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From
the April 7, 2003, issue of National Review By John Fonte |
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t is time to
stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the
world, or even that they occupy the same world,” writes Robert Kagan in
the first sentence of this new book. “Americans,” he tells us, “are from
Mars and Europeans are from Venus”: While Americans (by necessity) are
mired in “history”—that is, in an “anarchic Hobbesian world” of power
politics—Europeans are entering the “post-historical paradise” of Immanuel
Kant’s “perpetual peace.” The book is an expansion of Kagan’s seminal
2002 Policy Review article, which caused a sensation among European
and American elites alike. (Javier Solana, the European Union’s foreign-policy
chief, sent the essay to leading strategists and diplomats, describing
it as must reading.)
Kagan argues that Europe and America are divided by a power gap and an ideology gap that “reinforce each other.” At the core of the division is an overwhelming disparity in military-technological power that has developed over the past decade as American defense budgets and advanced weaponry have dwarfed European military capabilities. The “psychologies of power and weakness” logically dictate that the stronger power (the U.S.) is more willing to use force to accomplish its goals than the weaker power (Europe).
Even more important than the power gap is the ideological split, in which the Europeans have “developed a set of ideals and principles regarding the utility and morality of power different from the ideals and principles of Americans.” The Europeans have consciously rejected the power politics (Machtpolitik) of their past. EU official Robert Cooper argues that Europe lives in a postmodern age in which “moral consciousness” has replaced Machiavellian statecraft.
Of course, Europe’s chief preoccupation of the past century was the “German problem.” Since the end of World War II a once aggressive Germany has been tamed and integrated into a peaceful Europe. Many Europeans like to believe that peace on the Continent has been achieved through the transformation of European consciousness, and through political and economic integration. Kagan deftly points out the great irony that the “military destruction of Nazi Germany was the prerequisite for the European peace that followed”: It is U.S. military power that has made it possible for Europeans to believe they live in a post-historical Kantian world of peace.
Nevertheless, European elites believe in the superiority of their new ideology and actively promote their vision in world politics, in competition both with older theories of international relations and—indirectly and sometimes directly—with American principles and interests. “Many Europeans,” Kagan writes, “believe” they have a new vision to offer the world, one based not on “power, but [on] the transcendence of power.” The president of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, insists that Europe “has a role to play in world ‘governance,’” which includes offering its own experience as a model for other regions. In the EU, Prodi declares, “the rule of law has replaced the crude interplay of power. . . . [By] making a success of integration we are demonstrating to the world that it is possible to create a method for peace.”
Kagan says this is the root cause of the split between the U.S. and Europe: America’s willingness to use its power is “a threat to Europe’s new sense of mission.” Any U.S. military action in Iraq that is carried out in a unilateral and “extralegal” manner (presumably, without U.N. approval) “even if successful is an assault . . . on Europe’s new ideals, a denial of their universal validity, much as the monarchies of 18th and 19th century Europe were an assault on American republican ideals.”
Kagan concludes that despite this divergence between the U.S. and Europe there is still a “West” that shares a common set of “aspirations for humanity.” Moreover, he agrees with the core premise of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” theory, that the age-old question of “how mankind might govern itself had been definitively settled in favor of the Western liberal ideal.” Kagan ends by recommending that the Europeans accept and support with good grace America’s prominent role in the world as a small price to pay for the preservation of their own peaceful “paradise.” At the same time, the Americans should show more “generosity of spirit” and “more understanding for the sensibilities of others.” Thus, U.S. foreign policy “could pay its respects to multilateralism and the rule of law.” These small steps will not close the divide between the U.S. and Europe completely, but a “little common understanding could still go a long way.”
But for all its skill, erudition, and reasoned argument (not to mention ironic thrusts sure to delight American readers), Kagan’s essay is ultimately unsatisfying. It obfuscates the core ideological issues facing the West: the problems of democracy and self-government, and the fate of the liberal-democratic nation-state.
Kagan tells us that “the new Europe” (which is to say, the EU) is a “miracle,” a “paradise,” and a “reason for enormous celebration” by Americans as well as Europeans. But EU Europe is not a cause for American celebration on the grounds of either Realpolitik or Moralpolitik. The governing structure of the EU—with its universally recognized “democracy deficit”—is a mostly unaccountable, unrepresentative hybrid regime that is, in reality, a post-democratic form of governance. Whatever it is, it is not “government by consent of the governed,” and it is morally inferior, not superior, to that great achievement of the West, the liberal democratic nation-state.
Moreover, as we have seen recently, in the practical world of international politics it is the liberal democratic nation-states of Europe—not the post-national EU—that have rallied to the support of the U.S. It was Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Denmark, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic that endorsed the U.S. stand on Iraq—in their capacity as democratic nation-states, in opposition (explicitly and implicitly) to the implied common European foreign and defense policy crafted by EU elites. Pace Kagan, the political integration of Europe does not, necessarily, “benefit” American foreign policy.
Instead of “celebrating” EU Europe, as Kagan suggests, we should be celebrating (and politically encouraging) democratic-nation-state Europe. The true “miracles” of post–World War II Europe are not the bureaucratic institutions of Brussels, but these functioning democracies. Let us celebrate and give support to self-government, not bureaucratic collectivism.
The Europeans are more divided than Kagan asserts; and perhaps the Americans are as well. Kagan says that many in the American intellectual elite are more “European” in their approach to power. But he does not examine the extent to which the American liberal-Left (including foreign-policy specialists, NGO activists, and elected officials) seeks to constrain America’s power and manipulate its democracy by empowering transnational institutions (such as the International Criminal Court) with the authority to make decisions that constitutionally reside with the American president, Congress, or the courts.
In a sense, two “Wests” are fighting for the soul of the Occident. There is the West of the liberal-democratic nation-state friendly to U.S. power, and there is the West of the post-national “progressive” coalition on both sides of the Atlantic that seeks to limit U.S. power (and, implicitly, democracy in both America and Europe).
Near the end of the book Kagan states that “Americans, as good children of the Enlightenment, still believe in the perfectibility of man, and retain hope for the perfectibility of the world.” On the contrary, the American Founders did not believe in the “perfectibility of man.” They created a constitutional republic based on the principles of federalism, the “separation of powers,” and “checks and balances” precisely because they—unlike the French revolutionaries—knew that human nature was flawed and that human beings were not perfectible. They did, of course, believe in improvement, and, as Madison put it in Federalist 55, “there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”
In the final analysis, Kagan’s Hobbes-vs.-Kant metaphor abandons the moral high ground to the EU ideologues. His essay fails to defend either the principles of America’s democratic constitutionalism against the challenge of EU Europe’s post-democratic governance (lauded as a “paradise”) or America’s friends in Europe who prefer to act within the context of the democratic nation-state rather than the strictures of Brussels. He also underestimates those elements in the American elite who, unable to contain American power through institutions of American democracy, increasingly turn to international law as a weapon to block American policy.
Throughout his career, Robert Kagan has been a severe critic of foreign-policy realists who emphasize the “balance of power” at the expense of morality, ideology, and principle. Yet in this book, Kagan’s emphasis is mostly on power, not morality or democracy. Thus, ironically, as the author of this text he is “objectively,” as Marxists used to say, a realist. Unfortunately, this leaves the crucial philosophical-ideological divisions within the West (the great issues of Moralpolitik) that are central to the U.S.–European controversy mostly unexplored.