Why Timothy Garton Ash is wrong about Europe

Things become much clearer as years go by. I read Timothy Garton Ash all my adult life but only now, after the Brexit referendum forced us all to think hard about the EU, do I see how misguided and dangerous his ideas are.

He has contributed a 'Long Read' to the Guardian about the EU and it is tosh. It says nothing interesting or original - or even interesting and unoriginal.

He co-opts the fire in Notre Dame as a symbol of the danger Europe faces but by this he means the dangers to the EU and Eurofederalism. 

The danger to European civilisation in his eyes comes from people who are attached to nation states, from politicians who want to staunch the unprecedented flood of refugees and immigrants from Africa and Asia, not from the tidal waves themselves. 

This is Alice in Wonderland logic. Words like civilisation mean whatever Humpty Dumpty Ash wants them to mean.

He points to the True Finns party as an example of an extreme right party entering government but neglects to say that they were partners in the coalition that accepted, for the first time in Finnish history, large numbers of non-European refugees. Finland, Malta and Luxembourg had hitherto been the three almost all white countries in Western Europe.

Actually, I am being a bit unfair. Professor Ash strays into good writing in this one paragraph which deals with Europe's sharp decline, but he does not enlarge on the theme though it is the issue he should be discussing.

“With the European civil war that raged on and off from 1914 to 1945, once described by Winston Churchill as a second thirty years war, Europe deposed itself from its global throne. In act five of Europe’s self-destruction, the US and the Soviet Union strode on to the stage like Fortinbras at the end of Hamlet. Yet, Europe was at least still the central stage of world politics throughout the cold war that followed. Europeans made history once again for a brief shining moment in 1989, but then Hegel’s Weltgeist, the “world spirit”, moved rapidly on from Berlin to Beijing.”

The truth is that the World Wars do not explain why Europe thinks it needs the USA to defend it or from whom. I am not sure what the explanation is but I know that it is subjective, not objective, and relates to decadence and civilisational exhaustion. 

So do low birth rates and accepting unprecedented numbers of migrants. 

And yet while Europe is in unprecedented relative decline the continent has never been nearly so rich, so peaceful, so technically advanced or so comfortable and easy a place in which to live.

Perhaps rich, peaceful and comfortable are clues. 

Liberalism is a symptom, not the cause of this decline. Whatever the cause, the EU has certainly not helped. It has seen Europe steadily lose its political and economic importance. The customs union did not make the European economies surge forward, nor did the Single Market. The euro is a fire in a building without a fire escape, in William Hague's pithy observation.

Professor Ash says support for the EU rests on three generations – the 1914ers and 1939ers who remember the First and Second World Wars and the 1968ers, the people who share the ideals of the student revolutionaries of 1968. 

With the first two groups I have no quarrel, but the 1968ers were always a small and foolish left-wing minority, as malign in their way as the fascists or communists. Often they were communists, though most were what Lenin called useful idiots. They are symbolised by the students in West Berlin who marched against America and capitalism while protected from real existing socialism by GIs.

Their ideas did not conquer in the field of economics, thankfully, but have conquered European culture. The populists are best seen as genuinely conservative parties, whose views on immigration are less right-wing than those of Churchill or De Gaulle. They are engaged in trying to overturn as much as they can of 1968.

What Professor Ash might have mentioned is the generation of people who were young in 1989 in Eastern Europe - except that their only idea was wanting to enjoy the prosperity and freedom of the West. The East German protesters who wanted a third way between Eastern communism and Western capitalism in October 1989 were swept away by November 1989. 

Instead of Eastern European ideas, the wars in the former Yugoslavia put Western Europe into a terrible and understandable funk about nationalism. This is what has made nationalism seem a danger signal in the eyes of many reasonable people, even though modern nationalists in the EU want to defend Europe as a whole and are not going to start wars.

“The events of 1989 opened the door to an unprecedented era of globalised, financialised capitalism. While this facilitated great material progress for a new middle class in Asia, in the west it generated levels of economic inequality not seen since the early 20th century."

The end of communism was not the reason for globalisation and our author fails to say why economic inequality is in itself a bad thing. He is right, though, that a chasm has opened up in Europe between a hugely inflated graduate class – a sort of academic proletariat, as someone called it – which have tickets for good jobs and have imbibed the prejudices of progressive academics – and the rest who are largely shut out. 

I should add a third and growing class: the immigrants who work cheaply for the graduate class.

“For everyone who is a citizen of an EU member state, this is a continent where you can wake up on a Friday morning, decide to take a budget airline flight to the other end of the continent, meet someone you like, settle down to study, work and live there, all the time enjoying the rights of a European citizen in one and the same legal, economic and political community."

This is the reason you hear over and over again in Romania. The EU is good because it spends money on Romania and provides free and easy movement across Europe. 

The former is a good point, though attempts to stimulate economies by government spending rarely work. Britain got the lion’s share of Marshall Aid after 1945 but it was Germany not Britain that saw the dramatic economic ascension. 

The point about free movement is very understandable, but emigration is destroying Romania and Eastern Europe, while it does immeasurable harm to the sense of identity and cohesion of Western European countries.

The most important point to make is that the European Union and its earlier incarnation the EEC did not save Europe from war. 

The Cold War and Nato arguably did so, though I do not think Communist Russia would have invaded the West in any case.  

The most important event in European or world history since the fall of Rome is the economic miracle that changed the West and didn't happen in the Communist world.  The reasons for it have not, so far as I know, been explained.

This and the Communist threat meant Western European countries did not go to war with each other.

I used to buy the much repeated idea you heard from Eurosceptics in the 1980s and 1990s that democratic, prosperous countries did not go to war, even though rich countries with universal manhood suffrage did in 1914. After the bloody liberal wars of George W Bush, Tony Blair, Hillary Clinton, Sarkozy and Cameron this is alas clearly not true, when the wars are against small, relatively weak countries. 

But democratic, prosperous countries are unlikely to fight each other.

However, this certainly does not mean that the threat of war has gone away. 

We have wars now in Ukraine caused by a country, Russia, which is neither democratic nor prosperous. We may have wars in the Caucasus, though I don't expect them and I do not think that the Caucasus is in Europe. We have the danger of more liberal wars in the Middle East, which will agitate ethnic minorities in Europe. 

Even without such wars, which I hope the USA and UK will finally give up, we can certainly expect wars waged in Western Europe by non-state actors, to use that clunking phrase, caused indirectly by mass immigration. 

In fact, such a low-level war has already begun. 

If the terrorists succeed in their long-term aim to get large numbers of people in their communities on their side we really shall be in trouble. I hope that never happens, but Timothy Garton Ash's policy of accepting more migrants and refugees into Europe would make the danger greater.