At the start of the 21st century, the West has plunged into crisis. Europe tries to define itself in opposition to America; America increasingly regards Europe as troublesome and irrelevant; and Britain is split down the middle. What’s to become of what we used to call “the free world”?No contemporary thinker writes with the combination of passion, historical insight, and reportorial brilliance of Timothy Garton Ash, and here he assesses the causes and implications of our current geopolitical quandary–which dates back to the end of the Cold War and is not merely political but existential. The question is not just “What should we do?” It’s “Who should we be?”In Free World, Garton Ash draws on an extraordinary range of sources: from unique, personal conversations with Bush, Blair, and Schröder to encounters with farmers in Kansas and British soldiers in rural England; from history, memoirs, opinion polls, and sociological research to personal observations based on a quarter century of traveling in Europe and the United States.
