WASHINGTON - It is the future unity of the
"West" that, more than any other basic factor in
contemporary global affairs, is most at stake in the
presidential elections.
As Democratic challenger
Senator John Kerry has stressed virtually from the
outset of his campaign, transatlantic relations - which
are at the core of the post-World War II,
Western-dominated international system - have never been
more strained than under US President George W Bush.
No wonder: the coalition of aggressive
nationalists, neo-conservatives and Christian Rightists
that has driven Bush's foreign policy, particularly
since the September 11 attacks on the US, is
unquestionably the most contemptuous of Europe since
just before Washington's entry into World War II, when
US leaders still heeded the founders' admonition to
avoid "entangling alliances" with European powers.
That contempt has been registered. According to
a number of surveys taken in European countries -
including Britain - over the past six months, Kerry is
the overwhelming favorite of both "Old Europe", as
Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld dismissively called
Washington's core NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
Organization) allies last year, and of the "new" one -
the former Warsaw Pact nations of central and eastern
Europe, which have sided with Bush on the war on Iraq
and received virtually nothing in return.
The
rise in hostile feelings towards Washington is based
above all on Europeans' feeling that Bush, in his
unilateralism, has disregarded their interests and
advice - from his summary rejection of the Kyoto
Protocol to curb global warming and the International
Criminal Court to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
And while pollsters and political scientists say
the unprecedented anger and resentment directed at
Washington has been fundamentally anti-Bush, rather than
"anti-American", his re-election to a second term is
very likely to move that contempt into the second
category, cementing a permanent breach in the Western
alliance.
"This US election will shape the
future of Europe and the transatlantic West," wrote
Oxford University professor Timothy Garten Ash in a
column in the Washington Post a week ago. "If President
Bush is re-elected, many Europeans will try to make the
European Union a rival superpower to the United States."
Such a result would, of course, have the most
profound implications, not just for the two parties
involved, but for the entire world. For that very reason
alone, it seems unlikely, particularly considering the
durability of the Western alliance since World War II
and the fact that the economic, corporate and strategic
interests of both the US and Europe - overseen by the
elaborate multilateral structure that includes
everything from the International Monetary Fund and the
World Bank to NATO and the United Nations Security
Council - are so similar.
But those interests
might not be sufficient to keep the two sides from
breaking apart. After all, the US alliance with Europe
dates only from the Cold War, when the fear of the
Soviet Union welded the two together for what was
effectively the first time in history. In many ways,
Bush and the forces he has empowered represent a
throwback to an earlier period.
Having claimed
to represent the very best of "Western civilization",
Americans have, in fact, long been ambivalent about
Europe. The first colonists, mostly religious
Calvinists, saw themselves, like the ancient Hebrews out
of Egypt, as the "chosen people", brought forth from a
sinful, decadent and idolatrous Europe to found a "new
Israel".
Over the decades and centuries that
followed, "Americans" - overwhelmingly European in
origin until just the past few decades - sought
constantly to compare their achievements in the arts,
industry and science with those of the great powers
across the Atlantic while, at the same time, to contrast
their moral and political values grounded in democracy,
rugged individualism, civic-mindedness and
straightforwardness with the autocracy, rigid
hierarchies, corruption and mendacity of the "Old
World".
This sense of moral and political
superiority - or "exceptionalism' - was confirmed in a
150-year foreign-policy tradition, sometimes called
"isolationism", which was directed above all at Europe -
as opposed to Latin America, the Caribbean or Asia, all
of which have at one time or another constituted part of
America's "manifest destiny" to spread the blessings of
liberty southward and westward. That the US has
enjoyed a virtually uninterrupted rise from 13 sparsely
populated colonies hugging the Atlantic seaboard to its
current status as the world's sole superpower also tends
to confirm the sense that "providence" (as US leaders
referred to it from the mid-19th century to the early
20th century) has carved out a special role for the
country apart from Europe, especially given the Puritan
belief that God rewards the righteous.
These
hoary old ideas have experienced an unprecedented
resurgence under Bush, who has explicitly added the
Middle East to those regions that stand to be redeemed
by Washington's democratic "mission". The focus on the
Mideast is particularly compelling given the centrality
of Israel as another morally "exceptional" nation in the
ideologies of the Christian Right and neo-conservatism.
Indeed, Israel itself, and especially
Washington's unprecedented backing for its Likud
government, has become one of the most important sources
of contention between Washington and Europe.
Bush, a Texan and fundamentalist Christian
brought up in the heart of the US "Bible belt", clearly
falls into the "exceptionalist" tradition that sees the
US as the morally redemptive force in the world. In his
eyes, tying Washington to alliances and other
multilateral mechanisms or instruments in ways that
could constrain its power to act in the world is
immoral.
It is in this sense that his open
contempt for diplomacy and indifference to the views of
European allies and international law - constantly
echoed and promoted by neo-conservative polemicists in
particular - harkens back to a much-earlier time in US
history when Europe was both resented and despised and
the unique moral mission of the US was generally
unquestioned by citizens and leaders alike.
Kerry, who actually spent much of his upbringing
in Europe (including France), could not be more
different. Raised in the Atlantic-centered realism of
his father, a ranking State Department diplomat who
played important roles in the reconstruction and
unification of Western Europe and its integration into
the NATO alliance, Kerry has long shown an instinctive
distrust for any kind of political messianism, a
distrust sharply honed, of course, by his own
disillusionment as a highly decorated soldier in the
Vietnam War.
Indeed, it was only in the 1990s,
when the Bill Clinton administration launched
successive, but relatively modest - and ally-approved -
interventions in Haiti and the Balkans, that it appears
Kerry became persuaded that the exercise of US military
power could be a beneficial force under certain
circumstances.
Even then, when Clinton referred
to the US as "the indispensable nation", Kerry
complained to a long-time aide, "Why are we adopting
such an arrogant, obnoxious tone?"
The senator's
articulation of that belief as president - that the US
is morally neither "exceptional" nor superior to Europe
- rather than any immediate changes in substantive
policy, which could be made difficult or impossible by
Congress, could at least begin to mend the breach
between the US and Europe that has become so enormous in
the four years of the Bush presidency. But even that
might not be sufficient to put the alliance back
together again.
