The book opens by brilliantly illuminating the political divisions in Britain between a Right that takes its stand with America and against Europe and a Left that argues the direct opposite. What makes Ash’s analysis of the current scene so enlightening is his account of the British identity crisis captured in the idea of ‘Janus-Britain’. Janus (the Roman god of doorways, passages and bridges) had two faces pointing in opposite directions, one at the front and one at the back of his head. Britain, Garton Ash argues, has four. The back and front faces can be labelled ‘Island’ and World’; the face on the left says ‘Europe’ and that on the right ‘America’. What Britain lacks but desperately needs is a minimal consensus about what story it wants to tell of itself, where it is and where it would like to be. The most complex, ambitious and promising path—the one Tony Blair is attempting to take and the one least represented by the press—is to try to pull America and Europe together.

The whole of the new enlarged Europe, the author argues, is engaged in a great debate between Euro-Gaullist and Euroatlanticist forces and on its outcome depends the future of the West. If the great EU project is to succeed and the problems of the Middle East and the developing world ever to be overcome then European and American partnership is our best hope. Garton Ash ends with a compassionate and intelligent set of suggestions plotting courses for the future. He insists that foreign policy is too important to be left to the people who govern us. It’s not that they’re all scoundrels it’s just that "half the time they don’t really know what they’re doing." Overall Free World is an outstandingly sensitive historical and political analysis written with a confident and imaginative authority. --Larry Brown