"Workers in Poland once chanted, “There’s no freedom without Solidarity”; by the early 2000s, the slogan had become, “There’s no solidarity in freedom.” The Gdansk shipyard, where the Solidarity movement had begun in 1980, went bankrupt in
1996. But freedom, understood as some basic control over one’s everyday life, also suffered: As Garton Ash puts it, “The locus of unfreedom moved from the state to the workplace.” ...
This was not the only disillusionment: Heroes of dissident movements in Central and Eastern Europe turned into ordinary politicians—which, in some cases, meant corrupt politicians. Even Czechs eventually tired of such a towering figure as Vaclav Havel (
whom Garton Ash knew well); by the end, they no longer saw exemplary courage and integrity but only, Garton Ash writes, “theatrical gestures and moralistic preaching.”
Meanwhile, the self-restraint of Bush gave way to the hubris of his son’s America, where the financialization of everything and the trust in so-called self-regulating markets rightly discredited Western versions of capitalism after the 2008 crisis and
where the belief in spreading democracy through military conquest, sorely disappointed in Iraq and Afghanistan, made Western freedom rhetoric ring hollow. The global war on terrorism turned out to be a colossal failure of political judgment; Garton Ash
thinks Beijing should posthumously award al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden its highest honors for leading Washington into a decade of “strategic distraction.”
And so the downward turn began and, arguably, continues today. "
https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/29/europe-history-timothy-garton-ash-homelands-eu-liberalism-memory/
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