Homelands: A Personal History of Europe

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nearly 4 out of every 10 continental EU citizens to speak English... 38%, to be exact, see Special Eurobarometer 386, p.19, https://op.europa.eu/en/publication-detail/-/publication/f551bd64-8615-4781-9be1-c592217dad83

This European kaleidotapestry became a source of special pleasures and personal enrichment for its author just when – after centuries of wars, poverty, and hunger that generated forced movements and mostly negative transnational encounters – it was suddenly becoming a much more pleasant direct experience for most other Europeans too. If the discovery of this alternative Europe of high culture and pleasurable ways of life was largely novel and often stunning half a century ago, it is little surprise that it also generated a great sense of curiosity and possibility for the fortunate youth of those days. as the Czech dissident playwright Václav Havel kept pointing out,… Timothy Garton Ash, The Uses of Adversity. Essays on the Fate of Central Europe, Random House, New York 1989, pp.196-8. Der er bøger, som er gode; bøger, der er virkelig gode; bøger, som er fremragende – og så er der de helt sjældne, som sprænger skalaen. Told through Garton Ash’s personal reflections and his analyses of shifts in the political organization of the continent, this history explores the question of what it means to be European—if anything at all.”— New York Times Book Review living 'under the reign of the man of sin'...Alison Cunningham, quoted in James Mullen & Richard Munson, The Smell of the Continent. The British Discover Europe, Pan, London 2010, p.54.Garton Ash is a clear-headed chronicler of the Continent. A fervent supporter of the EU, he is nonetheless critical of its missteps – the countenancing of Viktor Orbán’s dismantling of Hungarian democracy, the vindictive pursuit of austerity in Greece, and a repeated indulgence of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. And while he has a clear affection for Europe, he is not misty-eyed about it. The historian’s perspective allows him to dismiss the notion that Europeans cast aside their proclivity for war in 1945, given the conflicts they continued to wage to hold on to their colonies, not to mention the genocidal wars that rent Yugoslavia apart in the 1990s.

He builds his narrative around five key themes: Europe destroyed, divided, rising, triumphing, and faltering. The most vexing question to emerge out of this sequence should be easy enough to intuit: why has Europe’s rise and triumph been followed by its recent faltering? That question is indeed a crucial personal matter too for the author. we may inadvertently have placed our relations with the Soviet Union on a hair trigger'… see Rodric Braithwaite, Armageddon and Paranoia. The Nuclear Confrontation, Profile Books, London 2019, pp.352-5. Homo Sovieticus… see Alexander Zinoviev, Homo Sovieticus, Paladin, London 1985, published in French already in 1982.

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From the ‘miracle’ of 1989 to the return of state thuggery, readers could hardly wish for a wiser guide to the continent’s triumphs and travails.”— Financial Times The downward turn of recent years serves as a reminder that the democratization of European states is a much more recent and fragile process than many Europeans realize. Garton Ash was born in 1955 into a Europe of dictatorships. In his youth, 289 million Europeans lived in democracies, while 389 million suffered under authoritarian regimes—not just the ones beyond the Iron Curtain but those in Southern Europe as well. Francoists would still raise their right arm with a fascist salute; the Greek colonels who came to power in 1967 would not only torture and kill but also ban “long hair, mini-skirts and the study of sociology,” he writes. He has written about the former Communist regimes 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. He has also examined the role of Europe in the world and the challenge of combining political freedom and diversity, especially in relation to free speech. A moving love letter to Europe, Homelands merges memoir, political analysis and social criticism to reflect on the future of a continent still haunted by its past. Friend of dissidents in former communist Europe, first-hand witness of high politics in the West, Garton Ash is unafraid to think about what the European project got wrong but also how it can redeem itself.”—Lea Ypi, author of Free

Neither did Kerensky'… quoted in Walter Isaacson, Kissinger. A Biography, Simon & Schuster, New York 1992, pp. 673-74. Garton Ash is a clear-headed chronicler of the Continent [and] Homelands is an engaging read.”— Irish Times Yet his career as a journalist for the British conservative establishment, writing for the Spectator, gets relatively short shrift. And he only briefly touches on the question of whether the Oxbridge crowd—including former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who made up outrageous stories about the EU—might not also have helped pave the way for Brexit, beyond the obvious press culprit: Rupert Murdoch, the Euroskeptic media magnate who owns a British tabloid, the Sun.People climb onto the Berlin Wall on Nov. 10, 1989, the morning after an announcement by the East German government that it would start granting exit visas to East Germans eager to go to the West. Robert Wallis/Corbis via Getty Images Taught by history,' the dissident Adam Michnik would later explain... This comes in a letter from prison written in 1985, see Adam Michnik, Letters from Prison and Other Essays, University of California Press, Berkeley 1985, pp. 86-7.