[api] Eric Alterman: USA Oui! Bush Non!
Russil Wvong
Alterman argues that the divide is mostly due to the Bush administration,
not anti-Americanism. The Nation, February 10. Via Brian Turner.
Anti-Bushism, yes. There's plenty of that. Europe is a continent
whose political center of gravity remains almost as far to the
left of center as America's is to the right. The current German
government governs from Wellstone/Feingold country. Even most of
the conservative parties in Europe are to the left of the
Democrats in this country. Cultural issues also divide; the
negative reaction to Bush in Europe feels quite visceral. It's not
as if Europeans can't stand the idea of a conservative Republican
President. To a surprising degree, they warmed to Ronald Reagan,
as Alain Frachon, who writes about foreign affairs on the
editorial page of Le Monde, explains. "When Reagan was President,
we never had the impression he was motivated by fundamentalism. He
was divorced. He had worked in Hollywood. But this George Bush is
totally foreign to us. He quotes the Bible every two or three
sentences. He is surrounded by Christian fundamentalists. He says
he has no problem sleeping after sending someone to death. There
was a dose of charm, humor, of Hollywood to Reagan. But not to
Bush. It's another world and one we find extraordinarily
hypocritical. No one told us that the Republicans had moved this
far to the right."
Things were quite different under Bill Clinton. As Serge Halimi,
the leftist editor of Le Monde diplomatique, the publication that
is frequently accused of being the intellectual home of the
anti-American worldview, argues, "The hostility to US policy would
be lessened with Clinton in the White House, even assuming that
these policies were exactly the same as Bush's. Clinton's 'I feel
your pain' worked well in the international arena too, much better
in any case than Bush's 'I don't give a damn what you think.' I
assume people prefer to be lied to than they do being overtly
despised." Susan Neiman, an American who heads the Einstein Forum
in Potsdam and has lived there on and off for twenty years, also
draws a distinction between the European reactions to Clinton and
Bush. "American leftists don't appreciate what Clinton did," she
says. "He was the thinking person's American Dream. Alive,
unpretentious, he played the sax. For seven years in Europe, it
was suddenly unbelievably cool to be American. Bush, on the other
hand, is the American nightmare: a spoiled frat boy who doesn't
know or care about the rest of the world."
The full article:
http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030210&c=1&s=alterman1
Russil
Jack Black
Hi Russil,
If you haven't read it already, Robert Kagan wrote powerful
article on the subject of American and European divergence.
http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html
Like Huntington's article on the clash of civilizations, Kagan's
article has been expanded and published as a book, Of Paradise and
Power.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1400040930/103-2615067-0521450?vi=glance
The book is short, 103 pages. One can easily read it in one sitting.
Kagan contends that the military disparity between America and
Europe, a heritage of the Cold War, has led to a world where
America is looking powerfully outward to a Hobbesian world while
Europe looks inward to build the paradise of a Kantian united
Europe.
Quotes:
"Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus."
"Those with great military power are more likely to
consider force a useful tool of international relations
than those who have less military power"
"A man armed only with a knife may decide that a bear
prowling the forest is a tolerable danger. The same man
armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different
calculation..."
Alterman seems to think that the divergence is a result of the
Bush administration but Kagan points to a general trend that
has developed over the last centry and a particular trend that
emerged shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Clinton
years were when Védrine coined the term "hyperpower".
Kagan wrote:
"The end of the Cold War, by widening the power gap,
exacerbated the disagreements. Although transatlantic
tensions are now widely assumed to have begun with the
inauguration of George W. Bush in January 2001, they
were already evident during the Clinton administration
and may even be traced back to the administration of
George H.W. Bush. By 1992, mutual recriminations were
rife over Bosnia, where the United States refused to
act and Europe could not act. It was during the Clinton
years that Europeans began complaining about being
lectured by the "hectoring hegemon." This was also the
period in which Védrine coined the term hyperpuissance
to describe an American behemoth too worryingly powerful
to be designated merely a superpower. (Perhaps he was
responding to then-Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright's insistence that the United States was the
world's "indispensable nation.") It was also during the
1990s that the transatlantic disagreement over American
plans for missile defense emerged and many Europeans
began grumbling about the American propensity to choose
force and punishment over diplomacy and persuasion."
The book/article is highly recommended.
Russil Wvong
> If you haven't read it already, Robert Kagan wrote powerful
> article on the subject of American and European divergence.
>
> http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html
Hi, Jack. I've seen Kagan's article before. He's right to point out the
disparity in military power between the US and Europe, and therefore
the greater willingness to use military power on the part of the US.
(In this respect, Canada resembles Europe.)
But overall, I'd have to say that I strongly disagree with Kagan's
view. (My own views are primarily based on George Kennan and Hans
Morgenthau, who had a major influence on the Truman administration's
diplomacy.)
1. In particular, I strongly disagree with the connection that Kagan
draws between weakness and support for international law. In an
anarchic world, international law doesn't protect the weak.
The fundamental divide isn't between the strong and the weak. It's
between states which support the status quo and those which oppose it
(sometimes called "revisionist" states; Napoleonic France, Nazi
Germany, the Soviet Union, Iraq are examples).
States which support the status quo have a strong interest in
supporting peace and international law. And the US, which has no
territorial ambitions outside its own borders, thus has a strong
interest in upholding and strengthening international law. This has
been a constant principle of US diplomacy right up until the Bush
administration took office. By seeking to weaken international law,
the Bush administration is acting *against* US interests.
Hans Morgenthau describes peace and international law as ideologies
which serve to justify the status quo, which the US administration
appears to have carelessly discarded:
Peace and international law are eminiently qualified to serve as
ideologies of the status quo. Since imperialistic [revisionist]
policies, by disturbing the status quo, frequently lead to war and
must always take the possibility of war into account, a foreign
policy that proclaims pacifism as its guiding principle is by the
same token anti-imperialistic and supports the maintenance of the
status quo. By expressing in pacifist terms the objectives of the
policy of the status quo, a statesman puts the stigma of
war-mongering upon his imperialistic opponents, clears his and his
countrymen's conscience of moral scruples, and can hope to win the
support of all countries interested in the maintenance of the
status quo.
International law fulfills a similar ideological function for
policies of the status quo. Any legal order tends to be primarily
a static social force. It defines a certain distribution of power
and offers standards and processes to ascertain and maintain it in
concrete situations. Domestic law, through a highly developed
system of legislation, judicial decisions, and law enforcement,
allows for adaptations and sometimes even considerable changes
within the general distribution of power. International law, in
the absence of such a system making for lawful change, is, as will
be shown later, not only primarily but essentially, by dint of its
very nature, a static force. The invocation of international law,
of "order under law,", of "ordinary legal processes" in support of
a particular foreign policy, therefore, always indicates the
ideological disguise of a policy of the status quo. More
particularly, when an international organization, such as the
League of Nations, has been established for the purpose of
maintaining a particular status quo, support of that organization
becomes tantamount to support of that particular status quo.
Since the end of the First World War, it has become rather common
to make use of such legalistic ideologies in justification of a
policy of the status quo. While the alliances of former periods
of history have not disappeared, they tend to become "regional
arrangements" within an over-all legal organization. The
"maintenance of the status quo" yields to the "maintenance of
international peace and security." A number of states that have
the same interest in the maintenance of the status quo will be
likely to protect their common interests against a threat from a
particular source not by a "Holy Alliance" but by a "system of
collective security" or a "treaty of mutual assistance." Since
changes in the status quo are frequently brought about at the
expense of small nations, defense of the rights of small nations,
such as of Belgium in 1914 and Finland and Poland in 1939, becomes
under appropriate conditions another ideology of the policy of the
status quo.
2. I don't understand Kagan's argument about European weakness leading
to different threat perceptions:
Europeans like to say that Americans are obsessed with fixing
problems, but it is generally true that those with a greater
capacity to fix problems are more likely to try to fix them than
those who have no such capability. Americans can imagine
successfully invading Iraq and toppling Saddam, and therefore more
than 70 percent of Americans apparently favor such
action. Europeans, not surprisingly, find the prospect both
unimaginable and frightening.
Why is this prospect "unimaginable and frightening", considering that
*somebody else* -- namely the US -- is willing and able to do it?
Europeans may be aware of their own weakness, but they're also
perfectly aware of US power, aren't they?
This argument also fails to explain why Britain and Australia are
supporting the US. Relative to the US, they're not particularly
powerful. Their support is better explained by ideological affinity
(they make up most of the "Anglosphere") than by power. I posted an
Economist article earlier talking about the different lessons that
Britain and France drew from the Suez crisis: Britain concluded that
it needed to keep its foreign policy closely aligned with the US,
France drew the opposite conclusion.
3. Kagan appears to equate *power* with *military power*. This is a
*huge* mistake. Material factors like economic size and military
power are important, but non-material factors (e.g. national morale,
national cohesion, how one's power is perceived by others) are also
critically important. (The EU is weaker than the US, for example,
even though it has a larger economy and population, because of a
non-material factor: it lacks political cohesion.)
Equating power with military power is the classic militarist mistake.
I've quoted Louis Halle numerous times:
... real power is always something far greater than military power
alone. A balance of power is not a balance of military power
alone: it is, rather, a balance in which military power is one
element. Even in its crudest aspect, power represents a subtle
and intimate combination of force and consent. No stable
government has ever existed, and no empire has ever become
established, except with an immensely preponderant measure of
consent on the part of those who were its subjects. That consent
may be a half-grudging consent; it may be a consent based in part
on awe of superior force; it may represent love, or respect, or
fear, or a combination of the three. Consent, in any case, is the
essential ingredient in stable power--more so than physical force,
of which the most efficient and economical use is to increase
consent.
By using physical force in such a way as alienates consent one
constantly increases the requirements of physical force to replace
the consent that has been alienated. A vicious spiral develops
that, continued, ends in the collapse of power.
I'd hate to see US diplomacy go the way of Wilhelmine Germany.
(Kissinger's "Diplomacy" includes a pretty good description of what
this was like.)
Morgenthau again:
A nation that throws into the scale of international politics the
maximum of material power it is capable of mustering will find
itself confronted with the maximum effort of all its competitors
to equal or surpass its power. It will find that it has no
friends, only vassals and enemies. ...
The only nation that in modern times could maintain a continuous
position of preponderance owed that position to a rare combination
of potential superior power, a reputation for superior power, and
the infrequent use of that superior power. Thus Great Britain was
able, on the one hand, to overcome all serious challenges to its
superiority because its self-restraint gained powerful allies and,
hence, made it actually superior. On the other hand, it could
minimize the incentive to challenge it because its superiority did
not threaten the existence of other nations.
At any rate, I agree that this is a very important article, even if
I disagree strongly with it. :-)
Russil Wvong
Vancouver, Canada
www.geocities.com/rwvong