NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 15, 2004
Cowboys & wimps
Timothy Garton Ash is among the most civilized writers on international affairs if we use the word "civilized" to denote something akin to table manners. He is well-informed and dispassionate. He is a conversationalist more than a debater always polite in expressing disapproval or more characteristically associating himself with others' disapproval. As a writer he combines that old-world charm with a mild new-world hipness. He comments and does not advise he has no intrusive "agenda" and because he is a very talented observer his reports from the field are invariably worth reading. His eyes and ears were well-employed observing at first hand the fall of Soviet Communism in central Europe both before and after the formal breach of the Berlin Wall. Yet it caught him by surprise as it caught almost everyone so that he was never granted an "I told you so" moment. Nevertheless his civilized ability to listen in this case to e.g. Polish Czech and East German voices outside officialdom made him almost unique among liberal writers in English. He was able to explain even to the readers of the New York Review that the gods of Communism had clay feet or that Reagan might have a point about the "Evil Empire". He was able to give the flavour of "unfreedom" in writing of a generation of typically liberal and civilized European intellectuals being crushed under a socialist totalitarian ideology. Mr. Garton Ash straddles. His background in central Europe places him as an interpreter of the "new" Europe to the "old"; his institutional bearings in both St. Anthony's College Oxford and the Hoover Institution in Stanford California have helped equip him with a truly trans-Atlantic view. He is far from the reflexive anti-Americanism that I associate with European intellectuals (and which he would deny or at least qualify). His remark that Americans are not cowboys and Europeans are not wimps, might pass as the moral of his new book Free World: Why a Crisis of the West Reveals the Opportunity of Our Time. His great strength is in the table manners: his refusal to descend into the vulgar his chewing everything so carefully. But in power politics it is necessary to go right down; all the great European statesmen and historians of the past had this ability. Mr. Garton Ash is a docile observer of the culture wars -- the intellectual and moral food fights of our time -- but I think to understand them you have to be a participant. He is in denial of the visceral anti-Americanism that is growing in Europe and the corresponding anti-Europeanism in America. But more precisely I think he too easily allows the mutual stereotyping. "Cowboys" and "wimps" exist in both continents and plenty of Europeans were eager to invade Iraq. (Conversely lots of Americans think George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are violent cretins.) The belief in "American-style" freedom and capitalism and even muscular Christianity is alive and well on the other side of the ocean -- but among only a small proportion of the people. And everything they stand for is under siege by great majorities who are (as here in Canada) sincerely committed to near-pacifism the nanny state child-free living and the public management of decline. Nor is the anti-Americanism in Europe some natural expression of the continent's war-bloodied historical experience. Some of it can be explained by envy -- the passing over the Atlantic of that sense of importance that Europe once enjoyed in its Imperial heyday. But power politics are more calculating and cynical than that. The whole project of building a united Europe depends on replacing the old intra-European national antipathies with a new common antipathy. The public demonization of America thus serves the interests of Europe's new bureaucratic order as George Jonas and others have argued. An unapologizing European who wants a Europe bound up with America in the cause of spreading freedom through the world Mr. Garton Ash often writes as if sweet reason were bound to prevail. It seldom is and to defeat the enemies of freedom her friends must be willing to get ugly. * My hero for the week: Jan Peter Balkenende the Dutch prime minister who is reversing his country's 30-year experiment in "multiculturalism" after a parliamentary report concluded that it is an unambiguous disaster responsible for institutional collapse ethnic ghettoes terrorism hatred and violence. He is using the current Dutch presidency of the European Union to spread the word that free Europe is threatened not by Americanization but by Islamicization. Now this is news: a politician who is not a plaything of the zeitgeist. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top