Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West

From Jim Huntley, a vice president of CCD:

A close friend alerted me the other day to a new book which I think you will all want to read. It's:

Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising
Future of the West, Random House, New York, 2004

When he phoned me, my friend said, "Jim, it's your book!" He meant what became soon apparent to me, viz. that Garton Ash deals with the same subject as I have tried to treat in my Pax Democratica, and covers it in a different--and more exciting--way so that I believe the two volumes are complementary. My book looked more at the international institutional arrangements, what they have become and what they ought to be. Garton Ash goes more deeply into the sources of discontent with European-American relations on both sides of the Atlantic; his probe is amazingly accurate, I think, and up-to-date. (Pax Democratica's second edition was "put to bed" before 9/11.)

Garton Ash discusses the 2000 creation of the Community of Democracies, and the Caucus at the UN. He goes deeply into the common interests that hold--or should continue to hold--the Atlantic alliance together. And he does a fine job of stating the case for a Community open to all democracies, and for attracting all countries to what he calls "Free World" (not the Free World). He looks at all important points of view on both continents and quite fairly (more so than I am able) dissects them all and searches profoundly well for the common ground. He is particularly good on the common task of all the rich democracies: attacking both economic and political underdevelopment much more vigorously and intelligently.

In short, if you are interested in the world future of democracy, or the parlous but not irretrievable state of the Atlantic alliance, and in reasoned but sensible optimism, this is a book for you.