Quando o Mercosul completou dez anos, já tendo escrito dois ou três livros sobre o bloco -- não exatamente de história do tempo presente, que os franceses chamam de histoire immédiate, mas de análise política e econômica, quando não diplomática -- eu pretendi escrever uma História do Mercosul, uma vez que eu tinha, de certo modo, assistindo ao nascimento da criança, acompanhado suas primeiras mamadeiras (sem chegar a trocar nenhuma fralda), e até participado de um ou outro encontro importante, sem mencionar ter sido envolvido, como negociador, na redação do Protocolo de Brasília (reuniões em Montevidéu, onde eu estava) sobre Solução de Controvérsias.
Descobri que seria impossível escrever essa história devidamente apoiado em "documentos históricos", à la Ranke, pelo simples motivos que estes supostos documentos não existiam. Etapas cruciais da construção do Mercosul simplesmente não estava documentadas. Não havia, por exemplo, uma descrição do processo decisório que tinha levado à conformação da TEC, a Tarifa Externa Comum, e sequer se descobriu depois (do Protocolo de Ouro Preto, de 1994) como e em que condições ela estava sendo implementada (e de fato nunca o foi, devidamente, bastando dizer que se o Mercosul possui, apenas no papel, um Código Aduaneiro, ele nunca foi respeitado).
Isso foi, portanto, em 2001, antes dos ataques terroristas em NY e Washington e antes que este livro do Timothy Garton Ash fosse publicado, que nunca li (a despeito de ter lido vários de seus capítulos nas páginas da The New York Review of Books, um jornal de resenhas-artigos do qual sempre fui assinante).
Descubro agora, quinze anos depois, este primeiro capítulo desse livro, e a respectiva resenha, publicados nas páginas da New York Times Book Reviews graças a uma postagem de Carmen Lícia Palazzo (https://www.facebook.com/carmenlicia.palazzo/posts/10203368945183826), interessada, como eu, eu teoria da história.
De certa forma, mesmo não sendo jornalista, ou sequer historiador, eu e ele nos interessamos pelos mesmos assunto, e praticamos, grosso modo, as mesmas habilidades "literárias", escrever sobre o tempo presente, a história se desenvolvendo aos nossos olhos, mesmo sem sermos atores dela, apenas "espectadores engajados", como disse uma vez Raymond Aron de si mesmo.
Obviamente eu não ouso comparar-me ao historiador inglês de Oxford. Com ele apenas partilho essa mania inseparável de sempre levar comigo um caderninho de notas, pronto para ser rabiscado, e registrar alguma frase, alguma observação sobre o que se vê, ou se lê, ou alguma ideia que vai fugir marotamente se longo não tomamos nota dela. Na verdade, eu costumo carregar dois Moleskines: um de tamanho médio, que vai no bolso do paleto ou na pasta de computador, e um mini-Moleskine, que vai no bolso da camisa, para anotações mais curtas e episódicas.
Ainda gostaria de escrever uma história do tempo presente no Brasil, ou seja os tempos do Nunca Antes, em torno dos quais tenho recolhido não mais do que matérias de jornais e revistas e alguns artigos de minha própria lavra. Mas, na parte que mais me interessa, que seria a História Diplomática Imediata, vou provavelmente descobrir que as lacunas, imprecisões, omissões (deliberadas, estou certo disso), são ainda maiores do que para os erros de política econômica que os companheiros cometeram fartamente nesses anos faustos da mentira, da fraude e da corrupção. Aliás, sem poder me me basear em evidências documentais para embasar alguns dos mais momentosos episódios de nossa história diplomática, só me resta imitar o economista queridinho dos keynesianos de botequim e escrever uma Teoria Geral da Fraude, da Mentira e da Corrupção, para ilustar estes anos.
Por enquanto fiquem com estas dez páginas do livro de Garton Ash, e sua resenha por Roger Cohen, que só descobri graças a Carmen Lícia e seu faro infalível.
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Hartford, 7 de agosto de 2015
From the Store of The New York Times Book
Reviews, October 29, 2000
(First Chapter)
INTRODUCTION
History of the Present
Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches From Europe in the 1990s
By TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
New York: Random House, 2000
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, 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 through 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, diary-like 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 winter of history. 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 businesspeople 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 for ever, 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 pictures
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 yourself
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.
The shortest and best-marked frontier is that
between history and journalism on the one side and literature on the other.
Both good journalism and good history have some of the qualities of good
fiction: imaginative sympathy with the characters involved, literary powers of
selection, description, and evocation. Reportage or historical narrative is
always an individual writer's story, shaped by his or her unique perception and
arrangement of words on the page. It requires an effort not just of research
but of imagination to get inside the experience of the people you are writing
about. To this extent, the historian or journalist does work like a novelist.
We acknowledge this implicitly when we talk of "Michelet's Napoleon"
as opposed to "Taine's Napoleon" or "Carlyle's Napoleon."
Yet there is a sharp and fundamental
difference, which concerns the kind of truth being sought. The novelist Jerzy
Kosinski, who played fast and loose with all facts, including those about his
own life, defended himself aggressively. "I'm interested in truth not
facts," he said, "and I'm old enough to know the difference." In
a sense, every novelist can say that. No journalist or historian should. In
this, we also differ from the father of contemporary history. Thucydides felt
free to put words into Pericles' mouth, as a novelist world. We do not. Our
"characters" are real people, and the larger truths we seek have to
be made from the bricks and mortar of facts. What did the prime minister say
exactly? Was it before or after the explosion in the Sarajevo marketplace, and
whose mortar actually fired the fatal shell?
Some postmodernists disagree. They suggest that
the work of historians should be judged like that of fiction writers, for its
rhetorical power and capacity of imaginative conviction, not for some illusory
factual truth. Eric Hobsbawm's given a finely measured response: "It is
essential" he writes, "for historians to defend the foundation of
their discipline: the supremacy of evidence. If their texts are fictions, as in
some sense they are, being literary compositions, the raw material of those
fictions is verifiable fact."
That applies equally to journalism. We all know
about fabrications at the bottom end of journalism, in the gutter press.
Unfortunately, the frontier with fiction is also violated at the top end of
journalism, especially in reportage that aspires to be literature. Any
reportage worth reading involves rearranging material, highlighting, and, to
some extent, turning real people into characters in a drama. But the line is
crossed when quotations are invented or the order of events is changed. There
is one genre of modern journalism, the "drama-documentary" or
"faction," which does this avowedly. Faction is, so to speak,
honestly dishonest. But more often this is done behind a mask of spare
authenticity.
The precedents are distinguished. John Reed's
account of the Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World, is probably
one of the most influential pieces of reportage ever written. Yet he spoke
virtually no Russian, regularly made up dialogue, offered secondhand accounts
as firsthand, mixed up dates, and added imaginative detail. As Neal Ascherson
observes, in a fine essay on his work, Reed "gives a thrilling account of
Lenin's appearance at a closed Bolshevik meeting in Smolny on 3 November,
allegedly communicated to him outside the door by Volodarsky as the meeting
went on. No such meeting took place. "
To save us from Reed's disease and to spoil our
best stories, great American journals such as The New Yorker employ
fact-checkers. As they drag their fine combs through your text, it is horrible
to find how many small errors of fact have slipped into your notebook or
intruded on the path from notebook to text. But sooner or later you come to the
passages, often the most important ones, that they annotate in the margin,
"On author." This means you are the only source for the fact (if fact
it be) that, for example, a church door in the Krajina was stained with blood,
or a Kosovo rebel leader said what your notebook records that he said. Then you
are alone with your notebook and your conscience. Did he really say that?
Ideally, I suppose, one should be permanently
wired for sound, like a superspy. Or, even better, have a miniature video
camera implanted in one's skull. And certainly some of the very best
contemporary history has been done on television. I think of documentary series
such as The Death of Yugoslavia. Although the television camera can also be
made to lie by tendentious selection and manipulative editing, at best it
brings you closer than any other medium to how things really were.
For the writer, however, the conventional,
handheld, visible tape recorder and television camera have major disadvantages.
They are cumbersome, even in their latest, slimmed-down, high-tech versions.
Try using one at the same time as taking notes during a fast-moving
demonstration. It is, in practice, very difficult to see simultaneously with
both the camera's and the writer's eye. You're always liable to miss the
telling detail that is vital to good reportage because you're fiddling with a
tape or lens. And then you keep worrying about whether and what they are
recording. Tape recorders and cameras put people off. Politicians and so-called
ordinary people speak less naturally and freely as soon as the machines come
out. Worse still, cameras and microphones also turn people on. Demonstrators or
soldiers strike heroic poses and make portentous statements they would not
otherwise make. So these apparently neutral, mindless recorders of reality
actually change it by their mere presence. Yet even the visible notebook does
that.
I occasionally use a tape recorder for an
important conversation, but my inseparable companion is a pocket notebook. The
notebook is often open when the person is speaking, but sometimes, when I think
they will talk more freely or simply when walking or eating or whatever, it is
not. Then I write the conversation down as soon as possible afterward. I am
obsessed with accuracy and, after twenty years, rather well practiced in this
kind of remembering. But as I look back through my notebooks there is always
this nagging concern: Did he really say that?
Take the opening passage of my reportage from
Serbia in March 1997: the student named Momcîlo exclaiming "I just want to
live in a normal country," and so on. Now Momcîlo said this, in his
imperfect English, as we hurried through the streets of Belgrade toward a
students' meeting. I wrote it down as soon as we got there. If I had a tape
recording of what he actually told me, it would probably be slightly
different-a bit more awkward and less sharp. But I don't have a tape recording.
The verifiable historical truth of that fragment of the past is gone for good.
You just have to trust me. A little later, I relate excited exchanges at the
student meeting. These I scribbled down as they happened. But I don't speak
Serbian, so what you read is my interpreter's version and we both have to trust
her.
Altogether, the business of language is
crucial. Most of what is quoted in this book was said or written in languages I
understand. But some, especially from Albanian and the southern Slav languages
now called Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Macedonian, was translated for me by
an interpreter, with the inevitable loss of accuracy and nuance. The first
thing to ask of anyone writing about anywhere is, Does he or she know the
language?
Finally, it seems to me, the key to trust is
not the technical apparatus of audiovisual recording and sourcing and
fact-checking, invaluable though that is. It is a quality that may best be
described as veracity. No one will ever be completely accurate. There is a
margin of unavoidable error and, so to speak, necessary license if cacophonous,
Babel-like reality is to be turned into readable prose. But the reader must be
convinced that an author has a habit of accuracy, that he is genuinely trying
to get at all the relevant facts, and that he will nor play fast and loose with
them for literary effect. The reader should feel that while the author may not
actually have a video recording of what he is describing, he would always like
to.
George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia is a model
of this kind of veracity. The book is a piece of literature. It is inaccurate
in many details, not least because Orwell's notebooks were stolen by the
communist goons who came to arrest him as a Trotskyist. Yet you don't doubt for
a single moment that he is striving for the greatest possible accuracy, for the
fact-based truth that must always set apart the plains of history and
journalism from the magic mountains of fiction.
The frontier between journalism and history is
the longest in our Three Country Corner. It is also the least well marked and
therefore the most tense and disputed. I can testify to this, having lived on
both sides and in between. In journalism, to describe a piece as "rather
academic"-meaning jargon heavy, boring, unreadable-is the surest path to
the spike. In academe, it's a put-down to say that somebody's work is
"journalistic," meaning superficial, racy, and generally not serious.
"Contemporary history?" sniffed an elderly don when I returned to my
Oxford college from a job in journalism at the end of the 1980s. "You mean
journalism with footnotes?"
I think it's important to understand that the
reasons why so much is made of the differences between journalism and academic
or professional history have at least as much to do with the practical
exigencies, self-images, and neuroses of the two professions as they have with
the real intellectual substance of the two crafts. Granted, the qualities of
bad journalism and bad history are very different: sensationalist, intrusive,
populist tosh with millions of readers on the one side; overspecialized, badly
argued, ill-written doctorates with no readers on the other. But the virtues of
good journalism and good history are very similar: exhaustive, scrupulous
research; a sophisticated, critical approach to the sources; a strong sense of
time and place; imaginative sympathy with all sides; logical argument; clear
and vivid prose. Was Macaulay, in his essays for the Edinburgh Review, a
historian or a journalist? Both, of course.
Yet, in modern Western societies, profession is
a defining feature of personal identity, and the professions that are closest
together take most pains to distinguish themselves. I say modern Western
societies, incidentally, because this was not so true in the communist world,
where the most important social identification was with a broad class:
intelligentsia, workers, or peasants. One of the interesting experiences of the
last decade in formerly communist parts of Europe has been to see friends
rapidly becoming differentiated by profession, Western style. Where once they
were all fellow members of the intelligentsia, now they are academics, lawyers,
publishers, journalists, doctors, and bankers, with diverging ways of life,
styles of dress, homes, incomes, and attitudes.
Now, because of the ways in which the
professions of journalism and history have developed and because of the
edginess between them, the writing of "history of the present" has
tended to fall between the two. That no-man's-land is perhaps wider and more tense
than it was when Lewis Namier put aside eighteenth-century English politics to
chart the European diplomatic history of his own times and Hugh Trevor-Roper
turned from Archbishop Laud to write The Last Days of Hitler
Every profession has its characteristic fault.
If I had to summarize in a word, I would say that the characteristic fault of
journalistic writing is superficiality and that of academic writing is
unreality. Journalists have to write so much, and they are so pressed for time.
Sometimes they are "parachuted" into countries or situations about
which they know nothing and expected to report on them within hours. Hence the
famous, horrible line 'Anyone here been raped and speak English?" Then
their copy is cut and rewritten by editors and subeditors who are working to
even tighter deadlines. And, anyway, tomorrow is another day, another piece.
Academics, by contrast, can take years to
finish a single article. They can (and sometimes do) take infinite pains to
check facts, names, quotations, texts, and contexts, to consider and reconsider
the validity of an interpretation. But they can also spend a life describing
war without ever seeing a shot fired in anger. Witnessing real life is not what
they are supposed---or funded-to do. Methodology, footnotes, and positioning in
some ongoing academic debate can seem as important as working out what really
happened and why. Participants in the worlds they describe sometimes throw up
their hands in laughter and despair at the unreality of what comes out.
Of course, I could equally dwell on the
characteristic virtue of each side, which is the opposite of the other's
characteristic fault: depth in scholarship, realism in journalism. The
interesting question is, Has it gotten worse or better? Well, some things have
improved. If you read what passed for contemporary history in Britain in the
1920s, you find a bluff amateurism unthinkable today. In journalism, the growth
of world television-news services such as CNN, Reuters, and BBC World
Television and that of documentation on the Internet offers wonderfully rich
new sources for present history. But, on the whole, I think it has gotten
worse.
There is still a handful of great international
newspapers of record. Top of my personal short list would be The New York
Times, The Washington Post, and The International Herald Tribune, The
Financial Times, Le Monde in France, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung and
the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in the German-speaking world. You can
generally believe what you read in these papers. Yet even with this select
group, it is astonishing how many discrepancies you find if you buy them all
and compare their accounts of the same event. By and large, they do still
separate fact and opinion, although there are exceptions. For example, the coverage
of the wars of the Yugoslav succession in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
was for years distorted by the pro-Croat views of one of that paper's
publishers.
In my view, the foreign reporting in the
leading American newspapers is the best in the world. Senior, highly educated
American journalists are proud to describe themselves as a
"reporter," whereas in Britain every twenty-three-year-old fresh out
of college wants to be a "columnist" or "commentator. "
Standards of editorial accuracy and fact-checking are second to none, and
corrections are published when errors are made. Moreover, extensive space is
given to foreign coverage. You have a definite sense that what happens almost
anywhere in the world matters, because the country in which the paper appears
is a world power. What was true of The Times of London a hundred years
ago is true of The New York Times today. For an Englishman, the contrast
in quality of foreign coverage between the New York and the London Times
is now painful to observe.
Outside this small group, the value as
historical record of most other newspapers in most other countries is slight,
and diminishing. This is particularly true in Britain, where the fierce
commercial competition for readers-above all between the groups headed by the
Australian-American owner of The Times, Rupert Murdoch, and the Canadian
proprietor of the Daily Telegraph, Conrad Black-has resulted in a
further erosion of the journalism of record. I'm talking not just about the
quite astonishing levels of routine inaccuracy and distortion, for reasons of
both sensationalism and ideology-although in Britain this is especially
apparent in anything to do with the European Union. As important are two other
traits: featurism and futurism.
A large part of newspapers is now taken up not,
as their name would suggest, with news, but with features: lifestyle, beauty,
fashion, medicine, food, holidays, etc. This is what readers are said to want.
Meanwhile, in what remains of the news pages, there is the more subtle disease
of futurism. More and more space is devoted to speculating about what may
happen tomorrow rather than describing what happened yesterday-the original
mission of journalism. When read any time after today, this stuff is useless,
except as an illustration of what people did not know at the time. Reading my
own pieces for this book, I am again reminded that nothing ages more quickly
than prophecy-even when it was prescient.
For all these reasons, the history of the
present gets written less in its first natural home, the newspapers. But there
are also problems on the academic side of the frontier. Some professional
historians do tackle subjects in recent history. Even the Oxford history
faculty; long accounted conservative (with a small c), now has a history
syllabus that is open-ended toward the present. Nonetheless, in my experience,
most academic historians are still reluctant to venture much closer to the
present than the canonical thirty years after which official papers are
released in most democracies. They still incline to leave this territory to
colleagues who have made it their own in subjects such as International
Relations, Political Science, Security Studies, European Studies, or Refugee
Studies.
Yet these relatively new specialisms often feel
the need to establish their academic credentials, their claim to the high name
of Science (in the German sense of Wissenschaft), by a heavy dose of theory,
jargon, abstraction, or quantification. Otherwise-horror of horrors-their
products might be confused with journalism. Even when those involved have been
trained to write history, the results often suffer from overspecialization,
unreadable prose, and that characteristic fault: unreality. At the same time,
the pressures of American-style "publish or perish" mean that a huge
amount of academic work in progress is hastily thrown into book form. Here,
too, the ratio of quantity to quality has surely changed for the worse.
So I maintain that, for all its pitfalls, the
literary enterprise of writing "history of the present" has always
been worth attempting. It is even more so now because of the way history is
made and recorded in our time. Sadly, it has suffered from developments in the
professions of journalism and academic history.
Yet you can soon have enough of such
methodological self-examination. Altogether, the habit of compulsive labeling,
pigeonholing, and compartmentalizing seems to me a disease of modern
intellectual life. Let the work speak for itself, In the end, only one thing
matters: Is the result true, important, interesting, or moving? If it is, never
mind the label. If it isn't, then it's not worth reading anyway.
T.G.A., Oxford-Stanford, March 2000
(C) 2000 Timothy Garton Ash All rights
reserved. ISBN: 0-375-50353-6
==========
Review by Roger Cohen:
A
journalist looks at the last decade through the perspective of a historian.
Related
Link
By ROGER COHEN
|
HISTORY
OF THE PRESENT
Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches From Europe in the 1990s.
By Timothy Garton Ash.
389 pp. New York:
Random House. $29.95.
|
With the cold war won and Wall Street on a
winning streak, America's interest in Europe has waned. Yet it has been a
convulsive decade. Violence took more European lives in the 1990's than in the
entire 44-year period of the cold war. Several post-Communist societies muddled
their way toward democracy and the market economy. Another, Yugoslavia, fissured
in a blood bath. The wars of its destruction may finally have ended with the
ouster this month of Slobodan Milosevic, Serbia's ruthless leader. Saying
goodbye and good riddance to the full exercise of their sovereignty, several
West European states created a common currency, the euro. The thinly-veiled
political objective behind the money could scarcely have been bolder: the
forging, one day, of a United States of Europe.
These are the
weighty themes of Timothy Garton Ash's ''History of the Present,'' a collection
of essays and dispatches from one the most penetrating observers of Europe's
recent transformation. A rather self-conscious introduction announces that the
author has sought to combine ''the crafts of historian and journalist,'' an
objective that in lesser hands might merely have yielded mediocre illustrations
of both. But Garton Ash has the wherewithal for his ambitious genre. His
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 essays in
Garton Ash's book, most of them previously published, form what he calls a
kaleidoscope. At times, the patterns are vivid, the images brilliantly
illuminating. At others, the fragments are disjointed or simply repetitive. We
hear not once but twice from the anonymous French businessman who comments
acidly that expansion of the European Union to include post-Communist central
Europe should always be talked about but never considered. The term
''demokratura,'' used to describe an authoritarian regime dressed up in the
garb of democracy, returns with irritating frequency to characterize
governments as different as Milosevic's murderous Serbia and Vladimir Meciar's
messy Slovakia. And the eviction of ''innocent'' Germans from Eastern Europe
after the end of Hitler's terror appears to be something of an obsession.
But when Garton
Ash, a fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford, explores his favorite themes,
the results are often formidable. Two of the most important essays are
''Catching the Wrong Bus?'' and ''The Case for Liberal Order.'' In them, he
argues that European leaders made a cardinal error a decade ago by setting
monetary union in the western part of the continent as their chief political
priority. That priority should have been the swift integration of
post-Communist countries into the democratic order of the European Union:
''They put Maastricht before Sarajevo,'' he writes, referring to the Dutch city
where the treaty on the euro was agreed to in 1991.
His case is
compelling, and impressive for the cogent consistency with which he has argued
it since the Berlin Wall fell. No post-Communist state has joined the European
Union; dates for entry keep getting postponed. Meanwhile, monetary union --
decided in haste and on high in order to tie a reunited Germany to an
integrated Europe -- is suffering from its largely undemocratic conception and
from the absence of a coherent, broadly acceptable political project to
accompany it. Hence, in part, the weakness of the euro, which has lost 25
percent of its value in 21 months. A European money probably needs a European
government to administer it; but not enough Europeans want such a government,
at least not now.
As a result,
Garton Ash is deeply suspicious of what he sees as a drive to push Europeans
toward more union than they want. His is a conservative Atlanticism, that of a
British intellectual deeply engaged in Europe, enraged by the myopia of so many
Little Englanders, but still suspicious of too much centralizing idealism on a
Continent so ravaged, still convinced that avoidance of the worst is a worthy
goal.
Disaster, he
suggests, is not impossible. Germans, who have abandoned the much-loved symbol
of their postwar nationhood, the mark, may come to view the euro as another
Versailles. A ''serious danger'' exists that the French-German ''magnetic
core'' of an integrating Europe could come to exert ''magnetic repulsion.'' In
a Continent now marked by the rise of populist, rightist politicians like Jorg
Haider in Austria, and increasingly wary of the notion of a European
''superstate,'' such warnings are hard to ignore. But the political investment
in the euro is probably too great, and the ultimate American interest in a
stable Europe too keen, for an implosion to come to pass.
In its
southeastern Balkan corner, Europe has already had its share of cataclysms in
the past decade. Garton Ash backs into the story in the strangest of ways, with
an account of the expulsion of the Serbs by a resurgent Croatian Army in 1995.
This is a bit like beginning an account of World War II with the story of those
Sudeten Germans ethnically cleansed after 1945. He refers to this expulsion
more than once as ''the biggest single exodus'' of the Bosnian war. In fact,
that dubious accolade belongs to the more than 750,000 Muslims driven out by
the Serbs as they swept through Bosnia in the first months of the war in 1992.
This exodus was also the result of one devastating, coordinated sweep. Yet the
Serbian concentration camps through which many of the Muslims were processed
merit not a mention.
This lacuna is
doubly strange because Garton Ash gets so much right. ''Hitler,'' he writes,
''should have been stopped when he remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936;
Milosevic at the siege of Vukovar in 1991.'' Indeed. And his critique of the
no-body-bags approach of Bill Clinton and the Pentagon in Bosnia and later
Kosovo is superb: ''It is a perverted moral code that will allow a million
innocent civilians of another race to be made destitute because you are not
prepared to risk the life of a single professional soldier of your own.'' As
Garton Ash explains, thousands of ethnic Albanian lives were sacrificed in 1999
because there was no readiness to accompany the NATO bombardment of Kosovo with
the deployment of a ground force that could stop the marauding Serbian killers.
Years before that, the dismemberment of Bosnia went as far as it did because of
similar hesitations. For President Clinton to claim Bosnia as a success story,
as he has often done since 1995, is simply extraordinary. Garton Ash now sees
little alternative to allowing ethnic separation to be completed in the
Balkans, a process that he hopes will eventually open the way for their
reintegration. This, he suggests, is the European way; to fight it is to try
''to freeze history.''
Of course, the
United States and its allies are trying to prove him wrong by preserving some
semblance of mixed societies in Bosnia and even Kosovo. In Bosnia, they may
succeed because they have something to build on; Garton Ash underestimates the
reality of a Bosnian identity even among many Serbs there. In Kosovo, however,
any meaningful multiethnic project is almost surely doomed at this stage.
Meanwhile, with Garton Ash, we are left to rue the painful fact that ''the
democratization of Yugoslavia, and of Bosnia in particular, would, had it
worked, have been a unique example of a part of Europe moving peacefully from a
truly multiethnic society under an undemocratic (imperial, then Communist)
political roof to such a society within a democratic framework.''
It is this sort
of perception, and writing, that makes ''History of the Present'' essential
reading. Garton Ash sometimes seems unsure of his role, assuming a highhanded
pomposity that makes certain passages read like a ''History of My Presence.''
He is often scathing toward journalists, dismissing their ''color,'' their
''clichés'' and their ''Sarajevo safaris,'' and suggesting that CNN and
Christiane Amanpour play fast and loose with the truth. Yet this is the craft
he claims to be practicing, at least in part, and the role of journalists in
the Balkans -- not least the discovery of the camps in Bosnia in 1992 -- has
surely done more honor to the profession than damage.
At the start of
his book, throwing in the towel on his convoluted attempts to define
history-cum-journalism, Garton Ash writes that the final test must be this:
''Is the result true, important, interesting or moving? If it is, never mind
the label. If it isn't, then it's not worth reading anyway.'' So let us apply
the test. True? Most of the time. Important? Sometimes. Interesting? Always.
Moving? Surprisingly so.
Roger
Cohen, the Berlin bureau chief of The Times, is the author of ''Hearts Grown
Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo.''
