The World Standard Part 2

Robert Kagan points out that European integration project, with its vast bureaucracy in Brussels, is not merely an agency for trade protectionism, but an entire portal into the future. (Hat tip Buddy Larsen) Some Europeans believe that the cumulative process of 'engagement', 'negotiation' and the expansion of governance constitutes a universally valid method of escape from the ravages of war, poverty and national hatred -- on the basis of the European experience itself.

As German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer put it in a speech outlining his vision of the European future ...  “The core of the concept of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European balance-of-power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states that had emerged following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.”  ... Fischer’s principal contention --  that Europe has moved beyond the old system of power politics and discovered a new system for preserving peace in international relations -- is widely shared across Europe. As senior British diplomat Robert Cooper recently wrote in the Observer ... Europe today lives in a “postmodern system” that does not rest on a balance of power but on “the rejection of force” and on “self-enforced rules of behavior.” ...

“The genius of the founding fathers,” European Commission President Romano Prodi commented in a speech at the Institute d’Etudes Politiques in Paris (May 29, 2001), “lay in translating extremely high political ambitions . . . into a series of more specific, almost technical decisions. This indirect approach made further action possible. Rapprochement took place gradually. From confrontation we moved to willingness to cooperate in the economic sphere and then on to integration.” ...

The transmission of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe’s new mission civilisatrice. Just as Americans have always believed that they had discovered the secret to human happiness and wished to export it to the rest of the world, so the Europeans have a new mission born of their own discovery of perpetual peace.

It was therefore natural that Europe would define itself in contradistinction to the United States, which it characterized as a living fossil from the age of power politics, a survival from the Stone Age of civilization. What they had forgotten, Kagan pointed out, was that the foundations of the continental miracle were rooted in the greatest military campaign of the twentieth century: the defeat of European fascism by the United States. The durability of the Pax Americana spanning the better part of three generations encouraged the Europeans to regard the arrangement as the natural order of things. Most Europeans remembered no other world; nor imagine that any other was possible. But because the only country that could not count on rescue by America was America itself, the United States continued to live in the world of power politics that the Europeans had abandoned, the two original halves of the Western world abiding in two increasingly separate universes.

Europe’s evolution to its present state occurred under the mantle of the U.S. security guarantee and could not have occurred without it. Not only did the United States for almost half a century supply a shield against such external threats as the Soviet Union and such internal threats as may have been posed by ethnic conflict in places like the Balkans. ... The United States, in short, solved the Kantian paradox for the Europeans. Kant had argued that the only solution to the immoral horrors of the Hobbesian world was the creation of a world government. But he also feared that the “state of universal peace” made possible by world government would be an even greater threat to human freedom than the Hobbesian international order, inasmuch as such a government, with its monopoly of power, would become “the most horrible despotism.” ... But for Europe the problem was solved by the United States. By providing security from outside, the United States has rendered it unnecessary for Europe’s supranational government to provide it.  ...Some Europeans do understand the conundrum. ... Thus Robert Cooper writes ... If the postmodern world does not protect itself, it can be destroyed. But how does Europe protect itself without discarding the very ideals and principles that undergird its pacific system? ...

“The challenge to the postmodern world,” Cooper argues, “is to get used to the idea of double standards.” Among themselves, Europeans may “operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security.” But when dealing with the world outside Europe, “we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era — force, preemptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary.” ...

What this means is that although the United States has played the critical role in bringing Europe into this Kantian paradise, and still plays a key role in making that paradise possible, it cannot enter this paradise itself. It mans the walls but cannot walk through the gate. The United States, with all its vast power, remains stuck in history, left to deal with the Saddams and the ayatollahs, the Kim Jong Ils and the Jiang Zemins, leaving the happy benefits to others.

Kagan's analysis, though brilliant, should not tempt us too far. The European project is more than a vehicle to attain mankind's loftiest aims. It is also an ordinary bureaucracy concerned with enforcing trade protectionism, distributing pork barrel, advancing agendas and accumulating power for its own sake as bureaucracies have done from time immemorial. But although one would not enter into trade negotiations with the EU expecting Kagan's model to be of operational assistance, it provides a penetrating insight into the myths that drive each civilization, which over time may shape their priorities and their ultimate destinies. Therefore its greatest utility is as a strategic guide. Although Kagan holds out the hope "that a little common understanding could still go a long way" toward reversing the divergence he is far more convincing when describing both in the grip of an historical trap.

Is this situation tolerable for the United States? In many ways, it is. Contrary to what many believe, the United States can shoulder the burden of maintaining global security without much help from Europe. The United States spends a little over 3 percent of its GDP on defense today. ... The problem lies neither in American will or capability, then, but precisely in the inherent moral tension of the current international situation. ... The problem is that the United States must sometimes play by the rules of a Hobbesian world, even though in doing so it violates European norms. It must refuse to abide by certain international conventions that may constrain its ability to fight effectively in Robert Cooper’s jungle. It must support arms control, but not always for itself. It must live by a double standard. ... Europeans today have come to consider the United States itself to be the outlaw, a rogue colossus. Europeans have complained about President Bush’s “unilateralism,” but they are coming to the deeper realization that the problem is not Bush or any American president. It is systemic. And it is incurable.

In this last he is almost certainly wrong. History's resource is deep time, against which not even Brussels can prevail.