Timothy Garton Ash

In honour of his outstanding scientific and journalistic work, the Board of Directors of the Society for the Conferring of the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen on 25 May 2017 honours the historian Prof. Timothy Garton Ash, a persuasive and important English European and European Englishman, who counts the United Kingdom among the European community of values and makes valuable contributions to Europe's self-understanding; who argued against Brexit, is now suffering from the result, but does not want to give up advocating close ties between the United Kingdom and the EU.
As a historian, Garton Ash does not assess the European integration process in terms of short-term or current political events. He sees the crisis in the context of complex interrelationships and points out that our world is experiencing major upheavals as a result of the digital revolution and networking, and that the familiar order is being overcome in the process. He advocates that democracy and its principles, a liberal and open culture of debate, and the defence of truth over lies in communication must be preserved. Garton Ash confronts the populists and simplifiers of our time and develops ideas on how we should behave in a globalised world. In doing so, he provides important impetus for the preservation of our values such as freedom, peace and democracy, as well as truthfulness, tolerance, justice and self-determination.
When Timothy Garton Ash reflects on a united Europe, he writes as a European who – ironically and at the same time admiringly – ‘considers the European Union to be the worst possible Europe, apart from all the other Europes that have been tried from time to time’. And he writes ‘as an Englishman, albeit often with a frustrated affection for our quirky, motley country – England and Great Britain at the same time’. In short, he writes with the necessary distance of the critical observer and analyst, who nevertheless cannot – and will not – hide his love for a Europe united in freedom and diversity. A passionate campaigner for the United Kingdom to remain in the Union, he experienced the day of the referendum on 23 June 2016 as ‘the greatest defeat of his political life’. A Briton who, ‘purely legally speaking, will no longer be an EU citizen from 2018 or 2019, but who, just as the UK will always be a European country, come what may, will always remain a European.’

‘Europe has lost its way,’ he diagnosed a decade ago. ’As we celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the European Economic Community, the predecessor of the European Union, Europe has forgotten what story it actually wants to tell us. For three generations, the post-war project of (West) European integration was held together by a common political narrative, but that was lost with the end of the Cold War. Most Europeans today no longer know where they come from and have no shared vision of where they want to go. We have forgotten why the EU exists and what it is for. We urgently need a new story.’

He was not at all concerned with ‘constructing a single unified mythology about the common past [of Europe].’ Rather, Europe must be confronted with its former self, with the ‘self-destructive, sometimes barbaric chapters in the history of European civilisation’; because: ‘Historical knowledge and conscience are of decisive importance here, but it must be a sincere history that also shows wrinkles and folds, not a smooth mythistoire.’
However, Garton Ash would not be the outstanding crosser of borders between historical science, journalism and precise political analysis if he were to remain in history alone. Rather, he added his suggestion at that time as to how Europe's new history could be told: an honest and self-critical account of the progress that leads us from our respective pasts to the common goals of a shared future: our heritage of European values. Because one thing is clear: ‘we cannot simply stand still. If we do not go forward, we go backward. Not forward, I emphasise, to some idealised United States of Europe, but to a practical construction strong enough to weather the storm’.

And when, in a later conversation, Garton Ash cites the EU's role in the world as another key argument that could motivate us to support Europe, stating that we are ‘experiencing one of the great international transformations, the 21st century will be dominated by emerging powers such as China, India and Brazil’, each of which is bringing its own historical experiences and cultural heritage to the discussion of values, then this is reminiscent of what historians have been dealing with in recent years in an unparalleled way: interactions in a world that is becoming increasingly interconnected and interdependent, a world in which we are all neighbours, where there are more telephones than people, ‘not a global village, but a global city, a virtual cosmopolis’ where almost anyone can be an author, journalist and publisher and can theoretically reach billions of people at top speed; where there are more opportunities to express one's opinion than ever before – in both a positive and negative sense.

Garton Ash questions how future society will function. In this context, he launched a broad debate on freedom of speech (http://freespeechdebate.com) as a research project of the ‘Dahrendorf Programme for the Study of Freedom’ at St Antony's College in Oxford: Participants from all over the world, including scientific institutions and journalists, non-governmental organisations and private individuals, have since been discussing conflicts arising from the collision of different convictions.
This debate provided the historian with the material for his work, published in 2016 under the seemingly simple title ‘Redefreiheit’ (Freedom of Speech), in which he translates the liberal idea of freedom of speech and expression into the 21st century and proposes ten basic principles of communication in an interconnected world – the answer of a great scientist and publicist to ‘fake news’ and hate speech, populism and simplification; a passionate plea for freedom of speech, open discourse and a strengthening of civil society.
‘Freedom of expression helps us deal with diversity, with an increasingly diverse world in which everyone is connected to everyone else,’ Garton Ash is convinced, because ’how should we make sensible political decisions if we don't know all the facts? And there is another important argument: freedom of speech helps us to search for and pursue the truth.’

And for this pursuit of truth, his principles offer guidelines with the help of which he wants to civilise global communication. In doing so, he explains in detail why he is opposed to excessive regulation by laws or measures from governments or corporations, despite the increasingly toxic atmosphere on the internet. Of course, anyone who endangers the lives of others through their speech must be legally prosecuted, but ‘hate speech should not be prosecuted by law, that achieves little. I advocate robust counter-speech in civil society and in the media. Without us, there would be no Facebook and no Google. Without us, there would be no advertising business. So we have to make it clear what we want. We have potential. We are just as important – if not more important – than the respective government,’ Garton Ash relies above all on social sanctioning. And if there is a core message in his latest work, it is probably rule number 5, according to which we “talk openly and with robust civility about all kinds of differences between people”.

You don't have to agree with Garton Ash unreservedly on this or any other point – and as an academic, he himself very consciously continues to put his principles up for discussion – but his work is in any case an impetus and an outstanding contribution to a debate that urgently needs to be conducted in Europe and far beyond: the debate about how we deal with our norms and values, especially the right to freedom of speech, in an interconnected world. concerns us all if we do not want to leave the field open to the preachers of hate and populists.
For himself, the ‘unconvertible English European’, Garton Ash sees two further tasks for the near future that are somewhat contradictory: now that the British people have voted for Brexit, he wants to do everything he can ‘to limit the damage for this country. Since we predicted in good faith that Brexit would have disastrous consequences, it is now up to us to ensure that we are not proven right. On the other hand, as Europeans, we must do everything we can to ensure that the European Union learns its lesson from this painful setback [...]. Because if the EU and the eurozone remain unchanged, they will be flooded by thousands of continental European versions [of EU opponents]. Despite its weaknesses, the union is still worth saving.’

Shaping Europe's common future requires, now more than ever, an open dialogue and the participation of many – citizens, politicians and economists, as well as representatives of culture and science. Only if the goals and expectations, as well as the weaknesses and limitations of community policy, are defined in public discourse, can the peoples of Europe regain faith in and trust in the European Union.
In the person of the historian and publicist Professor Timothy Garton Ash, the Board of Directors of the Society for the Conferring of the International Charlemagne Prize of Aachen is honouring in 2017 an outstanding English scholar who has accompanied and commented on the path of the European Union with passion and intellectual acuity and who also gives the community depth of thought. With his scientific and journalistic work, Timothy Garton Ash provides significant impetus for meeting the challenges of a global and interconnected world with principles based on deeply European values.
Biographical note:
Timothy Garton Ash was born in London on 12 July 1955. After graduating from Oxford University with a degree in history, his research on German resistance to Hitler in the late 1970s took the doctoral student to the Free University of Berlin – with detours to Humboldt University on the other side of the Iron Curtain. After studying the history of the Third Reich at Oxford, he was fascinated by the question of what made one person a resistance fighter and another a collaborator. ‘In the end, I didn't end up working on the German resistance after all. I discovered that on the other side of the Berlin Wall, in communist-ruled East Germany, real people were struggling with the same dilemma between resistance and collaboration. So instead of writing a doctoral thesis about Berlin under Hitler, I wrote a book about Berlin under Honecker. Subsequently, I dealt with dissidents in communist-ruled Central Europe and accompanied them on their rocky road to liberation.’

Travelling back and forth between the hot spots of Warsaw, Prague, Budapest and Berlin, the Brit held discussions with intellectuals and influential politicians, becoming one of the most important chroniclers and journalistic observers of the years of freedom in 1989/90. Having published ‘’And Wilt Thou Not Be My Brother...' The GDR Today’ and “The Polish Revolution: Solidarity” in 1983, he suddenly became well known in Germany in 1990 with his book “A Century is voted out”. His monumental work “In the Name of Europe”, published three years later, made him world famous. For this account of half a century of German politics in the context of the East-West conflict, Garton Ash conducted extensive interviews with almost all those involved at the time, examined personal notes and correspondence – for example from the German chancellors Brandt, Schmidt and Kohl, but also from Brezhnev and Gorbachev – and used all available material, including Stasi secret files.

‘The ‘Romeo’ File’, which the Ministry for State Security had created on the young researcher in 1980s Berlin, is the focus of the exciting report of the same name, published by the historian in 1997. His book ‘Zeit der Freiheit’ (Time of Freedom), published at the turn of the millennium and providing an account of the post-communist years after 1989, and his passionate plea for a ‘Free World’, published in 2004, also attracted widespread attention. In 2010, a collection of global political observations entitled ‘The Turn of the Century’ was published, in which the major, often contradictory movements in the first decade of the still young 21st century are analysed.

After spending several years in a still-divided Berlin, Garton Ash took up a research position at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, DC (until 1987). Since 1990, the expert in contemporary European history has taught at St. Antony's College, Oxford University, where he was director of the European Studies Centre. In 2000, he also became a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at the highly renowned Stanford University in the USA. In addition to his academic work, he is involved in the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and regularly writes columns for the Guardian, which are also published in leading European newspapers, as well as articles for the New York Review of Books, among others.