Victor Davis Hanson: More Continental Drift? - The rationale behind a new world order

victorhanson.com ^ | August 18, 2005 | Victor Davis Hanson

[NZerFromHK]

The new chasm between Europe and the United States seems to widen still — even as transatlantic diplomats assure us that it has narrowed — despite a common heritage and a supposedly shared goal of global democracy, free markets, and defeating terrorists. Europeans sell arms to autocratic China that will threaten democratic Taiwan. They legitimize the terrorists of Hamas and Hezbollah, and mostly caricature the American efforts at democratizing the Middle East. All this follows the past appeasement of Yasser Arafat, strife over the Kyoto protocols and the International Criminal Court, and the use of the United Nations to hamstring the United States in the war that followed 9/11.

What is behind this divide? Is it that the U.S. is militarily strong while the wealthy Europeans have made themselves essentially impotent — classic ingredients for deep-seated envy?

Or did the close of the Cold War bring an end to the shared purposes that used to paper over the cracks of innate cultural differences? Americans tend to wish for less government and more personal freedom. They are more religious, aggressive, and acquisitive. Europeans instead prefer statism and an enforced equality of result. Far more of them are irreligious, pacifist, and more interested in leisure than in national progress and personal wealth. Now that they have no fear of the Soviet army, they have little need for us — or so they think.

[Billthedrill]

Europe will not survive in the form envisioned in this article and there isn't a great deal we can do about it. The EU is as stone-dead as Stalin and for that the constituent countries should be breathing a collective sigh of relief.

So, for that matter, is the UN, and for the same reasons. In both cases the fantasy of a professional administrative class that acts as good shepherds for the Continent and the world respectively, has failed. In both cases the ability of a collective response to Islamic fascism has been dulled by corruption and a stubborn refusal to recognize a problem to which that class hasn't a solution.

Those countries who have recently thrown off the oppression of a centralized ruling class are in a somewhat different case. If there is a future for a Europe that does not resemble the EU, it is there. It is there that entrepreneurial capitalism is most free to create new wealth. It is there that a Thatcher or a Reagan will be possible. They are not possible in countries whose ruling classes subsume government, media, and trade union leadership. There the elite have won, and they're not going away, and it will take a social upheaval on the order of the French Revolution to dislodge them, and that is just not going to happen.

I am not, personally, optimistic that an Old Europe so shackled by comfort and vested interest will be able to make reforms necessary to compete in the economic or the military marketplace that is the rest of the world. It already bitterly resents the latter for existing.

[denlittle]

Thank you for that. I had never seen that before but I liked it so much that I will save it.

[dsc]

Dr. Joseph Warren, Boston Mass.

http://www.the-athenaeum.org/art/display_image.php?id=45503

[ckilmer]

Allow dissident Europeans to enjoy fast-track immigration to the United States. Welcoming folks from Europe who wish to join the American experience will send a powerful reminder to European elites that there were reasons their own people left their shores in the first place. Special warm immigration considerations for Europeans should replace the military alliances that used to knit us together.
I suspect that Europe is full of creative, risk-taking people stifled by the initiative-smothering welfare state and labor regulation. (I see some of them in my classes.) Before the Iraq war I heard someone say that the best revenge against Old Europe would be to double their immigration quotas. It's petty, but in my darker moments I'd like to vacuum out their best, brightest and most ambitious as much to smite them as to help us. In my brighter moments I'd like to do the same thing to push them to reform, except that I don't think it will be enough.
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Actually, an even greater danger than the mass illegal immigration over the border by mexicans--would be if the US took in European dissidents.

Think about it. Who are we talking about?

The most likely dissidents are Moslems. And as time goes on the likelyhood increases that they will be kicked out of europe IN MASS. The French have already deported moslem immans who were French citizens. The French simply revoked the citizenship papers of immans.

It would be a mortal blow to the USA if these people came to the USA. Why? Because the USA would be filled with their hated enemies. Christians and Jews.

From the moment the Moslesm stepped off the plane or the boat they would be looking to undermine and destroy this country.

[grey_whiskers]

Sounds like a cross between G.K. Chesterton's hymn O God of Earth and Altar and a poem by Dorothy Sayers, with the HUZZAH! thrown in from the old Maryland state anthem.

Cheers!

[King Prout]

the full article is well worth the read. thanks.

[metesky]

We must keep Europe in mind in all questions of U.N. reform. The European Union deserves one collective U.N. veto befitting its new transcontinental nationhood, not multiple votes as at present. India and Japan should assume their rightful places at the Security Council table next to the single European vote. And we should press for a General Assembly composed only of elected governments, rather than the present mix of democracies and rogue regimes that often look to Europe for tolerance, subsidies, and trendy anti-Americanism.

Three excellent ideas in one paragraph.

They would show the UN our resolve before we finally ditch the whole enterprise.

[kabar]

VDH's insights and observations are almost always right on point. Europe is undergoing great changes domestically and its relationship to the US is changing as well in the post Soviet Union world. We need a total reevaluation of the institutions and organizations, which arose from the end of WWII and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Europe is not a monolith. We need a policy of differentiation when it comes to dealing with countries like France and Poland.

The US has yet to come up with a strategic vision on the new world order.

[tkathy]

Could substitute "liberal" for "european" in much of the article and it would still be true.

[Valin]

"Proponents of the old transatlantic alliance shrug and say things will improve. Some allege that George Bush's cowboyism is to blame for the current rift. With a bit more astute diplomacy and softer voices


The problem is NOT "George Bush's cowboyism or the lack of "astute diplomacy and softer voices". It's that Europe and America took two differtnt lessoans from WWI & WWII. The lesson we took was, in order to have peace you must prepare for war, Europe took the lesson that war is bad and we must do everything to avoid it. Weather Europe will continus this wat for the long term remains to be seen. Ralph Peters wrote an interesting article on this (and other subjects) in a piece titled "Hidden Unities" . It can be found in
Beyond Baghdad
Postmodern War and Peace
By Ralph Peters

(from Townhall)
"Peters divides Beyond Baghdad into two parts: "Our Future" and "Our Wars". "Hidden Unities", the last essay in Part I, is the longest and deepest discussion of the "strategic environment" of the future. It is in this essay that Peters is at his most creative. His defining of "zones" and "states" is completely original, but also maddening. It is a unique and informed worldview with a dark underbelly. Aspects of Peters' religious, philosophical and historical perspectives can, and should be, challenged."

[JasonC]

One thing people don't understand about European society and economy and the interest pressures within it, is the enourmous social power and position of the idle rich. Who are not capitalist in our sense, and have no real connection to productive modern business. They have inherited million dollar apartments in Paris, vacation houses in the country, trust funds supplimenting government sinecures or no-work positions in corporations through family connections. They are modernist, liberal, pseudo-intellectual; they play at art or cultural pursuits, producing nothing substantive. Neither merit nor productivity have any connection to their position in life. Their lifestyle is the cultural ideal of large portions of the population.

[Just mythoughts]

Under Clintonism the Euros had confidence they would rival the US if not dominate US.

They are still in a deep state of shock that algore lost in 2000 and the UN their security blanket has been exposed for facilitating terrorist Saddam their secret partner.

[untenured]

Their lifestyle is the cultural ideal of large portions of the population.

Interesting. I am always struck by both the differing attitudes toward work in the two locations (an opportunity for achievement here, a necessary evil there) and the stark preference of Europeans to work in a secure position for someone else. Many Americans view starting a business as almost a personal declaration of independence.

In your view do the idle European rich to whom you refer have any great influence beyond being role models? Do they tend to dominate the governing classes, corporate boards, etc.?

Earth Last! Conservation as a Special Interest.

[Wallace T.]

Poland is a great nation in a horrible location. To both the east and the west lie larger countries (Germany and Russia) that have repeatedly invaded and conquered Poland. While the nation has deep water access through the Baltic Sea, Germany can easily block that access. While a shadow of its former Soviet power, the Russian Navy far surpasses anything Poland has.

The Poles saved Western Europe from Islam at the Battle of Vienna in 1681. The soldiers of that nation are well known for military courage in the face of desperate odds. However, Poland was dealt a poor hand with regard to its geography, with wide plains suitable for large scale hostile military forces to advance rapidly. In 1939, Britain and France could do nothing to prevent Hitler and Stalin from dividing Poland among themselves. At this point, American military power would be equally ineffective should a neo-Communist regime in Russia decide to restore the Warsaw Pact by conquering Poland.

Without a regime change in Germany to restore that country to a pro-American stance, an American alliance with Poland would benefit neither Poland nor the United States.

[Hornet19]

I absolutely love this man's brain and logic.

[JasonC]

Certainly. Scads of people work for them, directly or indirectly. They are consumers of intellectual opinion rather than inventors of it, but decide what is fashionable. They have no idea how wealth is actually created, because they have never had to. Intellectuals who are actually gifted want to pass one exam, get an easy job for working for the state whose requirements they can fufill in 2 hours each morning, and for the rest live like the privileged inheritor set, on the public payroll. A norm of opinionated useless leisure trickles down. People who actually work for a living, independently, are treated as slightly disreputable, although in my (limited, but recent) experience they are polite and conscientious by comparison.

[Grzegorz 246]

"Europeans sell arms to autocratic China that will threaten democratic Taiwan."

Really ? Who ? When ? What ? In last years the most important suppliers of military technology and equipment to China were Russia and Israel.