Advice for a larger, more beleaguered free world
Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West
By Timothy Garton Ash
Random House, 286 pp., $24.95
The continuing uncertainties in Iraq are, for certain thinkers, an extension of a fundamental American uncertainty about the status of the United States as a superpower, the hard shell of military might containing a runny yolk of intentions: a new American century, more oil, weapons of mass destruction, or democracy in the Middle East? This is the situation that a number of British experts have been trying to rectify over the past few years, foremost among them Niall Ferguson, whose "Empire" seeks to apply Britain's colonial expertise with crisp khaki, sun hats, and Lee-Enfield rifles to current American dilemmas.
Timothy Garton Ash's "Free World" is the latest of such British interpretations of American power. Although largely free of Ferguson's imperial nostalgia, it too is a policy document offered to the world's only superpower, its publication in the United States cleverly timed to coincide with the presidential election. Garton Ash is an elegant and intelligent writer, capable of seeing nuances, as when he argues against the generalization about Europeans and Americans in the fallout over the war in Iraq. A columnist for the liberal British daily the Guardian and a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University, he is sensitive to the ideological compulsions of both left and right.
But he is also a man close to the centers of power; although he ends this book by asking "the silent majority" of Western people to assert its will, his ideas are really addressed to those who make decisions from the top. The farmer from Kansas may be evoked occasionally for rhetorical purposes, but Garton Ash excels at interpreting the speeches and conversations of the big men: Tony Blair, George W. Bush, German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, and a host of Washington insiders. Occasionally fascinating and often insightful about such men of power (and they are mostly men), Garton Ash also reveals how information derived from studying the powerful to deliver an analysis back to them is almost certain to suffer from internal fallacies.
The West, Garton Ash argues, extends from the states of the European Union through Great Britain to North America. With a common history of fighting the Cold War, and of sustained military, economic, and cultural superiority over the rest of the world, the current differences between Europe and America are insignificant. More importantly, he writes, the West shares a set of Enlightenment values -- democracy, the free market, and human rights -- that constitute what he calls a free world, where people are "more free than ever before."
Some of this may sound a bit like Tony Blair -- neoconservative rhetoric delivered in a British accent -- but Garton Ash's sense of urgency comes from his belief that the superiority enjoyed by the West for five centuries may finally be on the wane. China and India are rising powers, and along with Japan, "they have the potential to shift the global balance of power from the Atlantic to the Pacific." What the West must do is ensure that its Enlightenment values take root in Asia before that shift happens.
This prediction of Western decline from someone so entrenched in its values is surprising. It is also a confused prognosis in assuming that the vast populations of Asia can be brought within the folds of the free world by the West alone. On the contrary, it is possible to argue that the free market Garton Ash favors excludes vast majorities from any possibility of freedom. In China, and certainly in India, the economic growth and the large populations work against rather than in perfect synchronicity with each other, so that it is quite possible for these nations to become global players even while many of their people remain subjugated and restless.
Garton Ash isn't completely oblivious to such problems. In a compelling but brief section of the book, he does ask the West to redress a global trading system condemning 1 billion people in the world to live on less than a dollar a day and forcing one in seven to go hungry. He suggests changes in American and European trade policies and a donation of 1 percent of personal income from well-off people, but his book is an excellent demonstration of why such policies are unlikely to be put into practice. In asserting the unique heritage of the West without addressing its record of plunder, and in assuming that conversations about freedom can be conducted only within the West, Garton Ash illustrates why the West has never felt the need to question such imbalances. If one believes the West to be superior, it is not hard to argue that it deserves the higher standards of living and consumption it is used to.
Garton Ash is conscientious enough to think mass poverty unfair, but he has too much faith in the powerful leaders he has observed so closely. The "silent majority" in the West should act by asking its leaders to change the inequities in the world, he argues. They might do better if they were to talk to other silent majorities, the ones invisible even in Garton Ash's book. To entrust one's faith to leaders of governments would be to replicate the fate of "Free World," where insight, intelligence, and even compassion are too often drowned in the white noise of policyspeak.
Siddhartha Deb is in Bhopal, India, reporting on the situation 20 years after the Union Carbide accident. His new novel, "An Outline of the Republic," will be published by Ecco in the spring.
