Timothy Garton Ash Misunderstands Liberalism

Timothy Garton Ash is pictured at the 2023 Oxford Literary Festival in England on March 25. David Levenson/Getty Images

Homelands: A Personal History of Europe, Timothy Garton Ash, Yale University Press, 384 pp., $28, May 2023

Homelands is both a history of Europe after 1945, told from the perspective of a supposedly clear-eyed but omnidirectionally empathetic British liberal, and the story of how Ash, by falling in love with the continent on his schoolboy travels and post-graduate stints behind the Iron Curtain, came to cherish an ideal of Europe. With the right-wing, illiberal turn of many European governments in recent years as well as the departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union, that ideal looks increasingly less like the destination toward which history is moving than the heaven of a vanishing religion. But Ash’s intention, as it has been over the past 40 years of his career, is to insist that, as he concludes Homelands, “[t]o defend, improve and extend a free Europe makes sense. It’s a cause worthy of hope.”

Readers’ suspicions might be immediately incited by the juxtaposition of these two claims. Hope is a feeling to be roused in the face of good reasons for doubt; it is precisely not what “makes sense.” Hope is produced by the stirring rhetoric of the politician, not the careful scholarship of the historian.

And indeed Ash’s goal of “a free Europe”—that is, an enlarged and empowered European Union enjoying respect in the world and popular support on its own continent—does not “make sense,” except insofar as one already accepts the canons of a certain common sense perhaps still taken for granted among many European and British elites but, as political trends show, increasingly questioned by a range of politicians, intellectuals, and electoral coalitions. It is an object of desire—and Ash sets himself the task in Homelands, as he has since his earliest publications four decades ago, of making readers desire it as much as he does, to seduce an increasingly unwoo-able public to want his Europe.

A statue depicting European unity is seen outside the European Parliament in Brussels on May 3, 2013. Francois Lenoir/Reuters

“Once upon a time there was Europe. Europe stretched from the Atlantic to the Urals. … Before the First World War an Englishman or American of means and spirit could personally discover the whole of this heritage, passing freely, without passport, let or hindrance, from Barcelona to Kraków, or from Naples to Aberdeen.”

Such a grand tour, real or imagined, is the essence of Ash’s Europe—and of a cosmopolitan, humanist liberal intellectual horizon that he conflates with the continent as seen through the eyes, tellingly, of extracontinental Anglophone visitors who style themselves, through their learned, leisured travels, as its inheritors. Europe is a box of souvenirs, and the mental outlook requisite for their appreciation is that of the collector toward his collection. This Europe—“our continent, our common culture”—was sundered by the Second World War and Cold War, but at least in its Western half was preserved and democratized as the British adolescent’s gap year, as Ash records in the reminiscences that fill Homelands.

This is a strange sort of history. Ash argues that it was Adolf Hitler who “began the work of destruction” that shattered Europe, while the “hope of one united Europe” was “cherished” by the victors and survivors of Hitler’s war, who unfortunately remained divided by the U.S.-Russian rivalry. But, of course, the Third Reich put much effort into promoting its own vision of a united Europe—running from the Atlantic to the Urals—that was “liberated” from communism. The racial project of Aryan supremacy was intertwined with an imperial project that saw Europe’s nations, at least the ones not appointed for the slaughter bench, brought together under Hitlerian leadership.

There can be no moral equivalence between the horrors of Nazism and the rose-tinted politics of Ash’s elitist Europhile fantasia, but in their sense of Europe as a purported unity, the two are linked. Indeed, nothing has so much divided Europeans, nor so bloodily, throughout the modern history of the continent as claims about Europe’s unity.

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These claims have been the basis for expansionist schemes of great powers, as well as reactionary attempts to suppress political change. Edmund Burke, notably, considered Europe—that is, Christian, monarchist, aristocratic, Old Regime Europe—to be a single “commonwealth” that had to be defended against the French Revolution; Prince Klemens von Metternich’s post-revolutionary Concert of Europe brought the continent’s elites together to prevent any repetition of 1789. To recall such facts is not to say that the intellectual content of ideas about the unity of Europe is necessarily doomed to resist the tide of history, but simply to observe that there is nothing inherently liberal or decent about it.

The vanished—but, he seems to hope, not permanently unrevivable—Europe from before World War One that Ash invokes was an undemocratic, illiberal domain, governed mostly by vast autocratic states that oppressed peoples not only in Asia and Africa, but within the “one united Europe,” out of which emigrants and exiles streamed. It was a Europe of empires.

Ash has, in fact, an unclear investment in the notion of empire. On the one hand, Homelands frankly describes the European Union as “Europe’s liberal empire” and argues that Ukraine had to choose between either aligning with it or with “Russia’s anti-liberal one” (one might question whether Ukraine has not rather—like Europe more generally—become part of America’s empire). Yet he notes only a few pages later that to “view the Soviet bloc in the 1980s as an empire … rather than as something entirely new, was to recognize an empire in decay and know that decaying empires eventually fall.” Perhaps Ash means that what distinguishes the supposedly European empire of the EU-NATO complex from the empires of the Soviet Union and contemporary Russia is that it is not in yet in decay—although this seems to be more an object of, as he puts it, “hope” than of certainty.

As the director of the European Studies Centre, Ash (center) speaks with former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami (right) and Grand Mufti of Bosnia Mustafa Ceric before the opening of a conference on “Who Speaks for Islam? Who Speaks for the West?” in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on Feb. 10, 2006. Zainal Abd Halim/Reuters

As he put it once, considering the specific case of (unnamed) Bosnian “liberal intellectuals” in the mid-1990s but applicable more broadly, their self-conscious irony and refusal to tell black-and-white stories about victims and perpetrators enabled them to narrate what struck Ash as a much more “subtle and therefore convincing story” than the one that leaders of Western Europe were told by “some Bosnian politicians” who portrayed Serbs as purely evil aggressors.

In contrast, the story told by these anonymous intellectuals and, in Ash’s recounting, relayed by him to “Messrs. Kohl, Chirac, and Santer” (then the leaders of Germany, France, and the European Commission) was a much more nuanced and complex one, properly situated in its historical context—but with the same moral: that Europe must support the Bosnian cause. Subtlety is an instrument in the service of generating conviction, first within Ash himself, then among political leaders to whom he has access, and, by extension, among his readers. Intellectual independence is the pose that a liberal public intellectual strikes in order to engage effectively in political partisanship.

Ash once described former German Chancellor Willy Brandt as a “master of emotive imprecision,” who “substitutes—as any good journalist would—a colorful phrase for a dull one, but also a vague, allusive, delphic formulation for a more precise one,” concluding that Brandt’s “private thinking was more clear than the public speaking.” Being an effective politician or journalist means giving the public the impression that thinking has taken place through the thick spreading-on of a superficially articulate word-sludge, allowing them to feel committed to a program that they have only the false impression of understanding. One can hardly imagine a more brutal critique of either profession—or of the foundation of democratic politics, insofar as the latter seems to require that voters choose leaders who promise to enact clear, specific platforms.

In that sense, Ash is a talented journalist, who knows how to begin his stories—whether they are brief articles or books—with short, attention-piquing, scene-setting anecdotes that lead readers, without their being quite aware of it, deep into his own political assumptions and projects. His 1983 book on the Solidarity movement in Poland, for example, begins thus:

“When I first came to Poland I kept hearing a very strange word. ‘Yowta,’ my new acquaintances sighed, ‘yowta!’ and conversation ebbed into melancholy silence. Did ‘yowta’ mean fate, I wondered, was it an expression like, ‘that’s life?’

‘Yalta’ (Polish pronunciation ‘yowta’) is where the story of Solidarity begins.”

This is cloying, affected, and successful. It figures Ash as ignorant enough to repeatedly misunderstand his Polish interlocutors but clever enough to turn the tale of his ignorance into a succinct, memorable means of conveying to his Anglophone readers the point that they ought to be thinking about Polish domestic politics primarily in terms of the geopolitical arrangements by which British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt “abandoned” the future Eastern bloc to Soviet domination. By presenting himself as something of an affable simpleton who is at least able to learn, and therefore teach, from his experience, Ash conveys a quite debatable political interpretation as if it were that experience’s natural lesson. It is not he but his reader who is really being put in the role of the unworldly dupe.

In Solidarity, Ash insisted that his eyewitness and archival experience of life and politics in the Eastern bloc gave him a critical perspective on the Solidarity movement that other Western intellectuals—whom he faulted for their lack of support for the Polish dissidents—lacked. He complained that while the embattled Spanish Republic in 1936 captured the sympathy of a wide spectrum of Western intellectuals, bringing together socialists and liberals—notably W.H. Auden and George Orwell—Poland in the early 80s was far less a cause célèbre.

He did not mention, intriguingly, one of Solidarity’s most important Western defenders, Michel Foucault, whom he may have judged a liability to the cause, as Foucault was fresh off his defense of the Iranian Revolution. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Foucault was elaborating a new understanding of politics in which the rights that liberals conceived as the inalienable foundation of a proper regime—and in the most hubristic cases as the natural aspiration of all human beings—could only be defended against the intrusions of modern bureaucracies and their erosive effects through a distinctly  “religious” ethos capable of mobilizing people to risk their lives for the sake of freedom. If he had been able to downplay the Islamist, reactionary dimensions of the Iranian Revolution, the merely conservative Catholic-nationalist dimensions of Solidarity were unlikely to trouble him.

They did, however, trouble many in Western Europe—wrongly, Ash insisted. He faulted the Western left for suspecting that Polish anti-communists might lead their country into a new-old regime of religious ethnic chauvinism. He called their fears “drearily familiar,” and based on a “cardboard stereotype from half a century ago.” While the Polish Catholic Church had once been, he admitted “nationalist, reactionary, anti-socialist, anti-feminist, anti-Semitic,” those who believed it was still like this were unaware of recent intellectual shifts centered around figures such as Pope John Paul II and Leszek Kolakowski, or of the complex, multiple, ambivalent political-intellectual positions of Solidarity’s diverse spokesmen and supporters.

Western leftist observers were perhaps less informed than Ash, who gave much evidence that the Polish church had undergone an enormous change over the preceding generation, sloughing off its antisemitism, anti-modernism, and illiberalism. And yet, in what may well have been their ignorant prejudice, those he castigated were right about the essential point. A post-Communist Poland, and indeed much of the post-Communist Eastern bloc, would gravitate toward an illiberal politics based on religious and nationalist appeals. In this case, it seems, a painstaking differentiation between moderates and hard-liners, a careful unworking of outdated stereotypes, a fine parsing of emphases in politicians’ speeches and clerics’ writings, was worth less than what struck Ash as the thoughtless reflexes of the left.

In a similar spirit of condemnation, Ash quoted “British steelworkers’ leader, Mr. Bill Sirs,” in a 1980 interview dismissing the notion of supporting Solidarity on the grounds that, as Sirs put it, “They are in a much better position than we are—we have dictators over us!” The comment was, if taken literally, ridiculous. Poland was a dictatorship, with even the pretense of so-called normal communist government suspended in a state of martial law; the United Kingdom, however ruthlessly its government treated unions, was a liberal democracy. Sirs’s remarks must have struck Poles—and indeed, even moderately intelligent Britons—as foolish and offensive.

But however wrong he was, Sirs had his finger on what, quite reasonably, was for him the key issue. In the early 1980s, in the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and across the capitalist democratic world, the postwar social model was being destroyed by neoliberal governments. This was a life-or-death struggle for the historical left—the left that focused on gaining control of the principal levers of economic and political power in order, if not to remake society in a revolution, at least to preserve, in the midst of liberalism, broad domains of material equality and common prosperity. It lost; it died.

Thousands of people gather in Hyde Park after finishing an antiwar protest march in London on Feb. 15, 2003. Scott Barbour/Getty Images

He was wrong again a generation later as Britain prepared to join with the United States to invade Iraq, with the pretext that its weapons of mass destruction posed a threat to global peace. In an essay written just after then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s infamous speech to the United Nations urging its support for the upcoming U.S. attack—the great strategic and humanitarian disaster of the United States’ brief, catastrophic moment as the sole superpower—Ash tried to “defend a position of tortured liberal ambivalence” on whether overthrowing Saddam Hussein was a good idea. He had four points in favor and four against, giving the appearance of weighing the complicated factors, incomplete information, and uncertain possibilities, like a truly responsible public intellectual, one meaningfully different from the ideologues ranging themselves for or against the war.

He has since acknowledged that the war was a terrible mistake. In his book Facts Are Subversive, Ash blames former U.K. Prime Minister “Tony Blair, Colin Powell and others” for deceiving the public—but not questioning the intellectual orientation that not only made him so easy to fool. What good, we might ask, is the pursuit of context and the consideration of both sides if they do not lead to good decisions? And why should liberalism—which is, after all, a commitment to the rather dogmatic a priori that there is such a thing as the invisible entity “human rights,” and the quasi-theocratic corollary demand that states be founded on the worship of this specter, and indeed that those that are not should be reformed or destroyed—be linked to such postures of ineffectual dithering?

The chauvinist trade unionist who says the plights of foreigners aren’t his problem; the bigoted leftist intellectual who says Catholics and nationalists are no friends of hers; the kneejerk peacenik who thinks every war is criminal—all these may be stupid people, and often wrong about much, but in the crucial issues of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, their unreflective common sense was of infinitely greater political worth than Ash’s “tortured liberal ambivalence.”

Ash remains attached to this affective-intellectual posture. It seems, indeed, to be something of a hallmark of British thinkers of an Oxbridge bent regardless of their substantive political commitments or areas of expertise. (Witness the portentous writing of Amia Srinivasan, who can spend thousands of words tarrying in what she means for readers to regard as difficult nuances that form exquisite arabesques around the dearest and least difficult received ideas of London Review of Books subscribers.)

It is useful to them, perhaps, because it makes political questions seem to be complicated matters that call for the informed opinion of, if not quite proper scholars, then of a special class of scholar-journalists (who have a bit more familiarity with archives and bibliographies than traditional journalists, but unlike traditional academics, are quite comfortable dining with presidents and recommending wars and revolutions to their readers). Public displays of intelligence uncoupled from the responsibilities of power, however, are not apt to make for wisdom.

Ash wants to distinguish himself from the “bad” kind of public intellectual, who promotes a simplistic, dogmatic political line that follows directly from his ideology. He often associates this figure with Voltaire (sometimes with Bernard-Henri Lévy—those French!), who supposedly had a rigid stance on issues of free speech, religion, etc., and represents what Ash has called Enlightenment fundamentalism—as does  Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

It is characteristic of Ash, in fact, that despite having criticized Ali as a so-called Enlightenment fundamentalist” 20 years ago during the era of the Iraq War, he now, in Homelands, withdraws the label as injurious while still asserting that he was right on the main point. If Muslim illiberalism—and particularly the illiberalism of Muslims living in Western Europe—poses a serious problem for the future of liberal democracy, then, Ash argues, “the frontal, atheist critique of Islam she espoused was not the best way to win over European Muslims to accepting the values of a free European society, including free speech.”

In the actual history of Europe—as opposed to idealized fantasy of Ash’s grand tour—religious toleration, freedom of speech, and other liberal values were never secured through a process of public intellectuals spreading soothing blandishments, but by the state grinding down the organized resistance of theocratic foes, and by populations exhausted by the consequences of their own fanaticism accepting this state-imposed exit from the spectacularly violent centurylong cycle of the Wars of Religion. Political liberalism, as Paul du Gay reminds us, emerged only after and because of the triumph of the absolutist state freed from its medieval submission to ecclesiastical influence.

But Ash, as he now recognizes, mistook the stern words of Ali for a dangerous intrusion into the walled garden of polite European liberalism—and promoted, at the time, the now-disgraced Tariq Ramadan as a more thoughtful, nuanced, and thus more effective and more liberal alternative. Ash laments in Homelands that Ramadan “turned out to be a fork-tongued, chameleon-like, and deeply unsavoury character.”

But are these not the very characteristics Ash takes to be desirable in the journalist-cum-politician, whose double figures compose his concept of the public intellectual? It is not Ramadan’s moral standing that Ash should be lamenting, but the failure of his own career-long conflations of liberalism with a certain dream of a strong, united Europe, and of those mis-conjoined ideals with the mission of an intellectual who tries to draw reluctant publics to his dogmas through poses of undogmatic flexibility.

Thomas de Maiziere (left), then the German minister of defense, arrives with Ash for the first day of the 48th Munich Security Conference in Munich, Germany, on Feb. 3, 2012. Johannes Simon/Getty Images

Perhaps this is a kind of realism, a frank admission that the United States must rule the Balkans (and, with greater indirection and through the pretense of near-equality, Western Europe). Certainly, Ash is at pains to present himself as a realist, and frequently condemns utopians who eschew candor about geopolitical realities. In his 1993 study of West Germany’s Ostpolitik and its connection to eventual German reunification (which remains a valuable reference), titled In Europe’s Name, Ash characterizes German politics in the second half of the 20th century as tending toward childish idealism, based on an understandable but foolish rejection of forms of realism that had endorsed political violence on the domestic and international stage. The German left, he argued, displayed with particular intensity the general trend of German political thinking, which was to imagine that the problems of the two Germanies, Europe, and the world, could be solved through the slow, elaborate building of consensus in service of a “vision of eternal peace, friendship and harmony.”

Germany might not strike inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia as a country dedicated to the peaceful friendship of peoples. As Ash was writing, Germany had just helped initiate the geopolitical division of that unravelling country into rival zones, one of which, containing Slovenia and Croatia, was to be rapidly linked to European institutions and to the German economy. To imagine Germany as a country suffering from an excessive of peace-loving idealism is to ignore its role in igniting the Balkan Wars of the 1990s—which indeed, Ash regularly did in his reportage from Southwestern Europe in that decade.

Likewise, to fault postwar Germans for the urge to “try to be friends with almost everybody” in the diplomatic arena is to ignore how Germany, not least through domestic and European banking institutions, has often pushed other nations into unpopular policies, dating at least from former French President François Mitterrand’s turn to austerity in 1983 (pressed on him by “European,” that is, largely German, financial interests). Although German intellectuals such as Jürgen Habermas may indeed continue to intone the pieties of post-Kantian political idealism, successive German governments hardly strike observers across the continent and beyond as having abandoned the pursuit of self-interest.

Absurd as a characterization of Germany’s foreign policy and political mindset, Ash’s comments do define a type against which he wishes to differentiate himself. He presents himself as the right kind of liberal—one who is not bound by any dogmatism or misled by any idealism, and who is able to face the facts in all their complexity, even at the cost of painful ambivalence.

Ash speaks to pro-European protesters congregating along Park Lane ahead of an anti-Brexit demonstration in central London on March 23, 2019. Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing via Getty Images

Ash, too, fundamentally believes that matters such as the future of Europe, while apparently open to discussion, do in fact have only one side—and believes that his job is to rally public opinion to it. But his strategy for doing so relies on creating the impression that he has listened to rival perspectives, sought out a great deal of information, and kept his mind open to the possibility of his being wrong. This is the way that he tries to tell his “more subtle and therefore convincing story”—combining an outward performance of conscientious thoughtfulness with an inner core of dogmatism no less fundamentalist than the bluntest followers of Voltaire. But in the era of Brexit and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, both Ash’s dogmas and his purported subtlety become ever less convincing.

Whether hemming and hawing about the invasion of Iraq or attacking the left for its reservations about the Solidarity movement, Ash presents himself in the media as someone with a superior grasp on the complexities of the situation. He maintains what the evidence of his career shows to be a mistaken confidence in the political utility of such a multifaceted understanding, and in the forms of communication that he assumes can convey it to readers.

In the 2001 book Facts Are Subversive, writing on Holocaust survivor and writer Primo Levi, Ash writes that his works, like all the “great books of true witness”—the model to which Ash aspires—“have a certain voice in common: one of pained, sober, yet often ironical or even sarcastic veracity.” Ash then asks, rhetorically, “how could we not believe” what is said in such a voice?

Of course, what Levi was communicating was not painstakingly nuanced liberal complexity-mongering but the still-urgent memory of evil—and his literary voice was unmistakably not the direct expression of what he witnessed, but a crafted and historically contingent means of representing it, one that might not be suitable for generating conviction about other matters or in other contexts. Being a fine writer—even one who tells the truth—is not necessarily sufficient to win the faith of a few readers, much of a mass audience.

Nor has Ash’s sense of what and who is to be believed been infallible. While he blames Blair and Powell for misleading the trans-Atlantic public about the case for the invasion of Iraq, he does not blame the media for its credulity, much less ask himself how his own performance of cautious skepticism only lent greater weight to what ought to have been the simply outrageous prospect of war.

Suspending the moral and political questions of fault, we might ask how even well-intentioned journalists and editors find themselves relaying false information to the public—misleading it not through the deliberate propagation of a so-called Big Lie, but rather through the endless production of new narratives and counternarratives, surrounding every topic with penumbras of “debate” that make it appear to be a matter about which much might be said for any number of possible perspectives, provided they are expressed with appropriately pained sobriety. The simple-minded point of view that sees foreign religious anti-communists as right wing can be deflated with historical context; moralizing outrage against war can be softened with humanitarian hedges and questions.

This might be a certain version of the dream of the enlightened press, in which extreme positions are moderated through the spread of information and diverse opinion. And yet, whether looking out onto Eastern Europe in the 1980s or the Middle East in the 2000s, it was the simple-minded perspective that was right. It would have been better, perhaps, not to read the newspaper.

To say as much is not to endorse ignorance or shrill commitment to a single perspective. It is, however, intended to insist not only that the media failed, as perhaps many working in it will now admit, to expose the systematic falsehoods of the Blair and George W. Bush governments—but also that Ash’s supposedly liberal ideal of the media, and of the public intellectual’s place within it as a master of nuance and the balancing of opinions, might be inherently misleading.

If liberal thinkers imagine that they have better political judgment than the public because they have more information and a greater capacity to generate complicated opinions that reckon with other, opposing points of view, they should take a hard look at Ash’s mistakes. The assumptions, postures, and rhetoric of the liberal intellectual that he has long defended and embodied appear utterly obsolete in our current political context and media landscape. They are unable to generate the “hope” in liberal democracy—whether or not we conflate it with Ash’s desired destiny for Europe—upon which its survival may depend.