Free World

Zusatztext “A powerful and morally compelling tract! not merely for our times but for the next half-century.” – Los Angeles Times Book Review “Unlike so much of the current rash of books seeking to make sense of the post-Communist world! Free World is totally engaging. . . . It will be of great use to anyone seeking to make sense of what is going on today.” – The New York Times Book Review “Fascinating. . . . Eloquent. . . . A model of common-sense reasoning.” – The New York Times “Stirring. . . . This extraordinarily astute and beautifully written book will take its place as a classic in the field.” – Foreign Affairs Informationen zum Autor Timothy Garton Ash Klappentext "We, the free, face a daunting opportunity. Previous generations could only dream of a free world. Now we can begin to make it." In his welcome alternative to the rampant pessimism about Euro-American relations, award-winning historian Timothy Garton Ash shares an inspiring vision for how the United States and Europe can collaborate to promote a free world. At the start of the twenty-first century, the West has plunged into crisis. Europe tries to define itself in opposition to America, and America increasingly regards Europe as troublesome and irrelevant. What is to become of what we used to call "the free world"? Part history, part manifesto, Free World offers both a scintillating assessment of our current geopolitical quandary and a vitally important argument for the future of liberty and the shared values of the West. A Crisis of the West When you say “we,” who do you mean? Many of us would start the answer with our family and our friends. Widening the circle, we might think of our town or region, supporters of the same football team, our nation or state, a sexual orientation, a political affiliation (“we on the Left,” “we Republicans”), or those who profess the same religion—world-straddling fraternities these, with more than 1.3 billion Muslims and nearly 2 billion Christians, though fraternities scarred by deep internal divisions. Beyond this, most of us have a strong sense of “we” meaning all our fellow human beings. Some would add other living creatures. Yet these largest senses of “we” are seldom what people really have in mind when they say “we must do this” or “we cannot allow that.” The moral “we” of all humankind is today more important than ever, but it’s not the same as our operational “we.” So let us pose the question more precisely: What’s the widest political community of which you spontaneously say “we” or “us”? In our answer to that question lies the key to our future. For me, an Englishman born into the Cold War, that widest political community used to be something called “the West.” My friends and I didn’t spend much time worrying about its boundaries. If you had asked us, we could not have said exactly where it ended. Was Turkey part of the West? Japan? Mexico? But we had no doubt that it existed, as Europe existed, or communism. At its core, we felt, were the free countries on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in Western Europe and North America. This Cold War West faced a hostile power that we called “the East.” The East meant, in the first place, the Soviet Union, its Red Army, its nuclear missiles, and its satellite states in what was then labeled Eastern Europe. Occasionally, Western politicians or propagandists tried to persuade us that noncommunist countries everywhere should be described as “the free world”—even if their governments were torturing critics at home, gagging the press, and rigging elections. My friends and I never accepted that claim. We did not think Chile under General Pinochet was a free country. Altogether, this tag “the free world,” with its strident definite article, implying that all inside are free, all outside unfree, has seldom been used in public without p...

Produktdetails

• Autoren: Timothy Garton Ash, Timothy Garton Ash
• Verlag: Vintage USA
• Sprache: Englisch
• Produktform: Taschenbuch
• Erschienen: 06.12.2005
• EAN: 9781400076468
• ISBN: 978-1-4000-7646-8
• Seiten: 304
• Abmessung: 132 mm x 205 mm x 15 mm
• Thema: Sachbuch