Tim Garton-Ash on the elections in the Ukraine:

Can Europe’s velvet revolution claim another prize? When Ukrainian demonstrators on the frozen streets of Kiev place flowers in the perforated metal shields of their country’s riot police, they are sending us two desperate yet dignified messages: "We want to join Europe" and "We want to do this in a European way". Peacefully, that is, supplanting the old Jacobin-Bolshevik model of violent regime change with Europe’s new model of velvet revolution – as in Prague and Berlin in 1989, as in Serbia’s toppling of Milosevic, as in Georgia, where exactly one year ago the people’s president marched into parliament bearing a long-stemmed rose. If we, comfortably ensconced in the institutionalised Europe to which these peaceful demonstrators look with hope and yearning, do not immediately support them with every appropriate means at our disposal, we will betray the very ideals we claim to represent.

Just to clear the decks for a moment, of course the election was stolen, of course we should be supporting the overturn of these fraudulent results. However, is it really necessary to use this as a paen of praise for the European Union?

These days, the most fervent pro-Europeans are to be found at the edges of Europe, and none more so than westward-looking Ukrainians. It’s the European Union they hope one day to join, not the United States of America.

Actually, it’s in places like Kiev, rather than in Brussels, that you see what a great story Europe has to tell, if only we knew how to tell it. It’s the story of a rolling enlargement of freedom, from a position 60 years ago when there was just a handful of perilously free countries in Europe, and virtually the whole continent was at war, to a position today where there are only two or three seriously unfree countries in Europe, and almost the whole continent is at peace.

It’s that last little bit that worries me, as it has done all the way through the process of building the EU. Is Europe collectively freer than it was 60 years ago? Yes, of course. Is it freer than is was in 1973 when we joined the EEC? Yes, of course, Franco and Salazar are gone and the Iron Curtain is down. Freer than it was in 1992 when the European Union came into being? Ah, well….now we’re talking tricky things. Firstly, how much of the increase in freedom across Europe is actually due to the European Movement? How much  of a contribution did it make to the end of the rule of the Colonels in Greece? To Franco’s death? To the Portuguese Revolution? To the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Hegemony? Not a lot is the correct answer. That political Europe expanded during the same time is not proof, that is confusing correlation with causality. The second is to ask whether Europe has become freer since 1992? The list of things which people may no longer do continues to expand, the distance between the ruled and the rulers continues to grow….we all already had free elections in 1992, we all already had democracy, the rule of law, liberty, and now we cannot sell a curved banana, make apricot marmalade nor, in certain cases which have been compared to blasphemy, criticise the Commission. At present there is a European Commissioner who has been convicted of fraud and it is illegal to mention this in his home country, in Belgium the most popular political party has been banned, in England a method of pest control some centuries old has been banned…..these are advances in freedom?
My conclusion is rather different from Garton-Ass’….freedom has increased in Eruope over the past 60 years, despite not because of the European Union, and is now decreasing because of not in spite of the EU.
The reason so many on the periphery want to join is two fold: Their own systems are even worse, which is a good reason, and they don’t actually understand what is happening here in the Euro Wonderland, which is a bad reason.