Letters
Vol. 18 No. 3 · 8 February 1996
From Timothy Garton Ash
In his stimulating though also amphibologous essay on Europe (LRB, 25 January) Perry Anderson several times takes issue with the argument I made in another place (TLS, 5 May 1995). The first of his objections is based on a wilful misunderstanding. Anderson sets me up to be arguing that a clear ‘dividing-line must be drawn’ between what I describe as a second Europe of some twenty states (15 of them post-Communist) more or less set on course for EU-rope, and a third Europe comprising Russia, its adjunct Belarus, Ukraine and (my words) ‘perhaps also’ Serbia. He contrasts this with my previous – but in fact continued – advocacy of rapid extension of EU and Nato membership to the new Central European democracies, starting with Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary.
Anyone who goes back to my TLS essay will see that I am very far from arguing that a ‘dividing-line must be drawn’. In fact, Anderson rightly quotes me as objecting to an instrumentalisation of the notion of ‘Central Europe’ to draw an ‘absolutely clear historical dividing-line between the so-called Visegrad group and, say, the Baltic states or Slovenia’. (Incidentally, it’s another canard to suggest that East Central European ideas of Central Europe all go back to Friedrich Naumann and the Germans. What about Palacky or Masaryk, to name but two non-German progenitors?) I do suggest that there is currently a significant difference between, on the one hand, the large array of mainly small post-Communist states, with a strong desire for membership of the EU among their political élites and a majority of public opinion, varying historical, political and economic qualifications for membership, and acceptance of their theoretical claim to membership by the political leaders of the EU, and, on the other hand, a smaller number of states, two of them large, where those conditions do not apply.
Does Anderson really think Russia or Serbia currently wants to join the EU, is set on a course to qualify for membership, or would find a claim to membership accepted, even in principle, by the political leaders of the EU? But identifying real differences (not least, between democracy and dictatorship) is a very different thing from insisting that a clear geographical ‘dividing-line must be drawn’. Indeed, I explicitly go on to envision ‘the longer-term possibility of a democratic Serbia re-oriented towards Europe’. The important point is precisely that one thing will lead to another, and EU-rope therefore has to start thinking now about how to make a functioning community of not just twenty but thirty member states.
Here comes his second objection, this time to my central argument for the importance of enlargement – especially at a time when the great gamble of monetary union seems increasingly likely to fail – and for the radical thinking about the structure and priorities of the Community that enlargement necessarily entails. Anderson argues that ‘the cost of integrating the Visegrad quartet alone would mean an increase of 60 per cent in the current Union budget.’ But that is only true if the applicants enter on the current terms of membership. Precisely because this is economically almost impossible for them, and unacceptable to influential constituencies in Western Europe, I argue that we have to give priority to rapid political membership – reverting to the original first purpose of the founding fathers of the European Community – combined with long economic transition periods, while at the same time trying to reform the bad system of the Common Agricultural Policy and structural funds, in which, for the time being, the new members might not participate. To characterise this project as ‘political embrace of the whole of Eastern Europe, under the guidance of Nato’ (‘guidance’ – where on earth does that idea come from?) ‘with power-sharing from Albania to Ireland’ is simply a caricature.
Most enjoyably but also most misleadingly, he conflates my views with those of the FO, the TLS, and what he calls ‘the wisdom of London’. The ‘wager in London’, he avers, is that widening will lead to loosening of the Community, and an end to federalism. This then enables him to pull an apparent rabbit out of his rhetorical hat. The ‘final amphibology’, he says, is that enlargement could actually lead to the opposite: a strengthening of Union powers in a new constitutional settlement. But that rabbit has already been skinned. This is exactly what I argued: ‘it would require more sharing of power and sovereignty; both in the form of Qualified Majority Voting, without which an EU of twenty or more member states would simply not work, and in the rather different procedures for what one might call Qualified Minority Acting … which is what is needed in foreign, security and defence policy.’ Others have made the same point. A British advocate of enlargement is not necessarily a Thatcherite. In the house of ‘London’ are many mansions.
I freely admit that, to use terms which will be familiar to Perry Anderson, the project I propose is a radical one. By contrast, Anderson’s argument seems curiously conservative.
Timothy Garton Ash
St Antony’s College, Oxford
Vol. 18 No. 4 · 22 February 1996
From Perry Anderson
Timothy Garton Ash (Letters, 8 February) protests amiably, but still too much. In the New York Review of Books of 24 October 1991 he published a ringing appeal, under the title ‘Let the East Europeans In!’, co-signed by one of Kohl’s aides, for the speedy admission to the EC of just three countries: Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary. This should start, he argued, with their immediate co-option into the foreign policy counsels of the Community, and continue with their participation in elections to the European Parliament in 1994. Economic aid should also, he argued, be concentrated on this trio. ‘To give priority to these countries’, he wrote, was ‘realistic when we consider the available resources of the present EC’. Meanwhile other and poorer candidates, not on the shortlist, would presumably have to fend for themselves.
About the same time, the American political scientist Ken Jowitt, a specialist on Romania, was warning of the dangers of dividing Eastern Europe into two zones – an Orange County and Watts. A few months later, fires duly started in the Balkan ghettos. Might a less one-sided distribution of journalistic energy in the Eighties, and diplomatic generosity in the Nineties, have helped to avoid the Yugoslav disaster? The practice of picking favourites does not benefit Eastern Europe, which needs collective rather than selective treatment from Western Europe. Even in the trinity of intended privilege, there are those, like George Konrad, who could see this.
Since the war in Bosnia, Garton Ash has extended his attention south of the Danube. But he still wants a shortlist. The new one is composed of states ‘not on course’ for entry into the EU – Russia, Serbia, Turkey, Belarus, Ukraine. These states are excluded because they are too large, or they are ambivalent about Nato, or ‘the political leaders of the EU and Nato’ do not want them, or they are undemocratic. About this it might be said that Turkey is a member of Nato, Serbia a small country, Russia more democratic than Croatia, and the preferences of EU leaders regularly discounted by Garton Ash himself, when they don’t coincide with his own. To round matters off, he gamely concedes that consignment to an excluded Third Europe is ‘probably unfair to Ukraine’. The criteria are a jumble of ad-hockery that unravels itself.
For the included Second Europe – i.e. all other former Communist countries – Garton-Ash advocates top-speed entry into an EU that has shed the misguided goal of a single currency, although Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary are still to occupy the front row. He argues that this design should not be confused with Conservative policies towards Europe, since it envisages ‘more sharing of power and sovereignty’ in the Union than at present. But since his recipe for a new constitutional settlement on the one hand excludes East European members from the Common Agricultural Policy and structural funds, pending the dissolution of this acquis communautaire, and on the other, reserves to a West European triumvirate (UK, France and Germany) the power to act as they please in ‘foreign, security and defence policy’, its effect must be to weaken rather than strengthen the cohesion of the Union. Decently veiled, it is a formula for dis-integration.
A scheme like this for scotching the single currency is music, if not from, certainly to the Foreign Office. From Thatcher’s speech at Bruges to Douglas Hurd’s recent leading article in the Financial Times. Conservative strategy has consistently sought to thrust Eastern Europe as a spoke in the wheels of the ‘ever closer union’ intended by the Treaty of Rome. Garton Ash is, of course, a writer with a mind of his own. It would be surprising if the advice he gave Thatcher back in 1990 chimed exactly with that of Trevor-Roper or Stone, when she conferred with them at Chequers over German unification. So, too, his current design for enlargement to the East, more capacious than any official proposals, is undoubtedly distinctive. After originally describing his scheme as ‘sceptical, empirical and pragmatic’, he now strikes a rather different note, explaining that ‘my project is a radical one.’ The claims are contradictory. There is no doubt the latter is more accurate. But the question remains: how realistic is this kind of radicalism, bent on undoing what the Union has so far done?
Lastly, a historical point. Garton Ash complains that it is a canard to trace ideas of Central Europe principally to Friedrich Naumann and his German predecessors. He asks: what about Masaryk? Indeed. The answer is suggestive. Masaryk commented only briefly and weakly – a few lines – on Naumann’s Mitteleuropa in 1916. In his own writing of this period, ‘The Problem of Small Nations in the European Crisis’ and The New Europe, composed in 1917, he accepted that there was a ‘striking difference between the East and West of Europe’ and argued that the principal problem of the First World War was ‘the political reconstruction of Eastern Europe on a national basis’. In that battle, ‘the Czech and Slovak nation is the anti-German vanguard of all the nations of Eastern Europe.’ At times Masaryk spoke of a ‘central zone’ stretching from Norway to Greece, but he distinguished it from the ‘vague term’ of Central Europe, which occasionally surfaces but never organises his thinking about the continent. In 1918, in exile in the United States, he could patronise a ‘Mid-European Democratic Union’ embracing even Armenians and Ukrainians, not to speak of Zionists, but he had no illusions about the association, nor the metaphysics of middleness. Masaryk was a much more considerable mind than Naumann. But on this subject there is no comparison between the contributions of the two. The idea of Central Europe could never acquire the salience for a Czech patriot aspiring to national independence that it had for a German contemplating regional dominance. Has the field of force behind that difference so greatly changed today?
Perry Anderson
European University, Florence
Vol. 18 No. 5 · 7 March 1996
From Timothy Garton Ash
There is a danger of diminishing intellectual returns from my exchange with Perry Anderson (Letters, 8 and 22 February). So let me be unamphibologous. Anderson is now reduced to travesty. Roughly half the October 1991 New York Review of Books article to which he refers was devoted precisely to the consequences for the rest of post-Communist Europe of giving priority to East Central Europe. Michael Mertes, Dominique Moisi and I argued: ‘The politics of inclusion are not necessarily the politics of exclusion. The contrary has been the case in the history of the EC. Including new members has always strengthened the case for including still more new members’ (emphasis added for speed-readers).
‘We should do our utmost to promote democracy in Russia,’ we wrote a few months after the August 1991 coup. As for potential Russian membership: ‘An application from a truly democratic Russia would pose a serious dilemma, if only because Russia is so big, and half in Asia.’ But, we continued, in words for which I take full responsibility: ‘even on the most optimistic view of Russian developments, that delicious dilemma is not one we are likely to face for a few years yet.’
‘Might a less one-sided distribution of journalistic energy in the Eighties,’ Anderson asks, ‘and diplomatic generosity in the Nineties, have helped to avoid the Yugoslav disaster?’ Does this mean that I’m partly responsible for the war in Bosnia because I wrote about Poland and Czechoslovakia, or what?
My point about German and non-German ideas of Central Europe was simply that there has been much serious and independent non-German thinking about it. In the Eighties, for example, the idea was revived by Czechs, Hungarians and Poles, not by Germans. If in 1917 Masaryk was reacting to Naumann, in 1987 Peter Glotz was reacting to Kundera and Konrad.
But rather than continue the list of small points, let me restate the large ones. First and foremost, the major division on this question in Europe today is not between those who favour or exclude particular countries or groups of countries, but between those who are serious about the enlargement of the EU to include post-Communist countries and those who are not. That was the real issue in 1991, and, alas, that is still the real issue in 1996. Our article then was trying to get the EC to do something for post-Communist Europe at the inter-governmental conferences which culminated in Maastricht. It failed. Now we approach another inter-governmental conference, and the danger is still the same: more internal fiddling while post-Communist Europe burns.
If you’re serious about enlargement you must have criteria for membership. Some European countries will meet them sooner than others. If you’re serious, you have to make an assessment of which countries are likely to do so, in what time-frame, so as to judge the scale of the task. That – and not drawing any eternal lines of European division – is what I was about.
The claim that I am ‘bent on undoing what the Union has so far done’ simply ignores my clear and repeated statements to the contrary. It is also fatuous. Why waste time trying to get new democracies into a Union which is good for nothing?
If Perry Anderson thinks there is a contradiction between being pragmatic and being radical, that only tells us something about his notion of radicalism. Anyway, rather than continuing to attack my project of enlargement with a ragtag army of nit-picking, misrepresentation and amphibologies, wouldn’t his time be better spent coming up with a better one?
Timothy Garton Ash
St Antony’s College, Oxford
Vol. 18 No. 6 · 21 March 1996
From Perry Anderson
The impulse to self-justification, common to us all, has made Timothy Garton Ash unneccesarily irritable (Letters, 7 March). The issues in our exchange were these:
1. Was it sensible or equitable in 1991 to urge that EC aid be reserved for the three best-off East European countries – Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary – and that they be rapidly inducted, ahead of all others, into the Community? Garton Ash points out that he and his fellow authors did not exclude other countries receiving comparable treatment later on, and defends their proposal on grounds of urgency: ‘Our article was trying to get the EC to do something for post-Communist Europe’ at a time when there was a danger of ‘more internal fiddling’ while ‘post-Communist Europe burnt.’ But why should poorer countries be put to the back of the queue for help – like worse-off citizens under Thatcher and Reagan, promised ultimate benefits from immediate hand-outs to the well-off; and what was the only region of Eastern Europe where the fuse was lit in late 1991? To call for emergency care to be rushed to the Visegrad states within a few months of the conflagration in Yugoslavia, can, without misrepresentation, be described as myopic.
2. What is the effect of Carton Ash’s current proposal that the European Union jettison a single currency and abandon the acquis communautaire, in favour of wide-scale enlargement to the East and differential categories of membership without any uniform rights or obligations? Affinities between this scheme and long-standing Conservative objectives are fairly plain, and it is puzzling that Garton Ash should be reticent about them. On the other hand, the balance of motives behind each is not quite the same. For Conservative leaders, the strategic aim is to dilute integration in Western Europe: the Eastern card, notwithstanding genuine pride in the pupils of privatisation, is a tactical means to that end. For Garton Ash the opposite holds. A passionate champion of countries and causes in East Europe, in the tradition of R.W. Seton-Watson, for him it is rapid enlargement that is the essential goal: disposing of monetary union and unwinding the acquis communautaire are simply seen, with good logic, as conditions of it. Once foreign editor of the Spectator, Garton Ash is unlikely ever to have warmed to European federalism, but concern with Brussels has never been a primary preoccupation. Perhaps this explains why he seems disconcerted that his proposals could be thought inimical to the Union. But he is mistaken if he thinks that the principle of the acquis communautaire, instinctively disliked but little understood in London, was anything other than central to the architects of integration.
3. Still, he asks, what is wrong with his plan for redesigning Europe in the sceptical but radical spirit of the British genius? The answer is straightforward. Garton Ash proposes to scrap the architrave of the institutional unity that the Community, with all its limitations, has historically achieved, in order to extend a status to former Communist states in the East that would, he makes clear, include no share in either CAP or the structural funds, let alone the privilege of ‘qualified minority acting’ reserved for Britain, Germany and France. What they would receive, however, is honorific promotion to the West. The order of priorities here was candidly indicated by Garton Ash in 1991, when he urged that Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia should participate in elections to the European Parliament without even being members of the Community – ‘this would be a powerful symbol,’ he wrote, ‘although the exact status of their Euro-MPs would have to be worked out.’ such blitheness is not pragmatic. It answers to a politics of gesture, in which not institutional reality but symbolic satisfaction is at stake.
It would be wrong to hold Garton Ash responsible for this. There is a deep craving in much of Eastern Europe for such solace, to which his new scheme can be seen as a generous reaction. Yet in these societies themselves, local wits can already be heard likening the fixation with quick membership of the EU, no matter how second-class, to a cargo cult. The real needs of the region lie elsewhere. Today, cancellation of the heavy burden of debt left by their former rulers would be of much greater material benefit to the populations of Eastern Europe than any number of native politicians sitting in on the Council of Ministers. So far only Poland, as the enfant doré of German-American goodwill, has been favoured with a serious reduction of its liabilities. Impartial and general relief, to ease fiscal pressures and stimulate employment, would be preferable. A steady job and a square meal are worth more than a mere glimpse of the high table. Much to his credit, Garton Ash has criticised the politics of personal prestige, even in the leaders – Havel and Walesa – he has most admired. Mutatis mutandis, there is a lesson for national welfare, too. It is not speed but solidity of construction that a less spatially and socially divided Europe requires.
Perry Anderson
European University
Vol. 18 No. 8 · 18 April 1996
From Timothy Garton Ash
Perry Anderson (Letters, 21 March) obviously doesn’t want to let this one rest. I think the time has come to do just that. However, I must briefly respond to what remain – however genially expressed – misrepresentations of my position. Taking his numbered points: 1. I certainly never argued the ludicrous proposition that ‘EC aid be reserved’ for Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. 2. I have never argued that the EU ‘jettison a single currency and abandon the acquis communautaire’. 3. I have never argued that what I call ‘qualified minority acting’ in foreign and security policy be ‘reserved for Britain, Germany and France’. On the contrary, other interested and capable European countries should participate in such ‘coalitions of action’ wherever possible.
While feeling honoured by the comparison with R.W. Seton-Watson, I don’t accept the implicit disqualification that I’m only seeing this from an East European point of view. Anderson himself argues that I’m also seeing it from a British point of view. Add the German one, and that makes, I think, a pretty good stab at a European view. After all, we all come from somewhere.
His final paragraph about the cancellation of debt raises an important point, but what post-Communist Europe needs above all is more access to our markets. Not aid but trade.
Perhaps Professor Anderson and I could now continue this discussion personally, in Oxford or Florence, over a plate of lightly braised amphibologies.
Timothy Garton Ash
St Antony’s College, Oxford
