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December 4, 2004
The argument of Timothy Garton Ash's Free World is that there should be no "either/or" about Europe and America, because the answer is "both". The interests of the two are very similar and so are their fundamental beliefs. What divides the West is less significant than what unites it.
These two zones of the old cold war West can capitalize on a "historic chance" to work in concert "to go beyond the 'free world' of the old West and lay the foundations of a free world" by advancing the cause of freedom worldwide.
Similarly for the Australia of John Howard, I would add. It is a third zone of western civilization in the Asia Pacific. It is part of the West in that it shares a set of Enlightenment values -- democracy, the free market, and human rights -- that constitute what Ash calls a free world, where people are "more free than ever before.
Ash argues that the superiority enjoyed by the West (as a civilization) for five centuries may finally be on the wane. China and India are rising powers, and along with Japan, "they have the potential to shift the global balance of power from the Atlantic to the Pacific." Consequently the West must ensure that its Enlightenment values take root in Asia before that shift happens.
I have my doubts about Ash's thesis. Another interpretation would stress the differences between Europe & Australia with the US. These differences included a strict adherence to secularism, state intervention to “correct” the market and buffer society from capitalism, the overcoming of national sovereignty, and the replacement of this now-outmoded arrangement of nation states by an international legal order. That is the view of Europe of Derrida and Habermas.
Another critical tack is this one by Tom Nairn.
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