History of the Present Read online

  INTERNATIONAL ACCLAIM FOR TIMOTHY GARTON ASH’S

  History of the Present

  “Formidable….[Garton Ash’s] strongest pieces combine a quick eye, a gift for concision and an ability to discern the deep currents of history in the restless waters of the present. Pith, prescience and intellectual passion often coalesce to provide a powerful European portrait.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Garton Ash is a fine historian, journalist and raconteur…. He has been at one time or another in most of the places that mattered during these turbulent times—Prague, Warsaw, Belgrade, Pristina, Berlin, Zagreb…. Journalism, history and literature come together…with elegance, erudition and skill.”

  —William Shawcross, Sunday Times (London)

  “An excellent and coherent panorama which should be read by anyone who wishes to make sense of his own times.”

  —Daily Mail

  “[Garton Ash is] the most eloquent reporter of post Cold War Europe…. He has the vivid intelligence of a Tocqueville and the unassumingly informed authority of a John Hersey…We’ll still be reading Timothy Garton Ash in fifty years, not for what he predicted, but for what he saw.”

  —Glasgow Sunday Herald

  “This is Garton Ash at his best, writing with both empathy and hard-won understanding….[He is] an original thinker and a restless traveler.”

  —The Washington Monthly

  “This intelligent, sensitive, multi-layered and wide-ranging book…raises fundamental questions not only about events in Eastern Europe since 1989 but also about the way history and our failure to understand it shape the present and the future.”

  —The Scotsman

  “A coherent picture of the upheaval of our times…. Garton Ash is one of the most acute commentators on contemporary European politics…. He offers accounts of history unfolding before his eyes marked by the detached precision of a trained historian. But he also writes with considerable verve and wit…. Beading these fine essays, one is astonished at the richness and danger of our times—and grateful that Garton Ash is on hand to decipher the outlines of the newly emerging European order.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “History of the Present is my book of the year, a masterful blend of literate journalism and academic history”

  —Iain Finlayson, The Times (London)

  “Magnificent…offers an abundance of riches…. Anyone who wants to better understand the last decade in Central Europe will benefit from reading this stimulating and perceptive book…. Authoritative and readable.”

  —BookPage

  “Each of the portraits is a neat jewel…. It is astonishing how fresh most of the accounts remain…. [Garton Ash] does know the people in Central Europe who count; he listens intently and intelligently; and he writes with remarkable elegance.”

  —The Independent on Sunday

  “In History of the Present we find [Garton Ash] chatting with Helmut Kohl, strolling with Václav Havel, in discussions with Lech Wałȩsa. His great theme is the ’surreal, almost grotesque discrepancy’ between the shells falling on the marketplace in Sarajevo and the economically integrated West, whose leaders proclaimed that ‘war in Europe has become unthinkable.’”

  —Moscow Times

  “Anyone gets a little smarter by reading Garton Ash. He’s the observer we all wish we could be. Unlike most journalists, he’s done all the reading and, more often than not, he speaks the language. Unlike most historians, he hungers to be where the action is, and writes with an immediacy and pungency that can be very effective, even memorable…. There is so much authority in Garton Ash’s work, it’s almost unnerving.”

  —San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

  “History of the Present is the natural sequel to [Garton Ash’s] compelling, indispensable eyewitness writings about the season of revolutions around the year 1989…. Garton Ash holds a mirror that magnifies…. He writes masterfully and with compassion.”

  —The Observer

  “Catches history on the hop…. The presiding spirit in this engrossing book is George Orwell…. [It] will prove invaluable to anyone attempting to put the 1990s in Central and Eastern Europe in perspective.”

  —Daily Telegraph

  TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

  History of the Present

  Timothy Garton Ash is the author of The File, In Europe’s Name, and three other volumes of “history of the present”: The Polish Revolution, which won the Somerset Maugham Award; The Uses of Adversity, which won the Prix Européen de l’Essai; and The Magic Lantern, his personal account of the Central European revolutions of 1989, which has been published in fifteen languages. Garton Ash is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books, among other journals. He was named Commentator of the Year in 1989 and has been honored with the David Watt Memorial Prize, the Premio Napoli, and both the Polish and German Order of Merit. A Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, and the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, he lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons.

  ALSO BY TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

  The Polish Revolution: Solidarity

  The Uses of Adversity: Essays on the Fate of Central Europe

  The Magic Lantern: The Revolution of ’89 Witnessed in Warsaw,

  Budapest, Berlin and Prague

  In Europe’s Name: Germany and the Divided Continent

  The File: A Personal History

  TO ROBERT SILVERS

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  MAP: EUROPE IN 1989

  THE SOLUTION

  AAPRÈS LE DÉLUGE, NOUS

  THE CHEQUERS AFFAIR

  GERMANY UNBOUND

  THE VISIT

  SEVEN CITIES

  FATHERS AND SONS

  INTELLECTUALS AND POLITICIANS

  MARTA AND HELENA

  CATCHING THE WRONG BUS?

  CLEANSED CROATIA

  BOSNIAN GLIMPSES

  BOSNIA IN OUR FUTURE

  ABNORMAL NORMALITY

  FORTY YEARS ON

  THE SERBIAN TRAGEDY

  BAD MEMORIES

  TRIALS, PURGES, AND HISTORY

  LESSONS

  THE CASE FOR LIBERAL ORDER

  GOOD-BYE TO BONN

  “BE NOT AFRAID!”

  CRY, THE DISMEMBERED COUNTRY

  LONG LIVE RUTHENIA!

  WHERE IS CENTRAL EUROPE NOW?

  HELENA’S KITCHEN

  WAR OVER KOSOVO

  RETURN TO KOSOVO

  THE PROTECTORATE

  ANARCHY AND MADNESS

  ENVOI

  MAP: EUROPE IN 2000

  NOTES

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  EVEN AT ONE MINUTE PAST MIDNIGHT ON 1 JANUARY 1990, We already knew that this would be a formative decade in Europe. A forty-year-old European order had just collapsed with the Berlin Wall. Everything seemed possible. Everyone was hailing a “new Europe.” But no one knew what it would look like.

  Now we know: in Western Europe, in Germany, in Central Europe, and in the Balkans. Of course, in all these parts, the future will be full of surprises. It always is. But at the end of the decade we can see the broad outline of the new European order that we have already ceased to call new. Only in the vast, ethnically checkered territory of the former Soviet Union is even the basic direction of states such as Russia and Ukraine still hidden in the fog. And perhaps also, at Europe’s other end, is that of the decreasingly United Kingdom.

  THIS BOOK DOES NOT pretend to be a comprehensive account of the 1990s in Europe. It is a collection of what are rightly called pieces—in other words, fragments—that reflect my own interests, expertise, and travels. However, a chronology running throu
gh the book not only supplies missing links between the pieces but also records significant European developments not covered in any of them. Into this time line I have inserted some short, diarylike sketches, drawn mainly from my own notebooks and recollections. There are also several longer sketches in the main text. The largest part of the book consists of analytical reportages, mostly published in The New York Review of Books, after the skilled attentions of the editor to whom this book is dedicated. Finally, there are a few essays in which I attempt an interim synthesis on a larger subject, such as the development of the European Union, Britain’s troubled relationship with Europe, or the way countries deal with the legacy of a dictatorship.

  As befits “history of the present,” everything in the main text was written at or shortly after the time it describes. The pieces have been edited lightly, mainly to eliminate repetition, but nothing of substance has been added or changed. I compiled the chronology and short sketches more recently. Occasionally, I have also added a comment at the end of a piece.

  HERE I WANT to reflect on writing “history of the present.” The phrase is not mine. It was, so far as I know, coined by the veteran American diplomat and historian George Kennan in a review of my book about Central Europe in the 1980s, The Uses of Adversity. It is, for me, the best possible description of what I have been trying to write for twenty years, combining the crafts of historian and journalist.

  Yet it immediately invites dissent. History of the present? Surely that’s a contradiction in terms. Surely history is by definition about the past. History is books on Caesar, the Thirty Years War, or the Russian Revolution. It is discoveries and new interpretations based on years of studying documents in the archives.

  Let’s put aside straightaway the objection that “the present” is but a line, scarcely a millisecond wide, between past and future. We know what we mean here by “the present,” even if the chronological boundaries are always disputed. Call it “the very recent past” or “current affairs” if you would rather. The important point is this: Not just professional historians but most arbiters of our intellectual life feel that a certain minimum period of time needs to have passed and that certain canonical kinds of archival source should be available before anything written about this immediate past qualifies as history.

  It was not ever thus. As the formidably learned German intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck has observed, from the time of Thucydides until well into the eighteenth century, to have been an eyewitness to the events described or, even better, to have been a participant in them was considered a major advantage for a writer of history.1 Contemporary history was thought to be the best history. It is only since the emergence of the idea of progress, the growth of critical philology, and the work of Leopold von Ranke that historians have come to believe that you understand events better if you are farther away from them. If you stop to think about it, this is actually a very odd idea: that the person who wasn’t there knows better than the person who was.

  Even the most ascetic neo-Rankean depends upon the witnesses who make the first record of the past. If they do not make a record, there is no history. If they do it badly or in pursuit of a quite different agenda (religious, say, or astrological or scatological), the historian will not find answers to the questions he wants to ask. It’s therefore best to have a witness who is himself interested in finding answers to the historian’s questions about sources and causes, structure and process, the individual and the mass. Hence, for example, Alexis de Tocqueville’s personal account of the 1848 revolution in France is worth twenty other memoirs of that time.

  This need for the historically minded witness has become more acute in recent times for a simple reason. In Ranke’s day, politics was put on paper. Diplomacy was conducted or noted immediately in correspondence. Politicians, generals, and diplomats wrote extensive diaries, letters, and memorandums. Even then, of course, much that was vital was not written down—murmured private understandings in the corridors of the Congress of Vienna, the pillow talk of queens. Then, as now, most of human experience was never recorded at all. But most of politics was.

  Today, however, high politics is more and more pursued in personal meetings (thanks to the jet airplane) or by telephone (increasingly by mobile phone) or by other forms of electronic communication. Certainly, minutes of meetings are made afterward and, at the highest levels, so are transcripts of phone conversations. But the proportion of important business actually put on paper has diminished. And who writes narrative letters or detailed diaries any more? A dwindling minority.

  To be sure, researchers can watch television footage. Sometimes, they can listen to the telephone tapes—or taps—of those conversations. Perhaps in future they will also read the e-mails. The point is not that there are fewer sources than there were. Quite the reverse. Where the ancient historian has to reconstruct a whole epoch from a single papyrus, the contemporary historian has a roomful of sources for a single day. It is the ratio of quantity to quality that has changed for the worse.

  On the other hand, politicians, diplomats, soldiers, and business-people have never been so eager to give their own version of what has just happened. Iraqi crises famously unfold in “real time” on CNN. European ministers tumble out of EU meetings to brief journalists from their own countries. Naturally, each gives his own twist and spin. But if you put the different versions together, you have a pretty good instant picture of what occurred.

  In short, what you can know soon after the event has increased, and what you can know long after the event has diminished. This is particularly the case with extraordinary events. During some of the dramatic debates between the leaders of Czechoslovakia’s “velvet revolution,” in the Magic Lantern theater in Prague in November 1989, I was the only person present taking notes. I remember thinking, “If I don’t write this down, nobody will. It will be gone forever, like bathwater down the drain.” So much recent history has disappeared like that, never to be recovered, for want of a recorder.

  Two objections remain strong. First, since those things governments and individuals try to keep secret are often the most important things, the eventual release of new sources will change the picture substantially. This is not a conclusive argument for waiting—in the meantime, other equally important things, well understood at the moment, may be forgotten—but it is a major hazard of the genre. In the preface to my first “history of the present,” an account of the Solidarity revolution in Poland, I observed that I would not have attempted to write the book had it seemed likely that the official papers of the Soviet and Polish communist regimes would become available in the foreseeable future. That, I continued blithely, seemed “as probable as the restoration of the monarchy in Warsaw or Moscow.” Eight years later, the Soviet bloc had collapsed and many of those papers were available. Fortunately, I also quoted Walter Raleigh’s warning, in the preface to his History of the World, that “who-so-euer in writing a modern Historie shall follow truth too neare the heeles, it may happily strike out his teeth.”

  The second strong objection is that we don’t know the consequences of current developments, so our understanding of their historical significance is much more speculative and liable to revision. Again, this is patently true. Every high-school senior studying ancient history knows that the Roman empire declined and fell. Writing about the Soviet empire in the 1980s, none of us knew the end of the story. In 1988, I published an essay entitled “The Empire in Decay,” but I still thought the empire’s fall was a long way off. In January 1989, I wrote an article pooh-poohing suggestions that the Berlin Wall might soon be breached.

  Yet there is also an advantage here. You record what people did not know at the time—for instance, that the Wall was about to come down. You dwell on developments that seemed terribly important then but would otherwise be quite forgotten now, because they led nowhere. You thus avoid perhaps the most powerful of all the optical illusions of historical writing.

  One of the real pleasures of immersing y
ourself in the archives of a closed period is that you gradually, over months and years, see a pattern slowly emerging through the vast piles of paper, like a message written in invisible ink. But then you start wondering, Is this pattern really in the past itself? Or is it just in your own head? Or perhaps it is a pattern from the fabric of your own times. Each generation has its own Cromwell, its own French Revolution, its own Napoleon. Where contemporaries saw only a darkling plain, you discern a tidy park, a well-lit square, or most often a road leading to the next historical milestone. The French philosopher Henri Bergson talks of the “illusions of retrospective determinism.”

  American journalists writing books of recent history sometimes modestly refer to them as “the first draft of history.” This implies that the scholar’s second or third draft will always be an improvement. Well, in some ways it may be, having more sources and a longer perspective. But in others it may not be, because the scholar will not know, and therefore will find it more difficult to re-create, what it was really like at the time; how places looked and smelled, how people felt, what they didn’t know. Writers work in different ways, but I can sum up my own experience in a doggerel line: There is nothing to compare with being there.

  KENNAN OBSERVED THAT history of the present lies “in that small and rarely visited field of literary effort where journalism, history and literature … come together.” Again, this seems to me exactly right. The corner of Europe where Germany, France, and Switzerland meet is known in German as the Dreiländereck, or Three Country Corner. “History of the present” lies in a Three Country Corner between journalism, history, and literature. Such frontier areas are always interesting but often tense. Sometimes working in this one feels like walking in a no-man’s-land.