Culture | Free speech

A right, not a duty

A British scholar makes a timely and forceful case for freedom of expression

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World. By Timothy Garton Ash. Yale University Press; 491 pages; $30. Atlantic Books; £20.

ON MARCH 31st Jan Böhmermann, a German comedian, read out a satirical poem on live television. He had admitted beforehand that the verses—in which Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, is described as a zoophile and paedophile, among much else—would land him in trouble. He was right: Mr Böhmermann may now face charges under an arcane German law which criminalises insults against foreign heads of state. Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor, may repeal the law, but not before the authoritarian Mr Erdogan has been able to exploit it.

Mr Böhmermann’s case makes the publication of “Free Speech” by Timothy Garton Ash, an academic at Oxford University, particularly timely. In 2011 Mr Garton Ash created freespeechdebate.com with students at his university. Before that, he had personal experience of how free speech can be curtailed while travelling in eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall: he describes a Polish censor’s verdict he received in 1989 for an article on the “total bankruptcy” of socialism, and watching a woman swallow a piece of cigarette paper after asking him to memorise the message on it, eating her words. The result is a powerful, comprehensive book.

The starting point of “Free Speech” is twofold: that increasing urbanisation and the spread of the internet makes the world a “global city”. This has increased the possibilities for freedom of expression, but also the consequences that stem from it. A video posted online in one country can be found offensive in another, years later, and lead to protests and violence.

Mr Garton Ash argues forcefully that despite, or perhaps because of, these trends there is an increasing need for freer speech, and that “unnoticed by many of us, a great power struggle over the shape, terms and limits of global freedom of expression is raging around us, inside that box in your pocket and perhaps even inside our heads.” The book is organised around ten sensible “principles”, among them that everyone should be able to express themselves; that they should not threaten violence; that there should be a free press and that people should be able to protect their privacy.

Mr Garton Ash goes to the Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco and gives talks on free speech just off Tahrir Square in central Cairo. He writes about the “trigger warning” and “no platforming” debates taking place in universities such as Oxford. The role of the state, in enforcing hate-speech laws and invading people’s privacy, is probed and found wanting. Examples abound of people whose speech has been curbed: from dissidents in China being locked up or harassed to anticlerical writers in Europe being prosecuted under blasphemy or hate-speech laws.

Mr Garton Ash does not call for total freedom of speech. He believes child pornography should be banned, for example, and that those who post “revenge porn” should be prosecuted. Overall he makes the case that people have a right, but not a duty, to offend. Better education and a more civil society should help people become more tolerant of one another, and also of their differences. The alternative is a higher degree of state intervention that would stoke resentment, particularly among young people, and end up isolating people from each other. “Only with freedom of expression”, he argues, “can I understand what it is to be you.”

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "A right, not a duty"

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