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Trans-Atlantic quarrel: An indifferent Washington shrugs
EFL
A senior Bush administration official is talking about the Europeans. "The quickest distinction between Europeans who come and sit on my couch," he says, "is between those who want to act and those who donât."
No mistake, after an exceptionally divisive year in American-European relations, the line in Washington on Europe in relation to Iraq and fighting terrorism is that for all the understanding Poles and Spaniards, Dutch and Danes, a significant part of European leadership remains disinclined to do much thatâs forceful about what America considers threatening to the peace.
and that will come back to haunt them, and possibly us, in the mid- or even near-term, I fear
Nuance here. The administration official thinks that the capture of Saddam Hussein, together with a great leap forward by the U.S. economy, American success in diverting Libya from nuclear arms, and signs of a return to a U.S.-Iran dialogue, are moving the recalcitrant Europeans - essentially the French and German governments, and significant slices of Continental and British public opinion that regard the United States as trampling caution and international law - toward accepting that American success in Iraq is in their interest. With a G-8 economic summit meeting in the United States, with President George W. Bush as host, and a NATO summit meeting both programmed for the first half of an American election year, the 2004 international agenda points toward less head-butting and a greater portrayal of solidarity, at least outwardly, across the sea. Indeed, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization could wind up taking over the command of troops in Iraq from the United States. But this is hardly, as some Europeans would have hoped, the soil of a new terrain for profound administration introspection about trans-Atlantic estrangement.
| That could be because we're too busy doing important things to spend a lot of time in navel gazing... |
The idea that something awful, fateful, has happened to the community of Western nations gets next to no attention here, if only because the complaint comes essentially from a fragmented Europe. In this view, Europe, officially designated by the Bush administration as "whole, peaceful and free," has devolved into an area of marginal strategic interest for the United States. Francis Fukuyama, the Johns Hopkins historian and author of the famous essay "The End of History," explains: "Generally, the American people just donât care, whatever the ritualistic mention of Americaâs alienation from the rest of the world. I even doubt this gets much traction even with the base of the Democratic Party." Rather, the administrationâs youâre-either-with-us-or-against-us judgments in relation to Europe sustain themselves because the Bush team sees Europe as disablingly divided, without anything approaching a foreign policy consensus, and because reticence in specific European countries about supporting Washington was regarded from the start of American engagement in Afghanistan not only as a disadvantage but also as a way of circumventing the bog of interallied consultations.
| "If y'got nothin' to do, don't do it here!" |
In reality, the great change on the U.S. side of European-American relations since the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington may be in the ready acceptance here of the neoconservative Robert Kaganâs characterization of two similar cultures with markedly different views on the use of power and military force. Many Europeans would want to caricature Kaganâs views as simplistic, even though he clearly refuses to qualify Europe as a crabby has-been. All the same, the Kagan vision is largely mainstream in Washingtonâs widest view of the world. Europe-as-ogre or rising danger to American pre-eminence - or, conversely, Europe-as-potential-returnee to an Atlanticist Garden of Eden - are convictions that appear, on the basis of a series of interviews here, to get much less palpable support.
| We're discussing different approaches to doing business. In managementspeak, it's Theory X (top-down, do-it-my-way leadership) versus Theory Y (concensus building, power-flows-up management). People say they enjoy working in Theory Y environments because they're more congenial; everybody's input is valued. It's a world where memos are vetted before being disseminated, and agreements are reached before meetings are held. Both approaches have their place. Theory Y is best for established, working organizations. Theory X is best for crisis situations, which is why militaries, police and your local firehouse are all overtly organized on Theory X principles: somebody's got to be in charge, somebody's got to define the objective and allocate the resources for attaining it. Europe's an established, working organization. The U.S. used to be; but we're at war, while Europe's not. Europe at best is cooperating with us, when it sees fit, in the war on terror, but it's not yet been devastated. When the Eifel Tower is gone, the Brandenburg Gate is gone, and the Vatican's rubble, Europe will change. Not before. |
Along this line, there is little American hesitancy now to slip around the once-sacred discourse of common Euro-American values or "a community of fate"- so much so that a collection of talks on European-American relations by a key administration figure refers, in a precisely calibrated definition, to "certain" common values. Fukuyama talked in an interview of the Bush administrationâs reveling in an "in your face" attitude toward multinational institutions, and of the rise of a "nastier, contemptuous attitude" toward Europe on the part of key executives of American corporations with whom he had spoken. Europe, they told him, was "hopeless on entrepreneurship and innovation."
| Theory Y gives everybody the chance to innovate, with ideas flowing up the chain. Whatcha might call Practice Y also gives those up the chain the opportunity to water down changes that they might find uncomfortable. Or that would be too much effort. Theory X, relying on principles of leadership rather than management, is more suited for startups or situations where the competition is intense. |
This, in a sense, he said, was a response to a Europe that seemed to find gratification in saying the United States was a more brutal, styleless, fundamentalist culture.
But unlike the Americans, who had not run away from decades of debate on race, in Fukuyamaâs view, the Europeans, including the British, were now hiding from their most destabilizing contradiction - dealing with Europeâs growing Muslim and Arab population and its effect on terrorism and relations with the Islamic world."
| Theory Y isn't good at reacting to threats. Since everybody's opinion counts, the threat can manage to get his own opinion into the stack. |
What they basically donât like is that itâs more democratic here than in Europe," Fukuyama said. "If you look at both sidesâ public opinion polling on the death penalty and gay marriage, there just isnât that much difference. But in Europe, itâs the elites that set social standards that donât necessarily reflect mass opinion. People are more deferential to the elites in Europe. What people in Europe have no patience with is that America is a democracy that doesnât reflect its elitesâ desires. It will come back to bite them."
In an interview, Robert Zoellick, the U.S. trade representative, who is much admired in Europe for his nuanced views of European realities, and was the key State Department operational player in forging German reunification, offered an elegant description of contrasts in American and European world views as he had seen them evolve: "The post-modern European notion of international arrangements fits the European context, but doesnât apply well in the rest of the world. That means that the European idea that all problems can be resolved through compromises at all-night sessions at nice locations just doesnât work everywhere. This European concentration on local circumstances leads to a status quo outlook on the rest of world. And this is because Europe is preoccupied and uncomfortable with major new approaches to match very changed circumstances."
and therein lies the problem.....
At the least forgiving end of the judgmental U.S. political scale on Europeâs perceived incapacities, Richard Perle - the neoconservative often portrayed in European media with Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz as outranking the president, vice president and defense secretary combined - says the stakes are next to none: "The end of the cold war liberated the United States so as to be less concerned about Europe. Before, anything that divided us was very dangerous. While we would clearly prefer a close relationship, it isnât vital. Theyâre not ready to invest in the military. Thatâs a given. Theyâre interested in their own comfort. I donât see any coherent ambition to make a mark on the world. Itâs not a very impressive performance."
Against this view, there is that of a senior foreign policy adviser to Howard Dean, the also- front-running Democratic candidate challenging Bush. .... "All the same," he told a visitor, "a Democratic administration is going to be much more unilateralist than the Europeans want." Steinberg accuses the Bush administration of not supporting EU integration, preferring to deal with individual European countries than a European whole. But he hardly sees the end-goal of such integration with the eyes of those Europeans who would want the EU to function as a counterweight to the United States. "I think more integration actually would have isolated the French and the Germans," he said, noting their effort to speak in Europeâs name against the United States on Iraq. "What so angered the other Europeans is the way the French and the Germans went off on their own."
| ... without vetting their memos and reaching agreement before the meetings were held. |
Chancellor Gerhard Schröder "doesnât give a damn about Europe," Steinberg said. And the other Europeans see the French and the Germans as "miscreants"... "Itâs a serious matter involving the place of religion here and, the primacy of secularism as a value there," he said. "Most of the elite here now believes Europe is anti-Semitic. We think Europe has lost its societal moorings. They think weâre backward." What Europeans resist understanding, perhaps because theyâve been treated with disdain,
Ahem - WHO treats WHO with disdain, regularly?
he said, is that "the United States has the choice not to cooperate. Atlanticists say everything will be fine. No, in the end it may be that things are not fine. Europe has to actively work this issue. That involves offering things the U.S. wants." What does the United States want? Action, movement, change (simplistically perhaps, as Vedrine once argued), but from the same people who America regarded even 50 years ago as not necessarily comfortable with the concept. John Kornblum, a Clinton administration ambassador to Germany, ... quotes the American journalist Theodore White, who wrote "Fire in the Ashes," as describing the United States as it left World War II as wanting to act, to do, to make history. Europe, White said then, had "a bellyful of history," a "sense of powerlessness that is the incubator of all European restlessness," and "a sense of being swung about by the actions of strange men in distant places."
"Europe is stranger to American understanding than ever before in our linked histories," White wrote. Europe wants rest, quiet and forgetfulness. But even this it cannot have in the world of today, for it is helpless to calm the world." That was in 1953. Today, much of Washington does not disagree
Posted by: rkb 2004-01-20 |
