My Top Three Books — Jan Techau
CEPA Fellows recommend their top three books.
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Jan Techau is a Senior Fellow with the Transatlantic Defense and Security program at the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA). He is the Director of Europe at the Eurasia Group.. Jan served as the head of speechwriting for three ministers in the German Ministry of Defense from 2020 to 2023. He was the Director of Carnegie Europe from 2011-2016 .
Inventing the Individual by Larry Siedentop: (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014)
Siedentop, an Oxford Historian, describes how the fundamental Christian idea of the equality of all souls before God triggered the unparalleled, perennially challenged, and ever-unfinished march of ideas toward the core of what makes the West: individual liberty.
The book’s narrative ends where most histories of the West start, around 1500 AD. By then, all the ingredients of modern Western society were in place and ready to be put on steroids by the Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation. Many of today’s hyper-charged debates appear in a different light after reading this genuinely view-changing book.
The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (Secker & Warburg 1953)
Why do educated, intellectually refined, freedom-loving people fall for the temptations of illiberalism? Why do they become defenders of totalitarian rule and the brutality and inhumanity that come with it? Milosz, a Pole born in Lithuania and active in the underground battle against the Nazi occupiers, joined the Polish government after World War II as a diplomat and witnessed first-hand how the well-meaning assist the ill-inclined in turning liberty into tyranny. A timeless study of how freedom dies because smart people willingly trade independent thought for ideological belonging.
In Europe’s Name by Timothy Garton-Ash (Knopf Doubleday 1993)
During the second half of the 20th century, the German question that had kept European diplomats and soldiers busy for centuries was finally resolved: first by defeating Hitler, then by partitioning the country, and finally by re-uniting it within NATO. Garton-Ash, Britain’s finest chronicler of all things German, tells this story from the Yalta conference of 1945 through the diplomatic weeds of the Cold War to the 2+4 Treaty that sealed unification in 1990. This book, still the unmatched reference on the subject, is key to understanding modern Germany – and the power and utility of Pax Americana.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position or views of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis.
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