"It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world. On the all-important question of power — the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power — American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s “Perpetual Peace.” The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might. That is why on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory — the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure. When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways."
-- Robert Kagan: "Power and Weakness," Online Policy Review
http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html
Bob, I hope you don't agree with this guy, or at least with his implicit favoring of the "European" way of doing things. I'd say that's all well and good for those who share the values of Western liberal democracy, but for those, such as the radical Islamists, who do not "transnational negotation and cooperation" will prove futile without the threat of force in the background. See Ryan Davidson's "Great War" series for a more developed argument.
Posted by: Evan Donovan at November 29, 2004 04:26 PMActually, I have some sympathy for the point he's trying to make, insofar as some important divergence of attitudes between American and European foreign policies has occured since the end of the second world war. Two big problems with what he says:
(1) It seems a little exaggerated to talk about one "European" way of doing things. There's a fair bit of diversity and even conflict on that continent.
(2) It seems more than a little ridiculous to talk about the "Europeans" as having chosen the better way, the higher path, the nobler option of laying down power struggles for the sake of brotherhood. Yeah, right. Seems like most of their decisions have been forced upon them.
Both problems dissipate somewhat upon futher reading of the article. This quote was just the first paragraph.
Posted by: bob at November 30, 2004 08:50 AMGuys, you might be interested to know that Kagan is a neo-con. This could be the first and only time that a neo-con has been, or ever will be, described as implicitly European. I guess Kagan is as European as neo-cons get though.
Kagan oversimplifies and I completely agree with Bob's first point, but the article is a really good analysis in spite of the oversimplification. It's much more about why the differences exist than about which approach is better.
I haven't read the article for awhile, but I think I was frustrated at Kagan's lack of ideas of how to actually reconcile the different approaches.
Posted by: Erin at November 30, 2004 12:58 PMIn my defense, I confess that I didn't read any more of the article than the paragraph Bob quoted. Thus, I was only extrapolating the conclusion from the implicit bias of his language: a "post-historical utopia" vs. an "anarchic Hobbesian world...mired in history". I agree that there is a distinct difference, but I don't want to say that our way is the wrong way, if that's what he's saying. And to call it "Hobbesian" is just another way of saying "the wrong way" to my mind, since I think Hobbes was wrong. We're not just isolated entities to pursue our own agendas, or at least we shouldn't be.
Posted by: Evan Donovan at December 1, 2004 12:14 AM