2025-12-25
29 分钟Hello and welcome to the Rachman Review.
I'm Gideon Rachman, Chief Foreign Affairs Commentator of the Financial Times.
This week's podcast is about the future of Europe.
My guest is Timothy Gardin-Nash,
historian and author who began his career covering the fall of communism in Europe in the late 1980s.
For many people, Gardin-Nash included, that was a period of hope and optimism.
But we're now living in a different Europe.
Russia is a war in Ukraine.
The radical right is on the rise.
So can Europe still look forward to the future with optimism?
Everybody who witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall knew that they were watching history in the making.
Timothy Garnash covered that period from East Germany and he also watched the development of the solidarity movement that unraveled communist rule in Poland.
He's written about all that and more in his recent book, Homelands, a personal history of Europe.
But the inexorable spread of democracy and liberal values across Europe,
apparently heralded by the fall of the Berlin Wall,
now seems to have slowed and even gone into reverse.
So when I met Timothy Garnash in London recently,
I began our conversation by asking him
if he thinks that we are once again witnessing a new order emerging in Europe.
I'm absolutely sure that we are at the beginning of a new era.