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Nobody is born European Ash: I think it is a great mistake to believe that there is out there in reality a set of nice and good values and norms which are true European values and another set which has to do with nationalism, intolerance, xenophobia and so on, which are -by definition- non-European. Interview by Michał Bardel

27.07.2011

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There was a time when Europe was the world and the world was Europe. The world defined itself exclusively from the European standpoint. Has something remained of this elementary orientation of the world today, in our reality, which seems now so much policentric?

I do not think I accept the premise. Europe discovered the world. There are actually wonderful historical maps show­ing the black clouds of ignorance about the Americas, Asia and Australia gradually spreading as Europe discovers them. Europe discovered the world for itself but the Chinese still knew they were Chinese and the Indians were conscious of their-in many respects as ancient or even older-cultures and traditions. Then, we had the Europeanization of the world or perhaps more broadly the Westernization of the world. There is a very little known and interesting book by historian Theodore von Laue called The World Revolution of Westernization and what he argues is that the kind of cul­tural dichotomies that more recently came from Samuel Huntington-the clash of civilizations of West and East-are quite unrealistic, because almost everybody has something of the West; because with European exploration and then colonization elements of Western culture were mixed up with those of all other cultures. The elements of Europe are everywhere you look. You go to Buenos Aires and there is French architecture, you go to Taiwan-and you have ele­ments of Europe there.

But then, after decolonization, it seems to me that Eu­rope withdrew from the world and started forgetting about the world.

We still tend to comprehend Europe in terms of the Western World or the West itself. But it was created, some three thousand years ago, by people of Eastern origin. Zeus kidnapped Europe in Phoenicia and brought West to Crete.

An Asian princess! Europa was an Asian princess on the other side of the Mediterranean.

What was then that very factor which ultimately divided these two civilizations: one to the West of the Aegean Sea

and one to the East?

First of all: Rome, and everything that comes to us from Rome. Both ancient Greece and Judaism. And Christianity, which came in time. They come to us through Rome. Sec­ondly-this has to be said-the confrontation with Islam. Europe was understood to be the Western Christendom. Yet, the first mention of the word ‘Europeans’ is in a Chronicle of the Battle of Poitiers in 732 against the invading Mus­lims. The true modern sense of ‘Europe’ starts with Pius II and his confrontation with Islam. It is very important to recognize that if we think about Europe and Muslims. It is also true that classical philosophy was created also by Arab philosophers, Averroes among them, but let us not falsify our history: this is where the real subjective definition of Europe started. In fact it was Piccolomini, Pius II-Bronisław Geremek wrote about it as a medievalist-who really estab­lished the political idea of ‘Europe’ in opposition to Islam.

Why then is it so that we hardly notice-if at all-that the tradition of the Byzantine Empire had great importance in the process of the making of Europe? We think of Charlemagne as one of the gravest architects of European unity, but his empire cannot be even compared to the greatness of Byzantium.

We hardly noticed until a man called Karol Wojtyła came along and reminded us. It was John Paul II, with his famous image of the two lungs-the Eastern and the Western lung- who drew our attention to the world of Eastern Christianity, the Orthodox. It was followed by the end of communism and the enlargement of the European Union which means we actually have several orthodox societies in the EU. I think it is one of many absurdities in Samuel Huntington’s book to claim that the orthodox world is a separate civilization. It is an absolute nonsense. Russia is a question in itself, but because it is Russia, not because it is orthodox.

And the identity of modern Europe has been also constructed

in opposition to Russia.

You are right. Moreover, in modern times Russian and Soviet expansionism has been a driving force of European integration. This is something people miss about the period 1950-1990, to what extent Soviet Union was the external integrator of the European project. It is a very interesting difference about Russia: there is an awful lot of countries which are not quite sure whether they belong to Europe fully, they have some doubts and uncertainties. But most of them want to belong. A great number of Russians does not want to belong. They believe themselves to be fine on their own, in their own Eurasian world.

I think that for decades or even centuries to come there is going to be a special relationship with Russia. Not pure exclusion, but a special relationship. But the answer to the Russian question, unlike the Turkish one, has to start with the Russians themselves. They have to work out who they want to be.

There is this famous comment by Dean Acheson, Ameri­can Secretary of State, in the early 1960s, that Britain has ‘lost an Empire but not yet found a role’. And that is Rus­sia’s position now. And we know it takes some time. I mean, losing an empire is a hard thing to do-you feel better in the end, but it is hard to do it. Particularly if you are not totally sure what you have lost, when you look at Bela­rus, Ukraine, Georgia and you think ‘Maybe we still have a chance’… So I think it has to be clear that Russia’s future

is a modern nation state-with many ethnicities, but a na­tion state, not an empire.

Is there any distinct European axiology? Some set of values that are somehow constitutive of being European?

I think it is a great mistake to believe that there is out there in reality a set of nice and good values and norms which are true European values and another set which has to do with nationalism, intolerance, xenophobia and so on, which are-by definition-non-European. You surely re­member the great debate about Central Europe in 1980s and François Bondy who said that Adolf Hitler is as much European as Milan Kundera. But what we have done since 1945 is to say who we want to be. And it is a conscious choice from among many existing European values.

I asked that question because it is only the day before yesterday that Javier Solana presented in Istanbul the report called ‘Living Together’ which was worked out by the Group of Eminent Persons, you among them. And this report seems to assume some kind of euroaxiology or at least it projects it.

Well, large international organizations, companies, when they go global, they often feel the need to have an explicit chart of values. In other words, if you are in a Polish com­pany you assume that people know the rules of the game. But when it suddenly becomes totally international you have to make these values explicit. It is what happened to us in Europe-we are becoming international. People from Viet­nam, people from Morocco, from Ukraine and from Portu­gal, empirically do not have a clear common codex and we have to make the codex explicit. And it is what this report is attempting to do. To show the things that every European must accept, like equal liberty under one law. It is the es­sence of it, for men and women of different race and colour…

As a minimum…

As a minimum, as a sine qua non for living together. You can be Muslim, you can be Scientologist, you may be Zo­roastrian, you can-and people increasingly do-live with multiple identities in multiple cultures. And because of the easy communication, cheap air travel, the Internet, satellite TV and mobile phones you live simultaneously in Spain and Morocco, France and Algeria, Britain and Pakistan. This is why we talk about ‘hyphenated Europeans’. Just as you have Italian-Americans, Polish-Americans, Vietnamese-Amer­icans, we have to accept Vietnamese-Europeans, Pakista­ni-Europeans and even Asian-Europeans.

Is this diversity and multiplicity something wanted or rather simply something inevitable?

It is certainly the latter. But it may also be the former. It is the latter because we have rapidly ageing populations in Western Europe and just across the Mare Nostrum, the Mediterranean, there are countries where 50-60 percent of population is under 30 and they are poor countries. It is self-evident: the poor young people will come towards rich old people. It is just going to happen-do what we will. Close our borders, shoot people in the waters of the Medi­terranean Sea, leave them to die in these waters, which is now happening on Lampedusa. They will come. And the future of Europe depends on our making it work and find­ing that right balance between integration, acceptance of a basic codex of what it is to be European in a free society, and diversity tolerance, coexistence.

On one side we agree on the value of diversity, on the other we find it somewhat provoking when it enters the historical discourse made up from the point of view of different nations’ interests. Is it not that we need one, univocal European history? For example to settle when the II World War began, among other things?

You cannot write history this way. You can spell out what different interpretations of the facts are. But you cannot create a book which has twenty seven different interpre­tations of The Second World War-it is simply impossible. If you remove everything that might offend any of these twenty seven nations, what you have left is a soup that does not taste of anything.

Ernest Renan in his famous lecture said that historians are a danger to the life of a nation, because, in the end, they question everything. So I absolutely accept that there is something like a national story told by poets, novelist and composers. A very good example would be the British idea that Britain-or especially England-stands for freedom. This is a very old idea that we have and throughout the history there were lots of periods when England had done nothing of this kind. If you were an Indian you would find this to be a very peculiar idea. But this is the idea that we have of ourselves. There came 1939 and people said that we were not going to put up with this, because ‘we fight for freedom’. There was a power in these stories. So you need both: the national narrative as the default version and you need the historians to question it.

But first of all, I do not think diversity is a first order value like liberty of justice. It is a fact. And it can be a good thing, an interesting thing, an enjoyable thing. But it is a mistake that has been made in the practice of the so called multi­culturalism to take diversity as a value itself. So far as what keeps us together as a human community is concerned, you probably know the great essay of Renan Qu’est-ce qu’une nation? where nation is presented as a community of shared memory and shared forgetting. The more nations you have in this community the more complicated it becomes. We come from everywhere. I do not think we should attempt to create a classic national history on the European scale, the kind Renan has remarked on: the mythopoeic narrative. We have to be honest about the diversity of our history. Po­land and Spain, Morocco and Pakistan, they all have very different histories. But let me say this: there is a group of people who very often do not have a shared past but who do wish to live together well. And the project is defined by where we are and where we want to be…

And not at all where we were?

Correct.

Maybe the Americans are somehow right when they do not bother much about what is already behind them and they

concentrate on the future?

I think it is a bit more complicated. The basic point is right. If you look at the way the pro-European arguments have been made in most European countries for the last half century it has been this: we were in some bad places; we want to be in a better one; and the better one is Europe. The bad place for Germans was Nazism. The bad place for the Spanish was Franco. The bad place for the British was he economic crisis. The bad place for Poland was being stuck behind the Iron Cur­tain. So the argument was made from a bad past to a better future. Today the trouble is: we are in it. We are in the bet­ter future. And we cannot go on making this argument. For someone who is twenty years old today it has very little attrac­tion. So we have to make a new argument-from the future.

On the other hand, what the Americans have is the Dec­laration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, a tremendously strong sense of the founding moments long time ago. This is what we lack: the great founding moments of the history of the European Union…

And “the Founding Fathers" is a phrase used every ten minutes in any conversation…

Yes, I mean Monnet does not function like George Wash­ington, he really does not…

The lack of univocal history is one thing. The other is the lack

of univocal politics and strategy in Europe. Don’t you miss this

one solid political voice of the European Union?

I think we should have more of that. The answer to Henry Kissinger’s question ‘Europe? Which number should I call?’ is: ‘Europe has always been a conference call’. It may not be all 27, but it will not be just one. And that is good. We do not need it to be one in order for Europe to have effective policy. If you look at the European foreign policy, when has it worked well? It was when you had a mixture of Euro­pean institutions taking a stronger lead and a significant number of member states pulling together. A good exam­ple would be the policy towards Ukraine since 2004, when Poland played the leading role, but others: Germany, Brit­ain, France joined in. And it is not that you need a single decision-maker, and it is not that Portugal and Luxemburg must be fully involved in Ukrainian policy. It is a mixture of institutions-you mentioned Solana, now it is Catherine Ashton-and a significant group of member states.

It is, however, one more thing. What you have in the United States is a terrific theater of politics. Everyone there knows who the leading characters are. Drama is important. We have no theater in European politics. Brussels is not even an operetta. And this is a real problem.

iii

In few weeks Poland will enter the stage of the European Union presidency…

… that struts and frets his hour upon the stage!-as Shake­speare said!

… What-in your opinion-will be the gravest challenge for the whole trio of players?

First thing, one does have to say: after the Lisbon Treaty national presidencies are meant not to be very important- although countries mysteriously continue to think they are important. And I think they are but in two senses. One is that for a member state a real test of its technical qualifi­cations is how you run the presidency, because it means a lot of meetings and conferences, and people notice these things: ‘ooh, the presidency of country X was such a com­plete mess!’-so that is a kind of internal importance. And the second is symbolic. I love the fact that Poland has come back to Jerzy Janiszewski who did the logo of ‘Solidarność’ to do the logo which I quite like.

I will tell you about the danger. The danger is that Poland comes along and says: in these six months we want eve­rybody to talk about Ukraine, everybody think about the Eastern Neighborhood. And there is that tendency in every Polish speech to have a passage on this issue. We talked of theater-Poland takes the role of the advocate of Europe and is meant to speak for the whole of Europe.

What is the biggest external challenge and chance for Eu­rope? Clearly the Arab Spring. And the truth is that Poland should be talking about the Arab Spring and the Southern Neighborhood instead of saying: ‘well, in order to help the Arabs what we have to do is to remember Ukraine’.

With the Arab Spring we start to witness the tremendous tension between the inevitability of immigration and the idea of Europe without borders. Will Schengen survive this pressure?

It is absolutely amazing to see how thirty thousand refu­gees on Lampedusa start reversing Schengen. Because that is clearly what has happened. If the European Union has accepted the insistence of France and Italy, there are going to be exceptions. And there is something we all know about exceptions: exceptions are elastic things. There is already a significant reversal of Schengen. So there is a huge ten­sion between the borderless Europe we have achieved and the pressure that is going to come.

Schengen eliminated political borders, but is it true that contemporary Europe is deprived of its historical borders: the Roman limes, the borders of Mitteleuropa or even the Iron Curtain? Maybe there is a chance for some spiritual Schengen in Europe to come?

This is one of the most multilayered questions. Because there are multiple borders, there are multiple lines. The fur­ther the European Union extends, the more complex the cultural geology becomes, the more layers there are. And therefore the less self-evident the sense of belonging together is. I think we are way beyond what you might call spiritual Schengen in the sense that it was Carolingian Europe that underpinned the old European economic community of six.

Now the question is: Turkey, yes or no? Bosnia, a coun­try of long established Muslim presence, is small. But Tur­key is different. They are clearly going beyond really deep cultural-historical background. As I said-Europe defined itself in the opposition to Islam, specifically to the Otto­man Muslims.

I am for the Turkish membership in the European Union, but not on the grounds that Turkey is unambiguously a Eu­ropean country and Morocco is not. For me, as a historian, that is a meaningless statement. Both are partially Euro­pean countries-it is a matter of degree. So I think Turkey is a special case. But if we then took in more countries round the Maghreb, round the Mediterranean, then we would be going back to Rome. From Pius II all the way back to Rome.

Exceptions are elastic-as you said.

I do not think, as far as the future that we can see is concerned, that anybody is going to say: ‘Because we have taken in Turkey, we have now to take in Iraq or Morocco’. Then the question becomes: what do you do for the whole historical world of the Mediterranean? What do you do for North Africa and the Middle East? And we have no answer.

Maybe we should not necessarily think of the European Union as having the same borders as Europe itself?

The European Union should not be larger than Europe. Because otherwise you can keep extending it ad infinitum. And of course, there are some people who think that the whole world should be a European Union. Actually, in the last 20 years a lot of people have been convinced that Eu­rope is a model for global governance and that the future of the world should become more like the 21st century Eu­rope. At the moment the world is becoming more like the 19th century Europe. You have sovereign powerful nation states: China, India, Brazil, South Africa, extremely proud of their sovereignty, competing with each other. We should put an end to the European illusion that the rest of the world is going to be like Europe.

What should we choose then: Europe without borders or some new form of ‘Festung Europa’?

Neither of them. As Adam Michnik said when he was asked whether he preferred general Jaruzelski or general Pinochet. He answered: given the choice between Jaruzelski and Pinochet, I prefer Marilyn Monroe. That is my response.

We need immigration, we will have immigration, so we cannot be Festung Europa. But we need to control it, so that it does not tear our societies apart. In other words: it has to be at a level and of the kind where we can successfully integrate people. And that integration leading to borderless Europe happens inside individual nations. People became European by first becoming French or German, or Polish. Nobody is born European.

Timothy Garton Ash (1955), british historian, author and journalist. he is currently serving as professor of European studies at oxford university. much of his work has been concerned with the late modern and contemporary history of central and Eastern Europe. he has specifically written about the communist dictatorships of that region, their experience with the secret police, the revolutions of 1989 and the transformation of the former Eastern bloc states into member states of the European union. more recently, he has focused on the role of Europe in an increasingly post-western world and the challenge of combining freedom and diversity-especially in relation to free speech. he also writes a widely syndicated weekly column on international affairs.

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