History of the Present

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 partiAsh, Timothy Garton is the author of 'History of the Present' with ISBN 9780375503535 and ISBN 0375503536.