History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s - Couverture rigide

Garton Ash, Timothy

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0375503536 ISBN 13 : 9780375503535

Editeur : Random House Inc, 2000

Synopsis

Book by Timothy Garton Ash

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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, 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, 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 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 "dramadocumentary" 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 you...

Présentation de l'éditeur

The 1990s. An extraordinary decade in Europe. At its beginning, the old order collapsed along with the Berlin Wall. Everything seemed possible. Everyone hailed a brave new Europe. But no one knew what this new Europe would look like. Now we know. Most of Western Europe has launched into the unprecedented gamble of monetary union, though Britain stands aside. Germany, peacefully united, with its capital in Berlin, is again the most powerful country in Europe. The Central Europeans—Poles, Czechs, Hungarians—have made successful transitions from communism to capitalism and have joined NATO. But farther east and south, in the territories of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia, the continent has descended into a bloody swamp of poverty, corruption, criminality, war, and bestial atrocities such as we never thought would be seen again in Europe.
        Timothy Garton Ash chronicles this formative decade through a glittering collection of essays, sketches, and dispatches written as history was being made. He joins the East Germans for their decisive vote for unification and visits their former leader in prison. He accompanies the Poles on their roller-coaster ride from dictatorship to democracy. He uncovers the motives for monetary union in Paris and Bonn. He walks in mass demonstrations in Belgrade and travels through the killing fields of Kosovo. Occasionally, he even becomes an actor in a drama he describes: debating Germany with Margaret Thatcher or the role of the intellectual with Václav Havel in Prague. Ranging from Vienna to Saint Petersburg, from Britain to Ruthenia, Garton Ash reflects on how "the single great conflict" of the cold war has been replaced by many smaller ones. And he asks what part the United States still has to play. Sometimes he takes an eagle's-eye view, considering the present attempt to unite Europe against the background of a thousand years of such efforts. But often he swoops to seize one telling human story: that of a wiry old farmer in Croatia, a newspaper editor in Warsaw, or a bitter, beautiful survivor from Sarajevo.
        His eye is sharp and ironic but always compassionate. History of the Present continues the work that Garton Ash began with his trilogy of books about Central Europe in the 1980s, combining the crafts of journalism and history. In his Introduction, he argues that we should not wait until the archives are opened before starting to write the history of our own times. Then he shows how it can be done.

From the Hardcover edition.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Random House Inc
• Date d'édition: 2000
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0375503536
• ISBN 13: 9780375503535
• Reliure: Relié
• Numéro d'édition: 1
• Nombre de pages: 405
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: Purmerul LTD; https://strengholt.nl/en/; ; 22 Liuleburgaz Str., floor 4, app. 9; Plovdiv; Bulgarie