As the map of Europe was redrawn in the 1990s bewteen Paris and St. Petersburg, Timothy Garton Ash came to think of himself as a kind of historian of the present. Which is to say he's a journalist with an eye for the old threads of Europe's past in its unruly politics today. Timothy Garton Ash's Europe is not just a physical place with more than 50 languages and 35 states; it's an idea and ideal, obsessed with its own meaning.
Ash has chronicled the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the ethnic cleansing in the Balkans, the Brussels bureaucrats fixated on monetary union, the expansion of NATO, and America's uneasy involvement in European affairs. A decade of unnecessary violence in Eastern Europe, he says, killed more people than the Cold War, but the trauma of that time could just lead to the construction of a stronger Europe. A living history of Europe is this hour on the Connection. (Hosted by Christopher Lydon)
