I was the man from Spekta

04 November 2009

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Timothy Garton Ash was a student in Berlin when The Spectator asked him to cover what turned out to be the fall of communism. He looks back on the adventure of a lifetime

That takes me to a final, somewhat melancholy reflection. Support for the struggle for freedom in communist-ruled Europe united writers, politicians and activists in this country from left and right (while, let us not forget, others on both left and right were indifferent or even hostile to that struggle). It also brought together friends and enemies of European integration, now familiarly known as Europhiles and Eurosceptics, though I don’t think we yet routinely used those epithets. Conservative Eurosceptics like Charles Moore and liberal Europhiles like me could heartily agree about Eastern Europe while profoundly disagreeing about Western Europe.

Now, 20 years on, the enlargement of the European Union to include most of the post-communist democracies of central and Eastern Europe, a logical (though not inevitable) conclusion of revolutions that were conducted under the motto of ‘the return to Europe’, has made the dreaded federal superstate of Eurosceptic nightmare a sheer impossibility. It is simply not going to happen, in any foreseeable future, and even Germany, once the motor of federalism, no longer wants it. Indeed, French and Belgian federalists complain sourly that enlargement has given us, increasingly, a Europe à l’Anglaise, a ‘British Europe’. Why is it only the British who can’t see this?

Timothy Garton Ash’s latest book is Facts are Subversive: Political Writing from a Decade Without a Name (Atlantic Books).

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Adrian Sells

November 5th, 2009 2:20pm Report this comment

So, instead of only the people of the former communist states living under the rule of unelected, bureaucratic elites, we now all get to live that way.
Why can't the Euro-amorous Mr Garton Ash see that?

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