[A-List] The U.S.-Europe Divide

[Sabri Oncu <soncu@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Kagan is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace and, among other things, a columnist at the
Washington Post on world affairs. There is a longer version of
this "U.S.-Europe Divide" article at

http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html

I just read an article by Ergin Yildizoglu in the Turkish daily
Cumhuriyet analyzing Kagan's Policy Review article but was not
expecting to see an adaption of Kagan's original in the
Washington Post almost simultaneously. Also see this

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/001
/279vnmvy.asp

by Kagan and Bristol at Weekly Standard. The above URL will break
so you won't be able to go there by clicking on the link. You
need to cut and paste. Kagan happens to be one of the
contributing editors of Weekly Standard, by the way. This Weekly
Standard article is a warning to Bush about his "backing off Iraq
invasion". It is a reminder to Bush that "they're still at war",
as Bush said on Thursay in Berlin. See the Guardian article below
if you want to read about this "back off":

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Archive/Article/0,4273,4421368,00.html


Again, this URL may break so you may not be able to go there by
clicking on the link. You need to cut and paste, if that happens.

Best,
Sabri

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The U.S.-Europe Divide

By Robert Kagan
Washington Post
Sunday, May 26, 2002; Page B07


President Bush is making a noble effort to pull together the
fraying alliance, but the fact is Europeans and Americans no
longer share a common view of the world. On the all-important
question of power -- the utility of power, the morality of
power -- they have parted ways. Europeans believe they are moving
beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and
transnational negotiation and cooperation. Europe itself has
entered a post-historical paradise, the realization of Immanuel
Kant's "Perpetual Peace." The United States, meanwhile, remains
mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian
world where international rules are unreliable and where security
and the promotion of a liberal order still depend on the
possession and use of military might. This is why, on major
strategic and international questions today, Americans are from
Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and
understand one another less and less.

Why the divergent perspectives? They are not deeply rooted in
national character. Two centuries ago American statesmen appealed
to international law and disdained "power politics," while
European statesmen spoke of raison d'etat. Europeans marched off
to World War I believing in power and martial glory, while
Americans talked of arbitration treaties. Now the roles have
reversed.

Part of the reason is the enormous shift in the balance of power.
The gap between the United States and Europe opened wide as a
result of World War II and has grown wider in the past decade.
America's unparalleled military strength has predictably given it
a greater propensity to use force and a more confident belief in
the moral legitimacy of power. Europe's relative weakness has
produced an aversion to force as a tool of international
relations. Europeans today, like Americans 200 years ago, seek a
world where strength doesn't matter so much, where unilateral
action by powerful nations is forbidden, where all nations
regardless of their strength are protected by commonly agreed
rules of behavior. For many Europeans, progress toward such a
world is more important than eliminating the threat posed by
Saddam Hussein.

For Americans, the Hobbesian world is not so frightening.
Unilateralism is naturally more attractive to those with the
capacity to act unilaterally. And international law constrains
strong nations more than it does the weak. Because of the
disparity of power, Americans and Europeans even view threats
differently. A person armed only with a knife may decide that a
bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger -- trying to kill
the bear is riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never
attacks. But a person with a rifle will likely make a different
calculation: Why should he risk being mauled to death if he
doesn't need to? Americans can imagine successfully invading Iraq
and toppling Saddam, and therefore more than 70 percent of
Americans favor such action, particularly after the experience of
Sept. 11. Europeans, not surprisingly, find the prospect
unimaginable and frightening.

But it is not just the power gap that divides Americans and
Europeans today. Europe's relatively pacific strategic culture is
also the product of its war-like past. The European Union is a
monument to Europe's rejection of the old power politics. Who
knows the dangers of Machtpolitik better than a French or German
citizen? As the British diplomat Robert Cooper recently noted,
Europe today lives in a "postmodern system" that does not rest on
a balance of power but on "the rejection of force" and on
"self-enforced rules of behavior." Raison d'etat has been
"replaced by a moral consciousness."

American realists may scoff, but within the confines of Europe
the brutal laws of power politics really have been repealed.
Since World War II European society has been shaped not by the
traditional exercise of power but by the unfolding of a
geopolitical miracle: The German lion has lain down with the
French lamb. The new Europe has succeeded not by balancing power
but by transcending power. And now Europeans have become
evangelists for their "postmodern" gospel of international
relations. The application of the European miracle to the rest of
the world has become Europe's new mission civilisatrice. If
Germany can be tamed through gentle rapprochement, why not Iraq?

This has put Europeans and Americans on a collision course.
Americans have not lived the European miracle. They have no
experience of promoting ideals and order successfully without
power. Their memory of the past 50 years is of a Cold War
struggle that was eventually won by strength and determination,
not by the spontaneous triumph of "moral consciousness." As good
children of the Enlightenment, Americans believe in human
perfectibility. But Americans from Donald Rumsfeld to Madeleine
Albright also believe that global security and a liberal order
depend on the United States -- that "indispensable nation" --
wielding its power in the dangerous, Hobbesian world that still
flourishes, at least outside Europe. Especially after Sept. 11,
most Americans remember Munich, not Maastricht.

The irony is that this transatlantic disagreement is the fruit of
successful transatlantic policies. As Joschka Fischer and other
Europeans admit, the United States made the "new Europe"
possible -- by leading the democracies to victory in World War II
and the Cold War and by providing the solution to the age-old
"German problem." Even today Europe's rejection of power politics
ultimately depends on America's willingness to use force around
the world against those who still do believe in power politics.
Europe's Kantian order depends on the United States using power
according to the old Hobbesian rules.

Most Europeans don't acknowledge the great paradox: that their
passage into post-history has depended on the United States not
making the same passage. Instead, they have come to view the
United States simply as a rogue colossus, in many respects a
bigger threat to the pacific ideals Europeans now cherish than
Iraq or Iran. Americans, in turn, have come to view Europe as
annoying, irrelevant, naive and ungrateful as it takes a free
ride on American power. This is not just a family quarrel. If
Americans and Europeans no longer agree on the utility and
morality of power, then what remains to undergird their military
alliance?

George W. Bush did not create these problems, and he alone won't
solve them. Indeed, there is no sure cure for this transatlantic
divergence. Those on both sides of the Atlantic who implore
Europe to increase its military capabilities are right -- though
a Europe that has so little belief in power is unlikely to spend
the money to get more of it. Those who ask Americans to show some
generosity of spirit, what the Founders called "a decent respect
for the opinion of mankind," are also right. The United States
should honor multilateralism and the rule of law when it can, and
try to build some international political capital for those times
when unilateral action is unavoidable. But even if it does, will
Europeans show the necessary tolerance for American power?

Whatever else we do, let's stop pretending that we agree. That
pretense has done little for the alliance since the end of the
Cold War than create more confusion, misunderstanding and anger.
Better that we should face our differences head on. That is the
necessary first step on the road to recovery.

The writer, a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, writes a monthly column for The Post. This
piece is adapted from an article in the June/July issue of Policy
Review.

Full at:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7629-2002May24.htm
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