Timothy Garton Ash

Timothy Garton Ash  link Amazon C-SPAN Geni Website (Historian)
File:Timothy J. Garton Ash.jpg
Born	12 July 1955) London,UK
Nationality	British
Alma mater	St Edmund's School, Sherborne School,Exeter College (Oxford), St Antony's College (Oxford), Free University of Berlin,Humboldt University
Parents	John Garton Ash, Lorna Judith Freke
Children	2, including, Alec
UK historian promoted by the deep state, Ditchley Governor with other connections. Presented a paper to the 1989 Bilderberg. Subsequently attended two more, over a span of 30 years.

Timothy J. Garton Ash is a historian and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution specializing in European history since 1945. Ash wrote a working paper on Domestic Developments In Eastern Europe:Policy Implications For The West for the 1989 Bilderberg.

George Szamuely wrote of him: {{#subobject: |Has superobject=Timothy Garton Ash |Has objectClass=Quotation |Has author=George Szamuely|+sep=, |Has text=“It is always fascinating to observe the manufacture of history. Our rulers want a certain story told. For this they hire Court historians, whom they then reward handsomely. They are showered with grants, prizes, trips abroad, fellowships, prestigious appointments. The Court historians get to mingle with men of power and assure themselves that they too are men of power.

There is today no better exemplar of the Court historian than Timothy Garton Ash, Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Though he does little more than summarize the conventional wisdom on any subject, every one of his writings carries an aura of importance. He repeatedly refers to past essays and past books, which are themselves collections of past essays. His mind rarely wanders from the reservation. He makes sure never to ask a question that might shake our assumptions about the good intentions of our masters.

No doubt future generations will read Garton Ash's nonsense and come to the appropriate conclusions about "naïve" Americans, policies "paved with good intentions" and "international protectorates" in the Balkans that nobody had ever sought.

That is the whole purpose of "official history." It is written to persuade us that all is for the best in this the best of all liberal worlds, that we, one and all, are marching to the liberal world order.” |Is about=Timothy Garton Ash,Historiography, official history|+sep=, |Has wikipediaPage= |Has location=|+sep=, |Has publicationDate=January 2000 |Sourced from= |Has sourceDetails= |Has sourceTitle= |Has sourceName= |Has sourceURL=https://www.antiwar.com/szamuely/sz012500.html

}}

“It is always fascinating to observe the manufacture of history. Our rulers want a certain story told. For this they hire Court historians, whom they then reward handsomely. They are showered with grants, prizes, trips abroad, fellowships, prestigious appointments. The Court historians get to mingle with men of power and assure themselves that they too are men of power.

There is today no better exemplar of the Court historian than Timothy Garton Ash, Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. Though he does little more than summarize the conventional wisdom on any subject, every one of his writings carries an aura of importance. He repeatedly refers to past essays and past books, which are themselves collections of past essays. His mind rarely wanders from the reservation. He makes sure never to ask a question that might shake our assumptions about the good intentions of our masters.

No doubt future generations will read Garton Ash's nonsense and come to the appropriate conclusions about "naïve" Americans, policies "paved with good intentions" and "international protectorates" in the Balkans that nobody had ever sought.

That is the whole purpose of "official history." It is written to persuade us that all is for the best in this the best of all liberal worlds, that we, one and all, are marching to the liberal world order.”
George Szamuely (January 2000) 

Education

Garton Ash was born to John and Lorna Garton Ash. His father was educated at Trinity Hall, Cambridge and was an officer in the British Army during the Second World War.

Garton Ash was educated at St Edmund's School, Hindhead, Sherborne School, Dorset and Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied Modern History.

For postgraduate study he went to St Antony's College, Oxford, and then, in the still divided Berlin, to the Free University in West Berlin on a German Academic Exchange Service scholarship in 1978 and to the Humboldt University in East Berlin in 1980 as the first GDR–UK exchange student. Garton Ash was suspect figure to the East German counterintelligence, who regarded him as a potential British intelligence operative.

Career

In the 1980s Garton Ash was Foreign Editor of The Spectator, editorial writer on Germany and Central Europe for The Times and a columnist for The Independent. He was among the first Western journalists to report from the Lenin Shipyard strike in Gdańsk, Poland in August 1980 that led to the Gdańsk Agreement, and met with Lech Wałęsa there. He interviewed several Polish opposition leaders. Eventually expelled from the country, he also visited the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic, the Hungarian People's Republic, the People's Socialist Republic of Albania and the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina at key moments of their late history.

In 1986/1987, he was a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

In his much-quoted essay "Does Central Europe Exist?" of 1986, he welcomed the resurgence of the former German notion of Central Europe as an anti-Soviet regional identity among the dissidents in Prague and Budapest. He was present at Viktor Orbán's speech on 16 June 1989 in the Heroes' Square in Budapest, and at the Fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

In March 1990, he was summoned by the Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher as an authority on Germany and one of "her favourite British historians" alongside Norman Stone and Hugh Trevor-Roper to answer her concerns about German reunification during a confidential seminar at Chequers that was later leaked out to the press.

He became a Fellow of St Antony's College, Oxford, in 1989, a Senior Fellow of Stanford University's Hoover Institution in 2000, and Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford in 2004. He directed the European Studies Centre at St Antony's College, Oxford, from 2000 to 2006,

He subsequently founded the Dahrendorf Programme at the European Studies Centre, and directed it from 2010 to 2024.

He has written a column on European and international affairs in The Guardian since 2004 and is a long-time contributor to the New York Review of Books. His column was also translated in the Turkish daily Radikal and in the Spanish daily El País, as well as other newspapers. He is a member of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism steering committee.

Opinions

Garton Ash describes himself as a liberal internationalist. He is a supporter of what he calls the free world and liberal democracy, represented in his view by the European Union, and the United States as a superpower.

Garton Ash opposed Scottish independence. He supported the 2011 war against Libya, arguing that the intervention in Libya was justified under the "responsibility to protect" (R2P) doctrine. About the 2022 Russian-Ukrainian war, he opined that "Europe is at war". "Societies that are still enjoying a comfortable peacetime lifestyle, and where many apparently believe this war can soon be over with a negotiated compromise peace deal, must be shaken awake".

References

[Upload logo to Wikipedia.png] This page imported content from Wikipedia on 01.01.2026.
Wikipedia is not affiliated with Wikispooks.   Original page source here