The founders of the modern American empire, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow
Wilson, believed that other nations would benefit from American moral
superiority. Opposition to our imperial advance was evidence of envy, or
resentment, the thinking went. If ephemeral, it could be dismissed as a
temporary aberration. Persistent, it showed that the miscreants deserved the
severest punishment.
"Why do they hate us?" is not a new question. Roosevelt and Wilson, however,
thought of the northern Europeans as first cousins, if not siblings. The
scholars of their generation, as useful to the powerful as their contemporary
descendants, conveniently provided proof that democracy and good government
came from the Germanic forests and the English countryside.
Today's American elites are not all descendants of northern Europeans. White
House chief counsel Alberto Gonzales, Secretary of State Colin Powell, National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D Wolfowitz
have no distant ancestors who signed the Magna Carta. The Europe they confront
had two terrible wars, revolutions and tyrannies, and then recovered to achieve
economic prosperity, the welfare state and the creation of the European Union
(EU).
The citizens of the EU, however, present a very special problem for the large
number of Americans who think of the rest of the world in imperial ways. The
Europeans have cast off their post-war dependence and insist on their autonomy.
For a half century there were European neutralists (including Pope John the
23rd) and advocates of what seemed like a Utopian vision of a united Europe.
Remember former French president Charles de Gaulle and his project, "one
Europe, from the Atlantic to the Urals".
The EU's frontiers are now a considerable part of the way there. When DeGaulle
first spoke, the Iron Curtain was a couple of hours' drive from Alsace.
European emancipation from American tutelage is impossible for our
foreign-policy makers to ignore. They cannot now plausibly dismiss French
President Jacques Chirac, German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Spanish Prime
Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero as only making gestures in opposing the
war in Iraq, although that was the standard line on the opinion pages a few
months ago.
A refusal to take orders from the US is a fundament of European politics: it
isn't a matter of tactical political gestures but of authenticity.
Bucking imperial orders
Our imperial managers think big. Africa, Asia, Middle and South America are as
important to them as Europe. Our armed forces are everywhere - even more
ubiquitous, if possible, than American capital.
True, a public with a short attention span and unburdened with either curiosity
or knowledge has left the rest of the world to experts, who themselves are
often convincingly inexpert and in the service of special interests. Few of
those who proclaim our unchallengeable power dwell on the political
consequences a few decades hence of Chinese and Indian economic growth. Bush,
so bellicose in words, in deeds has already kowtowed to China. The old
Republican obsession with remaking it has been consigned to history's scrap
heap.
Human rights have been sunk in the strait between Taiwan and the People's
Republic. It has been done on the sly, like the warning to the Taiwanese not to
upset the People's Republic unduly. Even when the ideology of limitless
American power collides with reality, our imperial managers are at pains to
maintain the fiction of their unique capacity to run the world.
What makes Europe's refusal of submission so painful to those usually
disdainful of "the good opinions of mankind" is that even the most vulgar of
unilateralists think of the Europeans, somehow, as ancestors. Those concerned
with foreign policy do care what the Europeans think. How else to explain the
frenetic efforts of some of them to instruct the Europeans that they no longer
count?
The Europeans conclude that they count for a great deal - especially in large
parts of the world that wish to be spared America's narcissistic belief in our
"responsibilities" for their well being.
In recent weeks, I've been in London, Berlin, Madrid and talked with friends in
France, Italy and Sweden. Considering what the Europeans think of our current
condition is like looking at oneself in a full length mirror - unflattering,
but unfortunately true.
Blair risks unity
Start with our British friends, despite our differences in language.
There will always be an England: the retiring head of British intelligence (the
"C" of the John LeCarre novels) is to become the master of an ancient Oxford
college. His successor is the man who helped Prime Minister Tony Blair to
falsify the evidence about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
British politics resembles its caricature in Masterpiece Theater. The British
public is distinctly unamused and has taken the appointment as evidence for
their prime minister's increasing inability to deal with reality.
The Conservatives managed to disembarrass themselves of former prime minister
Margaret Thatcher when she began to lose her grip. The Labourites who think
Blair an increasingly tiresome burden consider themselves fully equal to the
same task. There have been large Labour losses in the June European and local
elections and Blair's position is hardly solid.
The letter from British diplomats criticizing Blair for his total submission to
Bush, with supporting voices from the senior military ranks, are symptoms of
crisis. Meanwhile, in a singular instance of trans-Atlantic solidarity British
soldiers are reported to have mistreated their prisoners, too.
One understands Blair's proprietary feeling about Iraq, even if it has brought
him nothing but grief.
Great Britain put together the country after World War I by joining Kurdistan
to the Sunni center and the Shi'ite south. British troops then put down an Iraq
rising, with the Royal Air Force flying gas attacks: Saddam Hussein's brutality
was inherited from the imperial masters.
The Ba'athists were supported both by the UK and the US when they ousted the
pro-Soviet coalition that in 1958 liquidated the British puppet kingdom.
Nostalgia, however, is no substitute for political judgment.
Joining Spain's Jose Maria Aznar and Italy's Silvio Berlusconi in support of
Bush, refusing to negotiate a common European position on Iraq with France and
Germany, Blair put the entire project of a united Europe at risk. Now he has
been repeatedly humiliated in Washington and lost the confidence of the UK's
neighbors - and his own people.
What remains
Britain is no longer the nation, bankrupted and exhausted by five years of war,
which had to accept American domination in 1945. While its ties to the US
remain strong, a newer generation is much more aware of its closeness to
Europe. There are still Brits who look at the 20 miles that separates them from
France and the 3,500 miles to Maine - to declare that they are fortunate to be
in the middle of the Atlantic. They are not a majority.
Meanwhile, the UK has become multi-cultural and multi-ethnic in a way
unimagined by E M Forster or George Orwell. For them "home" and empire were
indivisible but a half world apart.
Blair was elected with a plan to reform and revitalize the welfare state, not
to terminate it, and the British are like the other Europeans in expecting
ample public services. That is another point of difference with the US.
Above all, a majority of citizens of the UK have little or no nostalgia for the
period in which their grandparents thought it their duty and their right to
rule large parts of the world. They do not think that the US will succeed where
they failed and indeed question our ability to use power wisely. They wish for
an alliance in which they are listened to - or no alliance at all.
Germans to the front
The other day, in Washington, a German general threw us back in time. In 1900,
as the Boxer Rebellion threatened foreigners in Peking, the British commander
of the rescue force gave an order which provoked paroxysms of enthusiasm in the
Kaiser's Germany: "Germans to the front!"
General Klaus Naumann is a retired German chief of staff and senior North
Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) officer. Speaking to a nodding group of our
"security" experts he envisaged a new NATO, a worldwide alliance of Europeans
and Americans to intervene everywhere, at any time, and for any reason.
The general's enthusiasm for opening new fronts is not shared by his fellow
citizens. The German public's negative attitude to war is evidence that one
nation, at least, is capable of learning from experience. (The Americans who
criticize Germany for its pacificism have never known combat more deadly than
the struggle for grants or space on opinion pages.)
The party of the German right, the Christian Democratic Union, is taking its
distance from the US. Former chancellor Helmut Kohl's defense minister,
the intelligent Volker Ruehe, once regularly chastised the Greens and Social
Democrats for insufficient loyalty to the US.
A while back, before he could have seen the photos of the Baghdad prison, he
termed the behavior of US forces in Iraq execrable.
A senior Social Democrat commiserated with me on Kerry's indifferent
performance to date. "Bush's re-election would be terrible for our American
friends but for us, a gift from heaven. We are stuck at 30% in the polls,
because we had to cut social benefits. We need 39 or so to be able to get back
in. With Bush as your president again, all we have to do is to say that the
opposition would send troops to join the next American adventure. That gives us
6% or 7%, and the rest we can get."
'The moustache' beside us
In Spain, former prime minister Jose Maria Aznar, who takes himself for an
Iberian Ahmad Chalabi, phoned Bush to apologize for his successor's withdrawal
of troops from Iraq. He proudly recalls telling Bush he would never be lonely:
"The moustache" would always be at his side. Aznar identifies himself with his
governor Tom Dewey-like moustache - but it is hardly as entertaining as the
Cheshire cat's smile in Lewis Carrol, even if it, too, floats in space. He is
coming to my university to teach in the fall: we had Kurt Waldheim, once, and
so can survive Aznar.
Berlusconi and Aznar shared a puppy-like delight at being received at the White
House and the ranch. Blair with the Bushes, by contrast, has the air of an
Episcopal curate condescending to visit a family not quite yet in the social
register.
Post-Aznar Spain has already mended the rupture with France and Germany
occasioned by his fidelity to Bush. Its new government asked one question in
Washington: would US troops in Iraq ever be put under United Nations command?
When the answer was no, the Spaniards promptly called theirs home. A snarling
Bush told Zapatero not to endanger American troops by the withdrawal. The
Spaniards were in a seething Shi'ite area and responded that what put our
forces in danger was Bush's decision to send them to Iraq.
Even after the Spaniards had begun to withdraw, their units received an order
from the US military to capture or kill a local cleric - and promptly refused.
The exchange strengthened Spanish opinion behind Zapatero: about nine of 10
citizens think he is right.
The view from Italy and France
As Spain sighs collectively at its former prime minister's antics (even his own
conservative party is embarrassed), the Italians insist that in any contest for
Europe's most prominent political clown, their prime minister remains the
champion.
Berlusconi faces his usual crises, possible imprisonment for bribery, social
protest and the opposition of those across the political spectrum who do not
think the entire nation is for sale. Two-thirds of the public now reject his
decision to send Italian forces to Iraq. A good many Italians are ashamed of
their premier. He does have an infallible gift for vulgar gaffes (like terming
Islam an "inferior" religion).
There have been Italian military fatalities in Iraq, some civilian hostages are
being held and one was murdered. The Italian opposition has suspended
demonstrations for withdrawal and taken to the streets to demand that the
hostages be released.
Berlusconi responded by denouncing the critics of the war in even shriller
terms. It is unclear that he will be re-elected in 2006, or that his government
will last until then. Of the many problems of his government, the newest is the
increasing defection of his conservative and Catholic allies - appalled at the
course taken by the occupation of Iraq.
France has its troubles. The expansion of the EU may well diminish its direct
influence and power in the new Europe. Conservative efforts to privatize state
industry and dismantle the welfare state have encountered embittered resistance
- after socialist moves in the same direction cost the left its majority. A
severe defeat for Chirac and his party at the regional elections in April has
forced the president to yield. The socialist and green opposition is almost as
insubstantial as the government itself - having stumbled into office in most
French regions because Chirac is so unconvincing.
Even in its conflicted state, France is able - by inner conviction and outer
panache - to mobilize a European coalition against the unilateral use of US
power. The peculiar rage of Americans at France acting as if it were an
independent nation has a number of grounds. The French intervened militarily
against the British to win the War of Independence for us. There is the New
York question: "Why are you so hostile, I haven't done anything for you
lately." France is the nation of good food and wine, of free-flowing libido.
Perhaps we consume more pornographic videos per capita than the French, but we
remain Puritans. If we define Puritanism as the dreadful suspicion that
someone, somewhere, might be enjoying themselves, the antagonism to France is
more comprehensible. Perhaps, however, it rests on competing claims to
represent universal values. In that contest, the French are not losing.
EU as a counterweight
The new members of the EU, including states like the Baltic nations, Hungary
and Poland, which have large immigrant communities in the US also harbor
memories of US solidarity (mostly rhetorical, to be sure) when they were under
Soviet domination.
That memory is historically fiction.
The Hungarians after the suppression of their revolt in 1956 had a communist
government with the motto "who isn't against us is for us". Poland after the
exit of its Stalinists in 1956 was ruled by a very stable alliance of two
conservative forces, the communists and the Catholics.
Hungary and Poland joined Italy, Portugal, Spain and the UK in a declaration of
fealty to the US last year - a declaration drawn up by a helpful Central
Intelligence Agency agent and read by other European heads of government in The
Wall Street Journal.
That is unlikely to be repeated, and the new entrants, quite aware of their
dependence on the goodwill of the older members, cannot afford to be branded as
US fifth columnists in Europe. They may be reluctant, but they will not block
(or be allowed to block) the gradual development of an autonomous European
foreign and military policy.
Nothing has contributed recently to the Europeans' sense of distinctiveness as
much as the attitudes and policies of the George W Bush gang.
While the obstacles to permanent European autonomy are many, the major
trans-Atlantic force is the newer capitalism, which knows no borders. A
majority of the citizens of the EU want to keep their social model, their
welfare states, their institutions of solidarity, and refuse to commodify every
segment of human existence. To do so, they will have to solve the
constitutional problems bedeviling the EU, construct alliances with the
societies of Africa, Asia, Latin America - in short, oppose American economic
and political power.
European social democracy is not as exhausted as the New Deal legacy in our
Democratic Party, but it isn't throbbingly alive, either. There are significant
numbers of (well paid) Europeans who favor an American model economy and an
alliance with the US against the rest of the world.
Still, many European conservatives find Bush's America repellent. They are
often Christians with a sense of social obligation or liberals with a firm
belief in civil rights. Forced to choose between an alliance with the US or the
inner cohesion of their own societies, they opt for their own continent. (The
EU's founders, in the late 1940s and 1950s, were profoundly conservative). When
he received Bush in Rome, the Pope told him that he could find no moral
justification for the war on Iraq.
The imprecations addressed to the Europeans by the ideologues of the Bush
regime have confirmed the Europeans' belief that they represent a different
civilization. Told that after two wars they are afraid to fight, they respond
that they know the moral costs of war - and its frequent political and social
destructiveness.
Mocked for their alleged appeasement of Islam because of their own Muslim
immigrant populations, they reply that a good deal less demonization of Islam
and more knowledge of it would greatly improve US policy in much of the world.
Attacked because their criticism of Israel supposedly expresses anti-Semitism,
they declare that their own memories of the Holocaust do not allow them to
encourage Israel on its present path of self-destruction.
Above all, they think that their past has taught them how to deal with the rest
of the world in a post-imperial mode. That, they think, is something our own
nation has yet to learn.
Norman Birnbaum is Professor Emeritus, Georgetown University Law Center
and a Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies. His most recent book
is After Progress: American Social Reform and European Socialism in the
Twentieth Century,Oxford University Press.
