Quo Vadis Europa?
The World of Yesterday, Stefan Zweig’s heartfelt memoir of a lost Europe, is beginning to feel prescient again. (Source: Stefan Zweig Zentrum)
It has often been said that Europe is not so much a place as an idea—an international community of shared culture and values, of collective identity and heritage, of common fate and destiny. Europe, in this view, is more than just a geographical concept. It is a model of cooperation and integration between nations, to ensure lasting peace and prosperity.
This idea of Europe is curiously both a reality and a mirage. It is at once here, in the form of the European Union, and yet not quite here at all, since Europe is neither truly united nor very sure about its direction. Europe is also less peaceful and prosperous than it was just a decade ago. What, then, does the idea of Europe stand for today? What is behind the recent setbacks and crises? And what role will Europe play in the future?
These are difficult questions, with no easy answers. Luckily, a new book by British historian Timothy Garton Ash is out to guide us. In Homelands, the author offers a personal account of how Europe rose from the ashes of World War II and has now descended into war again. The book deftly charts the evolution of the European project since 1945, making it the perfect backdrop to delve into our questions.
In this post, I will outline the book’s chronology and key themes (part I), explore the deeper causes for Europe’s ongoing crisis (part II), and share some thoughts on what lies ahead (part III). My primary focus is to trace the events and undercurrents that have led to Europe’s present discontent. This means ignoring other aspects, like culture or the lived experience of Europe. They would deserve a long piece of their own.
Homelands
Timothy Garton Ash has been traveling throughout Europe and chronicling its recent history for half a century. A prolific essayist who teaches at Oxford, he has made a career out of capturing history in the making. He was there in Gdańsk in 1980, when the Polish Solidarity movement was born. He was there behind the Iron Curtain, hobnobbing with dissidents and opposition leaders. And he was there in 1989, as the Berlin Wall crumbled and the Cold War dissipated. Time and again, he has turned up in the right place at the right time, bearing witness to events of historical importance.
As befits a “historian of the present”, Garton Ash’s writing is intensely personal and memoiristic. In an earlier work, The File, for example, he writes about his own surveillance at the hands of the Stasi, the East German secret police, who regarded him as a potential British spy (he describes his Stasi file as “325 pages of poisoned madeleine”). His latest book, Homelands, similarly combines history, memoir and reportage. Drawing on fifty years of notebooks and recollections, it gives both a personal account and an interpretation of Europe’s history since 1945. Remarkably, for a work of this scope, it manages to distill something of the essence of Europe into 350 pages.
Garton Ash identifies three distinct time frames in Europe’s history since the Second World War. The first is what Tony Judt famously called the postwar period, which began in 1945 and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 (although it can be said that the postwar period didn’t actually end then, since post-1945 institutions like the United Nations or NATO continued to be around). The second period is what the author calls the post-Wall era, which began in 1989 and almost certainly ended with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. This then takes us into the current era, whose character and course we don’t know yet. We may well find ourselves in a post-Western world today, in which revisionist states like China, Russia and Iran are on the march.
To understand how Europe evolved through the postwar and post-Wall periods, one has to start in 1945. For that, Garton Ash reaches back to his father who landed in Normandy on D-Day with the first wave of British troops. The war and its memories left an indelible mark on his father, as it did with many future Europe-builders. Garton Ash contends: “Personal memories, starting with those from the hell that Europeans made for themselves on earth, are among the strongest drivers of everything that Europe has done and become since 1945.” He calls this the “memory engine”. The basic shape of the pro-European argument was the same in every country: “We have been in a bad place, we want to be in a better one and that better place is called Europe.”
The road towards that better place proved to be a long and bumpy one. When Garton Ash set out to explore a divided Europe in 1973, aged eighteen, much of the continent was still a “Europe of the dictators”. The numbers he gives are startling: just fifty years ago, more Europeans still lived under dictatorships (389 million) than lived in democracies (289 million). Importantly, this tally includes not only the Soviet republics of eastern Europe but also the fascist dictatorships in Spain, Portugal and Greece, which hadn’t transitioned to democracy yet. Looking back, it becomes clear that the democratization of Europe is a much more recent phenomenon than people appreciate today.
Europe made great progress towards becoming “whole and free” in the 35 years that followed, from 1973 to 2008. It is from this era that many of the book’s central themes emerge. Chief among them is the struggle for freedom and democracy, which Garton Ash began documenting as a reporter from behind the Iron Curtain. His recollections of the period have an almost novelistic quality at times. He captures brilliantly the comic absurdity of life in a dictatorship (following a performance of Goethe’s Faust, someone whispered to him: “Watch out, Faust works for the Stasi”). He writes evocatively about the smell of the Cold War (the East German booth at Checkpoint Charlie stunk of “plastic wood, cheap cleaning liquid, damp boots and sweaty armpits”). And he brings back to life the vibrant cultural scene of the Eastern Bloc (“here was a realm where, as the poet Paul Celan said of his native Czernowitz before the Holocaust, ‘people and books lived’”).
One of the strongest sections of the book tells the story of 1989. “If ever the stars aligned for freedom in Europe, it was in the second half of the 1980s,” Garton Ash writes. “A cast of extraordinary individuals, a set of historical processes and a sprinkling of happy accidents combined to produce a peaceful transformation of our continent.” His account leaves no doubt that 1989 was the biggest year in world history since 1945. Its impact on geopolitics was transformative, marking the end of the Cold War, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the close of the “short 20th century”. A new Europe was born: Germany became reunited again; Maastricht turned the European Community into a Union and laid the groundwork for the euro; eastern Europe embraced liberal democracy and transitioned to market economies; and many new members joined the European Union and NATO.
As the postwar period segued into the post-Wall era, Europe began taking a holiday from history. Although the continent had long ceased to call the shots in international affairs, it had remained the central theater of world politics until 1989. With the Cold War over, attention moved elsewhere. “Europe largely disappeared from the front pages and even from the foreign pages of newspapers,” Garton Ash writes of the 2000s. “It was all the Middle East and Afghanistan, plus some China and Russia. Europe led only in the Style pages.” This was much to the liking of many Europeans. After a murderous century, which had ended with five more wars in the former Yugoslavia, Europeans tried hard to convince themselves that they now lived in a Kantian paradise of perpetual peace. Germany in particular fell prey to the hopes and illusions of that era.
The crucial turning point of the post-Wall period came in 2008, when a cascade of crises began sweeping over Europe. The first trigger was the global financial crisis, which soon morphed into a recession and the eurozone crisis. The second catalyst was Russia’s revanchist turn, starting with Putin’s war against Georgia and, a few years later, his annexation of Crimea. Europe suddenly found itself lurching from one crisis to another: Viktor Orbán began demolishing democracy in Hungary; Angela Merkel mismanaged the migrant crisis; France and others were hit by Islamist terrorist attacks; Britain voted to leave the European Union; Covid wrought havoc on health and livelihoods; and nationalist-populist parties were on the rise everywhere. While each of these crises had their own distinct causes, they were mutually reinforcing, which meant the whole was worse than the sum of its parts.
But the worst was yet to come. In 2022, Russia started the largest land war in Europe since 1945, bringing us full circle to where the narrative of the book began.
From postwar to post-Wall: West Berliners chipping away at the Berlin Wall after its demise in 1989.
Now comes the reckoning
Why has Europe’s rise and triumph in 1989 been followed by its recent faltering? Timothy Garton Ash explores this question as he reflects on the errors of the post-Wall period. In his analysis, there are three big themes that have one thing in common: in each case, the seeds of crisis were sown in the moment of greatest triumph.
The first theme relates to the historical lessons the West learned from 1989. Garton Ash describes how the West, giddy with success and seeing no major systemic rival, became complacent and hubristic in the post-Wall years. Many policymakers at the time subscribed to Francis Fukuyama’s idea of The End of History, which posited that History—understood as the struggle between rival ideologies—had ended, with liberal democracy emerging as the winner. It was thus only a matter of time, the thinking went, until the rest of the world would converge to Western practices and values. This assumption rested on a fallacy of extrapolation:
“We saw the way things had gone for nearly two decades after 1989 and somehow assumed they would continue in that direction, albeit with setbacks along the way. We contemplated one of the most nonlinear events in modern history—the fall of the Wall and the peaceful end of the Soviet empire—and made a linear projection forward from it. We took history with a small h, history as it really happens—always a product of the interaction between deep structures and processes, on the one hand, and contingency, conjuncture, collective will, and individual leadership on the other—and misconstrued it as History with a capital H, a Hegelian process of inevitable progress toward freedom. But freedom is not a process. It’s a constant struggle.”
The post-Wall transformation of eastern Europe is an instructive case study for how liberalism failed to live up to its promises. The economic “shock therapies” of the early 1990s made the former Soviet countries undoubtedly wealthier: Poland’s GDP per capita increased more than eightfold between 1989 and 2019; Hungary’s grew fivefold. But the benefits and burdens were unevenly distributed. There was a particularly sharp edge to the realization of who became wealthy and who remained poor (a 1993 study found that 57% of the elites in Poland’s private sector came from the old communist ruling class).
Intermingled with these economic and historical discontents were psychological factors. In The Light That Failed, Ivan Krastev and Stephen Holmes show that the rise of anti-liberal populism in eastern Europe stems largely from resentment at the imperative to imitate the West after 1989. They draw an interesting comparison to China to illustrate their point. While China copied the West selectively, adopting Western technology but not its values, eastern Europeans sought to emulate the Western model in its entirety. This resulted in the denial of the region’s history and identity, thus laying the ground for future resentment.
Besides the challenges in the impersonation process, there was a fundamental issue with the model being emulated. The version of the West that eastern Europeans looked up to was the anti-communist West of the postwar era. It was a West still defined by strong ideals, secure borders and social cohesion. But this image didn’t align with the West that emerged in the post-Wall era. Structural shifts like globalization, migration and multiculturalism reshaped the West into a place marked by rising inequality, porous borders and internal division. This is why the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent migrant crisis were such cataclysmic events for Europe. They exposed the flaws of Western liberalism and its model of globalized capitalism.
Adding to the complexity was the lack of viable alternatives. In crisis after crisis, it became a habit for Angela Merkel to justify unpopular policies as alternativlos. This made her handling of the migrant crisis so particularly damaging for Europe. “It was liberalism’s failure to address the migration problem that explains the public’s turn against it,” Ivan Krastev observes in his book, After Europe. “The inability and unwillingness of liberal elites to discuss migration and contend with its consequences, and the insistence that existing policies are always positive sum (i.e., win-win), are what make liberalism for so many synonymous with hypocrisy.” Garton Ash concludes that the absence of a powerful ideology to challenge liberalism is at the core of today’s crisis:
“At the heart of liberalism, from John Stuart Mill to Ralf Dahrendorf, is the idea that our liberal proposals must always be tested against alternatives. This leads to a core paradox of liberalism: for liberalism to flourish, there must never only be liberalism. Western liberal democratic capitalism did so well in the second half of the twentieth century precisely because it was challenged by fierce ideological competition from fascism and communism. Liberated from such competition, it became lazy, self-indulgent and over-confident. Then the ideological competition finally re-emerged from a direction no one had anticipated in 1989. China’s unprecedented combination of Leninism and capitalism created a model that had considerable appeal in many developing countries, especially when contrasted with the crisis of Western capitalism.”
This brings us to the second major theme to explain Europe’s downward turn. In 1991, the Soviet Union had crumbled with hardly a drop of blood shed. The West once again failed to grasp the true implications of what had happened. “Anyone who has studied the history of empires should have known that the collapse of the Soviet Union would not be the end of the story,” Garton Ash writes. “Empires usually do not give up without a struggle.”
Warning signs were present all along. The author recalls a visit to St. Petersburg in 1994 where he met the yet unknown deputy mayor, “a short, thick-set man with an unpleasant, vaguely rat-like face.” The irritating rat-man was no less than Vladimir Putin and he insisted on Russia’s need to protect residents of the former Soviet republics. He mentioned Crimea and other “territories that historically always belonged to Russia.” In Garton Ash’s view, Putin’s post-imperial yearnings were thus clear long before the first eastward enlargement of NATO in 1999.
The twin enlargements of NATO to the East were and are one of the most contentious issues of the post-Wall era. Garton Ash defends the expansions, even though he admits they increased Russia’s threat perception. He pinpoints NATO’s Bucharest summit in 2008 as the moment when the West fumbled its policy towards the region. At the summit, the Bush administration pushed for a “Membership Action Plan” for Ukraine and Georgia, but Germany and France opposed this. As a compromise, the summit communiqué stated that “these countries will become members of NATO” but didn’t specify any concrete steps to make it happen. “This was the worst of both worlds,” Garton Ash argues, “increasing Putin’s sense of threat without guaranteeing Ukraine’s security.”
In the decade that followed, Europe wilfully turned a blind eye to Russia, first in 2008 and then again in 2014. Garton Ash aptly calls the annexation of Crimea “the turning point at which the West failed to turn.” Germany in particular seemed out of touch with the world around it. Although the country was already heavily dependent on Russian gas supplies, it went ahead with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. To add insult to injury, Germany continued spending barely above 1% of its GDP on defense, allowing its armed forces to atrophy to the point of uselessness. Garton Ash is unsparing about these and other failures. “Partly because the West failed to turn, what had miraculously not happened in 1989–91 happened in 2022: the empire struck back with all the force at its disposal.” Quoting Wolf Biermann, he writes: “Now, thirty years later, comes the reckoning.”
The third major theme in Homelands revolves around Europe’s economic and political woes. Here too the seeds were planted in the early post-Wall years. Although the downward slide didn’t start until 2008, its origins can be traced back to decisions made at Maastricht in 1992. The Maastricht Treaty was groundbreaking in every way. Among other things, it led to what is arguably the greatest achievement of European integration: the creation of a single market of 500 million consumers. Yet, it also set in motion a process that would become a source of political disruption and economic misery: the creation of the euro.
It would take another essay to unpack the long and complicated origin story of Europe’s common currency. (For those who are interested, I can recommend Ashoka Mody’s brilliant and biting book, EuroTragedy). The short version is that the French pushed for the euro, believing it would lead to greater parity with Germany, and the Germans agreed to it, on the condition that they determine the design. The resulting monetary union was, thus, a Franco-German compromise, like so many other cases of European integration.
What they came up with had three basic flaws. First, there would be no fiscal transfers to a common budget to balance out discrepancies between member states. This was politically necessary to reassure German taxpayers, but it resulted in an “awkward halfway house of a common currency without a common treasury.” Second, there would be a common interest rate for all member countries, irrespective of their economic conditions. This meant that once economies began to diverge from one another, the common interest rate would cause the divergence to increase (since the interest rate would be too high for the troubled economies and too low for the booming ones). And third, there would be rigid rules to govern the economic policies of members, notably a 3% limit on annual budget deficits. This further restricted the leeway of governments to cope with economic downturns.
When the global financial crisis hit, it exposed all the flaws of this malformed currency union. The troubles began when the Greek government revealed that it had understated its budget deficit (instead of 3% of GDP, it was more than 13%). This triggered a chain reaction in the bond markets that soon spilled over into Portugal, Spain, Ireland and Italy. As the economies of the eurozone began to diverge from one another, it became clear that the union lacked the policy tools to offset the divergence. The eurozone didn’t have a common treasury to balance out economic differences. The European Central Bank couldn’t tailor its interest rate to the individual needs of member states. And governments couldn’t use national exchange rates as a “shock absorber”.
The situation was made worse by a toxic cocktail of unforced policy errors. By far the worst mistake was to rule out debt restructurings and instead impose harsh austerity measures on debtor countries. This greatly exacerbated the crisis and resulted in a decade of low growth, high unemployment and political instability. While southern Europe incurred the greatest damage, the austerity regime hurt the northern countries as well, since it led to a dramatic shortfall in public investment (an EU-wide estimate puts the investment shortfall at over €500 billion since 2009). No other policy has inflicted more lasting damage on Europe’s economic prospects than fiscal austerity. The political commentator Wolfgang Munchau has gone so far to call it “the biggest economic policy error of our lifetimes.”
Why did Europe’s leaders ignore the warnings of experts, who had long argued that the euro project came with considerable risks? At the heart of it was the belief that European integration should keep going forever. In the 1957 Treaty of Rome, the founding fathers of what is now the European Union established the goal for an “ever closer union”. This set the course of the European project in only one direction—forward. Whenever there was a problem with any step of European integration along the way, the solution was always more integration. This approach drew on Jean Monnet’s famous dictum that “Europe will be forged in crises, and will be the sum of the solutions adopted for those crises.”
The euro was the crowning piece of the enterprise of economic integration that had begun in 1957. Yet, getting the project over the finishing line required a huge gamble. The architects of the euro bet that an incomplete monetary union would, over time, evolve into a fiscal and political union. But the wager backfired. Governments in the north balked at the idea of surrendering their sovereignty in fiscal matters. The prospect of a “transfer union”, where wealthier states support poorer ones, did not appeal to their electorates either. “At Maastricht, the cart had been put before the horse,” Garton Ash observes. “Now the cart was dragging the horse down a road it did not particularly want to take.”
Europe would be in a better place today if it had never adopted the euro. The costs to sustain the common currency have been immense, and the benefits largely illusory. Although the euro removed the risk of currency fluctuations within the eurozone, it did not increase the share of trade among member states. Quite the opposite, in fact. Germany’s trade within Europe has grown most rapidly with three non-euro countries: the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland. In contrast, trade with France and Italy has steadily fallen over the years. A similar pattern can be observed in other eurozone economies. So much for the oft-touted claim that the euro promotes trade, or that a single market needs a single currency.
The larger point is that the euro was a bridge too far in the pursuit of European integration. After a decade of crisis, the continent has emerged neither stronger nor more vibrant, but weakened and divided. Worse still, there is no easy way out of this conundrum. Now that the common currency is in place, eurozone members are stuck with it, flaws and all. They can’t easily fix the project, since European voters remain opposed to a fiscal union. Nor can they abandon it, since that would be too costly. The only viable option is to “muddle through” and build a fiscal union through the backdoor, against voters’ wishes. This is surely not what the founding fathers of the European Union had in mind.
From post-Wall into the unknown: Ukrainian soldiers in Slovyansk at the start of the war in Donbas.
Whither Europe?
As we enter 2024, Europe faces several potential challenges that could further weaken the continent. These include the prospect of a second Trump presidency, Ukraine’s possible defeat in the war against Russia, a looming economic crisis, a potential far-right surge in the next European elections, and escalating tensions with China. Any one of these events would put great strain on Europe’s economic and political cohesion. Taken together, they would test the unity of European nations like never before.
Even without new crises intervening, European unity is frail and fraying. The issue of migration in particular has divided and polarized the continent. So too has the Israel-Hamas war, which exposed the European Union as an “illusory giant” of geopolitics. Even the Russia-Ukraine war has failed to create true and lasting unity among Europeans. As the war has dragged on, an emboldened Viktor Orbán has begun to extract a price for his support for Ukraine aid.
These kinds of divisions are not necessarily a new phenomenon. A recurring theme in Homelands is Europe’s uneasy balance between unity and diversity—between “dreaming of Rome” and “escaping from it”. It is this balance the European Union struggles with today. “Push too hard for unity and the forced union starts to fall apart,” Timothy Garton Ash writes. “Push too hard for diversity and Europeans end up fighting each other.”
Inertia may well be the glue that holds this union together. In a revealing passage, Garton Ash describes the European Union as “the most reluctant empire in history”, comparing it to the Holy Roman Empire. He quotes the Oxford historian Peter Wilson to point out some striking similarities between the two: “Success usually depended on compromise and fudge. Although outwardly stressing unity and harmony, the Empire in fact functioned by accepting disagreement and disgruntlement as permanent elements of its internal politics.” Garton Ash views this as a sign of hope, not despair, for the future of the European Union.
The problem I see with this reality of Europe is that it has become an increasingly abstract entity for Europeans. Even those in power have felt that way at times. When Václav Havel—an old friend and hero of the author—read the Maastricht Treaty, he felt he was “looking into the workings of an absolutely perfect and immensely ingenious modern machine.” But something profound was missing. “The Treaty addressed my reason, but not my heart.” Havel further elaborated on this point in a speech to the French Senate in 1999:
“I cannot rid myself of the sensation that all this may have been a train ride which began earlier, in another time and under different circumstances, and which just keeps going on, without receiving new energy, new spiritual impulses, a renewed sense of direction and of the purpose of the journey.”
What can give the European project new energy? If we recall, it was the “memory engine” along with Cold War imperatives that drove the European project forward for half a century. Several generations of Europeans had experienced war in their formative years and resolved to build a better Europe. Now, for the first time ever, we have a generation of Europeans who have grown up in a Europe that was free, peaceful and prosperous for three decades. I myself belong to this generation, having been born into a reunited Germany in 1990. When you grow up in favorable conditions like this, you wrongly take them for granted. This may be the biggest lesson that Homelands imparts on young readers.
As for new impulses, Garton Ash falls short of providing a compelling answer. He envisions an empowered and enlarged European Union that enjoys respect in the world and popular support at home. Intellectually, this vision is persuasive. Europe needs to act together and speak with one voice to advance its shared interest in the world. But practically, a deeper and wider union goes against the growing desire of European voters for a different trajectory. Garton Ash struggles to reconcile this tension. He is also unwilling to consider that Europe might need to loosen its tight bonds for pro-Europeanism to flourish. As a result, his plea for the European project reads a lot like “more of the same, just a little bigger and better.” But is this enough to rejuvenate the project?
There are some notable gaps in Homelands that would have provided important clues for how to revive Europe. In the post-Wall period, Europe saw the decline of its industrial base and the rise of digital technologies. These structural trends are nowhere mentioned in the book, not even in passing. This strikes me as a strange omission. The shift from an industrial to an information-based society is one that Europe has not managed well in my opinion. Unlike the US and China, Europe has failed to develop domestic tech giants of its own, leaving it trailing in the global technology race. The continent has also remained dependent on the US for everything from capital to energy and military protection. This dependence greatly undermines the lofty aspirations of the European Union for “strategic autonomy”.
The one area that the European Union has staked out a global leadership position is regulation. In recent years, the size of the EU single market, along with Brussels’ fervor to regulate it, has given rise to what Anu Bradford calls the “Brussels Effect”. With that she refers to Europe’s ability to shape global regulatory trends simply through its own domestic policy decisions. The textbook example is the EU’s data privacy law, GDPR, which went into force in 2018 and swiftly became the global standard. But this leadership is on shaky grounds, given Europe’s lag in digital innovation. “We will regulate things that we will no longer produce or invent,” Emmanuel Macron admitted recently when asked about Europe’s new AI Act. “This is never a good idea.”
Another shortcoming of the book is that it offers no viable remedies for Europe’s migration problem. Garton Ash’s observations on the topic are undoubtedly poignant. In a memorable chapter, he visits the Spanish North African enclave of Ceuta to report on Europe’s efforts to stem the tide of migration. “In 1989 we took down an Iron Curtain through the center of Europe,” he writes. “In 2023 we are erecting a new Iron Curtain around the periphery of an arbitrarily defined European space.” This time, instead of keeping their own people in, walls are built to keep other people out. Yet, despite being clear-eyed about the problem, the author fails to provide good alternatives to the new wall building. Instead, his account falls into many of the tropes often found in immigration narratives.
Such quibbles aside, Homelands is a brilliant and important book, written with a formidable command of detail. Garton Ash paints a vivid, often moving picture of Europe’s history since 1945. His remarkable journey through postwar and post-Wall Europe puts the current malaise into a helpful perspective:
“Today’s Europe, for all its faults, limits and hypocrisies, for all the setbacks of recent years, is still far better than the one I set out to explore in the early 1970s, let alone the hell my father encountered as a young man. It’s also better than those of earlier centuries, including the pre-1914 Europe idealised by Stefan Zweig. In fact, adapting Churchill’s famous remark about democracy, we might say that this is the worst possible Europe, apart from all the other Europes that have been tried from time to time. To defend, improve and extend a free Europe makes sense. It’s a cause worthy of hope.”
What may be most striking about this final paragraph is the author’s choice of words. As Václav Havel once noted, “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism.” What is it then? Garton Ash responds by citing Romain Rolland’s famous credo, “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” It is constructive pessimism, he argues, not Panglossian optimism or Zweigish fatalism, that is most called for today. We should expect the worst but work for the best. The trouble is that Europeans can no longer remember the worst and they find it hard to imagine the best.