 Good afternoon everybody, my name is Barry Culver and I'm the director of research here at the IIA. It's an enormous pleasure to be joined by Timothy Garten Ash, historian, author and professor of European studies at Oxford University. And Timothy's going to talk to us about his recent book, Homeland, which is available in all good bookshops and also at the back of the room here for anyone who's attending in person. We've got a couple of items of housekeeping out of the way then to quickly introduce Tim, and then to hand over to him. Professor Garten Ash will speak for about 20 minutes or so, and then we'll go to Q&A with our audience. That's both of you who are here present in Aitnork or Georgia Street in Dublin 01, and also those who are joining online and welcome to everybody. However, you'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom or by putting your hand up. And you should see the Zoom Q&A function on your screen and please feel free to put in questions throughout the discussion or get to as many of them as you possibly can. A quick reminder for all of us including Timothy that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. And if you wish to participate in the discussion on Twitter, you can use the handle at IIA. So I've known Timothy Garnash a little bit for a couple of years, but I've known him intellectually for much longer and is a battered copy of The Magic Lancer and travelled with me through various stages of my undergraduate and postgraduate career. And so it's really lovely for me to be presenting Timothy today to present. It's a magnum opus, a wonderful book, Homeland, which goes from post-war right up to post-cold war. And it's really, Timothy will obviously present it more adequately and appropriately, but it just feels like a love letter of 50 years of a relationship with a continent which I share, not quite 50 years yet Timothy, but I share the passion for the place. It's as much a primer on Europe, so anybody who wants to know about this continent since the Second World War, it's a great place to start, but it's also just a gorgeous memoir. And you feel like you spend time with the author from watching the moon landings as a schoolboy on an exchange in France to being around in 1989 and seeing and smelling and touching the revolution. And then experiencing the UK's withdrawal and right up to Russia's atrocious war. It's just, it's both a very, very informative, wonderful, but also very intimate book which I very much enjoyed reading. So I'm looking forward to Timothy telling us about this, but before handing over Timothy just formally I should give a bit more of a bio for our audience. I'm Professor Garten Ash, he's Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford where I spent a glorious time in the same place at the European Study Center for for a year. Timothy is also Isaiah Berlin, Professorial Fellow at Southampton College Oxford is mentioned and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. Timothy is the author of fully 11 books of political writing, most recently homelands, a personal history of Europe as mentioned the subject for today's discussion. Many of you will also know Timothy also writes a column on international affairs and the Guardian which over the past couple of years often felt like an oasis of sense and reason and what's often a desert in various parts of the British media and Timothy is a regular contributor to the New York review of books, amongst other journals. The awards he has received for his writing include the Somerset Morn Award, the Priya or a happy and the LSE and the George Orwell Prize Timothy it's a great pleasure, and I give you the floor. Thank you very much Barry it's wonderful to be back here in this wonderful Institute in Dublin in Ireland and in the European Union. Lucky you are still to be in the European Union, I have to say if I look at the progress Ireland has made over the 40 years since I first came to Dublin, and the regress my own country has made over the last 10 years. I feel a bit depressed. I hope you won't mind my saying I would probably be Irish by now. If my Irish grandmother had not very inconsiderately chosen to be born in 1886 in Bozeman Montana, rather than in Ireland. Didn't she know that 140 years later I would need her to have been born in Ireland. And, but nonetheless I feel very much at home here and that brings me to the very first point which is that that this book is is very much about the Europe of lived experience and one of the key features of that Europe of lived is that as Europeans, we can be at home abroad. So I'm abroad here, but I feel at home the same is true in Budapest or in Warsaw or in Berlin. That's pretty much unique to Europeans. Chinese only have the one homeland. Americans poor things only have the one homeland, as in Homeland Security. Again, we can have multiple homelands. Hence the title of the book in the plural. This book took me just 50 years to write 50 years of traveling around Europe, worrying about Europe studying Europe, writing about Europe. And it's an unusual genre, it's history, illustrated by memoir and reportage. And there's a whole series of stories and vignettes, all of them drawn from little notebooks like this in which my visit to Dublin will also be recorded. In which I recorded things since I started traveling to continental Europe in the early 1970s, but each of those stories has a point, it illustrates a larger history. So, for example, if I tell the story of walking down a street in East Berlin, just after the Berlin Wall came down and meeting an East Berliner, who told me he'd just seen an improvised poster in a window which said handwritten. Only today is the war really over. And that's not just an anecdote. I think it's expressed a profound truth about the whole of Europe behind the uncut. Or again, meeting Helmut Cole, how many people in this room have seen Helmut Cole, hands up who's seen Helmut Cole. That's quite a high proportion. I'm sure you will agree. He was certainly the largest man I've ever met. And in girth, he was what Dr. Johnson called a mountainous man. And there is Helmut Cole firing over me in his office in autumn 1991, talking about German and European unification and suddenly he says to me, by the way, do you realize you're sitting opposite the direct successor to Adolf Hitler. There's a conversation stopper, if ever, I heard one. What I should have said is actually her bundes counselor. There was Grand Admiral donets in between Hitler and you, but I was too flabbergasted to say anything. But of course, as you will all see, he was making a point he had a real sense of history. Hitler got everything wrong and Hitler tried to put a German roof over Europe he was going to try and put a European roof over Germany. And I tell the story of meeting President George W. Bush in May 2001, summoned to brief him before his first official visit to Europe and first meeting with Putin. And at one point in this conversation he said to the small group of advisors or invited guests. Do we want the European Union to succeed. Not just an anecdote about Bush and his ignorance. It's a story about the transatlantic relationship. No earlier American president would have thought to ask that question. But President since George W. Bush have all asked that question, do we want the EU to succeed all the way through to chronologically the last session of the section of the book. About a trip to Ukraine in December 2022, where I met one of these incredibly brave Ukrainian soldiers a man called Yevgen Hulevich. An editor critic a translator who volunteered after the full scale invasion on the 24th of February 2022 twice wounded twice went back to the front. Week by week by week, living in a foxhole he dug out himself with a spade he carried on his back, incredibly fierce fighting seeing his friends die around him. I met him in early December last year. He said, I'm determined to go back, because we have a lot of raw recruits, and they really need experienced soldiers like me. He was killed by a Russian sniper near Bachmoot on the last day of last year. That's chronologically one of the last moments in the book and that brings me to the larger story. So, what the history that this book is telling painting with a very bored brush is one of a ascending curve across roughly 35 years from the early 1970s to roughly around 2007 or eight. When they started traveling to continental Europe in 7273. It was still a Europe of dictators. Right. More Europeans were living under dictatorships and under democracies, including of course Spain, Portugal and Greece. We did the numbers 389 million Europeans living under dictatorships only 289 million living under democracies. When you go to Spain, Portugal and Greece you have this 35 year story. Again, painting with a very broad brush of the spread of freedom, and the enlargement of the geopolitical West, the European community from six to 27 NATO from 15 in to 26 in 2007. Of course, there were many major setbacks along the way, one has only to think of the wars of former Yugoslavia or 911. Although by the way 911 with hindsight is not the great turning point in European history we thought at the time. I think it's 2008 rather than 911. From 2008 onwards, the combination of the global financial crisis, and the Putin seizure of South Ossetian abkhazia. The beginning of what's sometimes called the poly crisis or more accurately, I would say a chain of crisis because poly crisis somehow suggest simultaneity whereas actually it's a chronological sequence of crises. The financial crisis segues into a great recession eurozone crisis. The demolition of democracy by Victor Orban in Hungary begins already in 2010 it's worth recalling. And then you have of course Ukraine 2014 the refugee crisis Brexit, Trump, Marine Le Pen, law and justice in Poland. COVID all the way down to the 24th of February 2022 in the beginning of the largest war in Europe since 1945. Now again, I have to qualify that or nuance that while there is clearly a downward turn a chain of crises. The EU itself, not only survives, but arguably gets stronger across this period. Nonetheless, I hope you will agree that there is something to be explained in that downward turn the question what went wrong which liberals have been debating ever since. And very quickly, let me suggest three kinds of thing that explain what went wrong. The first is what I would call a historical mistake. Put it, it's most simple. It's a fallacy of extrapolation. We took the way things had gone through those 35 years. And naively assumed that they would continue to go that way. We took the most nonlinear event in modern European history, namely the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and turned it into a linear projection, or to state it in more general terms. We took history with a small age, which is always a product of an interaction between structure and process on the one hand deep structure and process. And conjuncture contingency, chance and choice, collective will and individual leadership on the other, and turned it into history with a capital H, understood as a Hegelian process of inevitable progress towards the spread of freedom. And that's the historical mistake, which by the way kicks in not as many people think with Francis Fukuyama in 1989 90. That wasn't the moment of hubris. It's in the early to mid 2000s. When things seem to have gone so well since 1989 that the hubris sets in and that's my second category of explanation because there are multiple variants of hubris. And I'll just mention just a few for reasons of time and then we'll have time to talk about it in discussion, obviously the hubris of the United States marching into Iraq. The hubris of Tony Blair's cool Britannia believing that you could open open open without limit and there would be no reaction to it. What the German sociologist Andreas Räckwitz called apatistic liberalism the liberalism of constant opening. The hubris of the Eurozone, the hubris of a globalized financialized capitalism, which not only gave us levels of inequality, not seen for 100 of years not only led us into the great recession, but also assumed that global aggregate global gains would not merely justify but compensate for local specific losses. If you like it's an economist mistake, because there were indeed the aggregate global gains hundreds of millions of people in India and China were lifted out of poverty. But that didn't help the people in the north of England, or the southeast of Poland, or northeast and France, and populism taught us that lesson. The hubris of believing that it's the economy stupid that if you only get the economy right, all else will follow. I think populism taught us that issues of culture community and identity are at least as important as socio economic inequality the inequality of attention and respect, as I call it is as important as economic inequality. The hubris of the EU itself, which in the early 2000s tended to believe or to speak as if the world had only to graciously follow our example, and follow us down the path to rules based order, international law, multi level and, or, polisided cooperation, Mark Leonard's book of 2005, while Europe will run the 21st century, and the hubris of believing that we were indeed moving towards a manual counts, eternal perpetual peace, and the piece could be secured, simply by diplomacy, economic independence that's fine to become more dependent on Russia for energy, what the Germans call for flechtung, and that you didn't also need military power containment, credible containment, credible deterrence. And that leads me to the final point, which is the failure to learn one lesson of history. The great German historian Reinhard Kosselig has a wonderful essay called the unknown future and the art of prognosis. And he makes the very simple point that the more recurrent a phenomenon is in history. The more likely we are to be able to make probabilistic statements about the future on the basis of that experience. So for example, the statement, we shall all die has a rather high level of probability, because in a huge historical data set there are very few examples to the contrary. So, revolutions, wars, what happens to people when they're in power too long, these are recurrent phenomenon we have. Okay, so one of these recurrent phenomena is the decline of impulse. We know quite a lot about that. And one thing we know about imperial decline is imperial powers don't like it. Ask the British, ask the French, ask the Portuguese, ask the Germans. So when the largest remaining European Empire, namely the Russian Soviet Empire, just softly and suddenly vanished away in just three years between 1989 and 1991. We couldn't have assumed that was the end of the story. We should have understood that there was likely to be a reaction. I met Vladimir Putin in 1994 totally unknown Deputy Mayor of St. Petersburg, no one had heard of this guy rather unpleasant looking man at a conference in St. Petersburg. And at the end of a two day conference he pipes up and says, we have to remember that there are territories that have historically always been Russian. And the Russian Federation has a duty towards them. And he specifically mentioned Crimea. 1994, 20 years before 2014, five years before the first NATO enlargement, don't tell me NATO enlargement was responsible for Putin's invasion of Ukraine. So the imperialist revanchist instinct was always there. Now, I don't think it was unreasonable of us to try to do a modernization partnership with Russia to try to help a desirable transition in Russia. But starting in 2008 and at the latest in 2014 with the seizure of Crimea and the beginning of the war in eastern Ukraine because Ukrainians always remind us the war didn't start last year it started nine years ago. We should have woken up and said, aha, we know from history what's happening here. The empire is striking back. And I would argue, I mean you could never prove the counterfactual but I would argue that if we'd had a much stronger reaction then, and we maybe talk about this in discussion we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. But actually just before we go into discussion but gone on a bit longer than 20 minutes and three thoughts for where we go from here very very quickly. First of all, nothing is more important than that Ukraine should win this war. Our strategic goal should be that Ukraine should regain control of all its territory including Crimea. Because that is the only way in which we're then going to be able to construct a stable lasting European security order, and in which Russia will have learned to lesson. Secondly, Heraclitus war is the father of all things, the bigger the crisis the bigger the opportunity. The agenda of what I call the enlargement of the geopolitical West has been stalled for the last 15 years. The Croatia slips into the EU a few small countries slipped into slipping to NATO but basically it's been stalled. Now suddenly that log jam has been broken there's a strategic commit to at least the enlargement of the EU to include not just the Western Balkans but also Ukraine, Moldova and potentially Georgia. I would argue that our strategic goal in Europe and I speak as a European over the next 10 years should be to do another big double eastward enlargement of both the EU and NATO. And that is the only way in which we are actually going to make real progress towards the Europe hold and free. It is the only way in which you're actually going to secure countries like Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia against what is likely for a long time to come to be a very dangerous Russia. That of course is a huge challenge. It has to be done very differently from the way it was done before it requires a further deepening of the EU, but I personally find it a very exciting prospect. Last quick point. What the war in Ukraine has revealed is something that was actually developing throughout the 30 plus years since 1989, which is our transition to what one might reasonably call a post Western world. It is a world in which the West as a whole is no longer setting the agenda of world politics. And we've seen that in the Ukraine war, with the position taken not just by China, but by India, Turkey, South Africa and Brazil. So whereas in the 50 years on which my book concentrates. I've been thinking most of the time about ourselves about reuniting our continent about creating a European Union about all the internal agendas to Europe, broadly conceived. But the new agenda is as much if not more about our relations with the rest of the world and particularly with the non Western great powers on the non Western smaller powers, who no longer accept the bipolar framing. So you're with us or against us so you're with the West or the North or are you against it. And that I think is a really exciting part of the of the new agenda for for our homelands. And with that, I sit down and look forward to the conversation.