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Europe
Trans-Atlantic quarrel: An indifferent Washington shrugs
2004-01-20
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 don’t."
Sounds like Rumsfeld...
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 that’s 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 don’t care, whatever the ritualistic mention of America’s alienation from the rest of the world. I even doubt this gets much traction even with the base of the Democratic Party." Rather, the administration’s you’re-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 Kagan’s characterization of two similar cultures with markedly different views on the use of power and military force. Many Europeans would want to caricature Kagan’s 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 Washington’s 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 administration’s 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.
A Theory X culture...
But unlike the Americans, who had not run away from decades of debate on race, in Fukuyama’s view, the Europeans, including the British, were now hiding from their most destabilizing contradiction - dealing with Europe’s 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 don’t like is that it’s more democratic here than in Europe," Fukuyama said. "If you look at both sides’ public opinion polling on the death penalty and gay marriage, there just isn’t that much difference. But in Europe, it’s the elites that set social standards that don’t 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 doesn’t reflect its elites’ 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 doesn’t 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 doesn’t 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 Europe’s 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 isn’t vital. They’re not ready to invest in the military. That’s a given. They’re interested in their own comfort. I don’t see any coherent ambition to make a mark on the world. It’s 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 Europe’s 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 "doesn’t give a damn about Europe," Steinberg said. And the other Europeans see the French and the Germans as "miscreants"... "It’s 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 we’re backward." What Europeans resist understanding, perhaps because they’ve 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

#11  Shipman=Peter Pan. And thats a good thing!
Posted by: Lucky   2004-1-21 12:54:03 AM  

#10  zzzz...What, what. Sorry. Oh, the French are mad. Oh, I guess that's allright. The Poles are still OK, right? That should work. (picks up remote, changes to home shopping network, eyesdroop....) ZZ..ZZ..zzzz....
Posted by: Super Hose   2004-1-20 8:41:50 PM  

#9  What less interested than indifferent?
Never mind, let's get on to the important story of Shipman and the oil change.
Posted by: Shipman   2004-1-20 6:23:52 PM  

#8  Anonymickeymouse--Votre anglais est meilleur que mon francais. ;)
Welcome to Rantburg!
Posted by: Desert Blondie   2004-1-20 3:18:45 PM  

#7  camarilla
?
I google and get MUDD sites...
Posted by: Shipman   2004-1-20 2:55:57 PM  

#6  I wrote it before, but Eu 's problem, and that's even more true in case of France, is that the ruling class, wether high-ranking civil servants, professionnal politicians, chattering class,... is cut off from the populace, self-reproducting, and has become basically a camarilla.
That's why, if you count abstentionnists and such, the majority of french voters go for the anti-establishment parties (far-right, non-communist far-left, hunters,...).
Again, a complete, if very didactical, approach to theses problems can be found at :
http://www.freeworldacademy.com/globalleader/france.htm ("where France is going")
http://www.freeworldacademy.com/globalleader/hurri.htm ("Europe at war")
http://www.freeworldacademy.com/globalleader/agendacont.htm ("Future of EU")
Excuse the basic-english, it was written by a french guy, which come from the under 5% of liberals (not Us meaning, more like reaganites & tatcherians), who are usually pro-Israel and pro-Us, quite an oddity in french political landscape.
Posted by: Anonymickeymouse   2004-1-20 12:42:47 PM  

#5  -- 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."--

Hmmm, kind of makes me wish to be a fly on the wall. Must have been some interesting conversations.

I still think we make a mistake not imposing some of our ideals and practices on other countries, and made a BIG mistake not doing same in Europe. They're mired in 1000 years of stasism(?) or mutated monarchy, if you prefer. If we're going to be called "imperialistic" let's earn it. If we have to go back, this time give them at least the Bill of Rights.
Posted by: Anonymous2U   2004-1-20 12:38:22 PM  

#4  "Old Europe" is trying to do the impossible - freeze time. They don't want anything to change, since change requires action to deal with it. Most Europeans are comfortable, and want to continue their "comfort", even though the social, economic, and political system that creates that comfort is totally unsustainable. They have their collective heads in the sand (or somewhere else where reality is blotted out), and don't want to face reality. It will take another major bloodbath - something even more horrendous than 9/11 - to get them stirred up enough to pull out of their self-induced snooze. For those Europeans who actually want to move forward, it's like running through neck-deep molasses, and they get tired. Those that can emigrate, the others just give up. In many ways, modern Europe has the same problems that Latin America has - a large, irrelevant population, a small ruling class, and little incentive to change. Those caught between the other two masses are ignored, or treated with contempt as "being too American", or "out of step with European reality". Maybe someday it will change, but I doubt anything will happen without a major catastrophe overtaking Europe. I also see the potential for such a catastrophe just around the corner, triggered by unrealistic immigration policies, dependency, and neglect. The collapse of "Old Europe", when it comes, will be horrendous, and self-inflicted.
Posted by: Old Patriot   2004-1-20 12:09:02 PM  

#3  Thanks rkb, that was a good read.
Posted by: Parabellum   2004-1-20 11:57:42 AM  

#2  Anybody have a clue what France wants? Germany? Besides a long vacation.
Posted by: Lucky   2004-1-20 11:54:16 AM  

#1  I used to worry about our troops defending them while they sit in their cafes sipping coffee. Now they are as likely to be taken over from within by Islamists as they were to be rolled over by the Soviet Union, with or without our troops there.

Any "neoconservatives" in Europe planning ahead for a 21st Century reconquista?
Posted by: eLarson   2004-1-20 11:50:56 AM  

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