush and he asks you, do we want the European, we meaning the Americans, do we want the European Union to succeed? That seems like a very strange question for a president of the United States to ask. What did you make of it? Well, first of all, of the five Europeans or people there,

Europe was, strange enough, represented by two Brits, myself and Lionel Barber, subsequently editor of the FT. And Lionel, I immediately pushed back very hard and said, Mr. President, it is absolutely in the United States' interest to see the European Union succeed. But the point is this. No U.S. president between 1945 and that moment in 2001 would have thought to ask that question, not even Ronald Reagan, because it was obvious to them that it was in the U.S. interest. So this is the beginning of that process whereby the distance between the United States and Europe starts to increase, that a U.S. president can ask that question.

And by the way, that continues under Barack Obama. Well, and presumably gets to its worst point under Donald Trump, who says, if you don't pay your bills, I'm not coming to your rescue. In spades under Donald Trump. But the important point, I think, is, and this is very relevant, I think, to Canada, too, that it's a long-term secular process. It's worse under one president, better under Joe Biden. But nonetheless, for the United States now, it's China. It's all about China. And Europe is in some sense, I won't say a sideshow, but certainly a secondary consideration.

Europe has and has had for a while a very fraught relationship with Islam. And I want to do another quote from your book on that. Sheldon, top of page five, if you would. Board number three, a policy based on the expectation that millions of Muslims will so suddenly abandon the faith of their fathers and mothers is simply not realistic, you write. If the message they hear from us is that the necessary condition for being European is to abandon their religion, then they will choose not to be European. This appears to be a stalemate. Do you see any way in which Muslim Europe becomes more European, or I guess alternatively, old-stock Europe becomes more embracing of Islam?

It's already happening. Which? The process of peaceful integration. There's a famous remark Madeleine Albright reports when a senior French diplomat said to her, Madam Secretary, we know that will work in practice, but will it work in theory? Yes. The great French view, Cartesian view. With the integration of Muslims in Europe, it's, so to speak, the English way around.

It's working in practice, even if it might not work in theory. So in theory, you can construct a dichotomy. In theory, you can construct a dichotomy, but the practice is because we have many millions of fellow citizens, fellow Europeans, British, French, German, Italian, who've been living in Europe for many, many years, for generations, often second, third generation, and it works. It works in practice, maybe not in theory. And interestingly, the reason it works is because the national cultures are so strong. So if you have a meeting of European Muslims, I've attended a few, the British Muslims are just very British, and the French Muslims are very French,

and the German Muslims are very German. So it is absolutely working. This is not to say there isn't a problem with a significant minority who think the two are incompatible. We have a long history of terrorism. There's no question about that. And of course, what's happening today in Gaza is not just a foreign policy problem for Europe. It's also a domestic policy problem, because both anti-Jewish hatred and anti-Muslim hatred

is being stirred up by this conflict. But we have to make it work, Steve. We have no alternative. We have to. You would think so. You would think there's no alternative. Well, we have an aging population. We need immigration.

The immigration is coming anyway. Where is it going to come from? Africa and the wider Middle East. We just have to. And Canada is, in a way from Africa and the wider Middle East? We just have to. And Canada is a way, you know, one of the models. I mean, you know, you invented multiculturalism. Britain's relationship with Europe. Even the Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had this to say. Britain does not dream of some cozy, isolated existence on the fringes of the

European community. Our destiny is in Europe as part of the community. That's Maggie Thatcher. How did we get from that view to Brexit? It's the same party, but very different view. So here's the thing. The mistake we made about the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War and the spread of liberal democracy Was to believe it was somehow inevitable. It was the way history was going actually, it was a one-in-a-million example of historical luck good luck and Brexited the other way around it was anything but inevitable People tend now to see it as you expression of some deep, deep causes.

It was a one in a million example of historical bad luck. A whole series of things came together, from more important things like the role of the Euroskeptic Press, to the fact there was a height of the refugee crisis in continental Europe, all the way to the personal role of someone like Boris Johnson, and just squeezed it over the line. It was 52% to 48%. And we've been regretting it ever since. If you look at the opinion polls now,

it's going up around 60% of the Brits asked who say it was a mistake. Well, OK, but, and for this next question, I'm going to sort of combine what you've written in this book with what you wrote in your previous book about free speech. And that is, it seems to me one of the lessons that emerges from Brexit is that campaigns or arguments that are designed to appeal to the heart and the gut, using lies, using what everybody acknowledges after the fact, where out and out lies, that will succeed over a rational appeal to the brain. If what you have in your society is a kind of wellspring, your society is a kind of wellspring, deep wells of anger about the way things have been going.

Because Brexit was also an expression of the fact that a very large part of British society, particularly in the post-industrial north, felt left behind, ignored, underprivileged, felt left behind, ignored, underprivileged, through the kind of liberalism, neoliberalism, if you want, that we'd had for the last 30 years, Thatcher and then Blair. So it's also an expression of the thing that gave the United States Trump and gives France Marine Le Pen and gives Germany the AFD. That's another part of the story. And then the demagogues come along and tell this compelling narrative and the slogan of the Brexit campaign.

I mean, I was a passionate, of course, I was a passionate Remainer. That day of the Brexit vote was the worst political day of my life. But they did a brilliant campaign, mendacious, of course, and take back control with the most, with a slogan of genius, because it captured exactly what people wanted. We now have a new phenomenon in Europe,

relatively speaking, illiberal democracy. Hungary, for example, saying it doesn't want to join the, quote, mixed race world of Western Europe. Is that the future of Europe? So, if I may, I'm going to disagree because I think illiberal democracy is a contradiction in terms, like fried snowballs. Democracy is liberal or it's nothing.

It's nothing. And what we have in Hungary, shockingly, in a full member state of the European Union, is no longer a democracy. Is it fascism? No, it's what political scientists call electoral authoritarian regimes. I mean, there's this kind of hybrid. I mean, Turkey would be another way. You still have elections and you still have some sort of a democratic contest, but it's not actually a free and fair election. It's not a loving playing field. Shockingly, inside the EU, and to your question,

Viktor Orban, who is the author of this anti-liberal success, by the way, I write about him a lot in the book. I first got to know him in 1988. He was our student at Oxford. He was the bright young hope of liberal Europe. Look at him now. Viktor Orban is counting on the victory of Donald Trump. If Trump comes back in the United States,

he will have people like Viktor Orban and quite a few other allies scattered around Europe, not only cheering for him, but also relying on him. So there's this contest being played out in Europe between liberal and anti-liberal Europe. But it's in a way the same contest that is being played out in North America at the same time. Let's finish up on this. 50 years ago, we could not have imagined the end of the Soviet Union, the reunification of Germany, Lech Wałęsa being a trade union guy, and suddenly he's the president of Poland, the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Russia invading Ukraine, and on and on.

As you look at Europe today, what do you think will happen 50 years from now that we can't possibly imagine today? So my formula has always been pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. Just analytically, it's not looking good. We have two big wars at the edges of Europe. We have nationalist populist parties that are doing very well. There was growing unhappiness with the European Union so that one can very well imagine a Europe 50 years hence, which is back to its bad old ways, to go back to the beginning of our conversation.

However, history is always open. It was open in summer 1914. It was open in summer 1939. And it's open now. So it's up to us. And I am firmly persuaded that if we mobilize to defend the best Europe we've ever got, we can still hang on to it. There could still be a European Union 50 years hence. And that, in a way, is the reason for writing this book, to say to young people in particular everywhere, hey guys, you've got the

best Europe we've ever had, but if you don't watch out, we're going to lose it. We congratulate you once again on winning the Lionel Gelber Prize for Foreign Affairs Writing. The book is called Homelands, A Personal History of Europe. And we are so glad it has brought Timothy Garton Ash

back to our studio. All good wishes. Great pleasure. Many thanks. The Agenda with Steve Paikin is made possible through generous, philanthropic contributions from viewers like you. Thank you for supporting TVO's journalism.