Clash of Civilizations
In the battle between America
and Europe,
we better hope that they prevail.
by Harold Meyerson
The American Prospect magazine,
April 2003
1. BUSH V. WORLD
George W. Bush may believe he has the
mandate of heaven for what, as I write, is still the looming war
in Iraq, but he's not doing very well on earth. Indeed, he's all
but unified the planet in opposition to the notion of a U.S.-led
preemptive war.
Governments that support the war do so
at their own risk. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair is in
danger of losing the support of his own party. In Spain, the Popular
Party of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar has fallen behind the
opposition Socialists for the first time in seven years. In Eastern
Europe- a particularly pro-American part of the world where most
governments back the U.S. position on Iraq-huge majorities nonetheless
reject the war: 75 percent of Poles, 82 percent of Hungarians,
76 percent of Czechs.
These numbers directly reflect the failure
of the administration to convince the world that Iraq poses the
kind of imminent threat that justifies a preventive war. But plainly
they also reflect a more fundamental rift than that, as the answers
to an international Gallup Poll taken in January make clear. When
respondents were asked whether American foreign policy had a positive
or negative effect on their countries, what was stunning was the
uniformity of their answers: In Spain, the margin was 57 percent
negative to 9 percent positive; in Russia, the margin was 55 percent
to 11 percent; in Argentina, 58 percent to 13 percent; in Pakistan,
46 percent to 8 percent.
This global rejection is breathtaking,
but not all that surprising. Under Bush, America has become a
hegemon with a chip on its shoulder, at once belligerent and xenophobic.
The United States has been seceding from a new world order of
interdependence that, until recently, it had helped construct.
At the very moment when the world's peoples have recognized the
need to build global institutions to deal with a global economy
and environment, with globalized crime and weapons proliferation
and stateless terrorism, the United States has arrogated to itself
the right to ignore and undermine those parts of the emerging
global architecture that fail to please its eye. In Bush's Washington,
the World Trade Organization (WTO) is good so long as U.S. investors
don't have profits diminished by onerous labor and environmental
standards; the Kyoto Protocol on global warming posed such a threat
and was rejected; the International Criminal Court was fine for
deterring other nations' war crimes but not our own; the Anti-Ballistic
Missile Treaty threatened a new Pentagon program and had to be
scrapped. The United Nations-well, we'll just have to see about
that.
And then there's the European Union, which
is well on its way to becoming a supranational entity-more than
a federation but not quite a state-that would be something new
in the world. At first glance this convergence of America's longtime
allies might not seem threatening to the United States. But of
all the entities aborning at the dawn of the 21st century, a unified
Europe poses the greatest threat to the unholy alliance of neoconservatives
and xenophobes who dominate the Bush administration. For them
the 21st century has already been stamped as American property.
The one obstacle in their path is Europe-an emerging power bloc
committed to a different kind of capitalism than ours and the
primary champion of the very global institutions that impede the
construction of an American-dominated order.
On the whole this is an assessment with
which Europe- masses and elites alike-concurs. As Michael Emerson
of the Centre for European Policy Studies has written, "Europe
understands that the future governance of this world has to be
some system of cosmopolitan democracy." And, he might have
added, Europeans understand that such a system will never win
the blessing of the Bush White House. (Indeed, it's hard to say
which of those notions troubles the administration more-a democratic
world order or a cosmopolitan one.)
And so, at the outset of the 21st century,
the battle between Europe and America for the power to shape the
century, and on behalf of different models of social organization,
is already joined. And may I gently suggest that the best possible
outcome for the American democratic republic-for the America of
Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt-would be an American
(or more precisely, Bushian) defeat. But not an unconditional
one.
11. EUROPE V. AMERICA
I doubt that many, if any, European leaders
at the time the Berlin Wall fell envisioned this clash. Though
many took umbrage when Francis Fukuyama proclaimed history's end,
the idea that Europe would be so fundamentally opposed to the
United States within a scant 14 years would have taken them by
surprise. The European left, after all, had long since acclimated
itself to capitalism; the socialists, social democrats and British
Laborites were all heirs of Eduard Bernstein, the fin de siecle
meliorative socialist for whom the very idea of a final conflict
was anathema.
In his new book Of Paradise and Power:
America and Europe in the New World Order ... Robert Kagan adduces
some of the reasons for the rift that has opened up within the
erstwhile Atlantic alliance. Kagan depicts a Europe enmeshed in
unification (and the worlds of diplomacy and social harmonization
that attend such a project) and an America that has chosen instead
to be the lone sentinel guarding against external threats and
disorder. He omits, however, any discussion of the diverging economic
visions and realities that increasingly separate the two great
continental democracies. He especially omits any thought that
the European model might be the more compelling.
When the Western alliance formed at the
conclusion of World War II, it was unified by more than a common
commitment to democracy and opposition to Soviet communism.
Until roughly the early 1980s and the
advent of Ronald Reagan, both Europe and America shared a commitment
to a mixed economy in which unions, government regulations, a
growing public sector and Keynesian economics all mitigated laissez-faire
capitalism's tendencies toward inequality and cycles of boom-and-bust.
The U.S. economy was never nearly as mixed as the European one-its
unions were less powerful, its public sector smaller, its health
insurance spotty, its family policy nonexistent-but from FDR through
Richard Nixon, the public sphere would, in fits and starts, expand.
Then the two economies began to diverge.
While the welfare state continued to grow in Europe, its already
smaller American version grew smaller still. Under constant attack
from business, U.S. unions went into steep decline, and the balance
of power within the Democratic Party shifted sharply toward business
and, more particularly, finance. Decent-paying blue-collar jobs
vanished by the millions in the states, and inequality grew steeply
here while continuing to decline in Europe. American firms elevated
shareholder value above all other indices of success (including
long-term profitability), European firms put more funding into
research and development and capital investment, and the productivity
rates of northern European nations surpassed ours. For better
and worse, the economic lives of Europeans remained stable while
Americans found themselves in an increasingly dynamic and Darwinian
economy.
European egalitarianism existed between
nations as well as within them. In the course of building a unified
Europe, the wealthier nations of northern Europe transferred resources
to their poorer cousins in the south: If they were to be in an
open market with Portugal and Greece, the pay scales and educational
standards of such nations would have to rise. Likewise, the nations
of northern Europe were the world's most generous when it came
to providing aid to developing nations on other continents.
For its part, the United States never
evinced much interest in the upward harmonization of other nations,
and the policies of the U.S.-dominated International Monetary
Fund (IMF) tended only to worsen recessions in the less developed
world. And in the National Security Strategy that the Bush administration
unveiled last summer, the United States created a new foreign-aid
program intended to remake the world more to its liking. Alongside
its traditional foreign-aid program, the White House announced
a grant program in which money would flow to those nations that
embraced the administration's economics (free markets, low marginal
tax rates, not much regulation).
If the United States is a force for global
laissez-faire, however, it would be a gross overstatement to say
that Europe is a force for global social democracy. Such figures
as Willy Brandt and Olof Palme, who provided crucial assistance
for the African National Congress and who quietly initiated the
steps that led to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, are gone
from the scene, and of today's generation of Euro leaders, only
a few-most notably German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer-show
much concern for the world beyond Europe. The United States may
dominate the IMF but it's hard to find a European finance ministry
that has taken issue with the fund's draconian remedies for financially
troubled developing nations.
Kagan argues that Europe is too inwardly
focused to pay heed to crises in distant lands that may require
a resolution involving armed force, and that advocating force
abroad while renouncing it at home seems beyond Europe's inclinations-
or capacities. But Europe's inwardness has also led it to champion
workers' rights at home while effectively dismissing them abroad.
Perhaps because European workers have been so much better protected
than their American counterparts from the shocks of the world
market, it is-at the level of national leadership at least-American
liberals more than Europeans who have stood up for labor and environmental
standards in the developing world. European governments have never
insisted that workers' rights be made a priority of the WTO, and
it was in the United States, not Europe, that opposition emerged
to China's unconditional entry to the WTO. The idea of a variable
international minimum wage is even now being advanced not by a
Scandinavian socialist but by a Missourian Democrat (Dick Gephardt).
The European challenge to the American
version of globalism, then, is a sometime thing. If Europe does
not provide much resistance to the rule of American laissez-faire
in global economics, however, it does provide in itself a model
for a more humane form of capitalism. And when other nations go
comparison shopping between the European and American models,
Europe tends to do pretty well. When the iron curtain crumbled,
the newly post-communist nations of Eastern Europe adopted Europe's
electoral and health systems rather than America's money-dominated
ones. All well and good for those revulsed by a society organized
around the principle of one dollar-one vote. But if workers outside
Europe are to experience the global economy as something other
than a race to the bottom, Europe must do more to apply its principles
beyond its borders.
111. EU AND WHOSE ARMY?
On matters of military force, Europe needs
to realize that it actually has conflicting principles. In late
January, I met in Brussels with some leading members of the European
Parliament, who explained why the notion of preemptive war was
particularly repugnant to them. (As if anyone representing a continent
that had experienced the preemptive wars of 1914 and 1939 needed
to explain that.) "All our experience leads us to say, 'Never
again' to war and holocaust," one legislator said. But holocausts
are seldom averted absent the use of force, and Europe's inability
to block the massacres of Bosnia and the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo
reveal the shortcomings of its nonmilitary preferences when faced
with a challenge to its own moral imperatives.
The policy of saying "no" to
America's unilateral use of preemptive force may be morally satisfying
and strategically sound. But it has failed to deter the United
States or to weaken Saddam Hussein's resistance to inspections,
which has eroded only under threat of imminent war. The alternative
to this war is inspection and containment, in the manner laid
out by former Clinton State Department official Morton H. Halperin
in these pages last year [see "Deter and Contain," TAP,
Nov. 4, 2002]: an aggressive inspection regime, in control of
all the skies over Iraq and with a mandate to destroy from the
air all buildings from which inspectors are denied entry by Hussein's
government.
But both these kinds of interventions
(Bosnia and Iraq), as well as more conventional conflicts, would
require of Europe some things it does not have: a rapid reaction
force and a will to use it. In the late l990s, Tony Blair and
French President Jacques Chirac called for establishing such a
force, but Europe's attention has been directed inward, and no
such force as yet exists. What's more telling is that the United
States, for all its claims that it would like more allies, is
dead set against such a force. Indeed, as the Cato Institute's
Christopher Layne has noted, the United States is arguing that
each European nation should develop some niche military capability
rather than have Europe develop an autonomous force. By the same
token, the United States encouraged the European Union to expand
eastward in hopes that the new nations would bring perspectives
widely variant from those of the western states. It has also voiced
concerns that in the preliminary plans for a European Constitution,
individual nations will not be able to veto a foreign policy agreed
upon by a majority vote. The White House's ability to pick off
a Blair here, a Berlusconi there, would be totally undermined.
In short, the United States has been conducting
a preemptive war against a unified Europe for some time now.
And yet the Bush and neocon model of an
America First century is either undesirable or unsustainable-or
both. Even if we accept the wholly implausible thesis that a U.S.
overthrow of Hussein and subsequent occupation and reconstruction
of Iraq would democratize the Middle East, for instance, the willingness
of the American people to support such a project would run counter
to the vision of a privatized America that the conservatives commend
here at home. The generation of Americans who supported the Marshall
Plan had themselves benefited from an activist government; they
were accustomed to a government that undertook major public works
and that put millions of Americans on public payrolls. Today,
state and local governments are slashing basic services while
the Bush administration is throwing money at the rich. Why, under
these conditions, conservatives expect Americans to pay for the
reconstruction of Iraq is anyone's guess. The kind of solidaristic
values and confidence in the public sphere needed to support such
an ambitious, enlightened project can be found today, ironically,
only in Europe.
Americans must hope that, in this era
of global integration, we are not at the brink of the American
century. If anything, the Europeans should take some time out
from perfecting Europe to project their values more forcefully
on the wider world. We need Europe to save us from ourselves.
HAROLD MEYERSON is the Prospect's editor-at-large.
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