Life & Wisdom Quote by Timothy Garton Ash

The line lands like a polite Brussels memo with a pin hidden inside it. Garton Ash is diagnosing a classic EU problem: once you treat identity as a set of flexible criteria, every decision becomes a precedent, and precedents breed claimants. Saying yes to Turkey (or even seriously entertaining it) isn’t just a diplomatic gesture; it stretches the EU's self-definition from a club with cultural-historical guardrails into a project with porous edges. The difficulty he points to isn’t procedural so much as existential: if membership is about values and institutions, why should geography matter at all? And if geography matters, how do you justify admitting one borderline case while rejecting another without admitting that the rules are partly vibes?

The subtext is a quiet critique of the EU’s habit of speaking in technocratic absolutes while acting on political instincts. “Clear and consistent grounds” is the language of accession chapters and rule-of-law benchmarks, but it also implies the opposite: that the grounds are neither clear nor consistent when the applicant forces the Union to reveal what it really is. The dry kicker - “general vicinity” - punctures the moral grandeur the EU likes to project. It’s a reminder that even the most post-national institution still needs a map, and that maps are arguments disguised as facts.

Context matters: post-Cold War enlargement turned the EU into Europe’s main identity-making machine. Turkey, and then “more remote candidates,” expose the stress fracture between a universalist story (“any democracy can join”) and a continental instinct (“Europe is, still, Europe”).