F*ck Europe/Canada. What I like about our country is we don't follow the herd and never have. We LEAD.
Hamburgers yes, federalism no
By MARK STEYN
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'Europe and America," said President George W. Bush in Ireland on Saturday, "are linked by the ties of family, friendship, and common struggle and common values."
Bush seems to have quite a common struggle articulating what those common values are. In Prague in 2002, he told fellow NATO members, "We share common values – the common values of freedom, human rights, and democracy." In a post-communist world, these are vague, unobjectionable generalities. It's when you try to flesh them out that it all gets more complicated.
Here's another way to look at it: America, almost in inverse proportion to its economic and military might, is culturally isolated. I know, I know – you've read a thousand articles about America's "cultural dominance." And that's fine if you mean you can fly around the world and eat at McDonald's, dress at The Gap, listen to Britney Spears, and go see Charlie's Angels 3 pretty much anywhere on the planet. But so what?
The Merry Widow was both a blockbuster sensation on Broadway and Hitler's favorite operetta. It's not enough. And on the things that matter – which, no disrespect, Miss Spears doesn't – the gap between America and the rest of the world is wider than ever. If you define "cultural dominance" as cheeseburgers, America rules. But in the broader cultural sense, it's a taste most of the world declines to pick up.
Take, for example, the weekend's main events for geopolitical jet-setters: the EU-US summit in Ireland and the NATO summit in Turkey. The US spends 3.4% of GDP on defense, the other NATO members spend on average 1.9%. So if they do share common values, Europe's prepared to spend a lot less defending them.
As for the EU, Bush urged them to admit Turkey as a member. Good idea, but who's the president to propose it? In the unlikely event the United States wanted to join the EU, it would be ineligible. Why? Because "Europe" has ruled that abolition of the death penalty is a prerequisite of admission to the club. Thus, as I once pointed out to a distinguished senator, the US is ineligible to enjoy the benefits of EU membership. "Thank God for that," he said.
Unfortunately for Chris Patten and the other Eurograndees who turn up in Washington to lecture the administration on capital punishment every year, "America" doesn't have the death penalty, so "America" can't abolish it. Some individual states have the death penalty, others don't. Some that do don't use it, others use it a lot. Fifty American states are free to go their own way in this area. As I'm sure Louise Woodward – Britain's celebrated killer nanny from a couple of years back – would be the first to confirm, if you kill a baby in America, make sure you do it in Massachusetts rather than Texas.
SO THIS isn't an argument about the death penalty so much as one about the limits of democracy. The difference is that the popular sovereignty of American federalism allows local majorities to prevail, whereas in Europe the governing class decides the issue supranationally over the heads of the people.
If these are "common values," the two sides apply them in fundamentally different ways to the point where the principal European entity regards America as civilizationally beyond the pale. On a raft of other issues, from guns to religion, America is also the exception. In North American terms, it's Canadian ideas, from socialized health care to confiscatory taxation, that are now the norm in the other Western democracies and, alas, in many of the emerging democracies.
In the face of this rejection of the broader American culture, the popularity of Tom Hanks isn't much consolation. If one compares today's hyperpower with its 19th-century predecessor, Britain exported its language, law, and institutions around the world to the point where today there are dozens of countries whose political and legal cultures derive principally from London. On islands from the Caribbean to the South Pacific, you can find miniature Westminsters proudly displaying their maces and Hansards.
But if England is the mother of parliaments, America's a wealthy spinster with no urge to start dating. In the wake of September 11, some of us argued that, as "American imperialism" was already a universal slur of the Euroleft, Washington might as well make it a formal reality. In return, The Boston Globe pointed out that when you scratched the surface, the so-called American imperialists boiled down to a couple of Brits and a cabal of sinister Canadians (Bush "axis of evil" speechwriter David Frum, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, Kennedy School professor Michael Ignatieff, and yours truly) trying to force our pith-helmeted retro fantasies on Washington. Real Americans, it seems, don't have an imperialist bone in their body.
The British historian Niall Ferguson attributes this to what he calls "America's attention deficit disorder": its decentralized political system makes it difficult to muster the will for full-fledged long-term nation-building; the United States is the first global hegemon whose natural instinct is to load up the SUV and go to the beach. I would say it's also the case that many Americans feel that they came to their conclusions about the value of liberty on their own and that other peoples should, too.
Of course, they had the advantage of starting out as British subjects. Nonetheless, that's one reason why they're relatively relaxed about Iraq. If the Iraqis want a free society badly enough, they'll stick with it; if they don't and they take the easy option of falling for some benign strongman, that's their problem, not America's.
While this might be philosophically admirable, the practical drawback is that power abhors a vacuum. If America won't export its values – self-reliance, decentralization – others will export theirs.
Almost all the supranational bodies – from the EU to the International Criminal Court – are, if not explicitly hostile to American values, at the very least antipathetic to them. And if you're an emerging democracy seeking the favor of these bodies, you naturally find yourself inclining to their way of looking at things – as, say, Guinea did in the run-up to the Iraq war.
This, too, is historically unprecedented. Multilateral institutions set up and largely funded by America are now one of the major causes of American isolation.
Another paradox: American garrisons not rebellious colonies but sovereign allies, so they can spend their tax revenues on luxuriant welfare programs rather than tanks and aircraft carriers and thereby exacerbate further the differences between America and the rest of the free world.
In the Eighties, Paul Kennedy warned the US of "imperial overstretch." But the danger right now is of imperial understretch – of a hyperpower reluctant to sell its self-evidently successful inheritance to the rest of the world. Platitudes about "common values" are all well and good, but in determining the shape of the century ahead it's the differences that will prove decisive.
The writer is senior contributing editor for Hollinger Inc.
It would be quite ironic if Ireland considered Americans to be beyond the pale.
That Ireland seems to favor Clinton over Bush says much about its national character. Perhaps, as some in my family insist, the best of the Irish really did emigrate to the U.S a long time ago.
Why don't you do FR two favors by ceasing to post Steyn excerpted?
1. Stop wasting bandwidth by a partial post that is added to by another poster with the whole article, then added to many times over by the comments of people who are so grateful when the whole thing is posted on your partial thread
2. Stop aggravating the clientele by a partial post when a full post is allowed
Well, what say you?? Can you either post the whole nine yards, or leave it alone?