Politics & Power Quote by Timothy Garton Ash

“Always messy” is doing the real work here, because it refuses the comforting mythology of clean regime change. Timothy Garton Ash writes as a historian of Europe’s late-20th-century ruptures, someone who watched communism’s collapse up close and then kept watching what came after: the awkward bargains, the half-reformed institutions, the grudging coexistence of victims and former enforcers. The line is a preemptive strike against triumphalism, the idea that once ballots appear, brutality evaporates.

The intent is almost disciplinary: to train democratic romantics to expect moral compromise and procedural ugliness. When politics has been organized around violence - militias, secret police, insurgencies, state terror - those actors don’t just vanish when a constitution is drafted. They negotiate. They demand amnesties, posts, guarantees. The old habits of coercion linger inside new uniforms, and the new order often needs the old order’s expertise to keep the lights on. “Messy” also implies contested memory: justice versus stability, truth commissions versus forgetting, lustration versus reconciliation. Someone will experience “compromise” as betrayal.

Subtext: if you demand purity, you may get renewed violence. Democratic consolidation is less a moral victory lap than a managed de-escalation, with plenty of unsatisfying trade-offs. Contextually, Ash’s work sits in the long shadow of 1989 and its afterlives, and it reads even sharper against more recent cases where elections coexist with intimidation, corruption, and weak rule of law. The sentence is a warning dressed as realism: democracy isn’t born immaculate; it’s dragged into being by imperfect people trying to stop the killing without pretending the past never happened.