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Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review. I'm Gideon Rachman, chief foreign affairs commentator of the Financial Times. This week's podcast is about the future of Europe. My guest is Timothy Garden Asch, historian and author who began his career covering the fall of communism in Europe in the late 1980s. For many people, Garden Ash included, that was a period of hope and optimism. But we're now living in a different Europe. Russia is at war in Ukraine. The radical right is on the rise. So can Europe still look forward to the future with optimism? Everybody who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall knew that they were watching history in the making. Timothy Garnash covered that period from East Germany, and he also watched the development of the Solidarity movement that unravelled communist rule in Poland. He's written about all that and more in his recent book, A Personal History of Europe. But the inexorable spread of democracy and liberal values across Europe, apparently heralded by the fall of the Berlin Wall, now seems to have slowed and even gone into reverse. So when I met Timothy Garden Ash in London recently, I began our conversation by asking him if he thinks that we are once again witnessing a new order emerging in Europe.
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C
I'm absolutely sure that we are at the beginning of a new era. It begins on the 24th of February 2022 with Putin's full scale invasion of Ukraine. So we have the post war period after 1945. We have what I call the post Wall period, which goes from the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 until that moment in February 2022. The return of full scale interstate war, now well into its fourth year in Europe, something that people for most of those decades could not have imagined, thought indeed had become impossible, clearly defines this as a new era.
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B
So you covered the end of the last era. I mean, really at the start of your journalistic career. You were, you know, fortunately for you and for us, an expert in both Poland and Germany at the time of the fall of the Wall and the fall of communism in Poland. But that was a much more hopeful transition and Europe had a great sort of sense of optimism then. Is this a much darker transition, do you think?
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C
Undoubtedly. How could it not be with a full scale war? I've been to Ukraine many times since the full scale invasion, met people who've subsequently been killed. But I think it's important to say, Gideon, that this post war period wasn't all wasted time. You know how people now often talk about it as a kind of holiday from history, the illusions of the end of history and so on and so forth. Actually, it was a game of two halves. And what we managed to do in the first 17 or 18 years, I would say between 1989 and 2007, was quite extraordinary. All the transitions from half of Europe, which was in the Soviet bloc or from Yugoslavia into what are more or less democratic, free countries, more or less market economies, most of them in the EU and in NATO, including the Baltic states, which did not exist on the map of Europe in 1989, although it always existed in the hearts and minds of their own people. That is quite extraordinary. So that we actually achieved an enormous amount in the first half of that period. And in my view, it's since 2008 that actually this cascade of crises begins, beginning with the near simultaneous events of the global financial crisis, which of course segues into the Great Recession and the Eurozone crisis and Putin's seizure of two chunks of Georgia.
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B
And we fail to rise to those challenges then.
- [04:51]
C
Indeed, I think it was absolutely right to try to help Russia to become a more normal nation state, to become a democracy, to integrate it into the Western system, even to turn the G7 into G8. But the empire started striking back, you could say, in the second Chechen War, which brought Putin to power. But I would say Georgia, 2008, and then big time with the siege of Crimea in 2014 and the beginning of the war in Ukraine, because as Ukrainians always point out, this war has been going on since 2014. We should have said, aha. We know this from history. This is a declining empire which wants to strike back and we have to do more about it. And I think if we'd had a more decisive response, particularly after 2014, we might not be in this mess.
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B
And so how much of the blame is laid at the door of Angela Merkel, do you think, who was a figure I think all of us admired in many ways. But did she fail that challenge? And will historians, do you think, look back at her period in a slightly different way?
- [06:05]
C
Undoubtedly. I mean, there is a kind of paradox of Angela Merkel, which is that on the one hand, and I think you'd agree she was a personification of everything that was admirable about the new Germany, West Germany and then unified Germany, always reasonable, always seeking a peaceful compromise, highly educated, highly educated in Favor always of the rule of law, liberal in the best sense, and so forth. So she was utterly admirable and, by the way, with a hell of a lot less ego than most leaders, certainly I've met, usually men. And at the same time, if you take the big issues that we got wrong and go down the list, Russia becoming dependent on cheap energy and not responding strongly enough to the aggression in 2014. Wrong. Becoming too dependent on China, Wrong. Allowing Hungary to effectively, under Viktor Orban, demolish democracy while being inside the European Union. Germany had enormous power in Hungary. They didn't use it. Wrong again. So that I think history will say that on all the big issues, she actually got it wrong.
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B
Turning to Europe as a whole, one of the cliches about the European Union, I think it began right at the beginning. Was it Monet who said Europe will be built in crisis, is that Europe responds well to crises. And you said it was, in a way, a positive crisis, but it was certainly a reordering. When the Berlin Wall falls, Europe does respond. They enlarge the European Union, they create the euro and so on. Do you think Europe can respond to this latest crisis?
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C
Well, first of all, what Monet said, and he was quite right, was that Europe will be made in crisis and it will be the sum of the responses to those crises. Now, this has sometimes been turned into, as often happens, a sort of simplistic formula, the crisis theory of progress, that every time you get a crisis, Europe responds. Truth is, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn't. It did actually respond well to the COVID crisis, for example. It responded well to the crisis at the end of the Cold War. But I defy anyone to tell me how European integration has been aided by its response to the migration crisis. So sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't. Now, in this one, since 2022, it's a triple crisis, isn't it? I mean, I sometimes like to say there's a Putin shock, the Trump shock and the Xi shock, outright armed aggression from Putin's Russia. The rather shocking discovery that not just China, but India, Turkey, Brazil, South Africa, all these great and middle powers actually see things very differently and are quite happy to go on having good relations with Russia and have the wealth and power effectively to counterbalance the West. So we throw the kitchen sink in sanctions, that Russia and the Russia economy, at least until recently, has been doing pretty well because they had all these other partners. And then finally, the Trump shock, the shock of discovering that you cannot rely on the United States to continue to support Ukraine or Actually to guarantee Europe's security against a revanchist Russia. So that's a huge triple challenge. I would say that Europe has responded well to the Ukraine part of that challenge. And actually what Europe has done, what the EU has done in actually becoming an actor in defense, in supporting Ukraine, is pretty impressive. There is at least the declared will to spend more on defense, but we shall see what that actually comes to in the next few years.
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B
Yeah, so I was recently spending time with a former head of the European Commission who said to me, Ursula von der Leyen says we should be a geopolitical commission, that geopolitical Europe is the next thing. And yet in the Middle east crisis, it's Trump and the Israelis and the Qataris who are sorting it out. Europe nowhere to be seen. And that even although I take your point about how well Europe's done in Ukraine, in some respects, the really crucial diplomatic meetings which Europeans were trying to influence from the outside were Trump Putin in Alaska and potentially Trump Putin in Budapest, although that didn't come off. So is Europe finding itself marginalized geopolitically?
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C
I think that's too sweeping. I mean, what you raise is a question of what do we mean by Europe in this case? And clearly it's not just the European Commission or the eu. Europe becomes an effective geopolitical actor, which it is in many parts of the world, particularly for example in Africa with small or medium sized countries which are dependent on development aid and where the United States and Russia are not major players. Europe is an effective actor where you have a combination of a European Commission, an EU which knows what it wants to do, and 3, 4, 5 heads of major governments who are on the same page. And so you get as an internal coalition of the willing and then you can carry the rest of the European Union or the rest of Europe along. I would argue that is what we have done. In the case of Ukraine, I mean, obviously the United States remains crucial. But actually now the lion's share of the military and economic aid is coming from Europe. And we had a pretty united position in spite of having Viktor Orban and Robert Fritzo, great friends of Vladimir Putin, inside the eu. In the case of Gaza, Europe was disunited. There was no shared position. I mean, there are worlds that divide the German position on Israel, Gaza from that of Spain and then Europe cannot be effective.
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B
And is Europe's problem that particularly in an age of heightened geopolitical competition, it's an economic giant and it has this single market, but still a geopolitical. I don't know, dwarf, because it's divided. It doesn't really have the heft of.
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C
The United States or China, partly because it's divided. But also what I think that the combination of Putin and Trump has revealed is that a one dimensional superpower is no superpower at all. You remember there's a book by a woman called Anna Radford called Europe as a Regulatory Superpower.
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B
Indeed. I had her on my podcast a while back.
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C
There you are the economic journey giant. Well then tell me please, why this economic giant, this superpower, the greatest multinational trading bloc in the world, effectively caved in in the trade and tariff negotiations with Donald Trump? The answer is clear. Because if you're a three dimensional superpower like the United States, you can leverage your power in other dimensions of power to affect the economic negotiation. Concretely, Europe, Ursa von der Leyen in particular, was so desperate to keep the United States somehow at least partially on board in supporting Ukraine and by the way, in guaranteeing our security in NATO, that they felt they had to make concessions on the economic side.
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B
Do you think they had really no option, although, however undignified it was. And that photo of them, you know, grinning, forced grin and thumbs up with Trump after agreeing this well, I mean.
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C
Europe's relations with Donald Trump could produce a book called the Anthology of Sycophancy. And everyone does it and arguably has to do it. You know, Private Eye, the British satirical magazine, has this wonderful award called the obn, the Order of the Brown Nose. And all European leaders have competed for that. I mean, I think in that case, and by the way, not just many Europeans were deeply depressed by that, but actually many liberal Americans who were looking to the EU to stand up to Trump were disappointed. I think it's a combination of only being a one dimensional power and the fact that Europe itself was not sufficiently united because each individual major member state was looking to guard its particular special interest. So the lesson from that is very simple. The measure of whether Europe responds to this crisis, to this challenge, will be can we become a two or three dimensional power, that is to say, a military and security power as well.
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B
And what's your answer to that?
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C
We can, we should, and I'm not sure we will. Okay, so clearly, if you just look at the figures, the size of our economies, actually the size of our defense industry, there is a potential, clearly we are going to face a revanchist, neo imperialist, angry, authoritarian Russia for many years and probably decades to come. And clearly we can no longer absolutely rely on the United States for our Defense, certainly with Donald Trump, but arguably even after Donald Trump. So the logic is absolutely clear. We should and we could. Whether we will depends in my view on the following fundamental structural problem. The policies we need are European, but the politics are still national. So we need a defense policy at European scale, just as we need capital markets at European scale, at digital policy at European scale. But the politics remain national democratic politics. And as you know from your time in Brussels, in Brussels, everybody's looking at the calendar and saying, oh, but there's a French election coming up or a Belgian election coming up, or even a German regional election coming up. And we've got to wait for that. So the question of questions for me is can we make that complicated thing work? Can we do what we've done in the single market and indeed in the currency, and get to European scale policies while recognizing that the politics will continue to be national democratic politics?
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B
And it's an old question, isn't it? Because wasn't it Jean Claude Juncker who was President of the European Commission and before that Prime Minister of Luxembourg who said we all know what needs to be done, we just don't know how to get elected after we do it?
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C
Exactly so. And it's not become any easier with the strengths of eurosceptic, populist, anti liberal parties. But when you said it was an old problem, I thought you were going to go back 2,000 years. Because for the last 2,000 years, Europeans have been looking back to Rome and harking back and trying to recreate it. Charlemagne, Napoleon. It's no accident it's the Treaty of Rome, the final Treaty of the EU, 1957. Look at the speeches, they all evoke Rome. But at the same time, for all those years people have been trying to escape from Rome, which is the title of a great book by my Stanford colleague Walter Scheidel, Pulling Away, Back to our Own.
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B
Well, it was an empire after all.
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C
But it was an empire. And so you get these countervailing forces. And so Scheidel argues, and he's not the first actually Edward Gibbon argued this before him, that our great strength is precisely our diversity, that all these competing states and nations give us this energy and this creativity and the competition and the innovation and so on. Christopher Columbus couldn't get patronage in Portugal, so he goes off to Spain and so on. I think the lesson of that history is that what you've got to try and do is to find the golden balance between unity and diversity. Push too hard for unity and people try and escape from it. Go Too far towards diversity and we start fighting each other. And so the key, in my view, to the future success of Europe politically is, is finding this elusive balance between unity and diversity.
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B
How risky a period is it for Europe? I mean, it's the obvious risk, which is the war, and that's the biggest one right on our borders, the Russia, Ukraine war, the largest war in Europe since 1945. But if you pulled even further out, you could say that for centuries Europe sort of imposed its will on the world and now they no longer have that economic heft. And you describe the disillusioning effect for Europeans of discovering, oh, actually the world doesn't agree with us about the Russia, Ukraine war. That's disillusioning. But could it become threatening at a certain point that, you know, if you're not being the person pushing other people around, eventually you are the person or the country or the continent that's pushed around.
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C
Yeah, you're on the menu as they're saying. Yes, exactly. So, as you know, people talk about in the late 19th century, the scramble for Africa, where European leaders got together in Berlin and carved up Africa like a cake. A colleague of mine at Oxford is just writing a book called the Scramble for Europe, which is about how others, China, Russia, Dimitar Bechev, great title. So that is clearly a danger. And if you look at someone like Viktor Orban, very significant figure in European politics, despite being a relatively small country, you see that there's a kind of survival model for would be authoritarian leaders, which is actually to do from inside the European Union, what Narendra Modi calls multi aligning. So you get what you need from Europe, but you also have good relations with the United States, but you also get cheap energy and have good relations with Putin and, and you get a lot of investment from China and you play with all sides. That illustrates the danger that is clearly there. And that would lead to, I think, a gradual disintegration of this Europe.
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B
So just as Europe should integrate others, it's in their interest to play divide and rule with Europe.
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C
Correct. In other words, the way I would put it is not doomed or saved. But I cannot think of a period when the forces of disintegration and integration have been more finely balanced. So in the 1980s, 1990s, clearly the forces of integration massively had the upper hand. Now I think they're finally balanced and I think we will know in somewhere between five and 10 years which forces have prevailed not to make Europe a superpower to rival the United States and China, because that's not even necessarily a desirable goal and I don't think an achievable goal because we are all these different countries, but to generate sufficient power in all dimensions to defend what we have achieved in Europe and extend it somewhat geographically.
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B
And as he said, and we've discussed, the politics have always been the issue. Aren't the politics becoming more complicated? I mean, or to put it more precisely, don't you think that we're quite likely to have a major European country, have the anti European right, populist right come to power? It could be France. With a French presidential election in 2027. The AfD I don't think will ever rule Germany, but they might make it into government. They're ahead in the polls right now. If that kind of thing happens. Isn't it sort of game over for European immigration?
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C
I don't think it is. I think there's a very serious danger. We have major elections in all the major European states in the next five years. Polish parliamentary in 2027, probably Italian and Spanish, as well as a crucial French presidential election. Germany and Britain at the latest 2029. In many of these countries, eurosceptic anti liberal populist parties are ahead in the polls. I mean shockingly with the RFD in Germany, but also assembleement national in France and of course reform UK in this country, in Britain. So we would have to be very lucky for one or two of those elections not to go from my point of view as a liberal European the wrong way. The question then becomes, first of all, how many is it going to be? Because it is a question of internal balance of power within the union. And secondly, if to take the most obvious example, Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen's right hand man, young telegenic, et cetera, the very model of a modern populist, were to be elected French President 2027, if not before, would he be more like a Viktor Orban or would he be more like a Giorgio Meloni? If he's more like a Giorgio Meloni and says I want to stay in all the key European institutions, stay, stay in the euro, actually even helped to make them work.
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B
Just to be clear, for those listeners who don't remember, she's the Prime Minister of Italy from a far right background, but has governed slightly more from the centre.
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C
Giorgio Meloni, I think could be precisely described as a post post fascist.
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B
Post fascist.
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C
That's to say she was a very active member of a genuinely post fascist party in a direct line from Italian fascism that is no longer her party. But it's part of her biography. But she has partly because Italy depends so much on the eu, has a very high level of debt, is getting a lot of funds from the so called next generation EU post Covid funding, been really quite cautious and earned the cautious endorsement of none other than Mario Draghi, the great pro European and author of the Draghi Report on the Future of the European Economy. So there is a possible future in which someone like Bardella is more Maloney than Orban. And by the way, there's also a future in which Orban loses an election because he's in power for 16 years and next April there's going to be an election in Hungary. So I think if you're looking at this, the thing to avoid is every time there's an election saying oh my goodness, Europe is going all nationalist because Mr. Novrotsky is elected the president appointment, oh hooray. Europe is becoming more liberal because Rob Yetton has won an election in the Netherlands. It's going to be a series of swings and roundabouts, but the question is, how do we come out of that in a kind of five to ten year time frame?
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B
So let me finish with Britain, since we're sitting here, actually standing here in London. In a way it's a sort of encapsulation of a lot of the problems and challenges you've been discussing. First of all, it was the biggest, most shocking example of the disintegration of Europe, Brexit in 2016, which eventually comes into force five years later. And now one would hope that in this new, more challenging environment, the environment you describe, a war in Europe, the Putin XI Trump Triple Challenge. Obviously Britain and Europe have a lot of common interests, need to work together and yet progress in overcoming the divisions of Brexit, I'm not saying necessarily reversing it, but just getting London and Europe to work close together is frustratingly slow. Why is that? And do you think it's a sign that in the end Europe doesn't fully grasp the urgency of the situation it faces?
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C
So first of all, I think that Brexit was one of the largest acts of national self harm in our modern history, but it was also quite damaging to the eu, to elusive major member states. Secondary I do think that the Starmer government has missed an extraordinary opportunity. In order to get reelected, they felt they had to have the so called Red wall voters who were voters, particularly in the north of England, who had gone across to the Conservatives under Boris Johnson and therefore to have red lines on Brexit. But faced with Vladimir Putin literally attacking us from the east and Donald Trump threatening to withdraw from the West. It would have been a perfect moment for a British Prime Minister to say, the world has completely changed. We really need a much more fundamental reset to our relationship with Europe. And by the way, if we want to get dynamism back in our economy, it would help to have a closer relationship with our largest single market. What they have done is so much more timid and cautious. And essentially there has been a significant reset, but only really on security and defense policy and support for Ukraine. That's in a sense fine for many EU member states because they get a massive contribution from Britain while not having the more difficult ask of giving, for example, more access to the customs union and the single market. So I think there is a historic opportunity which is being missed there. And I hope that either Keir Starmer himself or it seems quite possible a new Labour Prime Minister in the next year or two will try to seize that chance.
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B
And is there also something that needs to be done on the European side? Because arguably they have a historic opportunity or at least some low hanging fruit with Britain. And yet we see, for example, on security, which should be a no brainer, they're saying, well, if Britain's going to participate in this common European safe fund to buy worms, you're going to have to contribute 6 billion pounds, which may sink the whole thing.
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C
Yeah. So you know very well how Brussels works when it's not a absolutely salient hot issue, it's the officials who basically deal with it. And this very hard line is coming to us from a group of officials for whom Brexit was actually, ironically, a great success for the eu because the EU remained united and got a very good deal for the EU narrowly out of the Brexit negotiations, supported by a few individual member states, including France. But it's remaining with them and they are continuing to drive this series of rather short sighted, very hard bargains. I think they're asking 6.5 billion for access to a fund which in total is only 150 billion euros, and the same on other areas because it hasn't become a major issue for the heads of government. If Britain did what I'm suggesting we do and propose a much larger and more strategic reset, making this argument about the historic moment, about the three challenges, the Putin, the Trump and the xi, you would then get the Chancellor of Germany, who, by the way, Friedrich Maps is really quite interested in and sympathetic to Britain, the President of France, the Prime Minister, Italy, Donald Tusk, Polish Prime Minister, engaged on this issue. And that's the point when the whole conversation, the whole negotiation changes and you could have a much bigger deal.
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B
That was Professor Timothy Garnas, author of Homelands, ending this edition of the Rachman Review. Thanks for listening and please join me again next week.
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A
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