Article. The west's blurred vision
Posted: 2003-03-10 04:14am
The West's blurred vision
Paul Kelly
March 08, 2003
EUROPEANS and Americans no longer share a common view of the world. This thesis of US writer Robert Kagan seems to be right. The Franco-US dispute transcends Iraq and mirrors different conceptions of the 21st-century world.
The most influential article in the US and Europe this past year was Brussels-based Kagan's 2002 warning (in Prospect magazine) that Americans and Europeans belong to different worlds, that "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus".
Kagan's prophetic article (now published as a book), written before the UN Security Council crisis, argues that "on the all-important question of power – the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power – American and European perspectives are diverging".
French President Jacques Chirac takes as his text the rejection of military force to disarm Iraq – the exact solution George W. Bush proposes. At his media conference yesterday, Bush signalled he would confront the Franco-German-Russian axis over Iraq: the US will demand a vote over the new resolution.
Europe must buckle or take a historic stand to deny the legitimacy of US military action and possibly signal the end of the Western alliance.
This crisis recalls a 1993 Foreign Affairs article by Australia's Owen Harries that predicted the collapse of the West. He argued that the Western strategic alliance, only 50 years old, was a product of the Cold War, which imposed a unity upon Western states that had usually disagreed with each other. With the common enemy gone, it was "extremely doubtful" whether the alliance would survive.
Harries said the idea of the West as an entity was "wrong in itself". It confused a common civilisation with a common political unity. History showed the concept of a "political West" was attractive to Europe only when Europe was in danger. The West was linked in Europe's mind with subordination, an unacceptable fate for proud peoples.
Kagan writes: "It is time to stop pretending that Americans and Europeans share a common view of the world. Europe is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and prosperity, the realisation of Kant's 'perpetual peace'. The US, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the 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. This state of affairs is not transitory, the product of one election or one catastrophic event. The US and Europe have parted ways."
Despite US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's cut-through "old and new" Europe line, the philosophy of the Franco-German axis on which the European Union is built is not likely to dissipate. Yes, the EU contains different views and will incorporate more nations – yet new nations may also be absorbed into the prevailing EU ideology. Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder have gone beyond opposing Bush's Iraq policy: they have become popular heroes stoking anti-Americanism at home.
In Europe the Bush administration is depicted as a disreputable caricature that still believes in good vs evil, a righteous Christian God worshipped by a President who prays, the power of the nation-state, solutions not process, war in the national interest, battlefield death for a just cause and a market-based liberal order.
The insults are returned. Oxford University's Timothy Garton Ash describes (New York Review of Books, February 13) the corresponding anti-European stereotype in the US: "Europeans are wimps. They are weak, petulant, hypocritical, disunited, duplicitous, sometimes anti-Semitic and often anti-American appeasers. Their values and their spines have dissolved in a lukewarm bath of multilateral, transnational, secular and postmodern fudge."
In a recent Washington Post article Kagan laments the descent of the European mind: "In London where Tony Blair has to go to work every day, one finds Britain's finest minds propounding in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the 'neoconservative' (read: Jewish) hijacking of US foreign policy. In Paris all the talk is of oil and 'imperialism' (and Jews)."
He concludes that "in Europe this paranoid, conspirational anti-Americanism is not a far Left or far-Right phenomenon – it's the mainstream view. When Schroder campaigns on an anti-American platform, he's talking to the man and woman on the street."
Kagan's thesis is compelling, over-drawn yet defective. He puts too much emphasis on military force, attributing the split to US strength and EU weakness. He argues that the US propensity to use its military power is matched by Europe's aversion to military force. As a result Europe wants to construct a world where it can "multilateralise" US military power to the point of delegitimising that power.
Enter Iraq.
What is the Chirac-Schroder objective? They have split the alliance, alienated Bush and threatened the utility of the UN to save Saddam Hussein and let him keep his weapons. Where is the logic? It lies in their assertion of a European moral and strategic position. They have the ability to discredit the US attack, provoke global protests against Bush, increase their own popularity and even destroy pro-Bush leaders such as Blair.
Yet there is a bigger message at the heart of their aims: they will have denied moral legitimacy to the US attack – and this act of pre-emption desperately needs such legitimacy. They will have shown the US that Europe's soft power of rules and process and regulations is a weapon against the US's hard power, a more potent weapon that Kagan grasps.
They will also send a strategic message. Within the Harries framework it is that Europe no longer feels threatened. The US may be at war after September 11, but Europe is not. And because Europe feels no threat, it has far less strategic need to maintain the Western alliance when the US adopts a new brand of military assertion.
But it doesn't stop here. The US-EU split reflects a conflict over the best way to organise the international system. This is the coming global debate.
It is a debate with great consequences for Australia; a conflict between the EU philosophy of imposed transnational rules based on Europe's values and the US belief in an order of liberal-democratic nation-states each realising an individual destiny.
Paul Kelly
March 08, 2003
EUROPEANS and Americans no longer share a common view of the world. This thesis of US writer Robert Kagan seems to be right. The Franco-US dispute transcends Iraq and mirrors different conceptions of the 21st-century world.
The most influential article in the US and Europe this past year was Brussels-based Kagan's 2002 warning (in Prospect magazine) that Americans and Europeans belong to different worlds, that "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus".
Kagan's prophetic article (now published as a book), written before the UN Security Council crisis, argues that "on the all-important question of power – the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power – American and European perspectives are diverging".
French President Jacques Chirac takes as his text the rejection of military force to disarm Iraq – the exact solution George W. Bush proposes. At his media conference yesterday, Bush signalled he would confront the Franco-German-Russian axis over Iraq: the US will demand a vote over the new resolution.
Europe must buckle or take a historic stand to deny the legitimacy of US military action and possibly signal the end of the Western alliance.
This crisis recalls a 1993 Foreign Affairs article by Australia's Owen Harries that predicted the collapse of the West. He argued that the Western strategic alliance, only 50 years old, was a product of the Cold War, which imposed a unity upon Western states that had usually disagreed with each other. With the common enemy gone, it was "extremely doubtful" whether the alliance would survive.
Harries said the idea of the West as an entity was "wrong in itself". It confused a common civilisation with a common political unity. History showed the concept of a "political West" was attractive to Europe only when Europe was in danger. The West was linked in Europe's mind with subordination, an unacceptable fate for proud peoples.
Kagan writes: "It is time to stop pretending that Americans and Europeans share a common view of the world. Europe is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and prosperity, the realisation of Kant's 'perpetual peace'. The US, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the 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. This state of affairs is not transitory, the product of one election or one catastrophic event. The US and Europe have parted ways."
Despite US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's cut-through "old and new" Europe line, the philosophy of the Franco-German axis on which the European Union is built is not likely to dissipate. Yes, the EU contains different views and will incorporate more nations – yet new nations may also be absorbed into the prevailing EU ideology. Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroder have gone beyond opposing Bush's Iraq policy: they have become popular heroes stoking anti-Americanism at home.
In Europe the Bush administration is depicted as a disreputable caricature that still believes in good vs evil, a righteous Christian God worshipped by a President who prays, the power of the nation-state, solutions not process, war in the national interest, battlefield death for a just cause and a market-based liberal order.
The insults are returned. Oxford University's Timothy Garton Ash describes (New York Review of Books, February 13) the corresponding anti-European stereotype in the US: "Europeans are wimps. They are weak, petulant, hypocritical, disunited, duplicitous, sometimes anti-Semitic and often anti-American appeasers. Their values and their spines have dissolved in a lukewarm bath of multilateral, transnational, secular and postmodern fudge."
In a recent Washington Post article Kagan laments the descent of the European mind: "In London where Tony Blair has to go to work every day, one finds Britain's finest minds propounding in sophisticated language and melodious Oxbridge accents the conspiracy theories of Pat Buchanan concerning the 'neoconservative' (read: Jewish) hijacking of US foreign policy. In Paris all the talk is of oil and 'imperialism' (and Jews)."
He concludes that "in Europe this paranoid, conspirational anti-Americanism is not a far Left or far-Right phenomenon – it's the mainstream view. When Schroder campaigns on an anti-American platform, he's talking to the man and woman on the street."
Kagan's thesis is compelling, over-drawn yet defective. He puts too much emphasis on military force, attributing the split to US strength and EU weakness. He argues that the US propensity to use its military power is matched by Europe's aversion to military force. As a result Europe wants to construct a world where it can "multilateralise" US military power to the point of delegitimising that power.
Enter Iraq.
What is the Chirac-Schroder objective? They have split the alliance, alienated Bush and threatened the utility of the UN to save Saddam Hussein and let him keep his weapons. Where is the logic? It lies in their assertion of a European moral and strategic position. They have the ability to discredit the US attack, provoke global protests against Bush, increase their own popularity and even destroy pro-Bush leaders such as Blair.
Yet there is a bigger message at the heart of their aims: they will have denied moral legitimacy to the US attack – and this act of pre-emption desperately needs such legitimacy. They will have shown the US that Europe's soft power of rules and process and regulations is a weapon against the US's hard power, a more potent weapon that Kagan grasps.
They will also send a strategic message. Within the Harries framework it is that Europe no longer feels threatened. The US may be at war after September 11, but Europe is not. And because Europe feels no threat, it has far less strategic need to maintain the Western alliance when the US adopts a new brand of military assertion.
But it doesn't stop here. The US-EU split reflects a conflict over the best way to organise the international system. This is the coming global debate.
It is a debate with great consequences for Australia; a conflict between the EU philosophy of imposed transnational rules based on Europe's values and the US belief in an order of liberal-democratic nation-states each realising an individual destiny.
