Timothy Garton Ash is the author of Homelands: A Personal History of Europe and writes the newsletter History of the Present. His upcoming book, Europe in 7½ Chapters, will be published in October 2026.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Timothy Garton Ash discuss the crisis of Labour and rise of Reform, why Europeans are struggling to adapt to a new political, cultural, and technologic...
Analyzing news articles and academic research, the authors explore how political polarization leads to the rise of extremist groups and ideologies in various countries. They identify patterns of sectarianism in the Netherlands and Turkey, where environmental activism is led by urban, highly educated, and bourgeois individuals with deeply conservative social policies. The article suggests that this development poses significant challenges to democratic norms, social cohesion, and pluralism.
The a...