Timothy Garton Ash: Beyond Berlin: Europe's new chapter starts now
[Timothy Garton Ash is professor of European studies at Oxford University.]
Well, they did it beautifully. Despite the rain, I found the official celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall a genuinely moving affair. The organizers, presumably guided by Chancellor Angela Merkel, got almost every accent right. Freedom, Europe and the wider world were the themes, not German unity.
Everyone was given their share of the credit: the East German woman from Leipzig who had been locked up by the Stasi for carrying a banner demanding “an open country with free people”; Poland's Lech Walesa and Solidarity; the Hungarians; Mikhail Gorbachev; the United States. (Oddly enough, the one person who did not receive adequate acknowledgment was Helmut Kohl.) And how good to put near the end of the celebration an interview with Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi pioneer of microcredits, who talked about the wall still separating rich north from poor south: die Mauer der Armut , the Poverty Wall.
So, three cheers for Germany and three cheers for Europe. Looking at the searchlights piercing the night sky above the Brandenburg Gate, we could reflect on the extraordinary distance travelled in a city that was at the heart of two world wars and the Cold War. But then it was over. The police started clearing away the crowd-control barriers; and at dinner, we were told, the leaders of the European Union were quietly conspiring about who should be the next chair of the European Council and the new high representative for foreign and security policy...
... We will still be able to create the institutions, notably a new European foreign service. And what we do with those institutions depends, with the Lisbon Treaty as without it, on the political will of member states and their governments. If they want it to happen, it will. If they don't, it won't.
They should want it to happen, because whether Europeans have anything much to celebrate in another 20 years will depend on whether they get their act together in their relations with the rest of the world. Of course, there are still vital things to be done inside the frontiers of today's EU: the creation of new jobs, the integration of Muslim fellow citizens, to name but two. But, increasingly, the key challenges for the EU lie not within its own borders but beyond them.
Geographically, the agenda starts with the rest of Europe that is not yet in the EU. Enlargement fatigue is palpable at every turn, but there is still a lot of Europe to be brought in, before “Europe” is really Europe: the rest of the Balkans, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, perhaps Georgia and Armenia, and, as a strategically vital special case, Turkey. Provided they meet all the conditions for membership, we should want these countries to be EU members, in our own long-term enlightened self-interest, as well as in theirs.
Then there is Russia. If the EU does not have a Russia policy, it will not have a foreign policy. And to have a common Russia policy, it needs a common energy policy. To the south and southeast, there is the question of how we help the modernization, liberalization and eventual democratization of mainly Muslim countries that are not, in any foreseeable future, going to be members of the EU. Although the Berlin Wall has gone, there is still the wall separating Israelis and Palestinians...
... Europe has a great story to tell from the past 60 years, and it was told brilliantly in Berlin on Monday night, but that story is mainly about what we have achieved inside Europe. The next chapter will depend on what we do outside it.
Read entire article at The Globe and Mail
Well, they did it beautifully. Despite the rain, I found the official celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall a genuinely moving affair. The organizers, presumably guided by Chancellor Angela Merkel, got almost every accent right. Freedom, Europe and the wider world were the themes, not German unity.
Everyone was given their share of the credit: the East German woman from Leipzig who had been locked up by the Stasi for carrying a banner demanding “an open country with free people”; Poland's Lech Walesa and Solidarity; the Hungarians; Mikhail Gorbachev; the United States. (Oddly enough, the one person who did not receive adequate acknowledgment was Helmut Kohl.) And how good to put near the end of the celebration an interview with Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi pioneer of microcredits, who talked about the wall still separating rich north from poor south: die Mauer der Armut , the Poverty Wall.
So, three cheers for Germany and three cheers for Europe. Looking at the searchlights piercing the night sky above the Brandenburg Gate, we could reflect on the extraordinary distance travelled in a city that was at the heart of two world wars and the Cold War. But then it was over. The police started clearing away the crowd-control barriers; and at dinner, we were told, the leaders of the European Union were quietly conspiring about who should be the next chair of the European Council and the new high representative for foreign and security policy...
... We will still be able to create the institutions, notably a new European foreign service. And what we do with those institutions depends, with the Lisbon Treaty as without it, on the political will of member states and their governments. If they want it to happen, it will. If they don't, it won't.
They should want it to happen, because whether Europeans have anything much to celebrate in another 20 years will depend on whether they get their act together in their relations with the rest of the world. Of course, there are still vital things to be done inside the frontiers of today's EU: the creation of new jobs, the integration of Muslim fellow citizens, to name but two. But, increasingly, the key challenges for the EU lie not within its own borders but beyond them.
Geographically, the agenda starts with the rest of Europe that is not yet in the EU. Enlargement fatigue is palpable at every turn, but there is still a lot of Europe to be brought in, before “Europe” is really Europe: the rest of the Balkans, Ukraine, Moldova, Belarus, perhaps Georgia and Armenia, and, as a strategically vital special case, Turkey. Provided they meet all the conditions for membership, we should want these countries to be EU members, in our own long-term enlightened self-interest, as well as in theirs.
Then there is Russia. If the EU does not have a Russia policy, it will not have a foreign policy. And to have a common Russia policy, it needs a common energy policy. To the south and southeast, there is the question of how we help the modernization, liberalization and eventual democratization of mainly Muslim countries that are not, in any foreseeable future, going to be members of the EU. Although the Berlin Wall has gone, there is still the wall separating Israelis and Palestinians...
... Europe has a great story to tell from the past 60 years, and it was told brilliantly in Berlin on Monday night, but that story is mainly about what we have achieved inside Europe. The next chapter will depend on what we do outside it.