Posted on 01/02/2003 2:54:41 PM PST by knighthawk
If 2001, that annus horribilis, was the year of Western unity in the face of terror, then 2002 appeared to herald a schism between America and Europe. As Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace put it in a groundbreaking article for Policy Review, "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus."
"It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world," Kagan warned. The Europeans, it seems, are realizing Kant's fantasy world of Perpetual Peace, a place wherein international law, international conventions and international opinion settle disputes. Negotiation, persuasion and diplomacy are their preferred methods of adjudication. The Americans, in contrast, are mired in history, "exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defence and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might."
Kagan concluded that the Europeans, past masters at Machtpolitik, had plumped for Kantianism not solely because of their dearly, if newly, held principles but also out of weakness. Militarily emasculated states (or transnational entities, such as the European Union), which have spent their money on social welfare rather than upgrading their ramshackle defence forces, have little choice but to truckle to any old tyrant causing a ruckus. America, on the other hand, is the world's top dog and needs to show it in order to maintain global order. It was the other way around in the 19th century, when Europe's throned powers reigned and Washington advanced its interests through evasion and diplomacy even as it criticized Europe's atavistic reliance on martial sway.
Why was this divergence not apparent before? The transatlantic power gap was disguised by the American nuclear umbrella during the Cold War, when both halves of the West were threatened by the same foe, but the disappearance of the Communist menace has allowed Europeans the luxury of enjoying continental peace without having to pay for their own defence. The Americans, however, are denied that pleasure: With their far-flung commitments, they are obliged to take care of enemies still living in a Hobbesian, death-drunk universe: the Islamists and Kim Jong Ils of this world.
Kagan, an American, is pretty sanguine about the divergence: The Europeans can be marginalized, even as they impotently whinge about "unilateralism," while the U.S. manfully shoulders the burden of running the world.
Kagan's piece was widely read on both sides of the Atlantic, with many commentators acknowledging that they agreed, at least partly, with his diagnosis. Pascal Lamy, the European Union's trade commissioner, thought the article "a very good one," for instance, and there have been several conferences and magazine issues devoted to the subject (the most recent being The American Enterprise's December issue on "Continental Drift").
When it comes to Kagan's prognosis, however, interpretations differ. In Washington, liberals such as James O'Brien, President Clinton's former presidential envoy to the Balkans, felt that while Europe and the U.S. "belonged" together, President Bush was doing his best to split them by "striking out alone." This is, put briefly, the European view, according to which the Yankee rough-riders persist in acting macho despite selfless attempts by the Euros to civilize them. Bush, it follows, needs to begin acting like a good social democrat and follow the rules.
While most conservatives similarly envisaged Europe and America as two peas in a pod, they pinned the blame for the divergence on the continentals: cursed with a "sovereignty deficit," said Christopher Caldwell of the Weekly Standard, Europe "cannot get its act together on defence and foreign policy," thus making it inevitable that "unilateralism is our only option." He speaks the truth. With a few honourable exceptions, European militaries have been left by welfarist governments to decay into clanking wrecks, as has happened in Canada. The American armed forces are quantum leaps ahead of their European counterparts in terms of technology, weaponry, capability, projection -- everything -- and the gap is widening. If anything, European "participation" in a war nowadays has become more of a hindrance than a help.
Others on the left and right sense divorce is on the cards, and cheer. Bilious anti-Americanism in Europe, for instance, is rising to an alarmingly high level, and in the U.S., insults directed at the Europeans' cravenness, hypocrisy and capriciousness can often be heard. For Americans, the "unilateralist" taunt sticks particularly in the craw: the EU habitually circulates preachy proposals -- hammered out cynically in a Brussels backroom, on biological warfare, landmines, the environment and the International Criminal Court -- that do not take into account America's unique global responsibilities. When the U.S. naturally cavils at some of the provisions, the Europeans go straight ahead and publicly announce that the EU backs the plan, making America look like the bad guy. Talk about unilateralism. And what about France's addiction to disguising her steely raison d'état in the raiment of sanctimonious morality?
Fed up, Andrew Sullivan counselled Europe to "grow up and join in -- or pipe down and let us do it," while Jonah Goldberg declared in The American Enterprise that "Europe is not the future," and dismissed the "continent's horde of bureaucrats, journalists, literati and activists" as a bunch of "whiners and complainers" unable to grasp "that they are now the backseat drivers of history." Bons débarras, mes amis.
But, no matter how annoying they can be, should Europeans be written off as irrelevant and effete? To do so would be unwise in the long run, argue other conservative Atlanticists such as John Hulsman of the Heritage Foundation, precisely because Europe is -- at the moment, but perhaps only for this moment -- irrelevant and effete. Certainly, "on matters relating to the International Criminal Court, on trade, on the axis of evil, through death penalty arguments, to the war on terror, whether to engage Iran or not, on how to set up economies or how to set up political systems, we are living different ideals," but Europe is nevertheless groping its way toward blending its disparate nations into an immense continental economic and political union. In a generation or two, this behemoth might shed its harmless Kantianism and evolve into a first-rank rival to the United States, by then also facing a possible challenge from China.
Clearly, it is better for Europe and America to cleave together than be cleaved apart over a few differences. Those differences, however, admittedly have the potential to flare into burning friction unless we cease talking in universals like "Europe," "Europeans," "America" and "Americans." Throughout this article, I've been guilty of doing so for the sake of convenience, but as John O'Sullivan of UPI and the Washington-based New Atlantic Initiative points out, this shorthand obscures the very real divisions within "Europe" and "America."
First, the British, the Eastern Europeans, Italians and Spaniards do not subscribe to the congenitally anti-American Franco-German party line now dominating European Union policy. Just as Europe is regarded as a worthy ally in America for the most part, the U.S. has firm friends there: By no means is all of Europe keen on splitting from Washington or convinced as to the merits of perpetual peacefulness. A lot of Red-White-and-Blue "European" conservatives and moderates are distinctly unenthusiastic about the prospect of supra-national entities haughtily lording over elected legislatures, let alone the distasteful habit of the "transnational progressives" -- Tranzis is an apt truncation -- of demonizing any display of patriotism as "fascist."
Similarly, not all Americans are sold on the "Hobbesian" principles of strong borders, military power, national identity and sovereign independence. Significant numbers of Tranzis in the media, the academy and the professional activist class urge the U.S. to outgrow its vulgar, populist nationalism and join the "global community." In this respect, nary a hair's breadth distinguishes American liberal Democrats from European social-democrats; the Manichaean vision of Europe vs. America is a trifle melodramatic.
As Jonathan Rauch at the moderate Brookings Institution notes, a rather more revealing analysis would focus on the gulf between the views of American/European publics and those held by mostly unaccountable American/European elites. The latter are generally far to the left of the voters, which explains why anti-Americanism -- from the Vietnam war demos of the 60s and 70s, to the early 80s, when some Europeans protested U.S. plans to introduce intermediate-range missiles and favoured unilateral nuclear disarmament, to the present, when the college kiddies come out to play post-modern grievance politics --has frequently been an elite, leftist preoccupation contemptuous of the general population.
Another reason for being a little suspicious of the divergence theory is that Europe does not really exist. The EU may try to make itself look, talk and sound like a united state, but it isn't one -- at least not yet. The Kagan argument assumes that the EU is a fait accompli, when in fact it is a work in progress and subject to radical alteration. Whereas the elites of France, Germany and the Benelux countries are keen on deeper integration into a world-class federal superstate controlled from Brussels (i.e., Paris, behind the scenes), their populations and those of Britain and other countries on the geographical outskirts want a decentralized, enlarged free-market model lacking the bulky Franco-German political baggage.
The twist here is that the U.S., now abuzz with concern over the fate of the Atlantic Alliance, incessantly encouraged deep European union over the past five decades precisely in order to seal Europe and America together. The easiest way to hamper Euro-inspired divergence is to cease supporting the evolution of an anti-American transnational entity, and instead galvanize pro-American advocates by working for, in O'Sullivan's words, "a decentralized, deregulated, free-trade Europe of nations," seeking closer bilateral ties with the U.S.'s European friends, and strengthening transatlantic institutions.
Who knows, 2003 might not be so bad after all.
If people want on or off this list, please let me know.
LOL!
'Europe', in its current non-wasteland, no-concentration-camp-death-oven, post-endless-state-of-war incarnation exists because we made it so.
Childish, egocentric, perverse, amoral fools that they are, they indulge themselves with the conceit that they're the authors of what little freedom they do have.
Well said.
Thank You
I think, to be more accurate, this worldview is largely illusory, a product of the American defense umbrella that is actually more than nuclear and always has been. Europe does not inhabit a world any different from the one in which fanatics funded and trained in the Middle East can crash buildings in New York City. It just hasn't had its collective nose rubbed in it lately. But if I am correct that is inevitable, and what worries me is the probable response given past behavior. Were somebody to crash the Eiffel Tower, for example, would the European response be one of anger against the perpetrators, or against the U.S. for "causing" the atrocity by virtue of its unenlightened foreign policy? Would anything shake the continentals out of this reflexive anti-Americanism or is it a permanent feature of the fantasy-land they inhabit?
ROFLMAO!
I fear you have something there. No matter what happens, America will be the bad guy.
You are, of course, entitled to your opinions. Still and all, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
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