The Paul Wells Show - Encore: Timothy Garton Ash’s personal history of Europe

Episode Date: June 25, 2025

Timothy Garton Ash has chronicled some of the biggest moments in European history for over 40 years. In his new book, Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, he offers a history of postwar Europe, told through personal memoir. He talks to Paul about the future of Europe, the war in Ukraine, advising George W. Bush on how to think about the European Union, having Victor Orbán as a student, and why these days, his main concern is about the United States. This episode was recorded at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. It originally aired on October 11th, 2023

Here's a standout episode from an earlier season with the historian Timothy Garten Ash Talking about the past and the future of Europe It's interesting listening back to this one. We spoke before Donald Trump was reelected and before he tariffed the entire planet But the ideas we talked about have a much longer timeline than one man's presidency And many of them are more relevant now than ever for instance ash talks about a decline in US soft power and one man's presidency, and many of them are more relevant now than ever. For instance, Ash talks about a decline in US soft power, and the idea of Canada joining the European Union. So enjoy my conversation with Timothy Garten Ash. Hey everyone, I managed to find a club that Canada doesn't belong to... yet. I've said often only half in jest that Canada would be a perfect member of the EU.

Today, Timothy Garden ash on Europe's bloody past and its uncertain future. I'm Paul Wells, the journalist fellow in residence at the University of Toronto's Monk School. Welcome to the Paul Wells Show. Okay. I don't know about you, but this week's episode is a big deal for me. If Europe has a historian, an in-house

journalist and chronicler, at least if we're talking about the people who do that work in English, then to me, that person is Timothy Garten Ash. And he's had that role for something close to 40 years. He was in Germany when the wall came down. He was in Poland in the early days of solidarity.

He's written about every big moment in the history of Europe for the Guardian newspaper in a succession of bestselling books. He's advised Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair and George W. Bush on how to think about and deal with Europe. He's a professor of European studies at Oxford. And when he came to the monk school at the

university of Toronto last month, I was eager to meet him. He's got a new book. It's a little bit different from some of his other books. It's called Homelands, a personal history of Europe. It's a kind of reported memoir. Ash goes back to the places where Europe's modern history happened, the places where he formed his own ideas about Europe. And he catches up with figures from Europe's past and his own and updates the continent's progress towards, well, towards wherever it's going.

Obviously he's got Brexit on his mind these days and the war in Ukraine and the rise of populist nationalist movements in Hungary and Slovakia and in Poland, a country that's very important both to him and to me. He's worried about Europe as anybody who cares about the place should be, but he's also got a romantic streak. One sentence that stood out among many to me

in this extraordinary book is this one. My Europe, he writes, was and still is about the struggle for freedom. I met Timothy Garten-Ash in a podcast studio in the basement of the Monk School in Toronto. Timothy Garten-Ash, thank you for joining me. Great pleasure to be here. The book is called Homelands, a personal history of Europe. It's the kind of book

that you could have written a version of any time in the last 15 years. Why did you write it now? This book took me just 50 years to write. And I've been traveling in Europe, worrying about writing about Europe for literally 50 years since the early 1970s. So that's part of the answer that I had this extraordinary perspective of what had gone right in Europe but also what had then gone wrong. And one of the big motivations for writing the book is that we've built the best Europe we've ever had. And now we're in danger of losing it.

And how that happened is to some extent the substance of the last 20% quarter of your book. The part that you say Europe is faltering. So my dear much missed friend Tony Jart famously identified a period called post-war, post 1945. I identified a period which is called the post-wall period from the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9th of November, 1989. And what I argue is that that comes to an end on the 24th of February, 2022 with Vladimir

Putin's full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And basically that period, like game football, European football, that is proper football, soccer, it's a game of two halves. So you have the first half up to 2007, which is an incredible progress. I mean, the enlargement of freedom, starting with German unification all the way through East Central Europe to the Baltic States. Estonia, a country that didn't exist on the map of Europe in 1989, comes into EU and NATO. But then I argue starting in 2008, the combination of the beginning of the global financial crisis

and Putin's seizure of two chunks of Georgia, you have what I call the downward turn. From that moment on, it's just a cascade of crises, one thing after the other. Eurozone crises, Putin's seizure of Crimea and the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian War, more than nine years ago. Brexit, Trump, the demolition of democracy in Hungary run through the COVID pandemic all the way down to the beginning of the largest war in Europe since 1945. So it's telling that story through things I've

seen, people I've met, be it Helmut Kohl or Vladimir Putin or Margaret Thatcher or quote unquote ordinary people, but also trying to work out why it happened, what went wrong. I was going to ask about Tony Jett near the end, but also trying to work out why it happened, what went wrong. I was going to ask about Tony Jett near the end, but since he raised his name, his extraordinary book, Postwar, came out, I believe in 2005.

And that whole period of crisis piled on crisis, what we could almost call poly crisis, a word you mentioned, that'll happens after his book and after he passed away, would you have been surprised by the turn that things have taken? So it's so fascinating this because Tony, who was really a dear friend, was one of the most

skeptical people I've ever known. Um, but that book post-war 2005 ends with an incredibly optimistic statement about Europe and the future. Why? Because that was the moment of maximum optimism and, as it seems now, the illusions of the post-war period. Or, if you like, hubris, right? And no one is immune to the spirit of their times. Even Tony with his hard-nosed skepticism. His very last book, shortly before he died, Il Fers La Land, is already saying,

hang on a minute, something has gone badly wrong. We've forgotten the lessons of social democracy, egalitarian liberalism, the kind of liberalism I believe in. We've neglected the other halves of our own societies. But it's fascinating to see how optimistic that book is. And by the way, if I had written a book at that time, I'd have made the same mistake. I sometimes try and figure out when things started to turn sour. And I sometimes dated from George W. Bush's second inaugural address, which was very

much a speech about freedom on the march. They had defeated the Taliban. They had begun to set things right in Iraq. And now it was time to really turn on the afterburners and go and fix countries around the world. And freedom house in Washington with their annual freedom in the world report dates 2005 is the beginning of a long secular decline

in freedom in the world. It's almost like we liberal internationalists got too big for our bridges. Absolutely. We thought history was going our way and would go on going our way. I mean the way I like to put it is that we made the mistake of confusing history with a small age with history with a large age. So history with a small age as history rarely happens, which is always the interaction between in a deep

structure and process on the one hand and conjuncture, contingency, chance, collective will, individual leadership on the other. That's how history really happens. And we started kidding ourselves, not so much in the early 1990s. We didn't know then how things were going to turn out, but precisely in the early to mid 2000s that this was history with a capital H, namely a Hegelian process of the inevitable progress towards freedom. And that was precisely the moment when things started going wrong.

And you know, it's really interesting, freedom isn't a process. Freedom is always a struggle. That's what the Ukrainians are reminding us of today. So I do agree that that was the moment of maxima pubris, as it were, just before the storm. Interestingly though, and there's something I found out writing this book, 9-11 isn't the big turning point

in European history, right? It's a big turning point in American history, Middle Eastern history, and of course that affects us, because then it affects the United States, affects us. That's like, that's for Canada. No. It's okay, we're used to it. But as I say, I think those illusions were building up and then the turning point, the

actual break is 2008. Because if you think about it, we had the 2004 big enlargement of the EU and NATO. Beginning of 2007, we bring in Bulgaria and Romania, so in our European perception things are still actually going quite well, even when they were going pear-shaped in certainly in Iraq and in the US. And all those illusions fed into it, including of course the US illusions. Finally you mentioned George W. Bush, so I have a part-time permanent appointment at the Hoover Institution.

My office is in the corner where George Shultz used to sit. I have various George Shultz memorabilia on the shelf, very odd things, including a glass eagle commemorating a dinner given for President George W. Bush. And on it there is a quotation from George W. Bush, maybe even from that inaugural, which says something like, the future belongs to free peoples. I would passionately want that to be true. But as a historian one has to ask if it's actually going to be true. The book is to a great extent, a love letter to Europe, but in the opening chapters, it

becomes clear that it's really hard to find Europe's address by any criterion, the geographical boundaries, the shared conception of history, the interpretation of major events, the presence or absence of democracy. Europe fades in and out the closer you try and scan it. And it seems in the early chapters of the book

that you're almost having fun with that dilemma. There are so many different Europe's, there is no single Europe. And, um, one thing I've learned in a long career of working on Europe is never name a boundary, except possibly in the North, because I think we could argue that Europe ends at the North Pole. We could agree on that. But across the vast expanse of Russia, it merely fades away, somewhere between St Petersburg and Vladivostok, across Turkey somewhere between

the European part of Istanbul and the old Persian border, of course across the Mediterranean, because for the ancient Greeks and Romans that was the Marienostrum, it was Arsi, it was one civilizational space. But I would also argue across the Atlantic. I've said often only half in jest that Canada would be a perfect member of the EU. You fulfill all the criteria of the European treaties, you're an admirable multicultural liberal democracy and bilingual in English and French. What could be better for the EU? And I quote

Bill Clinton saying when he received the Charlemagne Prize which is the most prestigious European political prize, Clinton said, because Europe is an idea and not just a place, America too, in a sense, is part of Europe. I've always hoped that Canada could seek some sort of associate membership of the EU, but even though we would seem unnatural, I think it's fair to say that Canadians, population,

leadership have not often enough done the required readings, were inattentive part-time Europeans. You must sense that when you come to visit. Yes, I think so. I mean, I think also what I sense here as in the United States is of sense here as in the United States is, of course, demography in the sense of the countries from which people or their ancestors came, people with a migration background. And that is obviously relevant, that there aren't the same family

and cultural ties. I mean, by the way, I have more Canadian cousins than British cousins because my uncle emigrated after the Second World War because things seemed so hopeless. I mean, you know, austerity Britain was a pretty gloomy place. So I have a very close relationship with Canada. And I still feel it would be a great fit. And I still feel that, you know, in this world where you have another superpower called

China and India and Brazil and South Africa and Russia, that we belong together in some really important ways. The interesting question is how do we make that work? It's interesting that you quote Bill Clinton because Europe's an idea. I'm European too. His successor was George W.

Bush, almost at the same time, Stephen Harper became the prime minister of Canada. Both men needed real convincing about whether this Europe thing was a good idea. And it occurs to me, even just as I say it, that maybe you were well-placed to make the case to Bush as you, as you and many of your colleagues did. Because as a Englishman, you

could have taken or left Europe yourself. You had to learn to love Europe, I think. And maybe you could explain to them how it's done. Yeah. So first of all, I actually did precisely that. One of the stories I tell in the book is of being summoned to brief President George W. Bush in May, 2001 before his first

official visit to Europe. He'd only spent a few days in Europe before that and his first meeting with Vladimir Putin. There were five of us. Mike McFaul from Stanford as a Russia expert, Tom Graham as a Russian expert, Felix Rahatin and then two Brits, me and Lionel Barber, subsequently editor of the FT. And there was a moment in this conversation, it was a long conversation, I think over two hours, there was a moment I will never forget when Bush leaning back in his chair, by the way with Cheney larring in the background, Dick Cheney, just loring is the word. Um, Bush said, do we want the European

Union to succeed? Question mark. And it was Lionel Barber and I, the two Brits, who spent quite a bit of time very emphatically persuading him, absolutely you should. It was in the U S interest. But of course, what's telling about that exchange to your question is that no US president between Harry Truman

and George W Bush would have asked that question. It was self-evidently in the US national interest to have a Europe that succeeded, right? So this drifting apart you can see in the very question. And then he wrote back and said it was only a provocation and so forth. As for being a British-European, I mean, I, as we say these days, I identify as an English-European. And

what's interesting about this is that my parents had very little connection with Europe. My mother was the daughter of someone who'd been in the Indian Civil Service, so her life had been in the Empire, and my father was just very English and rather Eurosceptic. So unlike many Brits, you know, whose parents had strong European connections, it was a personal journey to come to understanding that I am a European. You seem to have said about it with some relish.

You spent a lot of time on the road as young man. I did indeed. In fact, looking back, it's amazing. And by the way, I kept all my notebooks. I started traveling regularly, constantly, literally 50 years ago in 1973, traveling around the continent. And my motto is, this will appeal to you as a journalist, there's nothing to compare

with being there. This personal, direct experience. And there's a moment in my journals in 1977 when I was, God, how old, 22, 23, when I talk about encountering someone in a pizzeria in Berlin, I think, and I talk about him as a fellow European. And that's kind of the moment I track when I clearly am now thinking myself as a European. Had you been to Poland before 1980? 1979. 1979.

I'd lived in East Germany. I traveled a lot around. But I traveled behind the Berlin Wall, behind the Ankurtn. And then I thought, I've got to discover the rest of Eastern Europe. And I went on a great road trip all the way through what we then called Eastern Europe just after Pope John Paul II had gone on this amazing pilgrimage to Poland in summer 1979

with millions of people turning out, the communist state virtually ceased to exist. And so I came to a country, Poland, just absolutely electrified and energized by that experience. And I would say the solidarity movement, which was Solidarność, which was born the year later, was conceived in the summer, 1979 when I was. Skip ahead for people who don't know your work.

Poland becomes very important to your conception of Europe, to your conception of modernity. And it's where you met your wife, Danuta. Did you feel like you'd found your place or that you had found your story? Both. And actually I found it already in 1979. I immediately came back and started learning Polish.

And then I was on holiday in Italy and I had the first news that some Polish shipyard workers were going on strike and I immediately took the train, took a long long time to Berlin, across to the Polish consulate in East Berlin and I was in doing historical research on the Nazi period and so when they asked purpose of visit I put on the visa form, Polish resistance. And the consul said, oh, what a great subject,

thinking it was the Polish resistance, the Nazis, but it was the Polish resistance, the communists. And coming into the shipyard, which was then occupied by the shipyard workers who were creating this unprecedented, it was called a trade union, the Israeli Liberation Movement, that was it. And I wrote in my diary, Poland is my Spain, like the Spanish Civil War. And from that moment

forward, this was my absolute passion, Central Europe. And I was just so lucky that my heart, it wasn't calculation, it was just my heart took me to the place where world history was going to be made over the next 10 years, you know, culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the, the end of the Cold War. You talk in the book about a sort of an ambient sense of seriousness in central

Europe that is appealing to someone from a consumer society. And you quote Philip Roth, who said that he felt as an American that he came from a place where everything goes and nothing matters. And he'd come to a place where nothing goes and everything matters. Yeah.

Brilliant. Has that spirit survived now that more goes in central Europe? Alas not. It's a real tragedy. And I Has that spirit survived now that more goes in central Europe? Alas not. It's a real tragedy. Paul Celan, the great poet said that

Czernowitz before the Holocaust was a place where people and books lived. And one had that sense in central Europe behind the Ancet and of it being a place where people and books lived. Ideas really mattered. Classic example, someone who's really a hero of the book, Václav Havel, the dissident playwright who then became a leader of the Velvet Revolution in Prague, which I was lucky enough to witness at first hand,

thanks to him and then obviously the founding president of the Czech Republic. My hope at the time was that this intellectual excitement, this seriousness about ideas, also about the battle of ideas, that ideas and values matter, culture matters, would be something that Central Europe would bring in to Western Europe. Unfortunately, what happened was the opposite. Instead of the intellectual seriousness and energy

coming into Western Europe, capitalism, consumerism, altogether, one-dimensional, economicistic thinking flowed the other way. And that's one of the reasons I think we're in the mess we're in. And actually things don't look so good in East Central Europe either. I mean, that's awfully grim.

I mean, one could name prominent writers, Olga Tkarchuk, who just got the Nobel prize and so on, but you're saying that the soil within which that literary culture thrived is no longer as fertile as it used to be. So there were still some very good writers. There's a wonderful Czech writer called Jakim Topol, Olga Tkarchuk, who wrote the thrived is no longer as fertile as it used to be. So there were still some very good writers. There's a wonderful Czech writer called Jakim Topol.

I'll go to Káček, he's fantastic. But what they used to be is this very specific thing called the intelligentsia, a whole class that saw itself as trying to give moral leadership and intellectual leadership to the nation. And that's almost totally disappeared. And there's some very petty, you know, if you sometimes think our politics are petty and corrupt, and my goodness, they are in many of our countries, take a look at Polish politics.

It's very depressing. Now, that said, Germany in the 1950s was extremely materialistic and then you had the 60s, you had 68, you had the emergence of writers like Gunter Grass and Heinrich Böhl and wonderful contemporary historians. So maybe something, maybe they'll come out of it, but at the moment it doesn't look so great. And of course the Polish Church is now, whereas in the 1980s, it was a great force for emancipation, for universal human rights, for freedom, for democracy actually. Um, now it's a provincial xenophobic

reactionary organization. Since we're here, let's talk about the upcoming Polish election. I spent a decade from 2004 to 2015, covering Poland as much as any Canadian based journalist could, and then the law and justice party won the 2015 campaign, has been in power since then, and is moving Poland by fits and starts more in a quasi authoritarian

direction like Hungary. Their next rendezvous with the Polish electorate is in October. How do you think that's going? Let me go back for a moment. My particular version of the hubristic, the mission accomplished fallacy that we talked about a few minutes ago,

was to believe that by 2010 Poland and Hungary were consolidated democracies. Why? Because they were also inside the EU and NATO. And the whole constitutional theory of the EU is you've got to be a democracy and the EU is going to guarantee that. And Viktor Orbán in Hungary, who by the way was our student, I knew him, got to know him in 1988, I've never forgotten, 1989, there is he standing in my rooms at Oxford University, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, telling me how he's going to build the wonderful liberal democracy in Hungary. Well, look what happened to that. Orban, starting in 2010, demonstrated that you can actually demolish a democracy while remaining a full member state of the EU and continuing to get billions of euros from the EU.

So in other words, you use your EU membership not to consolidate the democracy, but to destroy the democracy. Shocking, shocking fact shouldn't have happened. And so you have that example now next door, Hungary, which is no longer a democracy. Now Poland is an illiberal democracy at the moment, okay? Strictly speaking, that's the contradiction in terms. Either you're a liberal democracy or you're nothing. It's like fried snowballs, right? Strictly speaking, that's the contradiction in terms. Either you're a liberal democracy or you're nothing.

It's like fried snowballs, right? But it's a useful term to describe a liberal democracy in a state of decay. This is where Poland is. Big danger. October 15th elections, if peace, to give it its Polish name, the Law and Justice, the Nationalist-Populist Party, gets a third term, they can take Poland further towards the Hungarian. I mean, they won't go that far. They won't entirely consolidate an authoritarian, because no one in the entire Polish history has ever succeeded in doing so, right?

I mean, it'll be chaotic. It'll be a mess. It's not looking good. Partly because they have all the tricks up their sleeve, like Auburn post-state TV, which I watch sometimes that great danger to my health is poisonous, but poisonous, you can't believe it. Anti-Western, anti-German and anti-opposition

propaganda, trying to tar the leading opposition candidate Donald Tusk with all those brushes. Listen to this. They're going to hold a referendum on the same day as the election. You can ask really leading questions in this referendum like do you want more migrants flooding into the country as the opposition propose and they have unlimited funding for the referendum so it's not going to be a fair election that's point number one but point number two I'm afraid and this is the tragedy in Hungary it's been

the tragedy in Turkey the opposition is not. And when you're up against a party like that, using all the advantages of incumbency, you actually need a united opposition. I shall be there and I'm just praying the opposition make it because it's going to be very bad news for Poland if they don't. Donald Tusk, the leading opposition figure, was president of the European council and spent a

decade in Brussels, or at least a Brussels of the mind and proved to be a much more formidable political figure really in the European context than he had seemed in the Polish context. But maybe he's a, he's an easy guy to fight against because he spent a decade fighting for Europe and you can attach sort of whatever nativist claims

you want against a figure like that. Well, in particular, they constantly accuse him of being a German agent because his grandfather was of German origin to be strictly true. So that state TV in sort of almost gobbles like fashion is constantly replaying a clip, which just has Tusk saying two words in German, für Deutschland, für Deutschland.

What they've caught is when he says and Europe and you give the guys giving a speech in Germany so he says a few words in German. But listen, the Tusk disadvantage, I'll tell you what it's like. Tony Blair was by far the most talented British politician of the last 30 years, since Margaret Thatcher. So when Labour was doing really badly, one or two people said, well hey, you, why don't

we bring Blair back? Bad idea, doesn't work. And it's a bit like Tony Blair coming back into British politics, right? All those people who didn't like stuff Blair did, and there was quite a lot of people who didn't like what Tusk did mainly as a Polish prime minister in the 2000s. They're not going to vote for him. So although he's a formidable politician, he has this large negative electorate. And then young voters say, I don't believe it. You know, here we are, it's 2023 and it's still Kaczynski against Tusk, these two old guys slagging it out.

I mean, it's a bit like sort of Biden Trump in the US, really? Is there nobody younger to step onto the stage? And we're at the point in central Europe's history where a new generation would be, uh, intellectually, if not in every other aspect, post-Walt, their entire experience would have been after the most formative event in your

lifetime in mind. Maybe that would almost be a healthy amnesia. So one of the things that I say in the book is that the history of Europe since 1945 is made by key political generations. I, it's probably true of Canada or the US too, but in Europe it's the 14ers, shaped by the experience of the First World War, the 39ers, the 68ers, and then the 89ers. And the 89ers are people who were young in 89. And actually,

that generation is there now. They're what, in their 50s now, like the mayor of Warsaw, Rafał Czeskowski. And actually, they're the people who should be taking the lead, I think. And then behind them, you've got this thing we've never had in European history. A generation who've grown up knowing nothing but a Europe which is pretty prosperous, free, and at peace, and relatively united. So that's the generation behind, and their day will come, and it'll be interesting to see what they make of it. But actually, for now, what we need is the 89ers to step onto the stage. The book ends with, obviously, the invasion of Ukraine. And you wrestle at some length with the notion

that, uh, it was in 2008, uh, with sort of NATO overreach that Putin's Russia felt itself on the back foot and has essentially been reacting to that overreach ever since then. I don't get the sense that you find that argument any more persuasive than I do, but you, you heard out at some length. I wrestle it to the ground and then knock it out because I think it's completely fallacious.

You know, we have a terrible tendency in the West always to think everything depends on us. And therefore things went wrong in Russia. It must be our fault. No, it wasn't our fault. Actually, we did a lot to try and bring Russia into the wider community. The G7 became the G8 with Russia added. Things went wrong in Russia. I tell the story in the book of meeting Vladimir Putin in 1994. No one has heard of this

guy. He was the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg where at a conference in st. Petersburg Nobody knows who this guy is and suddenly he pipes up and says we have to remember that there are territories that Historically always belong to Russia not true Of course, and he mentions Crimea and he has a Russian Federation has you know has to think about them And he said there are 25 million Russians outside Russia, and we have a duty towards them. 1994, just three years after the end of the Soviet Union, don't tell me that NATO enlargement,

which only started happening five years later, was the cause of Putin's revanchism, because that's what it is. He's trying to get back as much of the Russian empire as possible. He says Ukraine isn't a, isn't the country. It's really Russia and it belongs with an in Russia. That's a fundamental motivation.

It's absolutely clear. And, you know, if you listen to Putin's speeches, yeah, sure, he blames it on the West. Of course he does, but his main reference points are Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. We are now in a fifth or sixth month of a Ukrainian counteroffensive that has turned out to be a much tougher slog than it might have seen possible to hope.

Does Western cohesion start to be at risk if that counteroffensive continues to drag? You say in your book, historians shouldn't try to predict, but I'll put you on the spot. Well, let me start by predicting the past, which is rather easier. I spent half my time on Ukraine. I've been there three times in the last nine months, most recently in July. I mean, it is absolutely decisive for the whole future of Europe and some would say of the world. And in terms of predicting the past, I think we were too hesitant.

If you remember, they had great success last summer with a big counteroffensive that took them to Ha'iv. If we'd given them the long range missiles at that time, the tanks at that time, the air defenses at that time, started lining up the F-16s, they could have had much more success because instead in the winter the Russians dug in with these absolutely horrifying huge minefields, something I think not seen before in Europe, the sheer number and size of the minefields, multiple defensive

trenches, and defense is what the Russians are good at. So it's going to be a very long, hard slog, and the Ukrainians are only going to get their territory back, which is the only good way this war ends, if we the West are in it for the long haul. And interestingly, a year ago, I was really worried about Europe, I was worried about Germany and other countries.

Now Europe is pretty solid. My big worry is the United States. You can see, I just came from the US, talking to people about it in Washington. You can see how support is dwindling in the opinion polls. There's a debate on the Hill about, do we really wanna give another 50 billion see how support is dwindling in the opinion polls. There's a debate on the hill about, do we really wanna give another 50 billion or 60 billion dollars to Ukraine?

And above all, may God forbid, if Donald Trump became the next US president, I mean, that would be a disaster in so many ways, but it would be a catastrophe for Ukraine because if the US pulls a rug out from under Ukraine it's very hard to see how they get that territory back. In an interview with Jascha Munch and I'm sure in many other fora you've said that Europe doesn't make as much sense as it could unless it's a Euro-Atlantic idea.

You had to convince George Bush to take Europe seriously, but he listened to the argument. Trump thinks he knows the answer. What would a second Trump presidency mean for Europe? You know, it's a bit like people in the markets who are trying to anticipate. It's really interesting. European politics is politics is kind of anticipating a possible Trump victory, which by the May, may I say en passant, I think is

more than possible, particularly if Joe Biden stands again. I mean, I really feel very strongly that Biden should stand aside. And we talked about generations in in Poland and there are lots of good younger Democrats and suddenly then the age argument would turn against Trump. So Europe is kind of psychologically beginning to prepare for it. There's a lot we could do for ourselves and actually it's a catalyst of Europe kind of doing more for itself. The one thing we couldn't do for ourselves is defend ourselves against Russia or China. So there's a huge level of worry in Europe about that. And by the way, the other thing, which is a big, big contrast to 1989, 1989, the US

was still a model, right? People loved American culture. They admired American democracy. It still felt like a city built on a hill. You know very well, Paul, that the breakthrough election in Poland in the 4th of June 1989, the most famous election poster, just shows Gary Cooper with a Solidarność badge on his lapel and all it says is, high noon, 4th of June, 1989. That's all they needed to say.

That's how we want to be. That's all gone, all gone. You'd have to look long and hard to find a European who thinks American politics and society are any kind of model for Europe. So it's both about the danger of the Trump presidency, but also about the decline in US soft power.

If I had to pick a defining moment for at least central Europe after 1989, after the fall of the wall, I might nominate the Iraq war, which was so exciting to those countries because they were getting to make a big sovereign decision after having decisions made for them for so long. And they got to piss off Jacques Chirac and they

got to act like Gary Cooper. And then it turned very badly. I mean, you know that, you know that part of the world much more than I do. Is it as disillusioning as I think it must have been? You know what? It was obviously, it didn't work out well and they know that, but the Euroatlanticism is

still very deep and you see it again over Ukraine. The Estonians, it's a wonderful kaya kalas. Of course it's the Ukrainians themselves, it's the Poles, it's the Czechs who are saying, we've got to do this together. We can only do this together. So what that means is that in this enlarged EU, there was no possibility of the goalist version of trying to make a United States of Europe as an alternative superpower to the United States. You remember Emmanuel Macron on his way back from China gave an interview in which he said we don't want to be a vassal of the United States and we must be another pole.

Not going to work. Every single time it ends up dividing Europe rather than uniting it. So that I honestly think our future is Euro-Atlantis or it's nothing. And here's the opportunity for the United States and indeed for Canada. If we help Ukraine to win this war, difficult though that is, another two years, three years, you will have a weakened Russia, the largest, most combat hardened army in Europe, the Ukrainian army, the second largest in Poland, because Poland is building up its army big time, and Germany is spending 2% of its GDP, which would give it the third largest defense budget in the world because of the size of its economy.

So you would actually have, you won't have the United States of Europe, you won't have a Europe that can defend itself against Russia, but you would have a much stronger European arm of the Atlantic alliance that would be burden sharing. What would that mean? That would mean that the United States could actually devote more of its resources to the very real threat from China to Taiwan and to the Indo-Pacific. So for me, that's where we want to get. That's the win-win.

And then if you go back to the hill, to the Congress as a U S president, you say, we saved a free country. We helped a free country to defend itself and we've got a better deal and the relationship with Europe and that's good for seeing off China in the Indo Pacific. with Europe and that's good for seeing off China and the Indo Pacific.

Europe has always had many moving parts, but it has so often come down to the stability and the strength and the audacity of the French German motor. How's the French German motor doing today? Stuttering, spluttering or whatever motors do, not quite stalling, but it's not working well. And one reason for that is very interesting.

It's because of Brexit. Because actually, I mean, the history of Europe for 200 years, it's been about France, Germany, and Britain, those three players. And when Britain was still in, it actually helped the whole thing to work. I like to say that it's the opposite of Princess Diana's marriage. You remember Princess Diana famously left three of us in our marriage. It was a little bit crowded.

In the case of the EU, it was precisely the menage à trois which made the whole thing work. If those three countries, Britain, France and Germany, got together on something, you could be pretty sure there were a lot of other European countries who wanted to, right? If we disagreed, I'm a small country or a medium-sized country in the EU, I don't like the Franco-German initiative, I can go with Britain. I don't like the British-German initiative, I can go with France. So it was a constant balance. Absent that balance, it's just not working so well. And you've got the 25 other countries in the EU are just not ready to be told what to

do by France and Germany together. What's really missing in this, because for all his faults, I'm fundamentally an admirer of Emmanuel Macron. He is someone who has a strategic vision for Europe, maybe too many strategic visions for Europe, but nonetheless, he's thinking about it. What's missing here is Germany. There just isn't that kind of strategic leadership coming from Germany, which is not just the biggest but the most powerful country in the European Union. And that's what we really need.

Olaf Scholz so far seems a bit of a prisoner of his coalition, a bit constrained by the green movement, which is more than just green. It's peacenik, it's skeptical about liberal internationalism and he's not wholly owned by that school of thought, but he seems to keep looking over his shoulder at it. So there are two problems in the German you know, liberal internationalism and is not wholly owned by that school of thought, but he seems to keep looking over his shoulder at it.

So there are two problems in the German government at the moment. Ola Schultz, first of all, is a prisoner of Ola Schultz, right? I mean, he was a brilliant mayor of Hamburg and actually I think he'd be a very good managerial peacetime chancellor, but his bad luck is to have come into a time of dramatic change and a time of war when you need to act differently. And I've been credited with popularizing the term

Schultzing, which has been translated as proclaiming your good intentions and then making sure nothing happens. Which is a little bit unkind because actually he has shifted. But. If I may, that's also a national sport in Canada. Well, maybe you'd like to take Olaf Schultzing. Give us one of your, give us Christia Freeland.

We'd appreciate having her with us in Europe. But I mean, I don't want to be too unfair to the guy, Kristo Freeland, we'd appreciate having her with us in Europe. But I mean, I don't want to be too unfair to the guy, but on the whole, though, people are good at peace and people are good at war. So, for example, President Zelensky was actually not a very successful peacetime president, but he's been a fantastic war leader, and with Schultz, it's rather the other way around. Although I think he's learning. But the other problem is the one you describe, which is because German politics has become

so multi-party and you always have coalition governments, it's not just the Greens, who by the way have been on the whole great supporters of Ukraine, so let's be fair to them, and have some of the best politicians in the country, notably Robert Habeck, the economy and energy minister, but it's also the free democrats who are kind of economic liberals slash libertarian, and it's not working well. It's very, very difficult to get anything done. So as I said, the whole of Europe is looking to Germany for this kind of strategic leadership, and they're spending days arguing about a compromise on heat pumps. There's a sentence in the book that I find

absolutely haunting because so much of the last decade of world events essentially amounts to things that happen and we're left saying, how did that happen? How did Brexit happen? How did Brexit happen? How did Donald Trump happen? How did Western oriented governments in Poland and Hungary either change horribly or, or get

replaced? And you say we liberal internationalists neglected, we paid proper attention to the other half of the world, but we neglected the other half of our societies. So it seems to be a lot of what's happened in the last decade is essentially a story of backlash against hubris to use your word.

Is that a good gloss on your argument? That is exactly right. So, you know, there are multiple variants of hubris. You mentioned Iraq, we haven't talked about the Eurozone, but one variant of that hubris you mentioned Iraq we haven't talked about the eurozone but one variant of that hubris was a lot of our liberal elites people like us if I can put that in the broadest sense I use me word liberal with a small L not making any assumptions the other half of our societies felt that they were being ignored and disrespected,

and that we were living with our backs to them, looking to the international community rather than the nation, to the other half of the world rather than the other half of our own societies. And there was an economic component of that, you know, economic inequality, the quote unquote left behind, particularly in the US and the UK, but as important was the cultural component, what I call inequality of attention and respect, right? You're just not seeing us. You don't write about us with any respect in the media. You call us Nazis and fascists when we open our mouths and say things you think people That's not seeing us. You don't write about us with any respect in the media.

You call us Nazis and fascists when we open our mouths and say things you think people shouldn't say and all of that. And so actually the Polish populace, one Polish populace had a really interesting phrase which was the redistribution of respect. Not the redistribution of money, the redistribution of respect. Ha! Not the redistribution of money, the redistribution of respect. And actually that's something we liberals should have been on to. Right? We should have understood. And one other, we're talking here in a university,

one element in that, our great liberal aspiration was that half our kids should go to university. So they did. Unintended consequence? We split our societies down the middle between those who've gone to university and those who haven't. So there's a whole agenda there about what I call the renewal of liberalism in the broadest sense. And a big part of that is what do we do for this other half of our society? not just socioeconomically in terms of jobs and redistribution of income and wealth, but also in terms of respect and meaningful lives and education.

Here in Canada, the leading opposition leader is Pierre Proliéve in good shape to win the next elections, although nothing is guaranteed. And he is frankly, I would say very lightly populist in terms of his discourse, but elements of his discourse include firing the gate elections, although nothing is guaranteed. And he is frankly, I would say very lightly populist in terms of his discourse, but elements of his discourse include firing the gatekeepers, getting rid of the central bank governor, uh, shutting down the government funded broadcaster.

And he is, if anything, running to keep up with a discourse of skepticism about the world economic forum, Davos skepticism, which is really quite a strong current here. And basically it's about demoting the swells and I got to say as almost a card carrying member of the swells, it's pretty easy to understand why that would

be a powerful force because the swells haven't had a great 30 years. Yeah. So, so I think it's a great idea to demote us or actually better idea still to lift up the rest of society rather than pulling down. So actually the one good idea to be associated with Brexit because it doesn't actually come out of Brexit is this notion of leveling up because we

have this problem big time in the north of England, for example, the post-industrial north of England. And so leveling up is, in my view, a really good idea. Now, the problem is that this agenda of leveling up and we see you and then let's take the liberal elites down a peg or two is connected to what you just hinted at, which is a project of dismantling liberalism. Because liberalism is all about limits,

about checks and balances, about what my good friend Michael Ignatie, of course, anti-majoritarian institutions, the courts, the Supreme Court, or the Constitutional Court, if you have one, a strong media, a strong civil society, all that stuff which the populists go after in the name of democracy. We won the election, we have democratic legitimacy,

it's a simple majoritarian logic, so who needs the courts and who needs other mechanisms of accountability and the second chamber and so on and so forth. So what we have to do is to detach the good idea of leveling up from the bad idea of pulling down these key liberal institutions. It's a hell of an assignment though. It is, although interestingly enough, I mean, Brexit has been a disaster for Britain, right? Both all the negative economic consequences we foretold are coming about before our eyes, and the loss of international influence, reputation, soft power, which is very significant.

But our democracy has survived. So I tell the story in the book when Boris Johnson tried to prorogue, it's a technical term, prorogue Parliament, suspend Parliament 2019 in order to get Brexit through, the Supreme Court issued a magnificent verdict saying you can't do that, immediately complied with. Unlike in the United States, no one questions the authority of the Supreme Court or the courts altogether. You know, we still have the BBC, it's a little bit under attack, but it's still there. So actually in Britain, I would say the institutions

of liberal democracy are actually holding. The book is called Homelands, a personal history of Europe. I'll tell you a secret. I set aside 10 hours. I was going to strip it for parts and look for good things to ask questions about as one does. I was horribly slowed down because it was such a pleasure to read that I actually had to strip it for parts and look for good things to ask questions about as one does. I was horribly slowed down because it was such a

pleasure to read that I actually had to read it. So I want to thank you for taking up so much of my time lately, Timothy Garten-Nash. Great pleasure. That's the nicest thing you could say to an author. Thanks for listening to the Paul Wells Show. The Paul Wells Show is produced by Antica. Our producer is Kevin Sexton. Our executive producers are Laura Reguerre and Stuart Cox.

Our opening theme music is by Kevin Bright and our closing theme music is by Andy Milne. Go to paulwells.substack.com to subscribe to my newsletter. You'll also get a premium version of this show with bonus content. We'll be back next Wednesday.