"Canadians tend to be a bit more religious than most Europeans - though not more than the Poles or Ukrainians. Most important, their attitude to immigration and ethnic minorities is more positive than that of most Europeans"
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Garton Ash is doing something very European here: measuring national character with calibrated caveats, then sneaking a normative argument in through the side door. The opening move - Canadians are "a bit more religious" than "most Europeans", but not as religious as Poles or Ukrainians - isn’t idle sociological scene-setting. It’s a way of disarming the easy story that secularism automatically produces tolerance, or that religion necessarily blocks it. By isolating Poland and Ukraine, he also signals an Eastern European exception that Western Europeans often treat as an awkward appendix to the continent’s self-image.
The hinge is "Most important": a value judgment presented as a demographic observation. Canada’s comparative virtue is framed as an "attitude" - a soft metric with hard political stakes. It suggests that the real test of a liberal society isn’t church attendance but how it metabolizes difference. Underneath is a critique of Europe’s integration anxieties, where immigration is routinely coded as crisis and ethnic minorities as problem populations. Canada becomes the foil: a country often mythologized (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) as functional multiculturalism plus a confident national narrative.
Context matters: Garton Ash writes as a historian of European freedom and its failures, attentive to how institutions and myths shape everyday coexistence. The line reads like field notes from the liberal internationalist wing of the post-Cold War imagination: comparative, empirical in posture, quietly prescriptive in aim. It’s less "Canada is better" than "Europe, you could choose to be less defensive."
The hinge is "Most important": a value judgment presented as a demographic observation. Canada’s comparative virtue is framed as an "attitude" - a soft metric with hard political stakes. It suggests that the real test of a liberal society isn’t church attendance but how it metabolizes difference. Underneath is a critique of Europe’s integration anxieties, where immigration is routinely coded as crisis and ethnic minorities as problem populations. Canada becomes the foil: a country often mythologized (sometimes fairly, sometimes not) as functional multiculturalism plus a confident national narrative.
Context matters: Garton Ash writes as a historian of European freedom and its failures, attentive to how institutions and myths shape everyday coexistence. The line reads like field notes from the liberal internationalist wing of the post-Cold War imagination: comparative, empirical in posture, quietly prescriptive in aim. It’s less "Canada is better" than "Europe, you could choose to be less defensive."
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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