Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

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Western Europe and eastern Europe are... not equally civilised'… Gonzague de Reynold, Qu'est ce que l'Europe? La formation de l'Europe, Vol. I, Egloff, Fribourg 1948, esp. pp.54-55. Garton Ash first came to prominence during the Cold War as a supporter of free speech and human rights within countries which were part of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc, paying particular attention to Poland and Germany. In more recent times he has represented a British liberal pro-EU viewpoint, nervous at the rise of Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump and Brexit. He is strongly opposed to conservative and populist leaders of EU nations, such as Viktor Orbán of Hungary, arguing that Merkel should "freeze him out", evoking " appeasement". [12] Garton Ash was particularly upset about Orbán's move against George Soros' Central European University. [12] Anti-Soviet themes and Poland remain topics of interest for Garton Ash; once a promoter of the anti-Eastern Bloc movement in Poland, he notes with regret the move away from liberalism and globalism towards populism and authoritarianism under socially conservative political and religious leaders such as Jarosław Kaczyński, in a similar manner to his criticisms of Hungary's Orbán. [13] Personal life [ edit ] Garton Ash has carved out a unique niche as a ‘historian of the present.’ Homelands combines his eye-witness account of Europe’s evolution with his keen historical insight to offer an innovative and compelling book.”—Charles A. Kupchan, author of Isolationism

Still more Orwellian, and certainly more brutal... In this paragraph I draw on Connelly, Peoples into Nations, pp.678-81, supplemented by Dennis Deletant, Ceauşescu and the Securitate. Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965-1989, Hurst, London 1995. largely coterminous with Charlemagne's empire in 800… see, for example, map 1. in Wilson, Heart of Europe. The main differences are that the European Community of the 1960s included southern Italy, but not Catalonia and adjacent parts of northern Spain (Charlemagne's Spanish march), nor a significant portion of central Europe in East Germany and Czechoslovakia.Jacek Trznadel, wrote an entire book… Jacek Trznadel, Polski Hamlet. Kłopoty z działaniem, Libella, Paris 1988.

the Greek Colonels banned long hair, mini-skirts, and the study of sociology... Tony Judt, Postwar. A History of Europe Since 1945, William Heinemann, London 2005, p.507. Having sketched the above with masterful touches, Garton Ash is also cognizant of European integration’s frequently ironic and often rather disappointing consequences. As a Brit, he is all too acutely aware of how being proficient in foreign languages is a matter that continues to divide many European societies in two. He does not hide that, decades of deepening interconnections notwithstanding, Europe’s core political conundrum – the uneasy balance between unity and diversity, between “dreams of Rome” and “dreams of escaping from it” – has by and large been reproduced in the decades since the days of his youth. More specifically, Homelands’ narrative of contemporary Europe revolves around the concept of hubris. Garton Ash suggests that the West won the Cold War because it feared that it was losing it. He rightly considers the contrast with the early 2000s instructive. This leads him to highlight a core paradox of liberalism: for liberalism to flourish, there must never only be liberalism. Temporarily liberated from fierce ideological competition from 1989-91, Western liberal democratic capitalist countries soon became complacent and self-indulgent, he argues. The best of days were thus also the worst of days, triumph the source of faltering.drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe'...see text at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitution_for_Europe/Preamble In Estonia, the so-called 'forest brothers' went on fighting the Russian communist occupation from their camouflaged woodland hideouts well into the 1950s. The last surviving forest brother, August Sabbe, only died when the KGB tried to arrest him in 1978.… Lowe, Savage Continent, pp.340-58. Homelands is both a singular history of a period of unprecedented progress and a clear-eyed account of how so much then went wrong, all the way from the financial crisis of 2008 to the war in Ukraine. It culminates in an urgent call to the citizens of this great old continent to understand and defend what we have collectively achieved.

estimates of the number of languages in Europe range from sixty-four to 234… Jürgen Trabant, 'Babel oder das Paradies – die Sprachen Europas', in Etienne François & Thomas Serrier (eds.), Europa. Die Gegenwart unserer Geschichte, Vol. II., wbg Theiss, Darmstadt 2019, p.449. xiii) 'he says Europe and means France'… As for so many famous attributed quotations, we have been unable to find a source for him saying exactly this. Hence ‘supposedly’. Run through the middle of his body by a German rifle…'… quoted in Alex Kershaw, The First Wave. The D-Day Warriors Who Led the Way to Victory in World War II, Caliber, New York 2019, p.263. More generally, Garton Ash’s delightful dissection of the “bewildering variety of ways” that Europeans use the word Europe belongs among the most memorable parts of his history illustrated by memoir. The author describes with great erudition our fuzzy and contested ideas of geography; the powerful and problematic beliefs in a historical core region (the “Carolingian” as opposed to the more inclusive, “Ottonian” idea of Europe); the Europe of culture and values, “a well-dressed but distinctly two-faced character”; the institutional organization of Europe one might often – and out of various political sentiments – be inclined to call “Euromess”; not to mention – fifthly – Europe’s crude identification with civilization as such (a pattern which the author rejects).Bogen er delt i fem hoveddele: 1. Ødelæggelsen – efter Anden Verdenskrig. 2. Opdelingen – under Den Kolde Krig. 3. Løftet – 80'ernes frihedskamp. 4. Triumfalismen – efter Murens fald. 5. Rystelserne – fra finanskrisen til Ukraine. When I investigated the lives of the Stasi officers who had spied on me in east Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s… see Timothy Garton Ash, The File: A Personal History, Atlantic Books, London 2009. the mercy of a late birth'... see Maren Röger, 'Gnade der späten Geburt', in Torben Fischer & Matthias N. Lorenz (eds.), Lexikon der „Vergangenheitsbewältigung“ in Deutschland. Debatten- und Diskursgeschichte des Nationalsozialismus nach 1945, Transcript, Bielefeld 2015, pp.247-8.

Where the book jars at times, however, is the writing. Garton Ash is not the most adept of stylists, exemplified in the ungainly neologism he coins to describe European history – “kaleidotapestry”. Some of his locutions – “Lech was a laugh a minute”; “It turned out the most prophetic of the Abba songs we sang in our student years was ‘Money, Money, Money’” – are so clunky and bathetic as to occasionally give the book the unfortunate air of a footballer’s autobiography. Neither is it really that necessary to introduce Hannah Arendt as “the German philosopher” or William Faulkner as “the American writer”. Når man som Garton Ash forstår – sådan rigtigt, dybt forstår – forskellen på at se Europa fra Pristina eller Frankfurt, så anerkender man både, hvor vidunderlig og besværligt vores kontinent er. Ikke mindst alle politikere burde af samme årsag læse bogen. En stor europæer

Garton Ash is the most European of Englishmen but also the most English among Europeans. Fluent in many languages, a tireless traveler on the continent where he considers many countries “homelands,” he has long sought to explain to the British the people they regard as funny foreigners. (He and other historians convinced former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher that German unification posed no perils. In the end, he writes, the Iron Lady decided to “be very nice to the Germans.”) He has also been an important voice in foreign policy elsewhere: Former U.S. President George W. Bush, before his first trip to Europe, asked him innocently whether the United States should want the EU to succeed; generations of German politicians, especially when post-1989 insecurities about a new global role for the country became acute, have sought Garton Ash’s counsel. As a sober kind of Euro-Atlanticist, Garton Ash recognizes that it was always likely that the interests and priorities of Europe and the United States would diverge after the Cold War. He sounds more forward-looking and assertive though when emphasizing how essential a partnership with the US and all other liberal democracies remains in an increasingly post-Western world and how such a partnership would need to be combined with an embrace of the many people who live in unfree countries but “yearn to breathe free.” In short, whereas Timothy Garton Ash’s discussion of the European project at times resembles – and understandably so – that of a disappointed lover, making for a strange contrast between the first and the second halves of Homelands, his youthful liberal idealism still echoes in this articulation of a more global vision.