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novembro 22, 2004

Fukuyama, Russel Mead e Daalder

THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION A BROOKINGS INSTITUTION/HOOVER INSTITUTION BRIEFING TROUBLED PARTNERSHIP: WHAT'S NEXT FOR THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE Wednesday, November 10, 2004 10 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. Falk Auditorium The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. [TRANSCRIPT PREPARED FROM A TAPE RECORDING.]

MODERATOR: Tod Lindberg Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Editor, Policy Review PANELISTS: Ivo H. Daalder Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, and the Sydney Stein, Jr., Chair, The Brookings Institution Francis Fukuyama Bernard L. Schwartz, Professor of International Political Economy, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Walter Russell Mead Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations

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THE BROOKINGS INSTITUTION A BROOKINGS INSTITUTION/HOOVER INSTITUTION BRIEFING TROUBLED PARTNERSHIP: WHAT'S NEXT FOR THE UNITED STATES AND EUROPE Wednesday, November 10, 2004 10 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. Falk Auditorium The Brookings Institution 1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. [TRANSCRIPT PREPARED FROM A TAPE RECORDING.]
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MODERATOR: Tod Lindberg Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, and Editor, Policy Review PANELISTS: Ivo H. Daalder Senior Fellow, Foreign Policy Studies, and the Sydney Stein, Jr., Chair, The Brookings Institution Francis Fukuyama Bernard L. Schwartz, Professor of International Political Economy, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies Walter Russell Mead Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations
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THIS IS AN UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT. P R O C E E D I N G S MR. LINDBERG: Good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Brookings Institution for an event jointly sponsored by Brookings and the Hoover Institution. I'm Tod Lindberg. I'm a fellow at the Institution. I'm the editor of Policy Review, also. What brings us today is a discussion, "Troubled Partnership: What's Next for the United States and Europe." "Troubled Partnership" comes from the subtitle of a book that I have edited, four of whose contributors are before you today. "Beyond Paradise and Power" is the main title, and you may recognize the main title as an echo of a best-selling New York Times book by Robert Kagan a year and a half or so ago, "Of Paradise and Power," which in turn was an outgrowth of an article called, "Power and Weakness," that I published in Policy Review, which subsequently went on to attract a certain amount of attention, shall we say, both in Europe, the United States and elsewhere and even earning comparisons to certain other famous articles. One called, "The End of History," comes to mind. In this, Kagan laid out, I think, a rather provocative and original assessment of what was causing the structural cause of the drift between the United States and Europe. Kagan made, in essence, two arguments: One was that the amount of power that you have determines how you feel about power and its use, which is to say strong powers act like strong powers, and that's different from the ways in which weaker powers act--for example, European powers. The strong prefer freedom of action. The prefer rule-based systems in which they are treated more as equals. That was half the argument.
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The other half of the argument, which I think was the more provocative, and more compelling part and the one that I think caused the article to have sufficient resonance to turn itself into a best-selling book and then to lead, in turn, to this volume was the second half, which was that your ideas about power, and what to do with power and how effective power is and how much utility it has in the world, as against other things, will, in turn, affect how you think about how much power you should pursue and acquire. That difference between the United States and Europe, I think, was being appreciated, in a way, for the first time. But enough of the structural theory. We have also recently had a presidential election. We have had the return of the Bush administration, and we have what I think, by general agreement, is some fairly serious and significant trouble in our partnership. The question of the Atlantic Alliance and its future is before us. The question is whether we have deep structural fraying or dismantling that's been going on or whether, indeed, this has been largely a matter of the difficulties between the personalities involved or, indeed, whether there is a possibility that with a different set of attitudes, we might repair these kinds of relations, et cetera. So I think our task today will be to figure out where we are and, by way of having done that, maybe we'll be able to say something about where exactly it is we will be going. We have, of course, a very distinguished panel--Ivo Daalder, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; Walter Russell Mead, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations; Frank Fukuyama, professor at the Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. I will spare you further introductions--those are in your materials--so that we can have as much time as possible.
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We'll begin with short presentations from our three panelists, and then we'll open up for discussion, questions and answers back and forth. We'll do this in alphabetical order, and I'll turn to Ivo Daalder now to get us going. MR. DAALDER: Thanks, Tod. Thank you all for joining us today. I want to congratulate Tod at putting together what is really an excellent little volume on the future of U.S.-European relations and persuading such distinguished co-authors, one excepted, myself, to be part of this volume. I think there are books on sale just on the outside. I believe in selling books, for some reason, because mine don't get sold as much as my co-authors' are. [Laughter.] MR. DAALDER: Let me talk about what I think is the future of U.S.-European relations and divide the short term from the long term. In the short term, I'm a pessimist, and I think it's very difficult to be anything else besides a pessimist about U.S.-European relations in the short term. But in the long term, I'm an optimist. I was just in Europe earlier this week, in which the notion of being optimistic is, almost by definition, excluded and makes me an American, even though I was born and raised in Europe, but I am optimistic for reasons that, in fact, have very much to do with the short term. So let me explain that. Why am I pessimistic in the short term? Well, there are really three reasons: One is that, for all the rhetoric we are hearing, even emanating from Republican circles, I think American foreign policy in the next four years is going to be exactly what John Kerry said it would be--more of the same; that is, we're not going to see a grand strategic change. We're not even going to see a grand tactical change.
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Frankly, I don't think we're even going to see a grand rhetorical change in American foreign policy in the next four years. I think we're going to see exactly what we saw in the previous three and a half, actually four, years, which is an American foreign policy run by a very confident president, convinced of the power that the United States has and the purity at the motives that the United States has and that the combination of that power and purity allows the United States, basically, to do what it needs to do, and wants to do and have others follow it or not as they want. I thought it was remarkable, and anybody who saw the president's press conference last Thursday, when he was asked what he would do to repair America's image in the world, he basically said, "You know what? I had to make some tough decisions. They were the right decisions. People disagreed with them. That's their right to disagree, but I really am not going to change my view," and he became more emphatic as the answer went along, ultimately, explaining that he would reach out to other people in order to "explain my decisions." It's not that kind of reaching out, I think, that people in Europe are looking for because they already knew his decisions, and they knew his explanation. So I don't think there's going to be a lot of change in American foreign policy. And to the extent that American foreign policy is at least, in part, a reason for the problems that we have in U.S.-European relations, as I would argue it does, the continuation of the trouble that we have seen in the past few years will likely continue. That's point one. Point two is that I think that the Europeans will have looked, and are looking, at the outcome of this election in the same way that the punditocracy has tended to look at this election, which is that this was an affirmation of a particularly "red
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America's" views of the values of America, that, in fact, America is "red America," in the European view, that God, guns and gays is what matters to Americans, is what matters in the decision to vote in the way that they did. It is how Karl Rove continues to explain the outcome of the election. I believe, actually, that is a fundamentally flawed explanation of what happened, but that doesn't matter. I think the European elite, and certainly the European public, has bought into the notion that the way Americans look at the world and the way Europeans look at the world is fundamentally different from a perspective of what drives the individual policies and what drives politics, what drives the society, what drives the essence of the two nations. I noted that Karsten Voight, who is the German Foreign Ministry's representative for U.S.-German relations immediately went out and gave an interview to the International Herald Tribune, in which he wanted to reassure his American friends that Germany, too, had many religious people in their Parliament, and in fact there were more theologians in the German Bundestag than there were in the U.S. Congress. So, please, we can talk to each other. The notion that somehow because you have studied theology you could therefore have something to talk about with Americans tells you a lot, it seems to me, about how Europeans are looking at the election and the desperation there is in some European circles to find something to talk about. Finally, I would say that the rejectionists, France and Germany, in particular, will look at this election as a validation of their view of the United States, that, in fact, there was a reason to believe that not following the United States was a good thing because the U.S. was just very different from how Europeans were pursuing their interests in their foreign policy, and this just proves it, and that therefore the reality
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will be that France and Germany will have less no matter what Mr. Barnier says in the Wall Street Journal or, indeed, Jean-David Levitte on C-SPAN or what needs to be said. The reality is that the dominant view in France and Germany is we really can't work with the United States in the way we have done in the past because we are too different. The third fundamental reason why I am pessimistic is because of the structural issues that Tod talked about, but I put them slightly differently. I think the way in which the United States and Europe have come to view the world is so different that the ability of them to get together and develop join strategies has become so much more problematic. I'd say that the dominant American view, which Jim Lindsey and I have called a hegemonist point of view, a belief that what matters in international politics is power and states in order to deal with the fundamental dangers of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction that are out there and that because power matters, because states matter, international institutions, indeed, even international law does not matter. That has now been reaffirmed, and particularly with the re-election of President Bush, a reaffirmed American view of how the world works and how you need to engage in the world. The European view is very different. It's what we call a globalist point of view, a belief that the major elements in international society, what drives international politics isn't power, but is, in fact, globalization, that it is the transnational forces of disease, of poverty, of weapons of mass destruction, technology that really are driving international politics and that because those are the driving forces, the way you deal with it is through international cooperation, international institutions, in particular, as the means for cooperation.
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It's a normative approach that tries to figure out what are the rules of the game, how can we enforce those rules within an institutional structure so that you have, on one hand, a state-based, power-based world view and the others then a normative, institutionalized world view, which is driven by the fact that what makes the world tick is determined by different forces. So those are three pretty fundamental reasons for being pessimistic about the future of U.S.-European relations. Why then think about the possibility of being optimists? Well, in the long term, I'm optimistic because the reality is that even Europe will have to come appreciate that the world may be slightly different than the way it has looked at it up to this point. In fact, Europe will come to realize that if it wants to get anything done in the world, it will have to become a stronger power. It will have to come, in order to become stronger, a more united path. It will have to cooperate more, that in order to get anything done, and not just in Europe, but, more importantly, outside of Europe, to deal with China, to deal with what's happening in Africa, let alone to deal with what's happening in the Middle East, it can no longer rely on the United States. It doesn't want to rely on the United States. It will then have to do it itself. It will have to do it on its own. And there's a realization, it seems to me, emerging in Europe that only a strong Europe, only a united Europe can have the kind of voice in international policy, including here in Washington, that is necessary and that, therefore, the urge to unification, the urge to put apart the kind of differences that have marked intra-European debate may well be pushed aside because of the differences with the United States.
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I note that even a country like Norway is now restarting the debate about whether their future doesn't lie in Europe rather than in the trans-Atlantic or in the partnership with the United States. I'm not predicting that Norway is going to join the EU any time soon, but the fact that this is now becoming an issue just points to the realization in Europe that working together is becoming much more important because of the differences between the United States that have emerged in the last few years and that are likely to deepen, and that the big debate within Europe is the debate that Timothy Garton Ash and the Euro Atlantacist and the Euro goalist; that is, are we trying to build a stronger Europe in order to be a good partner with the United States to deal with the problems in the world or are we going to be a stronger Europe in order to be a counterweight to the United States? And that is a big debate. It is a debate that pits France and Britain as the two major poles, and it pits lots of the smaller European countries on the British side, with a few of the larger countries on the French side. And the key, it seems to me, the key to the outcome of that debate is, as always, Germany. It will depend on where Germany ends up. Germany has, in the last three, four years, pursued a foreign policy that frankly is not, to put it bluntly, one that a major power should be pursuing. It has not followed its own interests. It has followed weakly and meekly in the step of a Euro goalist foreign policy with, I think, disastrous results for Germany, but that's for it to decide. Germany will have to come face-to-face with the fact that it can very well decide whether Europe unites in a direction that makes it a partner of the United States or whether Europe tries to unite in a way that it makes it a counterweight, which I predict will not work because too many European countries are not willing to go into
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that direction, which leads me to recommend, finally, a change in American policy towards Europe. My recommendations to this administration are unlikely to be any more successful than my recommendations to the Kerry campaign, but let me try-- [Laughter.] MR. DAALDER: --which is to say we can help the process of what happens in Europe by, once and for all, stating unequivocally what we want Europe to be, which is rather than being divided and weak, we want a strong and united Europe. And even if that Europe at times will disagree with us, it is much better to have a Europe that is strong and united rather than weak and divided. And one of the decisions that this administration will have to face is whether the policy it has pursued in the past few years of divide and rule, of keeping Europe weak by picking out and cherry-picking its partners in order to build these coalitions of the willing, whether in the long term that is really in America's interests. I don't believe it's in America's interests. I don't even believe it is in America's interests if you take the perspective of foreign policy that this administration pursues and that therefore it is incumbent on the administration to come out strong and quickly to argue that we want a Europe that is united, we want a Europe that is strong, and we understand that a united, strong Europe may, at times, disagree with us, but that's okay because, in the end, we are confident that a united and strong Europe is more often going to be a partner rather than a counterweight and that, therefore, that is what we need to pursue. Whether, in fact, Europe will unite and whether, in fact, this administration will put European unity front and center is, I think, one of the questions
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that will determine whether my short-term pessimism can, in fact, become long-term optimism. MR. LINDBERG: Thank you very much, Ivo. Let me turn to Frank Fukuyama. MR. FUKUYAMA: Well, I guess I'm the opposite of you. I'm a short-term optimist and a long-term pessimist, but I do think that we need to pay a debt of gratitude to Bob Kagan. I think that in his book he didn't get everything right. I mean, there are things left out and things aren't quite correct, but I do think he did touch off a very important debate and now actually allows us to get beyond paradise and power and to see the differences between Europe and America more clearly. I am of the school that says that the differences actually are deep and abiding and are not going to be papered over by decisions that political leaders take in the short term, and I think that that's really been clarified in a lot of the things that have happened in the last few years. And I think, really, as a result of part of this Kagan debate, we actually can point quite precisely to the areas where these differences exist. I think one of the most useful summaries of them was the manifesto that was written by Juergen Habermas and Jacques Derrida in the year prior to the Iraq war, where they talked about a kind of manifesto for the new Europe and pointed to how Europe is different. They had six points, but I would boil them down to really four. Europeans like the welfare state. They believe in social solidarity. Whereas, Americans really have very mixed feelings about social welfare. Europeans believe that they are transcending sovereignty. Whereas, I think Americans very much believe that legitimacy comes from a democratic, sovereign
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nation state, and this leads to very different views about international organizations, the U.N., and so forth. I think that's become quite familiar. A third point, use of military force. In the American national story, military power has been used for redeeming moral purposes. This goes all the way back to the American Revolution. It includes the Civil War that led to the abolition of slavery. It includes World War II that liberated Europe from Nazism, and it goes up through the Cold War, which liberated Europe again from the threat of Soviet communism. I think in Europe the really central event in their modern history was the first World War, in which military power really served to undermine the very fabric of European civilization, and I think neither of these views is correct. It is in accord with the historical experiences of people on both sides of the Atlantic, but it does really I think serve as an underpinning for Kagan's famous quip about Europeans being from Venus and Americans from Mars. The final issue is religion. Europeans, Habermas and Derrida say that we live in a continent where we don't like the president getting up every morning and beginning with a prayer and saying that, overtly, that he has been inspired by God. Now, to this, I think we can add some other issues, very different perceptions about the Middle East, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the general sources of instability in that region and I think very large differences in perception of the threat that's been posed since September 11th. I think Americans think this is a cataclysmic threat of Islamism combined with weapons of mass destruction, and Europeans think that this is something that they're familiar with in terms of their earlier experience of terrorism from Bader-Meinhof or from the IRA and so forth.
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And I think that's what really important is that European identity is being built on this "not America" basis. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former French socialist prime minister, on February 15th, 2003, a month before the beginning of the Iraq war, when demonstrations erupted all over Europe, against the American-led war, he said that this is the birth of the European nation, so quite explicitly tying European identity to something that is not the United States. Now, I think that all of this, in a way, is the fruition of trends that have been underway for some time. Anyone familiar, for example, with the whole literature on American exceptionalism will understand that these have been deep and abiding differences for some time. It's just that during the Cold War it didn't really make all that much difference politically. I mean, basically, the American exceptionalism literature really begins by asking why America has no socialists, and that's a true characterization of American politics in the last century. So America is a land largely free of socialists. Europe is a land largely free of Republicans-- [Laughter.] MR. FUKUYAMA: And the overlap is the political space occupied by Timothy Garton Ash's Euro Atlanticists, on the one hand, and American Democrats on the other. In the Cold War all three of those legs could actually agree on a common policy, but now the common strategy has got to rest on the overlap between the left wing of the American body politic and the right wing of the European body politic, and I think that that's not a very stable platform over the long run--the right wing not meaning the far right in Europe, but really what the Europeans call the center right.
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And I think that the election doesn't, I mean, all that does is confirm, in the minds of many Europeans, as Ivo said, that they can't just blame President Bush for somehow having hijacked the country. It is really the American people that are the problem, and I think you're going to see a lot of that kind of analysis in the near future. I don't want to talk about--I really do want to move beyond "Paradise and Power" because I think there is a different common agenda of a rather different sort that really has to do with immigration, multiculturalism and identity politics, where actually Americans and Europeans have very similar kinds of issues and where I think there may be room for a bit more of a common agenda. One of the characteristics of the world now is multiculturalism, for better and worse. There's a very positive side to it which has to do with global integration, the ability of technology, and companies and people to work together productively in ways that bring together talent from all over the world, exemplified by America's Silicon Valley. And there's a negative side to multiculturalism, which has to do with the rise of intolerance and the reaction, in a sense, to that kind of globalization that is felt in many parts of the world. And I think that, in general, although you get this common European perception of the United States as a land of Bible-thumping, gun-toting, intolerant bigots, by and large, the United States has been much better in dealing with identity politics than Europe has in quite a lot of ways. This is the week, I mean, this got drowned out because of the American election, but this week saw the murder of Theo van Gogh in Holland, who was a filmmaker--a Dutch filmmaker--that had done some fairly films talking about Muslims in ways that went way beyond the boundaries of the
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previous Dutch discourse on this subject, and it led to a cycle of violence in Holland that I think the Dutch had really not seen for some time. And there's a certain sense in which I think the United States, and we've got plenty of problems with identity politics ourselves, but in a way we've been able to deal with this issue better than the Europeans over time. I have an Irish friend who actually grew up in Scotland. He's got an extremely Irish Catholic name, and Scotland is still a place where Protestants and Catholics, they were murdering each other quite viciously 400 years ago and a lot of that still remains. And he said that when he went to school in St. Andrews as a kid, every morning he was beaten up, basically, because of his Irish identity. He now lives in Silicon Valley, and he says he can never be happier, and that's the kind of world that he wants his children to grow up in. And so I think that there is, you know, something that we are all going to have to deal with in the future, particularly Europe, because I think they've got the bigger problem with identity assimilation. There's a big hole in liberal political theory as to how you deal with the whole question of communities rather than individuals that assert cultural rights. And there is not a clear answer to this because, in some sense, a liberal society has to be dedicated to common principles of openness, tolerance, pluralism but, on the other hand, it's clear that you don't have a community unless you have certain common shared values that people cannot communicate if they don't agree on the basic rules of the game. And I would say that, in Europe, especially the parties of the center right that should be bearing the torch on this issue, have really been, in a sense, deterred by a
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kind of stifling political correctness and talking about this whole set of issues having to do with identity. It's a very weird situation because this is a continent where there is practically no practicing Christians any more, and yet you get these Christian democratic parties that will get up and assert that this is a Christian civilization, and so the identity is, in a way, formerly weaker, but in many ways has personally felt stronger. And so there has to be, I think, the beginning of a dialogue there, and I think that this is an area where Europeans may actually have something to learn from Americans, who have dealt both with the positive side of multiculturalism, making that work as a kind of positive force for growth and change and also dealing with the negative side of multiculturalism, you know, inability of America's I think long-term ability to assimilate people from very different cultural backgrounds. It's also an area where I think we've got to watch it because we can do a lot of things that will either greatly exacerbate this problem or help it. I mean, the positive agenda I've kind of laid out. The negative one, you know, Americans and Europeans can say a lot of unhelpful things on this particular issue in the category of unhelpful you know, too much American advice on whether to take Turkey into the EU I think will probably not be appreciated. It's a little bit like Europeans advising us to open our border with Mexico. The reactions to the head scarf ban in France I thought were a little bit strange on our part because, after having attacked them from the right, we suddenly attack them from the left for being too intolerant and so forth. But it is an area where the threat is really quite common. I think that in many ways Europeans are threatened internally by radical Islam in a much more severe
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way than Americans are in terms of their external threat. And the threat to the common values of democracy, in the long run I think will be quite serious, and it's something where I think we really need to sit down and talk a little bit about our experience with different strategies in dealing with this set of problems. Thank you. MR. LINDBERG: Thanks, Frank. Walter? MR. MEAD: It's good to be here. It's also great to see so many students either taking an interest or being dragooned by their teachers into pretending to take an interest in this subject. I don't know whether I'm an optimist or a pessimist. The definition of an optimist, they say, is that things are about as good as they could possibly be, and a pessimist is someone who is afraid the optimist is right. [Laughter.] MR. MEAD: So maybe that's where I am. As I look at Europe and the United States moving into the future, what I see are two societies that are sort of like characters in a Preuss novel, they're chasing illusions. Both the Americans and the Europeans are basically wrong about where the world is going, but these beliefs are leading them to behave in a way I think at the end of the day we're both going to be very disappointed by the 21st century and what kind of a world we live in, and we'll sort of be forced to kind of work out some kind of a relationship. We'll be unhappy with each other, we'll be unhappy with the rest of the world, but like a married couple who realizes that they can't afford to divorce, we're
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going to still be sort of condemned to a not particularly happy relationship, but a close relationship. What do I mean by this? Well, it's probably better manners to start by talking about what it is that we Americans, where we go wrong when we look at the world, and that is that Americans, because of our sunny optimism and so on, and also because of our tremendous self-esteem and self-regard, tend to think that American power, we're the good guys, the more powerful we are, the weaker the bad guys are and therefore the better the world is going to be and that the rise of American power prefigures for the 21st century a Pax Americana, the triumph of American ideas in the Cold War, triumph of market economics are going to make for a world of stable, peaceful, democracy, and so, in general, all we have to do is persevere and deal with problems as they arise, but things are moving forward in a good way. I'd actually argue the relationship between American success and the rest of the world is more complex, that, to some degree, American society is based on further development of capitalism, which is the most revolutionary force for change in the history of the world--change in technology, change in the economy, change in social arrangements. And the better we are at being American capitalists, the freer our markets are, the more flexible our labor markets are, the faster and smarter our economy is at reacting to new developments in new technology and moving forward, the faster we change as a society. And, by the way, if you look back at how American society, our economy and our society have changed in the last 30 or 40 year, we have changed at breathtaking speed. To somebody my age, the fact that people are even debating gay marriage is so revolutionary. I grew up in a segregated South. I grew up in a society
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where, and I don't like to think of myself as that old, women were essentially barred from all serious professions. When my mother applied to a graduate school program at the University of North Carolina, she was told, "You're a married woman. We don't accept you, people like you, into this state university system," and that was it. There was no appeal, and people thought that was normal. We had a regulated economy. We didn't have anything like the kinds of capital markets. We have changed enormously. And as we have changed, competition is tougher. We all have to kind of fight harder to stay where we are. Our GDP is moving ahead. Our way of life is changing in all kinds of amazing ways, but the rest of the world has to react to this whether they like it or not business suddenly American companies are in your face with these revolutionary techniques, these tremendously effective ways of organizing, and managing and managing money, and you know "cutting to the chase," as they say in Hollywood, getting rid of all the extraneous stuff and focusing right on that bottom line. And other countries, other economies, other companies have to adjust to this or fall behind. Europe doesn't like this kind of pressure. The Middle East doesn't like this kind of pressure. Africa, to some degree, can't cope at all. The world is changing, and as those changes happen, it creates--disturbances come in the international system. A movement like al Qaeda or more generally the fanatical Islam is, in part, a reaction to the sense of a society in danger, of traditional ways of life being overturned. So American success does not necessarily lead to a peaceful, quiet world. It leads to a revolutionary world. But in another way, our success in technology leads to new problems in that the whole WMD proliferation issue is partly so serious today
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because it's getting easier and cheaper to make nuclear weapons and other forms of weapons of mass destruction. Back in the day when the United States developed atom bombs, you had to have a consortium of scientists, the leading scientists from all over the world and spend boatloads of money on this. You had to have Albert Einstein helping you. Today, you can be kind of a third-rate country that can't even educate your own kids and use a team of scientists, not one of whom could get tenure at Stanford or something like that, and you can build these things, and you can do it in a way that's undetectable by international monitors, and this is only going to get more difficult, and particularly perhaps as biological WMD become more and more available. But success in technology is one of the things that capitalism is all about in that it accelerates, it gets resources to people with new technologies, it turns more money to research and development and so on. So our very success is creating a more tumultuous world that will be more difficult for us to get some of the things that we want in it. So what I would say is that Americans are going to be facing a paradox of success in the 21st century, and life will not be getting easier for us, even as we do better and better at the things we think should make life easier for us. The Europeans, on the other hand, I think also have a sort of a false narrative that they believe in, which is the narrative of European recovery and sort of regaining the high ground in world politics and influence. If we look at it, probably the best-established single trend in world politics today is the decline of Europe. It's about a century old, that Europe has been sort of losing influence, political military influence around the world throughout the 20th century. Europeans diagnosed the cause of this as
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European disunity; i.e., the two world wars, and divided efforts and so on. And now they're saying, now that we are overcoming the disunity and now that we're having unity, Europe will now recover, and Europeans really often speak as if the destiny of a successful European Union is to be the counterweight or partner of the United States. There will be two pillars in the world of roughly equal, though not identical, strength and composition--one on one side of the Atlantic and one on the other side of the Atlantic--and between them these two pillars will rule the world; in other words, white people are going to rule the world in the 21st century, although Europeans very seldom express the dream in quite those terms. That's probably not what's going to happen. Americans, looking at Europe, and me and others looking at Europe, tend to kind of look and say there are five things we would need to see happening in Europe before we could believe that the European dream was coming true. One of these is radical economic reform. From an American standpoint, you look at what's going on in Europe, and what you see is people standing by the side of a cold swimming pool, and they dip a toe into the water of economic reform, and they say, "Oh, this is so cold," and they sort of agonize and agonize and then like stick another toe in, you know, "Oh, it's still so cold." We just say, "Jump in the pool, swim. Just jump in," because, to some degree, the process of European economic reform is so slow that they're not keeping pace with what they need to do to keep even. They may be falling further behind even as they reform. So "Thatcherize" or "Reaganize," to use an even uglier word for European economies, and do it quick, quick, quick. That would be the first thing. And I think that, to some degree, is an objective thing they have to do. They can do it in their own way, and so on, not exactly the way we did it or the British, but it needs to be done.
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The second thing is spend money on defense, a lot of money. The U.S. is moving toward about 4 percent of GDP. Europe, we've got to understand that Europe is going to be a less-efficient military spender than the United States or than other countries. There are so many different languages. There are also so many different politicians from so many different countries, each of whom is going to divert some of that money into pork-barrel spending rather than really effective defense spending, that, in fact, Europe will actually have to spend more money, more bucks for the same bang. In fact, it's likely to be spending less money, less bucks, and get even less bang because, if you look at the European demographic projections and the unfunded pension and welfare liabilities of European governments, they dwarf anything that we're facing, and we're facing some tremendous problems along those lines. The third thing that you would need to see is bring Turkey into the European Union, and I'm glad to see they're moving in that direction, but too slowly and too grudgingly. This is not something, you know, Europeans hear Americans talking about Turkey and the European Union think it's some kind of evil plot to further divide the European Union, and probably there are some Americans who think that. But a serious European concerned about power politics would see that the potential to detach Turkey from Washington and bind it into Europe, there is no other single thing Europe could do that would force the United States to take Europe much more seriously in the Middle East, and also in terms of remedying some of Europe's military weakness, Turkey is a huge, glittering, beautiful geopolitical prize for Europe, and yet European public opinion is horrified by the thought of getting maybe the biggest opportunity that Europe faces, which is a suggestion to Americans that, to some degree,
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Bob Kagan has got it right. Europeans care about other things more than they do about power, in a conventional sense, but really this is something that, if Europe were serious about power, they would be moving very, very rapidly to engage the Turks. The fourth thing Europeans have just got to do is make babies. I tell Europeans there are a lot of Americans who would be happy to give them some technical assistance in this matter, and they have only to call upon our assistance, but, in fact, the demographics of Europe are appalling. I've seen some projections that France could have a Muslim majority on present tends well before the end of this century, but the fact that the non-Muslim Europeans are failing to have babies, and we're facing falling populations, aging populations, falling labor forces, and therefore also slowing or even receding economic growth down the road. I've seen figures from the European Commission that project, by the year 2050, the U.S. share of global GDP will rise from 23 percent to 26 percent of GDP, while the European share will fall from 18 percent to 10 percent I think of GDP. That is remarkable, and it is largely driven by demography. So they've got to make babies. The other thing they've got to learn to do is either assimilate the kind of immigrants they're getting or stop getting those immigrants and start getting some immigrants they can assimilate; that, if you look at the polarization and alienation--and Frank has touched on this already, so I'm not going to go into too much detail--it's clear that Europe is failing to reproduce its culture, to maintain any kind of identity, to manage a sort of basic, you know, the question one has to ask sometimes is does Europe have the biological and the cultural will to live? And until Europe addresses these five issues, a lot of Americans are going to think that the process of European unification is not so much the grand
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emergence of a new superpower as it looks like the passengers on the Titanic huddling closer and closer together as the ship sinks. Now, I would say, again, that that kind of hyper American-Euro pessimism that I've been describing, that's taking it too far, and things are not necessarily going to work out in exactly that way. But I will say that those who think that Europe, with its present values and orientation, is going to successfully forge a superpower are wrong. Europe may slow its international decline, perhaps temporarily stop it, but is unlikely to seriously reverse that decline for the long term. What that is going to lead, though, to is an America and a Europe both facing the kind of somewhat unpleasant 21st century world that I talked about when I talked about the problems of the American dream for the 21st century, a world in which there is going to be tremendous social, cultural, economic, political dislocation and unhappiness throughout the non-American, non-European world, in which weapons of mass destruction are going to be getting cheaper and easier to make, and there are going to be more and more people who are kind of angry and discontented and have a willingness to make and to use them. So the United States and Europe are going to, like it or not, have a common agenda and, to some degree, the common agenda is going to be shaped by the fact that our two mutual dreams are no coming true, rather than by the success of our two dreams. So is that optimistic? Is that pessimistic? You tell me, but I think that's more or less where we're headed. Thank you. MR. LINDBERG: Thanks, Walter.
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I think that gives you an illustration of the richness of the intellectual contribution that you'll find within the pages of the book that I had the pleasure of editing. I assigned myself, as editor, in the role of moderator today, but in addition to editing "Beyond Paradise and Power," I also contributed a chapter to it. In fact, I assigned myself the last chapter, which is the prerogative of the editor. That's not to suggest that I think I've got the last word, by any stretch of the imagination, but it does mean, I think, I have something that I want to say and that I also want to put on the table here, exceeding the prerogative of the moderator, and it is this. The disagreement between the United States and Europe over policy matters and other matters strikes me as fundamentally a bounded disagreement. It is not a disagreement that will ever result in armed conflict as between the United States and Europe nor, for that matter, is it plausible that nations within Europe will go to war with each other again. Now, when one says such a thing, one usually gets a kind of nod as if this were somehow a banality, and it is, in fact, banal because its truth is so obvious. However, it's not banal. It is, in fact, profound because there has been no time in history when you could make such a statement about a similar group of nations. So that says to me that there is some kind of elemental tie that continues or disputes about such issues, use of force, are actually about the extension of the norms that exist within this community, which I have called without great originality the Atlanticist community, the extension of those norms beyond its boundaries. The other contentious issue within a community is precisely the point that's been raised by Frank and Walter, and that pertains to the integration and assimilation of immigrants. On the one hand, there is the question of the outside
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stranger. There is, on the other hand, the question of the in-dwelling stranger and whether he turns into a friend or, in fact, continues to exert a different kind of influence. I think Walter has well framed the question. The question of Europe going forward is, in large measure, in this century also a question of whether the Muslim population of Europe will become European, and therefore the basis of this community will continue and be expanded. But I want to probe a little bit first with Ivo. What I would like a little more from you on, Ivo, is what Euro goalism look like? What would an effort to be a counterweight look like? I believe we are in agreement on the essential piece question. So, therefore, it seems unlikely that we will decide that we will fight proxy wars in Asia or Africa or Central America. So, in the absence of that, what does counterweight look like? And then I want to turn to Frank and Walter briefly and have them respond to that. MR. DAALDER: In theory, Euro goalism is a Europe that does all the thing that Walter says it should do in order to become a serious, strong power, and that would oppose the United States probably short of the use of force. I think your insight on the profound, historically unique nature of the U.S.-European relationship, barring its change because of immigration, which is a good footnote, is true; that is, I think it is, in the 21st century, as impossible to conceive of a situation in which the United States and Europe would settle disagreements with the use of force as it was in the second half of the 20th century, and that is a profound, unique change, which makes the United States and Europe a different kind of entity than they are with any other part of the world.
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But what it would mean is a strong Europe that would actively oppose the United States, wherever it could, in order to achieve advantage of power--a normal balance of power relationship done in political, diplomatic, and economic and probably short of military force. That's the theory. I think the practice because, in fact, of the essential, historically changed nature of the relationship between Americans and Europeans means that Euro goalism is more of the same of what we have today--a deeply divided, essentially weak Europe that may rhetorically try to oppose the United States, but won't be, in fact, able to be in opposition of the United States. In other words, I'm a strong believer that European unity is possible only if it is based on the concept of partnership, as opposed to as a concept of counterweight, because the differences within Europe on that essential question of whether the one is a counterweight, tries to balance or wants to be a partner will prevent the counterweight ever from coming about. Whereas, I think the prospect for--the adherence of counterweight Europe, of Euro goalist Europe, are essentially one or two countries. Actually, in fact, one country, and will be, and as long as it is opposed by the Germans, which is why I think that Germany is the key to whether Europe will unite or will remain divided, will determine the outcome of that. MR. LINDBERG: Walter, can I turn to you? MR. MEAD: I want to agree that I think Germany holds the key to the future of Europe, and I think I want to underline that German foreign policy in recent years I think really during the life of this SPD government has been disastrous. In fact, we can go a little bit further and say, since unification, Germany, which had been the country in Europe that was the most successful in managing foreign policy of all the
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European countries has been roughly the least successful at dealing both with its internal problems, which would be unification with the East, but also reform and restructuring of its economy. Germany is failing on both of those important grounds, and partly as a result, it is failing as a European country. It's also failing trans-Atlantically. To some degree, by the way, the fact that the French are so eager to cooperate closely with the Germans these days is one way to measure France's contempt for the German government in the sense that at the time of unification, Mitterrand and the French establishment were terrified that this united Germany would be a juggernaut that would marginalize France and press it to the side. And so there was some Atlanticism in France at that point. France has now concluded we can stop worrying about Germany, folks. There is no problem here. These people, and I don't know what word they use instead of people, but they probably have some very idiomatic and colorful expression, can't manage what they've got on their hands. Meanwhile, what you see is I think in Germany a very unhappy recapitulation of sort of the Wilhelm the Second foreign policy; that is to say, just as Germany, at that time, was unable to resolve its domestic problems and kind of sought prestige, victories in international relations as a way to paper over internal problems and win support for its government, it's now embarked on a course of seeking prestige. Again, this is not just vis-à-vis the U.S. At the Nice Summit, the Germans insisted on more members of the European Parliament than the French had. This is something they never would have done back when they knew what they were doing. The insistence now over Italian and Spanish objections against Germany pursuing a permanent seat on the Security Council, Germany is going to pursue this
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outside of a European context, in violation of the will of its European partners. That is something the old Germany would never have done. Some of the ways of the relations with Poland and some of the way the pro-Atlantic countries were handled in the war of words in Europe over the war in Iraq were in cautious and even, at times, bullying in a way that I don't think the Bonn Republic would have done. And what is happening, to some degree, is that Germany is slowly in a process of forfeiting the trust of some of its partners, who may agree with it on particular stands, but who regret this and worry about this kind of instability in its foreign policy. Germany has enormous constraints. They're not really related to World War II and that sort of thing, which is the kind of way people often think about them, but they have a lot to do with Germany's size, influence, the fact that it has so many neighbors with such different interests. It's I think impossible for Europe to succeed when Germany is failing, and that would be true economically, as well as diplomatically. It gives me no pleasure at all to say that I think that's the situation that we have today. And I hope very much that the Germans, who have an enormous historical role to play, not only in terms of the trans-Atlantic alliance, but in terms of the future of Europe, manage to sort of recapture their balance. MR. LINDBERG: Frank, thoughts on Euro goalism? MR. FUKUYAMA: Well, I guess Euro goalism would look pretty much as Ivo described, but I would say not to worry because the idea that you'll have a strong, unified Euro-goalist Europe I would say is extremely small because the Europeans just have these really crippling collective action problems. If you think about how large political entities get put together, they are almost always put together as a result of
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military power on the part of the largest of the unifying entities. That's how Germany got unified. That's how Italy got unified. Our country became the United States of America as a result of a very bloody Civil War. The Europeans are trying to put together a collective action system based on consensus, and I think it just leads to these crippling weaknesses in their decision-making capacities. And you watch this in negotiations over the European Constitution. The enlargement to 25 just makes that problem all the more worrisome. And you talk about adding Turkey and other countries beyond the 25, I think it just becomes, I mean, Walter if you think Turkey is actually going to add to European power, but I think in respect to its ability to act collectively, it's going to lead to a tremendous weakening of an already weak system. So I would say that's one particular nightmare we probably don't have to worry terribly much about. MR. LINDBERG: I want to open it up to discussion from the floor. If you could be so kind as to wait for a microphone to arrive. Yes, sir, you are first, and please identify yourself. QUESTIONER: Hassan Azar [ph] at Turkey Daily. How does Turkey's EU membership process affect EU and U.S. relations? MR. : Well, I think that Turkey's interest in EU membership and the application process has led to some strain in U.S.-EU relations because of a perception that the United States is trying to push Turkey down the throat of Europe. I would submit, despite Frank's caution, in my view, that's done with a desire to be helpful to Europe, as well as to be helpful to Turkey.
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It is strongly, in any case, in the American interests to be a strong, steadfast supporter of Turkish membership in the European Union. And I think at every point in that process the United States is going to make clear that while the particular details of accession, and the timing of accession and so on are purely of concern to Turkey and its European partners. From the U.S. point of view, it really is extremely important that this process go forward and certainly that Turkey not feel that it's being treated unjustly or being discriminated against or that its membership is being put off indefinitely for no good reason. MR. : Let me add I think the question of what the United States should do is really past. We are now at a point where the decision is Europe's, and it is in the hands of Turkey, what it does. It seems to me this is one of those few times in history when you have a win-win situation on your hands for both sides. Clearly, what has happened inside Turkey, over the past few years, as it has moved closer to the prospect of membership, it can only be supported by everybody, including in Europe, and it has been supported in Europe by what's happening in Turkey and by us. The transformation of Turkey, in response to the desire to become part of the EU, has been extraordinary, is an example for, frankly, the rest of the world to look at, and it needs to be fed and continued by the prospect not only of membership, but actual talks that will then-- MR. : It's also the great example of the soft power that Europeans talk about as being so important. MR. : Absolutely. Solana, the High Representative, comes to the United States frequently in order to argue that the greatest force of regime change is the
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European Union. It has changed more regimes in Eastern Europe and, in many ways, that is true. It is exactly as Walter said. But it is, also, it seems to me, a win for Europe not just in the way that Walter put it, but in the way that both Walter and Frank talked about, the need to start thinking about how you deal with the Muslim population. You have, with Turkey, an influx of a Muslim country into the European Union, and dealing with that issue is one way which gives you an incentive, in fact, the need, to start dealing with your own Muslim population and, first, to realize that not every Muslim who comes to live in your country is, by definition, a fundamentalist and an extremist. In fact, the vast, vast majority are not. And dealing with that integration, both of a Muslim Turkey into and have Muslim into your own society is a win. Because if we don't do it, if the Europeans fail in this experiment as, frankly, up to this point we see they are not succeeding--they haven't yet failed, but they're certainly not succeeding--the future for European societies are as dramatic as both Walter and Frank were talking about earlier. MR. LINDBERG: Frank, did you want to come in on this point? MR. FUKUYAMA: Just briefly, because when I've said things about Turkey in the past, I have a lot of Turkish people that pay attention to what I say, and I want to make really clear I am really in favor of Turkey coming into the EU for all of the geostrategic reasons. I just think that there is a huge domestic European dimension to this that we Americans do not have to deal with, and therefore we've got to be a little bit careful about how we express ourselves.
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MR. LINDBERG: Let me just add a point or a footnote about Solana and the European Union as a force for regime change reform, et cetera, in Central and Eastern Europe. I think that is absolutely true and undeniably true. But there is a part of the story that Solana doesn't usually tell, and that is that the first door through which those countries walked was the NATO door. It was the security aspect of it. Once those issues were settled--and that, by the way, entailed some fairly significant reform on its own. You're not allowed to join NATO if you have an active dispute over borders with your neighbors. So we cleared away a lot of the underbrush for what I do think then became very much a tremendously successful European project. Yes, in the back, please. Right behind you. Thank you. Yes. QUESTIONER: Dimitri [?], Georgetown University Security Studies Program. I just kind of want to stay with the peripheral actor piece. If you could speak a little bit about Russia playing into the calculus. Are they a spoiler? Do they straddle or do they join Europe? How do they play into it? MR. LINDBERG: Just clarify the question, here. I don't think Russia is a problem in U.S.-European relations. Russia is a problem, and the U.S. and Europe are not dealing with it. That's how I-- QUESTIONER: In the context of the globalization argument with the problems that they have and their tendency to join with Europe on counter-U.S. policy and that sort of thing.
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MR. LINDBERG: We don't talk much about Russia these days. Is that a mistake? MR. : Yes, it's a huge mistake. What's happening in Russia is the one example, it seems to me, of where regime change is moving in the wrong direction, and I think there is a shameful European-American conspiracy, at the elite level, to hide it. We have a president here who refuses to talk about what is happening, in any real way, inside Russia. We have prime ministers, and chancellors, and presidents in Europe from Berlusconi, to Blair, to Schroeder, to Chirac, who refuse to talk about what it is happening in Russia. And what is happening in Russia is very, very serious, which is to say, in a country that is moving in a direction of fundamental change on which the internal change in that country was what precipitated, in fact, the very discussion that allows us to sit here, the change that we have seen in the world, for all the better, that that change is moving in the wrong direction. Mr. Putin is using an internal civil war, which has become blown up and tied to terrorism, as a fundamental reason for turning back every possible democratic change that has been happening inside that country, not to the benefit of the Russian people, not to the benefit of fighting the war on terror, not to the benefit of the people in Chechnya, not to the benefit of Europe or the United States. And for our leaders, collectively, this is one thing the United States and Europe agree on, and they are, frankly, fundamentally wrong about it, to ignore that is I think shameful, and we ought to start dealing with Putin as the autocratic leader that he is turning out to be.
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MR. : Well, there is also this other part of the agenda. We may be getting to the point where it's more productive not to deal with Russia because, in a way, that's a lost cause, but to deal with places like Ukraine or Georgia, where there is actually some return to democratic governance. And I would add that to the conspiracy of silence that neither Europeans nor Americans have paid any attention to. Russians have intervened massively in this Ukrainian presidential election in a way that would be totally unacceptable. If an American president went to Mexico City and campaigned on behalf of one of the candidates or if, you know, the French president did that in Germany, it violates every democratic norm, and yet basically no complaint about that. MR. : I would say that, to some degree, I think we lost the battle for Russia, if that's what you want to call it, in the 1990s, and in a sense thinking that the wholesale theft of the Russian national patrimony by a people with corrupt ties of various kinds either to the old regime or the Yeltsin government, to tell ourselves that this could be the enduring foundation of a society of law, and institutions and private property, when there is, essentially, no moral claim of legitimacy to the ownership of a lot of the large resources in Russia has put us in a tough position. I think the time to have engaged seriously with Russia was 10 years ago and 12 years ago, when of course a lot of our advice proved spectacularly unsuccessful and that now I think we're in the process of reaping a bitter harvest of what was sowed in the past, and the harvest is far more bitter for the people living in Russia than it is for people elsewhere. In terms of Russia's attempt to sort of play off the European, play off old Europe and the United States and try to win some diplomatic leverage for this, there is
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definitely sort of a Russian desire to be a great power doing great power things and playing great power games. And in its history this has more than once gotten the Russians into a lot of trouble. I'm thinking of the Balkans in the first 20 years of this century and then again at the close. But I think there's a kind of a boundary on Russia in the sense on how aggressively Russia can play this game in that it faces the problem, it sort of faces two big problems--one of them demographic of just quite rapid decline, but even more rapid decline in the Russian Far East, in a corner of the world where the Russian part is getting emptier and emptier, but other parts are getting fuller and more dynamic. And then you have the sort of Islamic issues that Russia faces throughout its kind of southern fringe. And those suggest that Russia can't alienate the United States too far in its quest for a multi-polar world. They suggest some limit on the distance and the aggressiveness with which Russia can play an anti-American card. And I think the fact that Europe is essentially irrelevant to Russia's future, where those two vital issues and a sense of survival are concerned, limits or helps shape the kind of game that Russia can afford to play. MR. LINDBERG: Yes, in the second row, please. QUESTIONER: Thanks. I'm Helga Flores. I'm heading the Henrich Boll Foundation, which is the think tank of the German Green Party. So I have two comments. First of all, on Euro goalism, I agree with Frank Fukuyama, I don't think this is a real threat. It is impossible to thank that you will have a united Europe under that umbrella not only because the new democracies, like Poland, will never accept it,
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but even also Germany, the majority of the people will not go along with that. That means with the concept of Europe being a Europe against the U.S. But, secondly, since you identified Germany as one of the key actors for what will happen next, I think it's important to also really describe what has been happening in Germany in the past years because it's been dramatic changes. And what you described as the Bonn Republic, this costly place that Germany had under the umbrella of the Cold War was really a lack of foreign policy. You only start having foreign policy--Germany's role in the world since really this coalition, in 1998. And since then, Germany having gone from not having any role around the world on conflicts or military forces around, et cetera, has gone to have, you know, military forces in Kosovo, Macedonia, Bosnia, and Afghanistan, and this government really risked also, the chancellor risked his government, to go about to Afghanistan. And so I think it's important because these changes note that it's very--it's been a very rapid change in German policy. Certainly, the last two years have been unclear regarding where Germany is going to go vis-à-vis the trans-Atlantic relations and maybe following too close behind France, but I think you will see that separate itself--again, Joschka Fischer coming out and supporting the Great Middle East Initiative of the Bush administration I think was already one signal. Let me just ask one question because one of the main problems that we are going to be confronting very, very soon is Iran, and there's, for the first time, some initiative in Europe, whether you think it's going to be successful or not, and it seems to me that still in the U.S. there is not clarity where the U.S. policy vis-à-vis Iran will go. MR. LINDBERG: Does anyone want to step up to Iran?
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MR. MEAD: Sure. Just on Iran, I think the U.S. is waiting to see what the agreement will be like, and I think virtually everyone in the United States hopes that what we're going to get is a good agreement out of that, and the devil is in the details, and we don't know what that is yet. But to get to your sort of underlying question, I think actually the most dangerous idea in Germany today is that the Bonn Republic didn't have a foreign polic

Publicado por maria teresa monica às 03:20 PM | Comentários (0)

Fukuyama-The Neoconservative Moment

The Neoconservative Moment

Francis Fukuyama
The National Interest, 01.06.2004

One of Washington′s most exclusive clubs during the 1990s was the annual board dinner of The National Interest. Presided over by founding editor Owen Harries and often kicked off with a presentation by Henry Kissinger, the group included Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Irving, Bea and Bill Kristol, Samuel Huntington, Paul Wolfowitz, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Pipes, Charles Krauthammer, Marty Feldstein, Eliot Cohen, Peter Rodman and a host of other conservative thinkers, writers and doers, including just about everyone now characterized as a "neoconservative."
What I always found fascinating about these dinners was their unpredictability. People′s views were very much set in concrete during the Cold War; while this group was divided into pro- and anti-détente camps, virtually everyone (myself included) had staked out territory years before. The Berlin Wall′s fall brought a great change, and there was no clear mapping between one′s pre-1989 views and the ones held thereafter. Roughly, the major fault line was between people who were more realist and those who were more idealist or Wilsonian. But everyone was trying to wrestle with the same basic question: In the wake of the disappearance of the overarching strategic threat posed by the former USSR, how did one define the foreign policy of a country that had suddenly become the global hegemon? How narrowly or broadly did one define this magazine′s eponymous "national interest"?
It was at one of these dinners that Charles Krauthammer first articulated the idea of American unipolarity. In the winter of 1990-91, he wrote in Foreign Affairs of the "unipolar moment"; in the Winter 2002/03 issue of The National Interest, he expanded the scope of his thesis by arguing that "the unipolar moment has become the unipolar era." And in February 2004, he gave a speech at the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute in which he took his earlier themes and developed the ideas further, in the aftermath of the Iraq War. He defined four different schools of thought on foreign policy: isolationism, liberal internationalism, realism and his own position that he defines as "democratic globalism", a kind of muscular Wilsonianism-minus international institutions-that seeks to use U.S. military supremacy to support U.S. security interests and democracy simultaneously.
Krauthammer is a gifted thinker and his ideas are worth taking seriously for their own sake. But, perhaps more importantly, his strategic thinking has become emblematic of a school of thought that has acquired strong influence inside the Bush Administration foreign policy team and beyond. It is for that reason that Krauthammer′s writings, particularly his AEI speech, require careful analysis. It is in the spirit of our earlier debates that I offer the following critique.
The 2004 speech is strangely disconnected from reality. Reading Krauthammer, one gets the impression that the Iraq War-the archetypical application of American unipolarity-had been an unqualified success, with all of the assumptions and expectations on which the war had been based fully vindicated. There is not the slightest nod towards the new empirical facts that have emerged in the last year or so: the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the virulent and steadily mounting anti-Americanism throughout the Middle East, the growing insurgency in Iraq, the fact that no strong democratic leadership had emerged there, the enormous financial and growing human cost of the war, the failure to leverage the war to make progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front, and the fact that America′s fellow democratic allies had by and large failed to fall in line and legitimate American actions ex post.
The failure to step up to these facts is dangerous precisely to the neo- neoconservative position that Krauthammer has been seeking to define and justify. As the war in Iraq turns from triumphant liberation to grinding insurgency, other voices-either traditional realists like Brent Scowcroft, nationalist-isolationists like Patrick Buchanan, or liberal internationalists like John Kerry-will step forward as authoritative voices and will have far more influence in defining American post-Iraq War foreign policy. The poorly executed nation-building strategy in Iraq will poison the well for future such exercises, undercutting domestic political support for a generous and visionary internationalism, just as Vietnam did.
It did not have to be this way. One can start with premises identical to Krauthammer′s, agree wholeheartedly with his critiques of the other three positions, and yet come up with a foreign policy that is very different from the one he lays out. I believe that his strategy simultaneously defines our interests in such a narrow way as to make the neoconservative position indistinguishable from realism, while at the same time managing to be utterly unrealistic in its overestimation of U.S. power and our ability to control events around the world. It is probably too late to reclaim the label "neoconservative" for any but the policies undertaken by the Bush Administration, but it is still worth trying to reformulate a fourth alternative that combines idealism and realism-but in a fashion that can be sustained over the long haul.
Excessive Realism
Krauthammer and other commentators are correct that what is seen as "Kissingerian" realism is not an adequate basis for American foreign policy. A certain degree of messianic universalism with regard to American values and institutions has always been an inescapable component of American national identity: Americans were never comfortable with the kinds of moral compromises that a strict realist position entails. The question, which was the constant subject of those board dinners, was: What kinds of bounds do you put around the idealistic part of the agenda? Krauthammer answers this key question in the following manner:
"Where to intervene? Where to bring democracy? Where to nation-build? I propose a single criterion: where it counts. Call it democratic realism. And this is its axiom: We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is strategic necessity-meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom. [italics in the original]"
While this axiom appears to be clear and straightforward, it masks a number of ambiguities that make it less than helpful as a guideline for U.S. intervention. The first has to do with the phrase "strategic necessity", which of course can be defined more and less broadly. Krauthammer initially appears to be taking a realist position by opting for the narrow definition when he refers to an "existential enemy" or an enemy posing a "mortal" threat. If these words have any real meaning, then they should include only threats to our existence as a nation or as a democratic regime. There have been such threats in the past: the Soviet Union could have annihilated us physically and conceivably could have subverted democracy in North America. But it is questionable whether any such existential threats exist now. Iraq before the U.S. invasion was certainly not one: It posed an existential threat to Kuwait, Iran and Israel, but it had no means of threatening the continuity of our regime. Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups aspire to be existential threats to American civilization but do not currently have anything like the capacity to actualize their vision: They are extremely dangerous totalitarians, but pose threats primarily to regimes in the Middle East.
This is not to say that Iraq and Al-Qaeda did not pose serious threats to American interests: the former was a very serious regional threat, and the latter succeeded in killing thousands of Americans on American soil. Use of WMD against the United States by a terrorist group would have terrible consequences, not just for the immediate victims but also for American freedoms in ways that could be construed as undermining our regime. But it is still of a lesser order of magnitude than earlier, state-based threats. The global Nazi and communist threats were existential both because their banner was carried by a great power, and because ideologically there were many people in the United States and throughout the Western world seduced by their vision. The Islamist threat has no such appeal, except perhaps in countries like France that have permitted high levels of immigration from Muslim countries.
I suspect that Krauthammer′s intended use of the term "strategic necessity" is actually broader than is implied by his own words about existential threats. At the end of his axiom he leaps to the need to fight an "enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom", and elsewhere speaks of the United States as "custodian of the international system", suggesting a broadminded understanding of self-interest. Does "global" here mean threats that transcend specific regions, like radical Islamism or communism? If the enemy′s reach has to be global, then North Korea would be excluded from the definition of a "strategic" threat. Or does "global" instead mean any mortal threat to freedom around the globe? Does the fact that an "enemy" poses a mortal threat to another free country but not to us qualify it as our "enemy?" Is Hamas, an Islamist group which clearly poses an existential threat to Israel, our enemy as well? Is Syria? And if these are our enemies, why should we choose to fight them in preference to threats to free countries closer to home like the FARC or ELN, which threaten democracy in Colombia, or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela? What makes something "central" in this global war? Was Iraq central to the war against radical Islamism?
It is clear that Krauthammer′s axiom provides very little practical guidance for answering these questions. He might respond that applying the general principle requires prudential judgment. He might further respond that his position is very distinct from that of the realists because he is using democracy as an instrument to advance U.S. strategic interests: By transforming Iraqi politics and turning a bloodthirsty dictatorship into a Western-style democracy, new possibilities will open up for the entire region that promises to get at some of the root causes of terrorism. This is indeed an ambitious and highly idealistic agenda, and it is precisely in the prudential judgments underlying the current project of transforming the Middle East that his argument is fatally flawed.
Excessive Idealism
Of all of the different views that have now come to be associated with neoconservatives, the strangest one to me was the confidence that the United States could transform Iraq into a Western-style democracy, and go on from there to democratize the broader Middle East. It struck me as strange precisely because these same neoconservatives had spent much of the past generation warning-in The National Interest′s former sister publication, The Public Interest, for example-about the dangers of ambitious social engineering, and how social planners could never control behavior or deal with unanticipated consequences. If the United States cannot eliminate poverty or raise test scores in Washington, dc, how does it expect to bring democracy to a part of the world that has stubbornly resisted it and is virulently anti-American to boot?
Krauthammer picks up this theme in his speech. Noting how wrong people were after World War II in asserting that Japan could not democratize, he asks, "Where is it written that Arabs are incapable of democracy?" He is echoing an argument made most forthrightly by the eminent Middle East scholar Bernard Lewis, who has at several junctures suggested that pessimism about the prospects for a democratic Iraq betrays lack of respect for Arabs.
It is, of course, nowhere written that Arabs are incapable of democracy, and it is certainly foolish for cynical Europeans to assert with great confidence that democracy is impossible in the Middle East. We have, indeed, been fooled before, not just in Japan but in Eastern Europe prior to the collapse of communism.
But possibility is not likelihood, and good policy is not made by staking everything on a throw of the dice. Culture is not destiny, but culture plays an important role in making possible certain kinds of institutions-something that is usually taken to be a conservative insight. Though I, more than most people, am associated with the idea that history′s arrow points to democracy, I have never believed that democracies can be created anywhere and everywhere through sheer political will. Prior to the Iraq War, there were many reasons for thinking that building a democratic Iraq was a task of a complexity that would be nearly unmanageable. Some reasons had to do with the nature of Iraqi society: the fact that it would be decompressing rapidly from totalitarianism, its ethnic divisions, the role of politicized religion, the society′s propensity for violence, its tribal structure and the dominance of extended kin and patronage networks, and its susceptibility to influence from other parts of the Middle East that were passionately anti-American.
But other reasons had to do with the United States. America has been involved in approximately 18 nation-building projects between its conquest of the Philippines in 1899 and the current occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the overall record is not a pretty one. The cases of unambiguous success-Germany, Japan, and South Korea-were all ones in which U.S. forces came and then stayed indefinitely. In the first two cases, we were not nation-building at all, but only re-legitimizing societies that had very powerful states. In all of the other cases, the U.S. either left nothing behind in terms of self-sustaining institutions, or else made things worse by creating, as in the case of Nicaragua, a modern army and police but no lasting rule of law.
This gets to a much more fundamental point about unipolarity. Krauthammer has always stressed the vast disparity of power between the United States and the rest of the world, vaster even than Rome′s dominance at the height of its empire. But that dominance is clear-cut only along two dimensions of national power: the cultural realm and the ability to fight and win intensive conventional wars.
Americans have no particular taste or facility for nation-building; we want exit strategies rather than empires-a point Krauthammer reiterated at the start of his lecture. Where then does he think the domestic basis of support will come from for this unbelievably ambitious effort to politically transform one of the world′s most troubled and hostile regions? And if the nation is really a commercial republic uncomfortable with empire, why is he so eager to expand its domain? Lurking like an unbidden guest at a dinner party is the reality of what has happened in Iraq since the U.S. invasion: We have been our usual inept and disorganized selves in planning for and carrying out the reconstruction, something that was predictable in advance and should not have surprised anyone familiar with American history.
Allies, Institutions and Legitimacy
The final area of weakness in Krauthammer′s argument lies in his treatment of legitimacy, and how the United States relates to the rest of the world. Failure to appreciate America′s own current legitimacy deficit hurts both the realist part of our agenda, by diminishing our actual power, and the idealist portion of it, by undercutting our appeal as the embodiment of certain ideas and values.
Krauthammer avoids confronting this issue by creating a bit of a parody of foreign critiques of American policy, something easily dismissed because it comes from "the butchers of Tiananmen Square or the cynics of the Quai d′Orsay." He manages to lump both the Democratic Party and most of our European allies into a single category of liberal internationalists. He argues that their opposition to the Iraq War was founded on a self-proclaimed normative commitment to multilateralism and international law. For liberal internationalists, war is legitimate only if it is sanctioned by the United Nations. But this high- mindedness, he argues, masks motives that are much baser: the Europeans are Lilliputians who want to tie the American Gulliver down and reduce American freedom of action. So they are both naive and hypocritical in the same breath.
What Krauthammer here describes as the Democratic/European position is one that is readily recognizable and does in fact characterize the views of many opponents of the Iraq War. But if he had listened carefully to what many Europeans were actually saying (something that Americans are not very good at doing these days), he would have discovered that much of their objection to the war was not a normative one having to do with procedural issues and the UN, but rather a prudential one having to do with the overall wisdom of attacking Iraq. Europeans tended not to be persuaded that Iraq was as dangerous as the Bush Administration claimed. They argued that Ba′athi Iraq had little to do with Al- Qaeda, and that attacking Iraq would be a distraction from the War on Terror. Many Europeans, moreover, did not particularly trust the United States to handle the postwar situation well, much less the more ambitious agenda of democratizing the Middle East. They believed that the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict was a more dangerous source of instability and terrorism than Iraq and that the Bush Administration was undercutting its own credibility by appearing to side so strongly with the policies of Ariel Sharon.
All of these were and are, of course, debatable propositions. On the question of the threat posed by Iraq, everyone-Europeans and Americans-were evidently fooled into thinking that it possessed significant stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. But on this issue, the European bottom line proved to be closer to the truth than the administration′s far more alarmist position. The question of pre-war Iraq-Al-Qaeda links has become intensely politicized in America since the war. My reading of the evidence is that these linkages existed (indeed, it would be very surprising if they did not), but that their significance was limited. We have learned since September 11 that Al-Qaeda did not need the support of a state like Iraq to do a tremendous amount of damage to the United States and that attacking Iraq was not the most direct way to get at Al-Qaeda. On the question of the manageability of postwar Iraq, the more skeptical European position was almost certainly right; the Bush Administration went into Iraq with enormous illusions about how easy the postwar situation would be. On the question of Palestine, the Europeans are likely wrong, or at least wrong in their belief that we could move to a durable settlement of the conflict if only the United States decided to use its influence with Israel.
The point here is not who is right, but rather that the prudential case was not nearly as open-and-shut as Krauthammer and other neoconservatives believe. He talks as if the Bush Administration′s judgment had been vindicated at every turn, and that any questioning of it can only be the result of base or dishonest motives. Would that this were so. The fact that our judgment was flawed has created an enormous legitimacy problem for us, one that will hurt our interests for a long time to come.
The problem of judgment gets to the heart of what is wrong with the vision of a unipolar world that Krauthammer lays out. In his words, the United States "has been designated custodian of the international system" by virtue of its enormous margin of military superiority. If we had in fact been designated global custodian, we would have no legitimacy problem, but we have unfortunately designated ourselves. We have in effect said to the rest of the world, "look, trust us, we will look out for your interests. You can do this safely because we not just any run-of-the-mill hyperpower. We are, after all, the United States." While we would not trust Russia, China, India, France or even Britain with a similar kind of power, we believe that the rest of the world should trust us. This is because the United States is different from other countries, a democracy espousing universal values and therefore not subject the same calculations of self-interest as other would-be hegemons.
There is actually something to this argument. But it is also not very difficult to see why it does not gain much traction outside the United States, and not just among those endemically hostile to America. Krauthammer-the-realist, after all, argues for a narrow definition of national interest, which does not suggest we will be a very reliable partner to a struggling friend when we do not have important interests at stake. And even if we were willing to bear other people′s burdens, what about our judgment?
Legitimacy is a tricky concept. It is related to substantive principles of justice, but it is not the same thing as justice. That is, people believe that a set of institutions is legitimate because they believe they are just, but legitimacy is always relative to the people conferring legitimacy.
Legitimacy is important to us not simply because we want to feel good about ourselves, but because it is useful. Other people will follow the American lead if they believe that it is legitimate; if they do not, they will resist, complain, obstruct or actively oppose what we do. In this respect, it matters not what we believe to be legitimate, but rather what other people believe is legitimate. If the Indian government says that it will not participate in a peacekeeping force in Iraq unless it has a UN Security Council mandate to do so, it does not matter in the slightest that we believe the Security Council to be an illegitimate institution: the Indians simply will not help us out.
Krauthammer and others have dismissed the importance of legitimacy by associating it entirely with the United Nations-and then shooting at that very easy target. Of course, the UN has deep problems with legitimacy. Since membership is not based on a substantive principle of legitimacy, but rather formal sovereignty, it has been populated from the beginning by a range of dictatorial and human-rights abusing regimes. Our European allies themselves do not believe in the necessity of legitimization through the Security Council. When they found they could not get its support for the intervention in Kosovo because of the Russian veto, they were perfectly willing to bypass the UN and switch the venue to NATO instead.
But our legitimacy problem in Iraq went much deeper. Even if we had switched the venue to NATO-an alliance of democracies committed to the same underlying set of values-we could not have mustered a majority in support of our position, not to speak of the consensus required for collective action in that organization. The Bush Administration likes to boast of the size of the "coalition of the willing" that the United States was eventually able to pull together. One can take comfort in this only by abstracting from the quality of the support we received. Besides Britain and Australia, no one was willing to put boots on the ground during the active phase of combat, and now that post-conflict peacekeeping looks more like real warfare once again, Spain, Honduras and other members of the coalition are pulling out. Those countries that did support the United States did so on the basis of an elite calculation of national interest-in almost all cases against the wishes of large majorities of their own populations. This is true alike for Tony Blair, our staunchest ally, and for Poland, the most pro- American country in eastern Europe. While the behavior of Germany′s Gerhard Schröder in actively opposing the war was deeply disappointing, I would still much rather have Germany on my side than a feckless and corrupt Ukraine.
It is clear, in other words, that a very large part of the world, including many people who are normally inclined to be our friends, did not believe in the legitimacy of our behavior towards Iraq. This is not because the Security Council failed to endorse the war, but because many of our friends did not trust us, that is, the Bush Administration, to use our huge margin of power wisely and in the interests of the world as a whole. This should matter to us, not just for realist reasons of state (our ability to attract allies to share the burden), but for idealist ones as well (our ability to lead and inspire based on the attractiveness of who we are).
I do not believe that the Bush Administration was in fact contemptuous of the need for legitimacy. What they believed and hoped, rather, was that legitimacy would be awarded ex post rather than ex ante by the international community. There was a widespread belief among members of the administration that once it became clear that the United States was going to disarm Iraq forcefully, other NATO allies including France would eventually come on board. Everyone was taken aback by the vehemence with which France and Germany opposed the war, and by the U.S. failure to line up normally compliant countries like Chile and Mexico during the Security Council vote.
The hope that we would be awarded ex post legitimacy was not an unreasonable calculation. It might indeed have materialized had the United States found a large and active WMD program in Iraq after the invasion, or if the transition to a democratic regime had been as quick and low-cost as the Bush Administration expected. Many people have argued that American unilateralism towards Iraq breaks a long pattern of transatlantic cooperation, but they are forgetting history. The United States during the Cold War repeatedly pushed its European allies to do things they were reluctant to do, often by staking out positions first and seeking approval later. In the end, American judgment on these issues was better than that of the Europeans, and legitimacy was in fact awarded retrospectively. When this happened, the United States was not blamed for unilateralism, but praised for its leadership.
One could then interpret the Iraq War simply as a one-time mistake or unfortunate miscalculation coming on the heels of a long string of successes. Certainly, it would be utterly wrong to conclude that the war teaches us that the United States should never stick its neck out and lead the broader Western world to actions that our allies oppose or are reluctant to undertake. Nor should we conclude that pre-emption and unilateralism will never be necessary.
On the other hand, it is not simply bad luck that we failed to win legitimacy as badly as we did this time. The world is different now than it was during the Cold War in ways that will affect our future ability to exert leadership and claim to speak on behalf of the world as a whole. This is so for three reasons.
The first difference is, of course, the demise of the Soviet Union and the absence of an overarching superpower threat. During the Cold War, there was rampant anti-Americanism around the world and popular opposition to U.S. policies. But our influence was anchored by center-right parties throughout Europe that were both grateful for America′s historical role in the liberation of Europe and fearful of Soviet influence. The global terrorist threat may some day come to be interpreted in a similar fashion, but it is not yet.
A second difference has to do with the very fact of our military dominance. During the Cold War, when our power was more or less evenly matched against that of the Soviets, we cared a great deal about credibility and slippery slopes. We were afraid that withdrawal in the face of a challenge would be taken as a sign of weakness and exploited by the other side. Today, the United States is utterly dominant in the military sphere. Credibility in our willingness and ability to use force remains important, but we simply do not have to prove our toughness to the rest of the world at every turn.
The final difference has to do with the fact that the current battlefield is not Europe but the Middle East. There were always sharp differences of opinion between the United States and its allies on how to proceed with respect to the Soviet Union, but they pale in comparison to the differences between the United States and virtually everyone else in the world with respect to the Arab world. So it is to this issue that we must turn.
Dealing with the Middle East
Krauthammer has thought long and hard about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and his views on how the Israelis need to deal with the Palestinians colors his views on how the United States should deal with the Arabs more broadly. Krauthammer has not supported strongly engaging the Arab world through political strategies. In the past, he has put forward a particular view of Arab psychology, namely, that they respect power above all as a source of legitimacy. As he once said in a radio interview, if you want to win their hearts and minds, you have grab a lower part of their anatomy and squeeze hard.
Towards the end of his AEI speech, Krauthammer speaks of the United States as being in the midst of a bitter and remorseless war with an implacable enemy that is out to destroy Western civilization. This kind of language is appropriate as a description of Israel′s strategic situation since the outbreak of the second intifada. The question is whether this accurately describes the position of the United States as well. Are we like Israel, locked in a remorseless struggle with a large part of the Arab and Muslim world, with few avenues open to us for dealing with them other than an iron fist? And in general, does a strategic doctrine developed by a small, vulnerable country surrounded by implacable enemies make sense when applied to the situation of the world′s sole superpower, a country that spends as much on defense as the next 16 most powerful countries put together?
I believe that there are real problems in transposing one situation to the other. While Israel′s most immediate Arab interlocutors are indeed implacable enemies, the United States faces a much more complex situation. In Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups, we do in fact confront an enemy that hates us for what we are rather than for what we do. For the reasons given above, I do not believe they are an existential threat to us, but they certainly would like to be, and it is hard to see how we can deal with them other than by killing, capturing or otherwise militarily neutralizing them.
But the radicals swim in a much larger sea of Muslims-1.2 billion of them, more or less-who are not yet implacable enemies of the United States. If one has any doubts about this, one has only to look at the first of the United Nations Development Program′s two Arab Human Development reports, which contained a poll asking whether respondents would like to emigrate to the United States if they had the opportunity. In virtually every Arab country, a majority of respondents said yes. On the other hand, recent Pew surveys of global public opinion show that positive feelings about the United States in Jordan, Egypt, Turkey, Pakistan and other supposedly friendly Muslim countries has sunk to disastrously low levels. What these data taken as a whole suggest is that for the broad mass of public opinion in Muslim countries, we are disliked or hated not for what we are, but rather for what we do. What they do not like is a familiar list of complaints about our foreign policy that we somehow continue to fail to take seriously: our lack of concern for the plight of the Palestinians, our hypocritical support for dictators in Muslim countries, and now our occupation of Iraq.
The War on Terror is, in other words, a classic counter-insurgency war, except that it is one being played out on a global scale. There are genuine bad guys out there who are much more bitter ideological enemies than the Soviets ever were, but their success depends on the attitudes of the broader populations around them who can be alternatively supportive, hostile or indifferent- depending on how we play our cards. As we are seeing vividly in Iraqi cities like Fallujah and Najaf, counter-insurgency wars are incredibly difficult to fight, because we must somehow destroy the enemy without alienating the broader population and making things worse. Counter-insurgency requires a tricky mixture of precisely targeted force, political judgment and extremely good intelligence: a combination of carrots and sticks.
Israel used carrots during the Oslo process and then shifted to sticks after its collapse and the beginning of the second intifada. I do not want to second-guess either of these approaches, neither of which seems to have worked very well. But an American policy toward the Muslim world that, like Sharon′s, is largely stick will be a disaster: we do not have enough sticks in our closet to "make them respect us." The Islamists for sure hated us from the beginning, but Krauthammerian unipolarity has increased hatred for the United States in the broader fight for hearts and minds. This suggests that we need a much more complex strategy that recalibrates the proportion of sticks and carrots. This has begun to happen with the leaking of the Bush Administration′s Greater Middle East Initiative, but that is only the beginning of a much longer political struggle.
Israel′s policy of constantly being on the offensive, pre-empting and taking the initiative (as in its policy of targeted assassinations) is also something that does not scale well. Unlike Israel, the United States has a substantial margin of strategic depth and does not constantly have to run risks in order to stay on top. A sole superpower that is seen being as inclined to intervene pre-emptively and often will frighten not just its enemies but its friends as well. The United States must never abjure its right to pre-empt, but it is a right that needs to be exercised cautiously. Even talking about such a strategy, as we did in the National Security Strategy document, will tend to promote opposing coalitions and resistance to U.S. policies. Israel can afford to antagonize potential allies and disregard international public opinion as long as it can count on support from the United States. The United States could, I suppose, survive if it were similarly isolated, but it is hard to see why we would want to put ourselves in this position. It is hardly an advantageous position from which to launch an idealistic Wilsonian crusade to reshape the Middle East in our image.
What Now?
Since I have volunteered only to write a critique of the views expressed by Charles Krauthammer and am not myself running for president, I am under no obligation to lay out in depth a positive agenda for American foreign policy that would serve as a substitute. On the other hand, there are elements of a different neoconservative foreign policy that are implicit in what I have said thus far. The United States should understand the need to exercise power in pursuit of both its interests and values, but also to be more prudent and subtle in that exercise. The world′s sole superpower needs to remember that its margin of power is viewed with great suspicion around the world and will set off countervailing reactions if that power is not exercised judiciously.
This means, in the first instance, doing the simple work of diplomacy and coalition-building that the Bush Administration seemed reluctant to undertake prior to the Iraq War and not gratuitously to insult the "common opinions of mankind." We do not need to embrace the UN or multilateralism for its own sake, because we somehow believe that such institutions are inherently more legitimate than nation-states. On the other hand, we need likeminded allies to accomplish both the realist and idealist portions of our agenda and should spend much more time and energy cultivating them.
The promotion of democracy through all of the available tools at our disposal should remain high on the agenda, particularly with regard to the Middle East. But the United States needs to be more realistic about its nation-building abilities, and cautious in taking on large social-engineering projects in parts of the world it does not understand very well. On the other hand, it is inevitable that we will get sucked into similar projects in the future (for example, after a sudden collapse of the North Korean regime), and we need to be much better prepared. This means establishing a permanent office with authority and resources appropriate for the job the next time around as part of a broader restructuring of the U.S. government′s soft-power agencies.
To this list I would add a final element that for reasons of space I cannot elaborate here. The visionary founders of the postwar order were institution- builders, who created not just the much-maligned UN system, but the Bretton Woods institutions, NATO, the U.S.-Japan and U.S.-Korea alliances, the gatt, the WTO, and a host of other international organizations. Institution-building is not something that has occupied the time of officials in the Bush Administration, but it should. If the United States does not like the fact that the UN is dominated by non-democratic regimes, then it should invest in an effort to build up other institutions, like NATO or the Community of Democracies founded during the Clinton Administration, that are based on norms and values we share. The Community of Democracies initiative, which the French foreign minister Hubert Védrine tried to strangle at its birth, was never taken seriously by the Republicans, for, I assume, "not invented here" reasons. But such a global alliance of democracies, led by newer ones in eastern Europe and Latin America, could play a legitimizing function around the world in a way that NATO cannot.
If the United States cannot create new global institutions, then it could try to pursue a vision of overlapping multilateral organizations on a regional basis. The Bush Administration has stumbled into a six-power format for dealing with North Korea; why not seek to make permanent a five-power caucus once we (hopefully) get past the current impasse over nuclear weapons with Pyongyang? Such an organization could play a very valuable coordinating function in the event of, say, a sudden North Korean collapse. Mutual suspicions between Japan, Korea and China are high, and a multilateral forum would be a much better vehicle for sharing information and plans that the current system of bilateral alliances running through Washington. The Chinese in recent years have been pushing a series of regional pacts-ASEAN Plus Three, the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area, a Northeast Asian Free Trade Area, and ultimately, an East Asian Free Trade Area-that they argue may some day serve as the basis for regional security arrangements as well. While the Japanese have seen these as bids for regional leadership and have replied in kind with trade pacts centered on themselves, the Bush Administration has not, as far as I am aware, formulated anything like a coherent response. Do we simply want to swat down proposals for regional multilateral organizations, as we did in the case of Mahatir′s East Asian Community in the early 1990s or Japan′s proposal after the Asian financial crisis for a regional IMF, or do we want to engage with the region and shape such proposals in ways that can suit our own interests? I believe that East Asia is under-institutionalized and ripe for some creative thinking by the United States.
I believe that this kind of recalibration of American foreign policy still qualifies as falling in Krauthammer′s fourth "democratic globalism" basket, being neither isolationist, liberal-idealist nor realist. Whether it will ever be seen as neoconservative I doubt, but there is no reason why it should not have this title.
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© Aspen Institute Berlin, 2004 - a wegewerk site – Editorial

In Defense of Democratic Realism

Charles Krauthammer
The National Interest, Fall 2004

ON FEBRUARY 10, 2004, I delivered the Irving Kristol Lecture to the American Enterprise Institute outlining a theory of foreign policy that I called democratic realism. It was premised on the notion that the 1990s were a holiday from history, an illusory period during which we imagined that the existential struggles of the past six decades against the various totalitarianisms had ended for good. September 11 reminded us rudely that history had not ended, and we found ourselves in a new existential struggle, this time with an enemy even more fanatical, fatalistic and indeed undeterable than in the past. Nonetheless, we had one factor in our favor. With the passing of the Soviet Union, we had entered a unique period in human history, a unipolar era in which America enjoys a predominance of power greater than any that has existed in the half-millennium of the modern state system. The challenge of the new age is whether we can harness that unipolar power to confront the new challenge, or whether we rely, as we did for the first decade of the post-Cold War era, on the vague internationalism that characterizes the foreign policy thinking of European elites and American liberalism.
The speech and the subsequent AEI monograph have occasioned some comment. None, however, as loquacious as Frank Fukuyama’s twelve-page rebuttal in the previous issue of The National Interest. His essay is doubly useful. It is a probing critique of democratic realism, yet demonstrates inadvertently how little the critics have to offer as an alternative.

Democratic Realism

IN MY SPEECH I describe the four major schools of American foreign policy. Isolationism defines the American national interest extremely narrowly and essentially wishes to pull up the drawbridge to Fortress America. Unfortunately, in the age of the supersonic jet, the submarine and the ballistic missile, to say nothing of the suitcase bomb, the fortress has no moat, and the drawbridge, as was demonstrated on 9/11, cannot be drawn up. Isolationism has a long pedigree, but today it is a theory of nostalgia and reaction. It is as defunct post-9/11 as it was on December 11, 1941, the day the America First Committee disbanded.
More important is liberal internationalism, the dominant school of American liberalism and of the foreign policy establishment. Its pillars are (a) legalism, the construction of a web of treaties and agreements that will bind the international community in a normative web; (b) multilateralism, acting in concert with other countries in pursuit of “international legitimacy”; and (c) humanitarianism, a deep suspicion of national interest as a justification for projecting power-hence the congressional Democrats’ overwhelming 1991 vote against the Gulf War, followed by a Democratic administration that launched humanitarian military interventions in Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. Liberal internationalists see national interest as a form of communal selfishness and thus as inimical to their true objective: the construction of a new international system that mimics domestic society, being based on law, treaties, covenants, understandings and norms that will ultimately abolish power politics. To do so, liberal internationalism is prepared to yield America’s unique unipolar power piece by piece by subsuming it into the new global architecture in which America becomes not the arbiter of international events but a good and tame international citizen.
The third school, realism, emphasizes the primacy of power in international relations. It recognizes that the international system is a Hobbesian state of nature, not to be confused with the settled order of domestic society that enjoys a community of values, a monopoly of power, and most important, an enforcer of norms-all of which are lacking in the international system. Realism has no use for a liberal internationalism that serves only to divert the United States from its real tasks. The United States spent the 1990s, for example, endlessly negotiating treaties on the spread of WMD, which would have had absolutely no effect on the very terrorists and rogue states that are trying to get their hands on these weapons.
Realism has the virtue of most clearly understanding the new unipolarity and its uses, including the unilateral and preemptive use of power if necessary. But in the end, pure realism in any American context fails because it offers no vision beyond power. It is all means and no ends. It will not play in a country that was built on a proposition and that sees itself as the carrier of the democratic idea.
Hence, the fourth school, democratic globalism, often incorrectly called neoconservatism. It sees the spread of democracy, “the success of liberty”, as John F. Kennedy put it in his inaugural address, as both the ends and the means of foreign policy. Its most public spokesmen, George W. Bush and Tony Blair, have sought to rally America and the world to a struggle over values. Its response to 9/11 is to engage in a War on Terror whose essential element is the global spread of democracy.
Democratic globalism is an improvement on realism because it understands the utility of democracy as a means for achieving global safety and security. Realists undervalue internal democratic structures. They see the state system as an arena of colliding billiard balls. Realists have little interest in what is inside. Democratic globalists understand that as a rule, fellow democracies provide the most secure alliances and most stable relationships. Therefore the spread of democracy-understood not just as elections, but as limited government, protection of minorities, individual rights, the rule of law and open economies-has ultimately not just moral but geopolitical value.
The problem with democratic globalism, as I argued in my address, is that it is too ambitious and too idealistic. The notion, expressed by Tony Blair, that “the spread of freedom is . . . our last line of defense and our first line of attack” is a bridge too far. “The danger of democratic globalism”, I wrote, “is its universalism, its open-ended commitment to human freedom, its temptation to plant the flag of democracy everywhere.” Such a worldwide crusade would overstretch our resources, exhaust our morale and distract us from our central challenge. I therefore suggested an alternative, democratic realism, that is “targeted, focused and limited”, that intervenes not everywhere that freedom is threatened but only where it counts-in those regions where the defense or advancement of freedom is critical to success in the larger war against the existential enemy. That is how we fought the Cold War. The existential enemy then was Soviet communism. Today, it is Arab/Islamic radicalism. Therefore “where it really counts today is in that Islamic crescent stretching from North Africa to Afghanistan.”

An Existential Threat

AT ITS MOST fundamental, Fukuyama’s critique is that I am misreading the new world because there is no existential struggle. By calling our war with Arab/Islamic radicalism existential, I exaggerate the threat and thus distort the whole fabric of American foreign policy. “Krauthammer”, he writes, “speaks of the United States as being in the midst of a bitter and remorseless war with an implacable enemy that is out to destroy Western civilization.” “Speaks of”-as one might speak of flying saucers. In reality, asserts Fukuyama, “Al-Qaeda and other radical Islamist groups aspire to be existential threats to American civilization but do not currently have anything like the capacity to actualize their vision.”
Fukuyama apparently believes that the phrase “not currently” saves him from existential peril. But the problem is that precisely as we speak, Al-Qaeda is energetically trying to make up for the deficiencies from which Fukuyama so complacently derives comfort. When Hitler marched into the Rhineland in 1936, he did not “currently” have the means to overrun Europe. Many Europeans believed, delusionally, that he did not present an existential threat. By Fukuyama’s logic, they were right.
What defines an existential threat is intent, objective and potential capability. Existential struggle is a struggle over existence and identity. Until it lost heart late in life, Soviet communism was utterly committed to the eradication of what it called capitalism, in other words, the entire way of life of the West. Its mission was to do to the world what it had done to, say, Lithuania and Czechoslovakia- remake it in its image. Existential struggle is a fight to the end-extermination or, even better, conversion. That is what distinguishes it from non-existential struggles, in which the contending parties in principle can find compromise (over territory or resources or power).
Fukuyama is unimpressed with radical Islam because, in his view, it lacks the global appeal of such true existential threats as communism and Nazism. But Nazism had little global appeal. A master race theory hardly plays well among the other races. Did it really have more sympathizers and fifth columnists in the West than does Islamism today? Islamist cells are being discovered regularly in just about every European capital, and some even in the United States. And these, of course, are just the fifth columnists we know about. The thought is sobering, given how oblivious we were to the presence among us of the 9/11 plotters. Just because Islamism in the West may not, like its Nazi or communist counterparts, take the form of a political party or capture Western celebrity intellectuals, does not minimize the threat or the power of its appeal. Radical Islam does not have its Sartre or its Pound. It is the conceit of intellectuals to think that this counts for more than a Richard Reid, armed this time not with a shoe-bomb but a nuclear suitcase or consignment of anthrax.
Disdaining the appeal of radical Islam is the conceit also of secularists. Radical Islam is not just as fanatical and unappeasable in its anti-Americanism, anti- Westernism and anti-modernism as anything we have ever known. It has the distinct advantage of being grounded in a venerable religion of over one billion adherents that not only provides a ready supply of recruits-trained and readied in mosques and madrassas far more effective, autonomous and ubiquitous than any Hitler Youth or Komsomol camp-but is able to draw on a long and deep tradition of zeal, messianic expectation and a cult of martyrdom. Hitler and Stalin had to invent these out of whole cloth. Mussolini’s version was a parody. Islamic radicalism flies under a flag with far more historical depth and enduring appeal than the ersatz religions of the swastika and hammer-and-sickle that proved so historically thin and insubstantial.
FUKUYAMA does not just underestimate the power of religion. He underestimates the power of technology. He is trapped in the notion that only Great Powers can threaten other Great Powers. Because the enemy today does not resemble a Germany or a Japan, the threat is “of a lesser order of magnitude.” For a realist, he is remarkably blind to the revolution that technology has brought. The discovery of nuclear power is the greatest “order of magnitude” leap in potential destructiveness since the discovery of fire. True, the atomic bomb was detonated half a century ago; but the democratization of the knowledge of how to make it is new. Chemical and biological weapons are perhaps a century old; but the diffusion of the capacity to develop them is new. Radical Islam’s obvious intent is to decapitate the American polity, cripple its economy and create general devastation. We have seen what a mere 19 Islamists can do in the absence of WMD. We have seen what but two envelopes of mail-delivered anthrax can do to the world’s most powerful capital. Imagine what a dozen innocuous vans in a dozen American cities dispersing aerosolized anthrax could do. Imagine what just a handful of the world’s loose nukes, detonated simultaneously in New York, Washington, Chicago and just a few other cities, would do to the United States. America would still exist on the map. But what kind of country-and what kind of polity-would be left? If that is not an existential threat, nothing is.
Fukuyama, of course, has a stake in denying the obvious nature of the threat, having made his reputation proclaiming the “end of history”, which, if it means anything, means an end to precisely this kind of ideological existential threat. One can understand how he would be loath to acknowledge that history has returned, that the 1990s were not the end of history but a holiday from history, and that we find ourselves once again, sadly but unmistakably, with everything at stake. But he goes further. He has so persuaded himself in denial of this new reality that he needs some psychological reason to account for why I and other neoconservatives are so inexplicably convinced that we are in an existential struggle. His answer: Neoconservatives apparently identify so strongly with Israel that they have come to confuse America’s predicament with Israel’s. Neoconservatives think United States is in the same boat as Israel. Fukuyama points out that it is not.
This is bizarre. Of course the United States is not in the same predicament as Israel. So what? You do not have to be Israel to be existentially threatened. If Israel’s predicament represents the standard for existential threat, then the West never experienced it during the six decades of anti-fascist, anti-communist struggle that Fukuyama himself insists was existential. Israel is threatened with Carthaginian extinction. France was conquered by Nazi Germany, and is still France today. Poland and Hungary were conquered by the Soviet Union, and have become Poland and Hungary again. If Israel had been conquered in any of its wars, it would not be Israel today, nor ever again. Simply not matching up to the Israeli standard says nothing about whether one is engaged in an existential struggle.
What is interesting about Fukuyama’s psychological speculation is that it allows him a novel way of Judaizing neoconservatism. His is not the crude kind, advanced by Pat Buchanan and Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamad, among others, that American neoconservatives (read: Jews) are simply doing Israel’s bidding, hijacking American foreign policy in the service of Israel and the greater Jewish conspiracy. Fukuyama’s take is more subtle and implicit. One is to understand that those spreading the mistaken idea that the War on Terror is existential are neoconservatives so deeply and unconsciously identified with the Jewish state that they cannot help seeing the world through its eyes.
What makes this idea quite ridiculous is that the leading proponents of the notion of existential threat are George Bush and Tony Blair. How did they come to their delusional identification with Israel? The American war cabinet consists of Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Don Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. They speak passionately of the existential nature of the threat to the United States. Are they Marranos, or have they been hypnotized by “neoconservatives” into sharing the tribal bond?

“Neoconservatism”

FUKUYAMA entitles his critique, “The Neoconservative Moment”, a play on the first exposition of my theory, “The Unipolar Moment”, published 14 years ago. His intent is to take down the entire neoconservative edifice. His method is to offer a “careful analysis” of “Krauthammer’s writings, particularly his AEI speech”, because “his strategic thinking has become emblematic of a school of thought”, that is, neoconservatism.
What Fukuyama fails to understand is that there are two major strains of neoconservative thinking on foreign policy, not one. There is the democratic globalism advocated by Blair and Bush and long elaborated by such thinkers as Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol. And there is the democratic realism that I and others have long advanced. Both are “democratic” because they advocate the spread of democracy as both an end and a means of American foreign policy. But one is “realism” because it rejects the universalist scope and high idealism of democratic “globalism” and always requires geopolitical necessity as a condition for intervention. This is hardly just a theoretical debate. It has very practical consequences. They were on stark display just half a decade ago, when there was a fundamental split among conservatives on the question of intervention in the Balkans. At the time, Kagan and Kristol (among many others) were strong advocates of intervention in the Balkans and of the war over Kosovo. I was not. I argued then, as I argue now, that while humanitarian considerations are necessary for any American intervention, they are not sufficient. American intervention must always be strategically grounded. In the absence of a strategic imperative, it is better to keep one’s powder dry, precisely because that powder might be necessary to meet some coming strategic threat. On 9/11, that strategic threat revealed itself.
At the time of Kosovo, many realists took the same position I did, while many democratic globalists (lazily just called “neoconservatives”) took the opposite view and criticized my reservations about intervention as a betrayal of democratic principles. Fukuyama’s essay does not just conflate these two distinct foreign policy schools. He repeatedly characterizes me as a champion of democratic globalism, the school with which I explicitly take issue. (Thus: “his [Krauthammer’s] own position that he defines as ‘democratic globalism’. . . .”) It is odd in the extreme to write a long critique of a speech and monograph entitled Democratic Realism and then precis that critique thus: “Krauthammer’s democratic globalism fails as a guiding principle of foreign policy and creates more questions than answers.” Perhaps Fukuyama believes that he alone has a proprietary right to the word “realism.” Perhaps he believes that by misrepresenting me as a globalist he can then identify me with every twist and turn of the Blair and Bush foreign policies.
One of the reasons I gave this speech is that I thought the universalist, bear-any burden language of both Blair and Bush to advance the global spread of democracy is too open-ended and ambitious. The alternative I proposed tries to restrain the idealistic universalism with the realist consideration of strategic necessity. Hence the central axiom of democratic realism:

We will support democracy everywhere, but we will commit blood and treasure only in places where there is a strategic necessity- meaning, places central to the larger war against the existential enemy, the enemy that poses a global mortal threat to freedom.

FUKUYAMA finds this central axiom “less than helpful as a guideline for U.S. intervention” because “it masks a number of ambiguities.” He asks the following questions.
Does “global” here mean threats that transcend specific regions, like radical Islamism or communism?
Yes.
If the enemy’s reach has to be global, then North Korea would be excluded from the definition of a “strategic” threat.
Yes. North Korea is a discrete problem. Islamism is not our only problem, no more than Soviet communism was our only problem in the second half of the 20th century. There can be others, though they are of a lesser order. North Korea is not on a deliberate mission to spread Juche communism around the globe or to destroy the United States. Its mission is regime survival, with intimations of threat to South Korea. Its ambitions do not extend beyond that. Which is why it is a very different kind of threat from the existential Arab/Islamist one we face, and falls outside the central imperative. It needs to be contained. But there is no imperative for its invasion, overthrow and reconstruction-unless we find that, for commercial and regime-sustaining reasons, it is selling WMD to our real existential enemy. Under these circumstances it would be joining the global war on the other side.
Or does “global” instead mean any mortal threat to freedom around the globe?
Any serious threat to what was once known as the “free world” as a whole is “global.” In the 1930s and 1940s, that meant fascism. In the second half of the 20th century, that meant communism. Today it means Arab/Islamic radicalism.
Does the fact that an “enemy” poses a mortal threat to another free country, but not to us, qualify it as our “enemy?”
No.
Is Hamas, an Islamist group which clearlyposes an existential threat to Israel, our enemy as well?
As it defines itself today, as an enemy of Israel, no. Were it to join the war on the United States, then the answer would be yes.
Is Syria?
Because of its hostility to Israel? No. To the extent, however, that it allies itself with and supports the jihadists in Iraq, it risks joining the enemy camp.
And if these are our enemies, why should we choose to fight them in preference to threats to free countries closer to home like the FARC or ELN, which threaten democracy in Colombia, or Hugo Chavez in Venezuela?
We should not. See above.
What makes something “central” in this global war?
Whether a change in the political direction of a state or territory will have an important, perhaps decisive, effect in defeating Arab/Islamic radicalism. Afghanistan meets that test. So does Iraq.

Legitimacy

THIS IS NOT terribly complicated. What then is Fukuyama’s quarrel with democratic realism? He seems to accept democratic realism as a theory but then condemns it in practice because … well, because of Iraq. He has enthusiastically joined the crowd seizing upon the difficulties in Iraq as a refutation of any forward-looking policy that might have gotten us there, most specifically, any unilateralist, nationbuilding policy that got us there. Iraq, he says, is a mess, and the experience proves two things: the importance of “international legitimacy” and the futility of U.S. nation-building among Arabs.
On legitimacy, Fukuyama endorses my view that international support does not confer superior morality upon any action-other nations are acting out of self-interest, not priestly wisdom. He admits that the United Nations has “deep problems with legitimacy”, and that Kosovo demonstrated that our European allies themselves do not believe in the necessity of legitimization through the Security Council. Nonetheless, he charges me with being too dismissive of the practical utility of international support and approval.
But no one denies the utility of international support. Of course there are practical advantages to having Security Council approval, NATO assistance or whatever political cover that might induce, say, India or Turkey to offer assistance. You seek whatever approval, assistance, cover you can get. You even make accommodations and concessions to get it. None of this is in dispute. The only serious question is how far you go. Is “legitimacy” a limiting factor? When you fail to get it, do you abandon the policy? Should we have abandoned our policy of regime change in Iraq-military force being the only way to achieve it-because we lacked sufficient cover?
Fukuyama seems to be saying yes, we should have-although he deploys a Kerry-like ambiguity about what he would actually have done. He seems to be saying that we should have deferred to the opposition of our allies and to the absence of an international consensus, and not invaded Iraq-and that our experience in the aftermath of the war supports that prudential judgment.
But this assumes two things:
First, that a lack of legitimacy is the cause of our postwar problems. Our central problem, of course, has been the Sunni insurgency and the Moqtada Sadr rebellion. I hardly think that either of these groups, or the foreign jihadists who have come to join them, are impressed by UN resolutions. Indeed, the Security Council passed a unanimous postwar resolution legitimizing the American occupation. The UN even established a major presence in Baghdad right after the war. The insurgents were unimpressed: They blew the UN headquarters to smithereens. It is possible that we will fail to defeat these insurgencies, but the “legitimacy deficit” will hardly be the reason.
Second, it assumes that the choice in March 2003 was between invasion and postwar difficulties on the one hand and pre-invasion stability on the other. It assumes there were no serious prudential considerations that impelled us towards war. Of course the lack of Franco-German support made things more difficult. Of course the lack of international consensus constituted a prudential reason not to invade. But Fukuyama assumes these were the only prudential considerations, that doing nothing about Iraq had no cost, that the Iraq problem before the war was in some kind of sustainable equilibrium. It was not. The tense post-Gulf War settlement was unstable and created huge an

Publicado por maria teresa monica às 03:14 PM | Comentários (0)

ANTHONY GIDDENS

NS Essay - The left must open up more clear water between itself and its opponents
NS Essay
Anthony Giddens
Monday 1st November 2004


Why are social-democrat parties in such trouble in so many European countries? Have they been too quick to break with their traditional policies, or too slow? By Anthony Giddens

The European left is not in good shape. At the turn of the millennium, left or leftish governments were in power in 13 of the 15 states of the European Union, while Bill Clinton held office in Washington. All these were revisionist, Third Way governments; the Jospin coalition in France was no different, even if Lionel Jospin had a distaste for the term Third Way itself.

Now, out of the 25 EU countries today, the centre left holds power in just nine. Gerhard Schroder's Social Democratic/Green coalition in Germany has suffered unprecedented reversals in local and regional polls. The three states in eastern Europe - the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland - are all suffering from "post-enlargement blues" and look shaky. Goran Persson is enjoying his third term as prime minister in Sweden, but the Social Democrats do not have a majority in the Riksdag. Though the Socialists took power in Spain this year, they did so only after the Madrid bombings changed public opinion. Before that, they had looked likely to lose the election. In the UK, even Tony Blair, though still odds-on to win the next election, is in difficulties over the Iraq war.

Where the left is out of power, the situation seems even more discouraging. The Italian left appears rudderless: though Romano Prodi's return as leader of a new centre-left alliance prompts hopes for a revival, the parties and groups involved do not yet have a common programme. The French left has still not recovered from the shock of Lionel Jospin's elimination in the first round of the 2002 presidential elections. The Socialists are divided between modernisers and traditionalists, and the "plural left" that Jospin held together while in government has fallen apart.

Yet when I talked to a senior British government adviser - just before the latest Progressive Governance conference, held in Budapest from 13-14 October and organised by the international think-tank Policy Network - he was remarkably laid-back about it all. He did not think it mattered much, he said: after all, the "right-wing" parties or coalitions in some European countries are actually quite leftish in British terms.

The CDU in Germany, for example, is essentially a one-nation Tory party, far removed from current British Conservatism. Christian-democratic parties on the Continent, the adviser pointed out, have played a significant part in building and sustaining Europe's welfare institutions.

It is true that the centre of political gravity differs from country to country. It is as difficult for a government significantly to reduce taxes in Sweden, for example, as it is for a government to raise them in the UK. Moreover, as I wrote a book with the title Beyond Left and Right, you would expect me to agree that some issues no longer fall under the usual left-right divisions.

But the political composition of Europe certainly does matter. Many rightist parties or coalitions in power in Europe today are, to some degree, in hock to the far right, and most have embraced anti-immigration policies. Some - such as those in Italy and Austria - have brought far-right groups directly into government. The left absolutely needs to fight such trends.

So what explains the centre left's diminishing fortunes? The point should first be made that the decline has not been quite as marked as some suggest. There never really was a firm centre-left hegemony in 2000. Some left-of-centre parties came to power at that time largely because of the political cycle: the Social Democrats in Germany, for example, had been out of government for almost as long as Labour in the UK. Though the electorate responded positively to these parties' ideological innovations, many people simply voted for change. Moreover, in 2000, the left had a parliamentary majority in only four of the 13 countries concerned: Britain, Germany, France and Greece.

Contingent events are often more important in politics than ideology. But for a few thousand dimpled chads (or Ralph Nader's decision to stand), Al Gore, not George Bush, would have become US president in 2000. The occupant of the White House almost always has an influence on Europe's political complexion and, if Gore had been elected, a different approach to Iraq might well have prevented the splits on the Iraq war that have so damaged much of the European left.

Tactical failures also help to explain the left's declining fortunes. Left and right are everywhere internally divided, but the left is usually more prone to sectarian division. If the left had stuck behind Jospin in the first round of the French presidential election, he would at least have been able to put up a good fight against Jacques Chirac. If the Olive Tree centre-left coalition had managed to stay intact in Italy, Silvio Berlusconi might not be in power today. The principle "United we win, divided we lose" is a powerful one in politics. When Labour put its sectarian past behind it, it was accused of "control-freakery". Yet Labour's continuing electoral strength owes much to the containment of its internal schisms.

However, the weaknesses of the European left are undeniably ideological in some part. Do they flow from too much revisionism, or too little? I believe strongly that the problem is the latter. Social-democratic governments have often been either unwilling or unable to push through the programmes to which they are committed in principle.

Take Schroder in Germany. A Third Way disciple, surely? Yes, but more in spirit than in reality, I would say, at least until quite recently. He signed up to the "Blair-Schroder manifesto" in June 1999, supporting the kind of economic restructuring that new Labour has followed in the UK, but it was almost immediately disowned by many fellow Social Democrats circles in Germany. Schroder made little immediate progress in reforming a benefit system that prices German workers out of jobs. Only more recently, in his second term, has he started to make such reforms. By deferring them, he has arguably made the backlash much greater.

Labour's version of the Third Way was less original than some of its proponents believed. Active labour-market policy, for example, in the shape of the New Deal, was pioneered in the Scandinavian countries. In one key respect, however, Labour was ahead of the game: it believed that no area should be treated as "belonging to the right". Labour should generate left-of-centre solutions to "rightist" problems - such as those to do with crime or immigration.

Other social-democratic parties in Europe came round to such a standpoint too late. The Jospin government, for example, started to talk about crime reduction only late in its electoral campaign, and failed to convince the French electorate of its sincerity.

The Danish Social Democrats fell from power after they failed to anticipate and respond to a wave of right-wing populism, led by the anti-immigration Danish People's Party. Similarly, in the Netherlands, the ruling "purple coalition" was shocked to find itself ejected from government as a result of the rise of the anti-immigration campaigner Pim Fortuyn.

How can the left revive its fortunes? Despite what many have written on the subject, the populist parties as such are not a major problem for social-democratic parties. They tend to be intrinsically unstable, depending as they do on the appeal of "anti-political politicians".

Much more consequential for social democracy are the conditions that lead to right-wing populism. The stresses and strains of globalisation have created a new schism in our society. On one side are those who are at ease (or relatively so) with technological advance and the cosmopolitan interchange of cultures, and who possess the qualifications to do well in the new economy. On the other side - much further down the socio-economic scale - are those, often lacking in skills or qualifications, who feel that their jobs or even their way of life are threatened. These groups blame the "establishment" or "outsiders" or both for what is going on, and are easily attracted by racist or xeno- phobic sentiments. Many are erstwhile social-democratic voters who feel let down or disenfranchised by the mainstream parties.

Some commentators argue that populism flourishes because we no longer have the great ideological confrontations of the past. Politics, they argue, has become too mundane for voters to take much interest. The large majority, therefore, feel that "all politicians are the same" and that they are not being offered a real choice. The political vacuum is then filled with protest votes and direct action - outsiders against the establishment. If social-democrat parties are to get back on track, so this analysis goes, they must open up more clear water between themselves and their opponents on the right.

I have some sympathy with this view, which was the subject of much debate in Budapest. But we must not be naive. The third way turn in social-democratic politics is inevitable and inescapable. Left-of-centre parties will not enjoy electoral success unless they respond to change.

They have to win battles of tactics, strategy and ideology: tactics in the sense of sustaining a united front and organising election campaigns professionally; strategy in the sense of continuing to innovate in policy; ideology in the sense of giving revisionism emotional appeal. Pragmatism without passion will not command enduring political support. Social democrats must respond to populism without succumbing to it.

At the height of the social-democratic "boom", Blair talked of the aspiration to make the 21st century a "social-democratic century". So far, there is little sign of it, but the aspiration can still be realised. Outside Scandinavia, the left has never held power for long. This could change if social democrats could learn to speak for the majority, not just for sectoral interests. It could change if the left can rise to one of the biggest challenges - to promote a renewed egalitarianism, but one compatible with a dynamic and competitive economy.

The political right in Europe does not have an especially coherent political agenda. Right-wing parties dominate because they have responded more rapidly than the left to voter concerns about security and identity; and because of the left's tactical and organisational mistakes. With enough determination and intellectual effort, however - allied to a more lively and continuous exchange of ideas following on from the work of bodies such as the Policy Network - there is no intrinsic reason why the political map of Europe should not change yet again over the next few years.

But what happens in America has a big influence on Europe. The prospects for a social-democratic revival will be all the greater if, within a week, John Kerry wins the US presidency.

Anthony Giddens, former director of the London School of Economics and now a member of the House of Lords, is the author of The Third Way (Polity Press, 1998)

This article first appeared in the New Statesman. For the latest in current and cultural affairs subscribe to the New Statesman print edition.

Publicado por maria teresa monica às 03:12 PM | Comentários (0)

Michael Walzer

Arguing about War
Michael Walzer

Edited transcript of remarks, 10/13/04 Carnegie Council Books for Breakfast (Merrill House, New York City).

introduction
JOANNE MYERS: Good morning. I'm Joanne Myers, Director of Merrill House Programs, and on behalf of the Carnegie Council I would like to welcome our members and guests to our Books for Breakfast program.

This morning our guest is Michael Walzer, who will be discussing his book, Arguing About War, and the book will be available for you to purchase at the end of the program today.

There have been very few times in the history of civilization when there hasn't been a war taking place somewhere. For Americans that somewhere is Iraq and that sometime is now. At a period when we as a nation are increasingly divided over ideas about war and over the proper use of our armed forces, just think how constructive it would be if we had a common language that could frame the conversation and advance the debate.

Towards that end it is indeed an honor to welcome Michael Walzer to our Books for Breakfast program this morning, for he is just the person who has the moral authority to clarify our thinking on this topic. Without a doubt, Professor Walzer has more influence than anyone else writing today about the morality and philosophy of war.

In arguing about war, our speaker has collected his recent essays that he has written about U.S. foreign policy and offers us a conceptual framework to critique war, whether discussing the present war in Iraq or recent conflicts. To guide us he sets down complex ethical principles that enable us to judge American conduct at home and abroad, and tries to explain the point at which a country is morally justified in resorting to military force.

Although this is not the first time Professor Walzer has explored the theory of Just War, it is this time around that he has taken a bold step forward in questioning many of the ideas he has wrestled with in the past and reveals that his own thinking has changed over time to include not only issues of justice in deciding when to fight and justice during combat, but justice after the war has ended. And even though it has been almost thirty years since the publication of his seminal work, Just and Unjust Wars, in which he established the underlying philosophical principles with which to explain, for example, why World War II was morally justifiable and Vietnam was not, today the arguments and arguing about war are more cogent than ever.

Our speaker has written on a wide variety of topics in political theory and moral philosophy. Currently he is the UPS Foundation Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Co-Editor of Dissent, as well as a contributing editor to The New Republic.

Please join me in welcoming our guest today, the very distinguished Michael Walzer, a warrior of words. We are so pleased to have you with us.

Remarks

MICHAEL WALZER: Thank you very much. I am amazed at your numbers this morning and very grateful that so many of you came out so early.

Since my book is a series of elucidations on and comments on and applications of Just War theory, I am going to begin our discussion today with just a few words in defense of the theory, and then I will say a few more words about the Iraq war, since that is not an avoidable topic, however much I might want to avoid it.

So, first, Just War theory is not high theory. It is not like dialectical materialism or Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action. This is just a systematic, jargon-free account of the moral judgments that we ordinarily make, that people have been making for a very long time, about the decision to go to war and about the conduct of war. It is an effort to understand the arguments and to see whether or how they fit together.

My experience is that most people who reject the theory then go on to make unsystematic arguments of exactly the same kind, which is okay. I don't think that it is always necessary to be systematic, though it is sometimes helpful to think about what you are saying. Those of us who write regularly and often about war will want to write consistently, and so we will reach for some kind of theoretical order.

Second, Just War is a critical theory. There are a lot of unjust wars, and the theory gives us a language for describing what that adjective means and why it applies in this or that case. But the theory also, obviously, provides a language for justifying war, at least some wars. Some wars are just. The theory is hostile to pacifism.

Now, languages of criticism and justification, like this one, are open to misuse. The most common attack on Just War theory is simply that it can be used, and often is used, to justify wars that are unjust. And that is true. It is even obviously true.

But that same attack can be made with the same truth against moral political language generally and against every example of moral or political language. The idea of friendship can be exploited by false friends. The idea of democracy can be exploited by undemocratic regimes. Remember the people's democracies of Eastern Europe. Rights talk can be used by people who oppose individual rights, as by advocates of states' rights in the United States in the south in the 1960s. But we don't stop talking about friendship or democracy or rights. Instead, we try to explain what those words really mean and why false friends aren't friends and why people's democracies aren't democratic and why states' rights don't override individual rights. And that is all we can do.

There is no way to devise a moral language that is proof against misuse. There is no way to create a language whose words will rebel when they are misused. The adjective "just" won't automatically dis-attach itself from wars to which it is misapplied. That is something we have to do, and only we can do it.

Third, Just War is a secular doctrine. There is indeed a religious doctrine that justifies some wars, wars that are fought on God's behalf or against infidels, holy wars and Crusades. And some writers on the left recently have been quite eager to confuse just wars and holy wars for polemical purposes.

So Michael Hart and Antonio Negri in their new book Multitude, which is the sequel to their famous Empire published just four years ago, claim that Just War theory comes from the age of the Crusades and the religious wars and carries the sensibility of that age into modern times.

But that is exactly wrong. Just War theory was developed by Catholic philosophers in the Middle Ages, but it was developed as an alternative to and a critique of holy war. The definitive statement comes from the Spanish Dominican Francisco de Vitoria: "difference of religion is not a just cause of war."

It is also wrong to say, as Hart and Negri do, that the word "evil" — as in "evil empire" or "axis of evil" — is a concept allied to or implied by Just War theory. The temptations of wartime propaganda often lead writers and publicists, and politicians even more readily, to the portrayal of an "evil" enemy.

But that is not the language of Just War theory. The general negative term is simply "unjust," and the particular negative terms are words like "aggressor" and "war criminal." Now, some aggressors and some war criminals may be evil, like the Nazis in World War II, but that is a different judgment. There is a vast philosophical literature about evil, and it doesn't overlap at all with Just War theory.

Of course, in political discourse different moral languages get mixed up, even deliberately mixed up. But again, there is nothing to do when that happens except to un-mix them, to sort them out, to argue for the necessary distinctions.

I should add that the political versions of the crusade are no more justified than the original religious version. Wars to convert the world to democracy or to foster or expand neo-liberal and capitalist regimes, or, if it is ever an issue again, to sponsor communist revolutions mdash; all these are unjust wars. Religious doctrines and political ideologies cannot legitimately be advanced by military force.

Fourth, Just War theory possesses whatever degree of objectivity is possible in moral discourse. Today it is a leading theory, it is frequently invoked, and so it is open to the Marxist challenge that the ruling ideas of the age are the ideas of the ruling class, which means that the ruling ideas are developed by intellectuals in the service — or, more vulgarly, in the pay — of the ruling class; or in this case, since we are talking about international rather than domestic politics, in the service of the hegemonic power.

So does Just War theory serve the interests of today's hegemon, the United States? Certainly, supporters of our government, and even officials of our government, insist that it is acting justly, just as lawyers in a courtroom insist that their clients acted legally. Nonetheless, the law provides the basis for criminal convictions and Just War theory provides the basis for arguments about injustice.

Remember how opponents of the Vietnam War adopted the language of Just War theory in their criticism of American policy. That is where I first learned that language. It was regularly used by opponents of the American government.

And then I listened to myself using it, and I decided that one day in quieter times I would try to figure out its moral grammar. And, having tried to do that, I remain as convinced as I was in the Vietnam years that words like "aggression" or "noncombatant" have objective meanings. They cannot be reduced to the material or political interests of one country or one government or one social class.

We will inevitably have to argue about what those meanings are and how the words apply in real-life situations and what we ought to do in the gray areas that open up between, say, aggression and self-defense. But in principle there are right and wrong answers to questions like those, and in practice there are better and worse answers.

Of course, it is true one man's just war is another man's criminal aggression, but that is not to say that these words have no objective meaning. In fact, one of those two men is speaking falsely, and there is no way to avoid the argument about which one that is.

Let's turn to the war in Iraq. The Bush Administration's misuse of Just War theory is probably the most immediate cause of contemporary attacks on the theory — and there are many attacks these days, especially from European intellectuals. I am going to be visiting Italy and France — this book is coming out in Italian and in French& mdash; and I am preparing arguments, because I have been warned of all the criticism that is made of Just War theory, which is taken to be an ideology of the American government, and certainly this American government has used the theory.

There are three examples of misuse, recent examples, which are defended sometimes by different people in the Administration, and sometimes by the same people.

First, President Bush himself in his speech at West Point in 2002 systematically confused preventive and preemptive wars. That confusion has been a central feature of the Administration's case for the Iraq war. The distinction between those two is very important in the general theory, since it is one of the places where the line falls between just and unjust.

Now, you probably know the difference, and you probably know it very well, it has been talked about so much.

A real preemptive war begins with a decision to attack an enemy that we know is about to attack us. The attack is literally on its way; we see it coming. We move to strike first so as to avoid the dangers of waiting to be hit. The classic example is Israel in 1967.

Preventive war aims to ward off a much more distant threat, a speculative threat, that may or may not materialize somewhere down the road, and which might be dealt with through deterrence or alliance or diplomacy. There are other things to do.

The classic example is the balance of power. There is a balance. Suddenly the new technology developed by country X or a mobilization of its forces or a new alliance with some powerful neighbor endangers the balance. We worry that if we don't act now, some time in the future we will be at the mercy of country X; and, if we let the situation get too unbalanced, we will not be able to respond when the threat is actual — now it is only potential — and so we launch a preventive war.

Just War theorists and international lawyers have always been very skeptical about arguments of that sort, since there are other things you can do. If they are rearming, you can rearm. If they are developing new technologies, you can develop new technologies. If they have made alliances, you can make alliances. The danger has always seemed too speculative to warrant the killing that war involves right now.

Now, it is possible to make an argument that the line between preemption and prevention is harder to draw today, in an age of rapid delivery systems and weapons of mass destruction. But the containment regime imposed on Iraq after the first Gulf War was — or we can now think of it as — an experiment in addressing this new kind of threat: using force, but short of war. And we had good reasons in 2002 and 2003 to think that the experiment was working, at least with regard to weapons of mass destruction and long-range delivery systems. It is not so successful, as we are now learning, with regard to conventional weapons. But it was successful enough to make full-scale war unnecessary — and, if unnecessary, then unjust.

Second, spokesmen for the Administration have sometimes attempted to pass the war off as an example of humanitarian intervention. It wasn't that. Indeed, the Iraq war may make it much harder to persuade people around the world to support humanitarian intervention in those cases — and there will continue to be cases where it probably is necessary, as today in the Sudan.

Saddam's regime was brutal and oppressive, but at the time of our invasion it was not engaged in mass murder. A military intervention in 1991, after the first Gulf War, to stop the massacre of Shiites and marsh Arabs in the south might have been justified. But the containment regime imposed after 1991 made any repetition of those killings impossible in the north in autonomous Kurdistan and unlikely in the south.

It is only massacre or ethnic cleansing of mass enslavement in progress that justifies marching an army into someone else's country. That is what humanitarian intervention is, and that is not what the Iraq war was.

Nor was it, third, a necessary engagement in the war against terror. In Afghanistan we overthrew a regime that was not merely harboring the terrorists who had attacked us, but was in active partnership with them, for the Taliban provided al-Qaeda with all the benefits of sovereignty, most importantly with a territorial base where they could bring recruits, open training camps, and prepare these recruits for action around the world.

Iraq, by contrast, was a political supporter of some terrorist groups, most importantly in Palestine, but it was not a partner and it was not providing terrorism with a territorial base. We may be doing that in Iraq today, but Saddam was not doing that in 2003.

So all the justifications failed. Nonetheless, it would be better for all of us here in the United States, and in Europe also, and at the UN generally, if there were a decent outcome in Iraq: A stable regime, a more or less liberal, more or less democratic regime, with some protection for both individual and minority rights.

I don't know if that is possible now. I think it would require, as John Kerry has been arguing, a major U.S. effort to internationalize the search for a decent outcome, to bring in other countries, and to cede significant authority to the United Nations.

It is unclear that any other countries are ready to commit resources to such a project or could take on the responsibilities that some countries would have to assume under UN authority. It is unclear that countries are prepared to do that, even if they are asked to do it by a new American administration, as I very much hope they will be, that acknowledges the mistakes of the old one.

Now, if we have to fight on, can this be a just war? Well, it seems to me that this question is independent of the same question asked about the war that we started in 2003, which I have already called unjust.

It is an old argument in Just War theory that jus ad bellum (justice of the war itself) and jus in bello (justice in the conduct or the war) are independent. Those are two separate judgments that we make. A just war can be fought unjustly, as say when we fire bombed Dresden or Tokyo or Hiroshima. An unjust war can be fought justly, as maybe it was by Rommel in North Africa — he had that reputation anyway. So those are independent judgments.

I am suggesting now that the judgment about jus post bellum (justice after the war) may also be independent, or partially independent, of the judgments we make in those other cases.

Given where we are in Iraq today, the occupation, the violence it now requires could possibly be justified if: first, the occupying forces are visibly and certainly prepared to leave within some relatively short time frame, which doesn't go along with building large and permanent-looking bases in the country; second, if the occupying forces are working toward genuinely free elections; third, if they are prepared to leave behind a sovereign state, which means not a satellite state; and fourth and finally, if they make no claim to material benefits from the war and the occupation, like privileged access to Iraqi oil.

Think of those as the conditions of jus post bellum (justice after the war). It is a neglected part of Just War theory which is in urgent need of development, though maybe we are already developing it in the course of the arguments that are now going on about what ought to be done in Iraq.

I received yesterday Noah Feldman's new book, called What We Owe Iraq, which is specifically an argument about jus post bellum made with the hope that it can stand independently of any judgments we make about the initiation of the war.

The four conditions that I listed have not been met so far by our government and its allies, and it is hard for me to imagine them being met, and being seen to be met, which is a crucial part of legitimacy, without some kind of internationalization of the conflict.

I think I will stop there and invite your questions.

JOANNE MYERS: Thank you very much. I would like to open the floor to questions.

Questions and Answers

QUESTION: I would like to start from where you left off, with this post bellum internationalization. As you say, an awful lot depends on what is seen to be the case as well as what is the case. If you were a member of the Security Council asked to undertake the kind of authority and the role that you depict in Iraq, would you be confident that you could send your forces into that country, and that the people who are now fighting the occupation would accept that this is something completely new that they should cooperate with and lay down their arms and compete in elections? Or would you not fear that they would see it as a continuation of the occupation by other means and continue to fight it just as ruthlessly as they are fighting now?

MICHAEL WALZER: I would have no confidence that UN forces, the blue helmets, would make much of a difference to the people currently leading the insurgency. It might reduce their ability to recruit, it might shorten the conflict, but there would be a conflict. If the UN were to take responsibility, it would have to be prepared to send soldiers who were fighters, not just peacekeepers, because there is no peace.

As I said, I'm very doubtful that any countries would be ready now to do that. It's a mess, and why should anyone else involve themselves in this mess, except that I think that there is a wider responsibility for the mess than is commonly recognized, especially in Europe.

And so let me just say a word about how I think that responsibility falls. Well, I told you that I am preparing for arguments in Italy and France.

Suppose that the regime of containment, and you know its elements — it was the embargo, which was supposed to be replaced by something called "smart sanctions," but never really was; the no-fly zones; and the inspection system — suppose that regime had been throughout the twelve years from 1991 to 2003 a genuinely multilateral regime. Suppose that the French, for example, had not withdrawn from the enforcement of the no-fly zones, as they did fairly early on. Suppose that the threat of force that brought the inspectors back had been a multilateral threat, and not just an American threat. Suppose that the embargo had been a genuinely American-European-UN operation, with governments in Europe and Asia preventing their companies from dealing, as we now know they did in quite extraordinary quantities of weapons, during the whole of the embargo period. Suppose this had been a regime of containment enforced internationally.

Then it seems to me the Bush Administration could not unilaterally have called it all off and replaced it with a war. The Bush Administration could call it off because they were running the whole thing pretty much. But had they not been running the whole thing, I don't think the war would have been possible. Had there been a commitment to internationalism after 1991, American unilateralism — I don't pretend that the Bush Administration would not have wanted this war anyway — I don't think they could have fought it.

In that sense, the war is the responsibility of all the countries that dropped out of this regime of containment, and I think they now owe the Middle East, the world, the Iraqi people, some effort to deal with the mess. We created it; I don't doubt that we are the immediate cause. But, as Aristotle taught, there are other causes at work in the world, and the ultimate responsibility may be spread more widely.

And so I think there is at least a moral reason for other countries, not under American authority but under UN authority, to take on this task.

QUESTION: I think the post-war situation has been spelled out pretty well by Stanley Hoffmann in the latest issue of New York Review of Books, where he has all your arguments. It first requires a clear declaration from the Bush Administration about exit strategies — they don't want to have any benefits afterwards, and so on &mdash34; and I doubt we will get that.

But one essential component is precisely this, that the whole operation afterwards must be genuinely UN-led and a multinational force should have Iraqi leadership, not American.

I think when you go to Europe you shouldn't be too afraid, depending of course where you go, in which locale so to say, because Europeans can see the difference between Afghanistan and Iraq. Afghanistan was legitimate because it was self-defense and there was the UN behind it, and therefore you had practically the whole world community in Afghanistan helping with elections, reconstruction, and so on, the UN, etc., etc. You don't have that in Iraq.

Finally, I think that the Michael Walzer of the seventeenth century, Hugo Grotius in the Netherlands, defined this very clearly too, sayijng that the only just war was when there was an injury received. 9/11 was an injury received and therefore Afghanistan was justfiable. But there was no injury received from Iraq. This Europeans know. They see the difference with Kosovo and Afghanistan versus Iraq. So don't be afraid of that. You will do well.

QUESTION: I'm not sure I agree. I think I would be afraid of going to Europe if I were you.

But just to continue that thought for a moment, it seems to me that talking about a greater level of internationalization of Iraq post a Kerry victory is really talking about fairyland. I mean the reality is that you are quite right, I can't foresee circumstances in which, for example, the French and the Germans are going to commit troops in Iraq or make a substantial effort there. In fact, I would say that it has got to be Chancellor Schröder's worst nightmare for John Kerry to be elected and then to ring him up the next day and say, "Help me in Iraq."

But just to go back to what I think — forgive me — seems to be some contradiction in what you say about containment. In your initial remarks you said very clearly that containment had been abandoned, that it was an approach which should have been continued with; but then you later said to us that it wasn't working because, in effect, the Americans were running it. Isn't it fair to say that containment had failed, that the prospect was clearly that sanctions were failing seriously, and there was every indication that Saddam was likely to take advantage of that situation to at some stage resume the WMD program that he had often enough had in the past?

MICHAEL WALZER: Certainly the no-fly zones were working, especially and most clearly in the north. It does seem to me that the no-fly zones were a kind of humanitarian intervention, short of war, and they had produced a kind of regime change, namely an autonomous Kurdistan. So that was successful. It was American planes and some British planes flying. And as I said, the French had withdrawn; the French had initially flown, I believe, but then stopped.

The embargo was obviously not working, it was causing considerable injury to the Iraqi people and not preventing the acquisition of weapons, but at least an attempt could have been made to repair the embargo. Colin Powell talked about smart sanctions in the period between the election of Bush and 9/11. The Americans presumably had some kind of a plan, and it would have been possible to publicly shame, or to try to shame, governments around the world into cracking down on the arms trade that their countrymen were engaged in.

The inspection system had worked until 1999, had really worked. As we now know, the reports were accurate. And then it seemed to be potentially working again.

I suggested in a New York Times Op-Ed page a few weeks before the war that we expand the no-fly zones, provide armed soldiers for the inspectors, so that once a site was inspected you could post guards there and it wouldn't have to be inspected again. So it moved to the smart sanctions that Colin Powell that had proposed. That seemed to me to be a better program than an all-out war.

QUESTION: I quite agree with you that the UN's blue helmet troops are inadequate to be able to help in this particular incident. The UN today seems to primarily specialize in $10 billion graft operations.

However, I would like to know what disagreements you seem to have with the Europeans that would cause fear on your trip to Europe. What particular policy points do you think that you are coming from that may cause disagreements and might be of interest to us?

MICHAEL WALZER: Well, because I do believe that they are partly responsible for this war, that they should have been part of the regime of containment, and that had they proposed a plan for making containment work, instead of simply opposing the American proposals, I think they would have at least made the war much more difficult for the Bush people to fight. And I think that now they have some responsibility to help in Iraq, as I said; not under American command, but under some new set of political and military arrangements.

QUESTION: The concept of Just War is certainly a necessary and stimulating and thoughtful way of approaching something. But I'm wondering if we are looking at something morally and we are trying to analyze a situation in moral terms, like family deliberations or like human squabbles, somehow or other the prerequisite for a moral modeling is that there would be some rational approach to things and that there would be understandings of agendas and that the outlook would be common.

But what we have here, once we get past a sort of moral measurement, is that we don't have a situation that lends itself to simple views. You have just acknowledged that perhaps a true friend was not a true friend in this situation, that agendas really are not defined, and that perhaps we are measuring it in a slightly different way. Perhaps there really is a much larger agenda, and it has been postulated this is almost a continuation of the Gulf War or continuation of the Carter Doctrine.

So I am just questioning whether or not moral views are helpful and necessary, but whether real politics in a sense also has a counterbalancing answer and has to be addressed.

MICHAEL WALZER: I am not exactly sure of the question. Of course there is no such thing in politics as a pure moral will. Individuals have interests. Countries have interests. Political leaders even have a moral obligation to act in the interests of the citizens of their country. We don't expect foreign policy to be dictated by morality; we expect it to be constrained by morality. It is dictated by interest, constrained by morality. I think that is a fairly plausible account of the way people actually do think about these questions.

I never was a soldier, and so when I came to write about these questions I spent a lot of time talking to soldiers and reading memoirs of soldiers and military histories. The memoirs of combat are full of accounts of soldiers worrying about what's the right thing to do, even in very tense and difficult situations when their lives are at risk. It is a saint, I suppose, who sacrifices his life.

But in war risks are quantitative; you can take a very big risk, you can take a very little risk. And morality does affect them — you just talk to people — morality does affect the level of risk that they are prepared to accept. And I think that is also true of political leaders.

But there was another suggestion in your comment. Sometimes Just War theory is accused of focusing too much on the immediate occasion of the war. This is especially a critique — I don't know where you are coming from — that comes from the left, that Just War theory misses imperialist design.

As in the case of Rome, every time Rome fought a war, they had a legal reason, and they were very scrupulous about that. Every war was always preceded by an argument that a treaty had been violated, something had been done by the other side that justified this war. If you focus on that question, was the treaty really violated, you miss the long history of Roman imperialism.

But I don't think Just War theorists are required to focus in that way. In fact, a long history of conquest is a long history of injustice, and imperial design is unjust. The paradigmatic example of an unjust war is a war of conquest. If it has been premeditated over a long period of time, I would think that the theorists can address that issue of premeditation, just as a lawyer looking at an act of violence can ask "was this planned over a long period of time or did it happen at this moment for some reason specific to the moment?" Those are questions that we can open up.

QUESTION: I want to pick up that last point. People who invoke the Just War theory often refer back to Munich, and they see Munich as the paradigm of an example that had the Allies prevented the invasion by Hitler into the Sudetenland and then taking Czechoslovakia, that had they confronted him at that time, World War II might have been avoided, and that would have been a good example of a preventive war. Looking back, how do you feel about that as an option and as an argument?

MICHAEL WALZER: Well, it would not have been an example of preventive war. Preventive war would have been to attack in 1933, after Hitler made his first speech. That would have been a preventive war. When he marched into the Sudetenland, to have fought then would have been a just war and would have been a classic paradigmatic example of a just war.

A just war is fought by the victim of the attack — as by, say, the Finns responding to a Russian invasion, or the Poles to a German invasion in 1939 — but it is also just for any country to come to the aid of a victim of aggression. If I am attacked on the street, I can defend myself and that is justified. If you see me being attacked and rush to help me, that is also justified. And so a war to defend the Czechs would certainly have been a classic example of a just war.

QUESTION: The Financial Times this morning had in their headlines that the Germans now say they wouldn't rule out sending forces to Iraq as long as it was through a UN ruling. In fact if this follows through, how much effect do you think this would have on other countries?

MICHAEL WALZER: I assume the intention is to have an effect on this country, I hope. Schröder said in the course of his own election campaign that he would not send troops even under UN auspices, but I think that was a very bad position, and I know that there were people in his party and in the Green Party who were opposed to that policy declaration, precisely because there are still internationalists among German Social Democrats.

But yes, I would think that if the Germans were prepared under a new American Administration and under a real UN regime to send forces, that would make a difference in a lot of other countries.

QUESTION: There is an assumption in your argument that everyone agrees on what should have been done about Iraq prior to the war. You talked about the allies dropping out of the sanctions regime and dropping out of the no-fly zone and so forth. But I wonder if that is really correct. I think that it is quite possible that there were allies who thought that Iraq should have been restored to a normal country and they fundamentally disagreed with the regime of keeping Iraq contained. I don't know how they would feel now. They may be willing possibly to engage in restoring Iraq to the position of a normal country.

But if they do that, and if Iraq is able to make its own decisions and so forth, then there are choices to be made about what sort of relationship we and they are going to have with Iraq. It seems to me that is also part of the consideration that you ought to take into account in your post-war justice.

MICHAEL WALZER: I accept that there were real disagreements about the containment regime. But countries that criticize the unilateralism of the Bush Administration should not unilaterally have dropped out of the sanction regime, which was in its origins a multilateral commitment, an international commitment.

QUESTION:I was interested just in the elements that you outlined in terms of Just War theory, the jus post bellum. I was wondering why you have emphasized the status of Iraq, for example, after the occupation forces leave. I was wondering whether or not we should be considering whether there should be a duty of accountability, for example, when the occupation forces are there and in government, or whether there is actually a fiduciary duty between the governors and the people in occupied territories. That is, is there room for some sort of relationship during the occupation, as opposed to simply afterwards, preparing for elections, preparing for going forward?

MICHAEL WALZER: As you know, the community of international lawyers has been arguing a lot recently about trusteeship arrangements, which does impose a fiduciary duty. But the trust is owed to, say, the United Nations — or in the 1920s to the League of Nations — and then through the UN to the Iraqi people. It would not be owed directly. I think that's the way the legal regime worked, although I am not sure.

But I do accept that an occupation regime is responsible in very important ways to the people it occupies and it ought to be held legally responsible. It is one of the difficulties of this American occupation that the private contractors who we have there, apparently in very large numbers, are responsible to the companies that pay them, which are under contract with the U.S. government, and those private contractors apparently have to be tried in the United States even for crimes they commit in Iraq, and are not subject to military justice under the U.S. Armed Forces Code.

So I am really not sure how committed we are to this notion that we are responsible for what we do and for what any of our soldiers do in Iraq.

QUESTION: I'm sure everyone here is aware that there is an effort to put on the air a film showing Senator Kerry in a very bad light with regard to the Vietnam War. Clearly when he came back he said the war was not a just war and it was not fought justly, as you indicated earlier, these two aspects of it.

What would you say? How would you advise him to respond to that? What is being said is that his characterization of the war really caused tremendous damage to American forces. That is a very serious allegation.

MICHAEL WALZER: He is a politician in a difficult position, and I am entirely sympathetic. He wants Americans to respect him because he went and fought in Vietnam. He wants Americans to respect him because he came home and opposed the war. He is really aiming at two different audiences, asking for respect from two different audiences, whose members may not like one another. So that is a difficult political position.

I happen to think he deserves respect from both audiences, and I hope he gets enough of it on November 2nd.

QUESTION: We know that there were no weapons of mass destruction in March of 2003 in Iraq, and we know there is no connection now between the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda. But if in fact there had been weapons of mass destruction and if in fact there had been a connection in March of 2003 between the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda, would the Administration have been justified under the theory of preemptive attack for going into Iraq, because while Saddam wasn't threatening to use those weapons of mass destruction immediately against the United States, his connection with al-Qaeda and al-Qaeda's proclivity towards the use of that type of thing could have been argued to be enough of a threat to be closer to the Six Day War situation and attacking Hitler in 1933?

MICHAEL WALZER: Actually I believed that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction. I thought there was good reason to believe it, since he did not do what he obviously should have done had he wanted to avoid the attack, and that is to bring out the people who had, as we now know, destroyed the stockpiles, and have them tell us exactly what they did and where they did it and how they did it. All that was secret.

So we had reports from UN inspections about quantities of biological and chemical weapons in Iraq in the very late 1990s and we had no information about the destruction of those weapons, so there was in fact, I think, good reason to believe that Iraq had these weapons.

And yet, it seemed to me at the time, and to many other people, that the regime of containment was sufficient to prevent the deployment of those weapons. If the inspectors were moving freely around the country, and if they had stopped giving Saddam forty-eight hours' notice before they went anyplace, if the no-fly zones were in full operation and maybe expanded, and if smart sanctions were in effect, I think this regime would have been a successful effort to deal with that kind of threat.

Now, if we also had information, which we did not have, if we also had reason to believe, which we did not have, that Saddam was actively cooperating with al-Qaeda and might be passing weapons to al-Qaeda, that would have been I think a reason to go to war.

JOANNE MYERS: Professor Walzer, as always, I thank you for giving us a framework so we too can argue about war.

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ROBERT KAGAN

The 21st Annual
John Bonython Lecture

Tuesday 9 November 2004

The Crisis of Legitimacy: America and the World

Robert Kagan

CLASHING VIEWS

"What kind of world order do we want?" asked Joschka Fischer , Germany 's foreign minister, on the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. That this question remains on the minds of many Europeans today is a telling sign of the differences that separate the two sides of the Atlantic -- because most Americans have not pondered the question of world order since the war.

They will have to. The great transatlantic debate over Iraq was rooted in deep disagreement over world order. Yes, Americans and Europeans debated whether Saddam Hussein posed a serious threat and whether war was the right way to deal with it. A solid majority of Americans answered yes to both questions, while even larger majorities of Europeans answered no. Yet these disagreements reflected more than just differing tactical and analytical assessments of the situation in Iraq . As Dominique de Villepin, France 's foreign minister, put it, the struggle was less about Iraq than it was between "two visions of the world." The differences over Iraq were not only about policy. They were also about first principles.

Opinion polls taken before, during, and after the war show two peoples living on separate strategic and ideological planets. Whereas more than 80 percent of Americans believe that war can sometimes achieve justice, less than half of Europeans agree. Americans and Europeans disagree about the role of international law and international institutions and about the nebulous but critical question of what confers legitimacy on international action. These diverging world views predate the Iraq war and the presidency of George W. Bush, although both may have deepened and hardened the transatlantic rift into an enduring feature of the international landscape.

At the beginning of 2003, before the Iraq war, the transatlantic gulf was plainly visible. What was less clear then was how significant it would turn out to be for the world as a whole.

Today, a great philosophical schism has opened within the West, and mutual antagonism threatens to debilitate both sides of the transatlantic community. At a time when new dangers and crises are proliferating rapidly, this schism could have serious consequences. For Europe and the United States to come apart strategically is bad enough. But what if their differences over world order infect the rest of what we have known as the liberal West? Will the West still be the West?

A few years ago, such questions were unthinkable. After the Cold War, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama assumed along with the rest of us that at the end of history the world's liberal democracies would live in relative harmony. Because they share liberal principles, these democracies would "have no grounds on which to contest each other's legitimacy." Conflicts might divide the West from the rest, but not the West itself. That reasonable assumption has now been thrown into doubt, for it is precisely the question of legitimacy that divides Americans and Europeans today -- not the legitimacy of each other's political institutions, perhaps, but the legitimacy of their respective visions of world order. More to the point, for the first time since World War II, a majority of Europeans has come to doubt the legitimacy of U.S. power and of U.S. global leadership.

The United States cannot ignore this problem. The struggle to define and obtain international legitimacy in this new era may prove to be among the most critical contests of our time. In some ways, it is as significant in determining the future of the U.S. role in the international system as any purely material measure of power and influence.

THREE PILLARS

Contrary to much mythologizing on both sides of the Atlantic these days, the foundations of U.S. legitimacy during the Cold War had little to do with the fact that the United States helped create the UN or faithfully abided by the precepts of international law laid out in the organization's charter. Rather, U.S. legitimacy among Europeans rested on three pillars, all based on the existence of the Soviet communist empire. The sturdiest pillar was Europe 's perception that the Soviet Union posed a strategic threat to the West -- a reality made manifest by hundreds of thousands of Soviet troops parked in the center of Europe -- and its understanding that only Washington possessed the power to deter Moscow . Europeans also perceived the Soviet Union as a common ideological threat. The United States prided itself on being the "leader of the free world," and most Europeans agreed. Finally, Cold War bipolarity conferred what might be called "structural legitimacy" on the United States . The two superpowers' roughly equal strength meant that U.S. might, although vast, was kept in check. This is not to say that Europeans welcomed Soviet military power on the continent, but many implicitly understood that the existence of Soviet conventional and nuclear power acted as a restraint on Washington . Charles de Gaulle's France , Willy Brandt's Germany , and other states relished the small measure of independence from U.S. dominance that the superpower balance gave them.

When the Cold War ended, the pillars of U.S. legitimacy collapsed along with the Berlin Wall and Lenin's statues. There has been little to replace them with since. Radical, militant Islamism, however potent when manifested as terrorism, has not replaced communism as an ideological threat to Western liberal democracy. Nor have the more diffuse and opaque threats of the post-Cold War era replaced the massive Soviet threat as a source of legitimacy for U.S. power. Most Europeans never fully shared Washington 's concerns about weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in Iraq , Iran , and North Korea -- not during the Clinton administration, and not since. Nor do they share its post-September 11 alarm over the possible nexus between WMD and international terrorism. Rightly or wrongly, Europeans do not believe that those weapons will be aimed at them. To the extent that they do worry, moreover, most Europeans do not look to the United States to protect them anymore. They live in their geopolitical paradise, without fear of the jungles beyond. They no longer welcome those who guard the gates. Instead, they ask, Who will guard the guards?

THE UNIPOLAR PREDICAMENT

What might be called "the unipolar predicament," therefore, is not the product of any specific U.S. policy or of a particular U.S. administration. With the end of the Cold War, unprecedented U.S. global power itself has become the critical issue, one with which Europeans and Americans have only begun to grapple. "What do we do," Fischer asked after the Iraq war began, "when ... our most important partner is making decisions that we consider extremely dangerous?" What indeed? The question is relatively new, because Europe 's loss of control over U.S. actions is relatively new too. During the Cold War, even a dominant United States was compelled to listen to Europe , if only because U.S. policy at the time sought above all else to protect and strengthen Europe . Today, Europe has lost much of that influence. It is too weak to be an essential ally but too secure to be a potential victim. That is why Europeans are now concerned about unconstrained U.S. power and about regaining some control over how it is exercised. Long accustomed to helping shape the world, Europeans do not want to sit back now and let the United States do all the driving, especially when they believe that it is driving dangerously.

Aside from signaling Europe 's demotion, the unipolar predicament also raises fundamental issues about world order today. Above all, it tests the United States ' political and moral legitimacy. The modern liberal mind is offended by the notion that a single world power may be unfettered except by its own sense of restraint. No matter how diplomatically adept a U.S. president might be, the spirit of liberal democracy recoils at the idea of hegemonic dominance, even when it is exercised benignly. Well before the Bush administration proved so maladroit at reassuring even Washington 's closest allies, other post-Cold War administrations faced mounting anxiety about growing U.S. dominance. In the 1990s, as Clinton and Madeleine Albright were proudly dubbing the United States the "indispensable nation," the foreign ministers of China , France , and Russia were declaring the U.S.-led unipolar world dangerous and unjust. Samuel Huntington warned about the "arrogance" and "unilateralism" of U.S. policies when Bush was still governor of Texas .

Europe 's worst fears became real with September 11, 2001 . After the attacks, the Bush administration and Americans in general became unabashed about wielding U.S. power primarily in defense of their own, newly endangered vital interests. Europe 's initial support for the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan and NATO's historic invocation of the right collectively to defend the United States were aimed in part at ensuring that Europe would have some say over the U.S. response to the terrorist attacks. It is no wonder, then, that Washington 's apparent indifference to these offers of assistance was so troubling to Europeans.

When the United States began to look beyond Afghanistan , toward Iraq and the "axis of evil," Europeans realized they had lost control. It became clear that the bargain underlying transatlantic cooperation during the Cold War had become inverted. Whereas once the United States risked its own safety to defend the vital interests of a threatened Europe , a threatened United States was now looking out for itself in apparent, and sometimes genuine, disregard for what many Europeans perceived to be their moral, political, and security interests.

U.S. hegemony has been an especially vexing problem for Europeans because there is so little they can do about it. Hopes that a multipolar regime might emerge have faded since the 1990s. Almost everyone concedes today that U.S. power will be nearly impossible to match for decades. And the states most likely to become its competitors, China and Russia , do not present an attractive alternative for most Europeans. Meanwhile, Europe 's own military capabilities continue to decline relative to those of the United States . France 's ambitions to create a European counterweight to the United States are constantly overwhelmed by the more powerful postmodern European aversion to military power, power politics, and the very idea of the balance of power. Such aspirations have been checked, too, by fears of alienating the powerful United States , by widespread suspicion in Europe of France's "soft" hegemonism, and by lingering fears of renewed German power.

In the end, however, Europeans have not sought to counter U.S. hegemony in the usual, power-oriented fashion, because they do not find U.S. hegemony threatening in the traditional power-oriented way. Not all global hegemons are equally frightening. U.S. power, as Europeans well know, does not imperil Europe 's security or even its autonomy. Europeans do not fear that the United States will seek to control them; they fear that they have lost control over the United States and, by extension, over the direction of world affairs.

If the United States is suffering a crisis of legitimacy, then, it is in large part because Europe wants to regain some measure of control over Washington 's behavior. The vast majority of Europeans objected to the U.S. invasion of Iraq not simply because they opposed the war. They objected also because U.S. willingness to go to war without the Security Council's approval -- that is, without Europe 's approval -- challenged both Europe 's world view and its ability to exercise even a modicum of influence in the new unipolar system.

Europeans believe that legitimacy is an asset they have in abundance. In the new geopolitical jostling with the United States , they see it as their comparative advantage -- the great equalizer in an otherwise lopsided relationship. The EU, most of its members believe, enjoys a natural legitimacy, simply by virtue of being a collective body. The United States needs Europe , argues Javier Solana, the secretary-general of the EU Council, because Europe is "a partner with the legitimacy that comes through the collective action of a union of twenty-five sovereign states." In a modern liberal world, this legitimacy can be wielded as a substitute for other types of power and bartered for influence. In return for a greater say in world affairs and over the exercise of U.S. power, the argument goes, Europe can give the United States the legitimacy it now lacks.

Americans cannot afford to dismiss the proposal out of hand, as much as some might wish to do so. Invading Iraq and trying to reconstruct it without the broad benediction of Europe has not been a particularly happy experience, even if the United States eventually succeeds. It is clear that Americans cannot ignore the question of legitimacy, and it is clear that they cannot provide legitimacy for themselves. Where, then, should they look to find it?

LEGITIMACY MYTHS

Since the United States first began openly contemplating the invasion of Iraq , Europe 's answer has been to look to the Security Council. "The United Nations is the place where international rules and legitimacy are founded," de Villepin declared before the Security Council in March 2003, "because it speaks in the name of peoples." But is the Security Council really the ultimate depositary of international legitimacy, as Europeans insist today? International life would be simpler if it were. But it is not. Ever since the UN's creation almost six decades ago, the Security Council has failed to function as the UN's more idealistic founders intended. And it has never been accepted as the sole source of international legitimacy, not even by Europeans. Europe 's recent demand that the United States seek UN authorization for the Iraq war, and presumably for all future wars, was a novel -- even revolutionary -- proposition.

During the four decades of the Cold War, the Security Council was paralyzed by implacable hostility between its two strongest veto-wielding members. Only after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War was it even possible to imagine that the Security Council might function as the sole source of international authority and legitimacy. Still, it has not. The Security Council did function on occasion, but most observers agree that its authority weakened rather than strengthened over the first decade after the Cold War. In 1994, for example, the Clinton administration sent troops to Haiti without the Security Council's authorization, which came only after the fact. In 1998, it bombed Iraq in Operation Desert Fox over the strong objections France and Russia expressed before the Security Council.

By no means are Americans the only culprits in acting without UN approval: Europeans also bypass the Security Council when it suits their purposes. In Kosovo, for example, it was the Europeans who (along with the United States ) went to war without obtaining the Security Council's legitimizing sanction. And that did not prevent them from arguing at the time, and since, that the Kosovo war was legitimate. They believed that they had a particular moral responsibility to prevent another genocide on the continent and a special license to go to war to stop it. According to Fisher, one of war's strongest proponents in 1999, in this case history and morality trumped traditional principles of state sovereignty and nonintervention.

But exceptions can be deadly, especially when they are used to sidestep norms as fragile and often-violated as international laws on the use of force. The fact remains that the Kosovo war was illegal, and not only because it lacked Security Council authorization: Serbia had not committed any aggression against another state but was slaughtering its own ethnic Albanian population. The intervention therefore violated the sovereign equality of all nations, a cardinal principle -- perhaps the cardinal principle -- of the UN Charter and the bedrock principle of international law for centuries. During the Kosovo conflict, Henry Kissinger warned that "the abrupt abandonment of the concept of national sovereignty" risked unmooring the world from any notion of order, legal or otherwise. Many Europeans rejected this complaint at the time. Back then -- just four years before the Iraq war -- they did not seem to believe that international legitimacy resided exclusively with the Security Council, or in the UN Charter, or even in traditional principles of international law. Instead they believed in the legitimacy of their common postmodern moral values.

When the United States and some of its allies went to war against Saddam Hussein in March 2003, not much had changed. The principle that the Security Council alone could authorize the use of force had not been established, not even by the Europeans themselves. Secretary of State Colin Powell could well argue, as he did in October 2003, that the United States and its supporters possessed the "authority to intervene in Iraq ... just as we did in Kosovo." Yet these days, most Europeans and some Americans argue that, by invading Iraq without the Security Council's approval, the United States has torn the fabric of the international order. In doing so they overlook that the fabric of this hoped-for international order has yet to be knit. And they forget that if such an international order did exist, Europe would already have undermined it in 1999.

The point here is not to catch Europeans contradicting themselves. If their definition of legitimacy has proved conveniently flexible in recent years, it is because legitimacy is a genuinely elusive and malleable concept. Discovering where legitimacy lies at any given moment in history is an art, not a science reducible to the reading of international legal documents. That is a serious challenge for the modern liberalism that animates the United States and Europe alike. Recent crises such as those in Kosovo and Iraq have shown that the search for legitimacy creates a fundamental dilemma for liberalism and liberal internationalism.

The problem is that the modern liberal vision of progress in international affairs has always been bifocal. On the one hand, liberalism has entertained since the Enlightenment a vision of world peace based on an ever-strengthening international legal system. The success of such a system rests on the recognition that all nations, big or small, democratic or tyrannical, humane or barbarous, are equal sovereign entities. On the other hand, modern liberalism cherishes the rights and liberties of the individual and defines progress as the greater protection of these rights and liberties across the globe. In the absence of a sudden global democratic and liberal transformation, that goal can be achieved only by compelling tyrannical or barbarous regimes to behave more humanely, sometimes through force.

Given the tension between these two aspirations, what constitutes international legitimacy will inevitably be a matter of dispute within the liberal world. This is a problem for all modern liberals. But it is a particularly difficult one for Europeans. Although many Europeans now claim to define international legitimacy as strict obedience to the UN Charter and the Security Council, the union they have created transcends the UN's exclusive focus on national sovereignty. The postmodern European order rests on an entirely different political and moral foundation than the one on which the UN was erected. At the time of the Kosovo war, Blair argued that Europe must fight "for a new internationalism where the brutal repression of ethnic groups will not be tolerated [and] for a world where those responsible for crimes will have nowhere to hide." If this is the "new internationalism," then the "old internationalism" of the UN Charter is dead. Europeans may have to choose which version of liberal internationalism they really intend to pursue. Whether they do so or not, however, they must at least recognize that the two paths diverge.

For Americans, the choice is likely to be less difficult. By nature, tradition, and ideology, the United States has generally favored the promotion of liberal principles over the niceties of Westphalian diplomacy. Despite its role in helping to create the UN and draft the UN Charter, the United States has never fully accepted the organization's legitimacy or the charter's doctrine of sovereign equality. Although fiercely protective of its own autonomy, the United States has reserved for itself the right to intervene anywhere and everywhere, generally in the name of defending the cause of liberalism.

In this sense, the United States is and always has been a revolutionary power, a sometimes unwitting -- but nevertheless persistent -- disturber of the status quo, wherever its influence grows. For Europeans, who are consumed with radical changes on their own continent and seek a predictable future in the world beyond, the United States has once again become a dangerous member of the society of nations.

FAREWELL, WESTPHALIA

The problem of legitimacy is a good deal more complex today because the emergence of a unipolar era coincided with two other historical developments: the proliferation of WMD and the rise of international terrorism, both of which seem more threatening to Americans than to Europeans. It is the Bush administration's response to these developments, including the doctrine of "preemption" ("prevention" would be a more accurate term), that has caused the greatest uproar. It has prompted many Europeans, and many others around the world, to call the United States ' willingness to take preventive action a prime example of the superpower's disregard for international law and the international order -- stark evidence of its new illegitimacy.

But a more compelling way to assess the Bush doctrine is to ask whether new international circumstances might not be forcing Americans, as well as Europeans and even the UN secretary-general, to reexamine traditional international legal principles and definitions of legitimacy. Even before the Bush administration publicly enunciated its policy of preventive war in 2002, a growing body of opinion in both the United States and Europe was arguing that preventive action might at times be necessary to meet new international threats, even if it violated state sovereignty, prohibitions against intervention, and other traditional legal norms. Thinkers as diverse as Michael Walzer and Henry Kissinger concluded that principles left over from Westphalia were inadequate to deal with today's challenges. Even Kofi Annan has suggested that UN members consider developing "criteria for an early authorization of coercive measures to address certain types of threats -- for instance, terrorist groups armed with weapons of mass destruction."

Given this growing, if unrecognized, convergence of opinion, the real issue may not be whether prevention is ever justified but rather who may do the preventing and who decides when, where, and how it is handled. In this matter as in many others, Europe objects less to U.S. actions than to what it perceives to be their unilateral character. The dispute over preventive war is, in other words, little more than a restatement of America 's unipolar predicament: how can the world's sole superpower be controlled?

WHAT MULTILATERALISM?

Most Europeans would argue that if the United States seeks to gain international legitimacy for any use of force, it must avoid acting alone and it must embrace a foreign policy of multilateralism. Most Americans would gladly agree -- so long as they did not look too closely at what Europeans mean by the term.

When Americans speak of "multilateralism," they mean a policy that actively solicits and tries to gain the support of allies. For Europeans, however, "multilateralism" has a more formal and legalistic cast. It is a means of gaining legitimate sanction from duly constituted international bodies before undertaking any action; it is an essential prerequisite for action. A recent poll showed that, whereas a majority of Americans would bypass the Security Council if U.S. vital interests were threatened, a majority of Europeans would follow a Security Council decision, even at the cost of their nation's vital interests. At least so Europeans claim today, after the Iraq war. Of course in 1999, when the issue was Kosovo, they felt differently.

And why, exactly, did so many Europeans believe the United States acted unilaterally in Iraq last year? After all, the United States invaded Iraq not alone, but with a number of international partners, including such prominent members of the EU as the United Kingdom , Poland , and Spain . In some sense, then, its action was "multilateral," even without a UN authorization, just as the Kosovo war was multilateral even though the Security Council had not approved it.

When the United States invaded Iraq , the Europeans set a new, high, but shaky standard for international legitimacy. "The authority of our action," de Villepin declared in his famous speech to the Security Council in February 2003, had to be based "on the unity of the international community." But what does that mean? Can no action be legitimate without the unanimous consent of the entire international community? Or is "unity" something less than unanimity and a notion with a shifting definition?

The United States enjoyed the support of dozens of nations for its war in Iraq , but that, according to de Villepin and many other Europeans, was not enough. What magic number, if any, would have conferred legitimacy? Would the support of certain critical allies have satisfied the test? It is difficult to imagine that Europeans would have called the U.S. action in Iraq unilateral if France , Germany , and the United Kingdom had supported it but not China or Russia . (After all, they did not think their own war in Kosovo was unilateral simply because Russia and much of the developing world opposed it.) Is that to say that France 's support is worth more than Spain 's? "Legitimacy depends on creating a wide international consensus," Solana insists. But how wide is wide? And who decides what is wide enough? The answers to such questions are inevitably subjective -- far too subjective to serve as the basis for any rules-based international order.

It is difficult not to conclude, therefore, that when Europeans and American critics call the war in Iraq unilateral, they do not really mean that the United States lacked broad international support. They mean instead that the United States lacked broad support in Europe , and more specifically, in France and Germany . The Bush administration was "unilateralist" not because it lost the support of Beijing , Brasília, Kuala Lumpur , Moscow , and dozens of other capitals but because it lost the support of Paris and Berlin .

In the end, what Washington 's critics really resented was that it would not and could not be constrained, even by its closest friends. From the perspective of Berlin and Paris , the United States was unilateralist because no European power had any real influence over it. From this perspective, even with a hundred nations and three-quarters of Europe on its side, the United States might still have lacked legitimacy. Today's debate over multilateralism and legitimacy is thus not only about principles of law, or even about the supreme authority of the UN; it is also about a transatlantic struggle for influence. It is Europe 's response to the unipolar predicament.

THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING LEGITIMATE

Americans might be tempted, therefore, to dismiss the debate over legitimacy as a ruse and a fraud. They should not, however. There are indeed sound reasons for the United States to seek European approval. But they are unrelated to international law, the authority of the Security Council, and the as-yet nonexistent fabric of the international order. Europe matters because it and the United States form the heart of the liberal, democratic world. The United States ' liberal, democratic sensibilities make it difficult, if not impossible, for Americans to ignore the fears, concerns, interests, and demands of their fellows in liberal democracies. U.S. liberalism will naturally drive U.S. foreign policy to seek greater harmony with Europe .

The alternative course would be difficult for the United States to sustain. It is unclear whether the United States can operate effectively over time without the moral support and approval of the democratic world. That is not, however, for the reasons usually cited. Most U.S. advocates of multilateralism insist that the United States needs the material cooperation of its allies. But it is an open question whether the United States can "go it alone" in a material sense. Militarily, it can and does go it virtually alone, even when the Europeans are fully on board, as in Kosovo and in the Persian Gulf War. Economically, it can go it alone too if it must, as with the reconstruction of places such as Iraq . (Five decades ago, after all, it rebuilt Europe and Japan with its own funds.) It is more doubtful, however, whether the American people will continue to support both military actions and the burdens of postwar occupations in the face of constant charges of illegitimacy by the United States ' closest democratic allies.

Because losing legitimacy with fellow democracies would be debilitating -- perhaps even paralyzing -- over time, Americans cannot ignore their unipolar predicament. The biggest failure of the Bush administration may be that it was too slow to recognize this truth. Bush and his advisers came to office guided by the narrow realism that dominated Republican foreign policy circles during the Clinton years. But the unipolar predicament and the U.S. character require a much more expansive definition of U.S. interests. The United States can neither appear to be acting, nor in fact act, as if only its self-interest mattered. The United States , in short, must pursue legitimacy in the manner truest to its nature: by promoting the principles of liberal democracy not only as a means to greater security but as an end in itself. Success would bring it a measure of authority in the liberal, democratic world, including among Europeans, who cannot forever ignore their own vision of a more humane world, even if these days they are more preoccupied with strengthening the international legal order.

The United States ' conduct in Iraq today is especially important in this regard. At stake is the future not only of Iraq and the Middle East more generally but also of the United States ' reputation, its reliability, and its legitimacy as a world leader. The United States will be judged -- as it should be -- by the care and commitment it takes to secure a democratic peace in Iraq . It will be judged by whether it indeed advances the cause of liberalism, there and elsewhere, or whether it merely defends its own interests.

In promoting liberalism, the United States cannot fail to take account of the interests and fears of its liberal democratic allies in Europe . It should try to fulfill its part of a new transatlantic bargain by granting Europeans some influence over the exercise of its power -- provided that, in turn, Europeans wield that influence wisely. NATO, an alliance of and for liberal democracies, could be the forum of such a bargain. The United States has already ceded influence to European states in NATO: they vote on an equal footing with the superpower in all of the alliance's deliberations. For decades, NATO has been the one organization capable of reconciling U.S. hegemony with European autonomy and influence. Even today, its members retain a sentimental attraction for Americans more potent than their attraction for the UN.

The challenge for the United States will be to cede some power to Europe without putting U.S. security, as well as the security of Europe and the entire liberal democratic world, at risk. Even with the best of intentions, the United States cannot enlist Europe 's cooperation if the two regions disagree over the nature of today's global threats and the means to counter them. This gap in perception has driven the United States and Europe apart in the post-Cold War world, and it is difficult to imagine how the United States ' crisis of legitimacy could be resolved so long as this schism persists.

What, then, is the United States to do? Should Americans, in the interest of transatlantic harmony, adjust their perceptions of global threats to match that of their European friends? To do so would be irresponsible. U.S. security and the security of the liberal democratic world depend today, as they have for the past half-century, on U.S. power. "The United States is the only truly global player," Fischer admits, "and I must warn against underestimating its importance for peace and stability in the world. And beware, too, of underestimating what the U.S. means for our own security." Yet the United States has played that role by seeing the world through its own eyes rather than by adopting Europe 's postmodern world view. Were Americans now to adapt their vision, neither the United States nor postmodern Europe would remain secure for long.

Herein lies the tragedy. To address today's global dangers, Americans will need the legitimacy that Europe can provide, but Europeans may well fail to grant it. In their effort to constrain the superpower, they might lose sight of the mounting dangers in the world, which are far greater than those posed by the United States . Out of nervousness about unipolarity, they might underestimate the dangers of a multipolar system in which nonliberal and nondemocratic powers would come to outweigh Europe . Out of passion for the international legal order, they might forget the other liberal principles that have made postmodern Europe what it is today. Europeans might succeed in debilitating the United States this way. But since they have no intention of supplementing its power with their own, in doing so they would only succeed in weakening the overall power that the liberal democratic world can wield in its defense -- and in defense of liberalism itself.

Right now, many Europeans are betting that the risks posed by the "axis of evil," from terrorism to tyrants, will never be as great as the risk posed by the American leviathan unbound. Perhaps it is in the nature of a postmodern Europe to make such a judgment. But now may be the time for the wisest heads in Europe , including those living in the birthplace of Pascal, to ask themselves what will result if that wager proves wrong.

Robert Kagan is a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington DC and an expert in U.S. national security and foreign policy. He writes a monthly column on world affairs for the Washington Post and is a contributing editor at both the Weekly Standard and the New Republic . He served in the US State Department from 1984-88 as a member of the Policy Planning Staff, as principal speechwriter for Secretary of State George P. Shultz, and as Deputy for Policy in the Bureau of Inter-American Affairs. His most recent book is Of Paradise and Power, a best-seller in eight countries, and he is well known for an article titled, Power and Weakness in which he famously noted that ‘on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus’.

Publicado por maria teresa monica às 02:56 PM | Comentários (0)

GARTON ASH 1

QUESTIONS FOR TIMOTHY GARTON ASH
Transatlantic divides
By Wen Stephenson | November 21, 2004

"Yes, it is a manifesto," Timothy Garton Ash said last Monday as he sat in the bar of his hotel in Kenmore Square. The Oxford historian and transatlantic commentator was referring to his new book, "Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West" (Random House). "It is an attempt," he said, "to wake people up, and to say, `The world is not safe in this lot's hands. And you can make a difference."'

The genre is a notable departure for Garton Ash, 49, whose previous books have documented the upheavals in central and eastern Europe with a combination of eyewitness reportage and keen historical analysis -- what the diplomat George Kennan, reviewing Garton Ash's "The Uses of Adversity" (1989), called "history of the present." And yet this manifesto isn't likely to spur people into the streets. It's far too nicely reasoned, and reasonable, for that.

His purpose, Garton Ash writes in the new book, is "to chip away at the mind-walls of prejudice and constructed difference between Europe and America." He argues forcefully, though always politely, against both the Bush administration's unilateralism and against those who would have Europe become a superpower to rival the United States. ("The Chiracian version of Euro-Gaullism leads nowhere," he writes.)

Our present situation, says Garton Ash, is simply far too dangerous to allow divisions between and within Western democracies to distract us from urgent crises in the Middle East, from global warming, and from crippling poverty and disease in the developing world. If we don't get these things right, he warns -- and we can only do so together -- the epitaph on the West's gravestone may read: "They squabbled as the Earth burned."

IDEAS: Colin Powell has announced his resignation as secretary of state. How did he play in Europe?

GARTON ASH: Well, he played extremely well -- literally played. If you have seen David Hare's play, "Stuff Happens," about the diplomacy surrounding the Iraq crisis -- which was a terrific hit in London -- the absolute hero of that play is none other than Colin Powell. He is the only unambiguously sympathetic character. . .. So if he's gone and Rumsfeld stays, that would be read, rightly or wrongly, as a signal of the Bush administration's intentions.

IDEAS: What is the European reaction to Condoleezza Rice as Powell's successor?

GARTON ASH: The reaction is, "Let's wait and see." She's been interpreted as not unambiguously for or against the administration's approach to Europe. . .. So I think it's good news. She does have a very sophisticated understanding of international affairs, and a very good understanding of the British position, not least because of her connections to the British government. It's remarkable that she recently celebrated her 50th birthday at the residence of the British ambassador in Washington, with the president in attendance.

IDEAS: You met with President Bush at the White House in May 2001. How did that come about?

GARTON ASH: It was the most extraordinary thing. I was sitting in my office in Oxford, and I get a telephone call, and someone says, "It's the White House here, could you come and tell President Bush about Europe, uh, next Thursday at 1:45?" So, I said, "Well, I do have a lunch, but if I can move it. . .."

IDEAS: What was the meeting like?

GARTON ASH: We were a group of specialists on Europe -- three Americans, two Brits, no French, no Germans -- and the president was clearly feeling his way, very much sure of himself on some issues like missile defense and the environment -- "Kyoto is mush," he said -- and not on others. . .. But I'll never forget one thing he said, very emphatically, "Do we want the European Union to succeed?" And my British colleague and I said that we certainly did, and we thought the United States should, too. And then he sort of stepped back and said, "That was just a provocation." But actually, I thought that probably not a single president since 1945 would have asked the question in that form.

IDEAS: You write that when you see how foreign policy decisions are made, "you are left with a sense of mild incredulity that this is how the world is run."

GARTON ASH: It's an almighty mess. . .. It's amazing on what little knowledge, and what prejudices, our leaders make their decisions. . .. The diplomacy of the Iraq crisis was a case study of how not to run a world, with terrible mistakes made on all sides, in Washington, Paris and London, Berlin, Beijing.

IDEAS: Would a different generation of leaders have done better?

GARTON ASH: Yes, I actually do think that. An earlier generation -- Churchill, Roosevelt, Truman, Adenauer, De Gaulle -- had gone through certain very formative experiences. Our leaders, who are 40-something to early 50s, are professional politicians who haven't done much else in their lives and often don't have much international experience. And it shows.

IDEAS: You write of the US-Europe divide over Iraq as a "crisis of the West." Yet is it possible that Europeans have this sense of a crisis and Americans don't?

GARTON ASH: Perhaps many Americans are less inclined than Europeans to think that it matters so much. You know, I can have a crisis with my cleaning lady, but I don't think that matters as much as the crisis with my wife. So is Europe the wife or the cleaning lady?

IDEAS: There's another analogy -- Europe as the jilted lover.

GARTON ASH: Yes. America spends its time talking about America. Europe spends its time talking about -- America.

IDEAS: It's not good, they should really get over us.

GARTON ASH: Well, that's part of American soft power -- and it's part of American hyperpower, too. Everyone is fascinated by what's going on here. . .. A very important example is Germany. We talk so much about France, but the one that matters more is Germany. And Germany, which was of course liberated, occupied by America, and became extremely Americanized, feels that its love has not been requited, that it's been spurned.

IDEAS: Is Turkey going to be invited into the EU?

GARTON ASH: I hope so, because it will send a very important signal to the whole Islamic world, that a country with a secular state but an Islamist government has a place in one of the main clubs of the West.

IDEAS: Does this create divisions in Europe over what is "European"?

GARTON ASH: People often say what's at issue here is, "Is Europe a Christian club?" But you could equally well say that what's at issue here is, "Is Europe a secular club?" Because a strong part of the ideology of most people who support the European project is the notion of secularism . . . indeed, they are secularist to the core. In other words, their objection to Turkey is the same as their objection to America.

IDEAS: One wonders if Europeans really understand the debate over religion and politics in America.

GARTON ASH: There are aspects of American religiosity that are baffling. Sitting in a cab the other day, I listened to Family Radio, and the announcer is seriously discussing a book, "Did God Have a Plan for America?" And the answer is "Yes, He did."

IDEAS: Of course, it was an Englishman who gave us that idea.

GARTON ASH: Oh? Which one?

IDEAS: Well, you go back to the Puritans and John Winthrop.

GARTON ASH: The Puritans, oh, yes, the City on a Hill! But that was the 17th century, and we're now in the 21st.

IDEAS: How far apart, really, are the US and Europe?

GARTON ASH: In some respects, the Atlantic is narrower than the English Channel. I think the divide is much more in mutual perceptions than it is in reality. But perceptions can become reality. And if we go on thinking of each other as the "other" for a few more years, then that can become so.

IDEAS: And what's at stake in that?

GARTON ASH: I would say what's at stake is genuinely the future of freedom. If we duck these big challenges because we're involved in these absurd squabbles, what Freud called "the narcissism of minor differences," then the world will be a much more dangerous and nasty place for our children in 20 years.

Wen Stephenson is the deputy editor of Ideas

© Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company

Publicado por maria teresa monica às 10:33 AM | Comentários (0)

novembro 03, 2004

Gilles Kepel

Islam: la batalla de Europa

Por Gilles Kepel

El País (03/11/04, 07.42 horas)

Recep Tayyip Erdogan reveló en París, donde se encontraba para defender la causa de la incorporación de Turquía en Europa, que sus dos hijas, debidamente cubiertas con el velo, estudiaban en Estados Unidos al no poder asistir a la Universidad turca, donde el laicismo heredado de Atatürk prohíbe llevar el hijab.

En ese mismo momento, el presidente de la Unión de Organizaciones Islámicas de Francia declaraba a la prensa que su movimiento ya no se sentía vinculado por la tregua que siguió al secuestro de Christian Chesnot y Georges Malbrunot en Irak: la guerra escolar -en versión islamista- se reavivó con la comparecencia ante el consejo disciplinario de las primeras de las 70 alumnas que se obstinaban en llevar el velo en los colegios e institutos franceses.

La coincidencia de estos dos acontecimientos arroja una cruda luz sobre el embrollo en el que está atrapado el devenir de las poblaciones de origen musulmán en Europa, tanto los actuales 10 millones de ciudadanos de los Estados de la Unión, descendientes en su mayoría de inmigrantes del Magreb, así como de África, Turquía y del subcontinente indio, como los 70 millones de turcos, el día en que su país se incorpore a Europa. Inscribe este devenir en la confluencia de los retos de la política interior francesa, alemana, británica, italiana, etcétera, y de retos a nivel de civilización que determinan la evolución del islam en su conjunto.

¿Acaso la europeización de esta religión -mediante la combinación de la demografía y de la emigración- trae consigo un aggiornamento decisivo con un valor ejemplar para el resto del mundo o, por el contrario, es la oportunidad para los militantes islamistas y salafistas de establecer las cabezas de puente de un proselitismo que, de creer a los más exaltados, garantizaría la tercera -y victoriosa- expansión islámica en suelo europeo, tras los dos fracasos sancionados por la Reconquista española en el siglo XV y la derrota otomana en el asedio de Viena en 1683?

Dos acontecimientos dramáticos que han tenido lugar en 2004 ilustran este dilema y lo llevan al paroxismo: el atentado de Madrid, por un lado, y por otro, la movilización de los ciudadanos de origen musulmán a favor de los periodistas secuestrados en Irak. El atentado de Madrid fue perpetrado por jóvenes marroquíes inmigrados a España, con el apoyo logístico de "profesionales" de la red de Al Qaeda.

Junto a los marginados y los delincuentes que son la presa habitual de los predicadores salafistas-yihadistas, había también individuos socialmente bien integrados, como el estudioso Mohamed Ata, estudiante aplicado en Hamburgo y jefe de los terroristas del 11-S; la aparición de personalidades esquizofrénicas transfiguradas por el islamismo radical en asesinos en masa sólo afecta a algunos individuos, pero su impacto es devastador para el devenir del islam europeo, al que toman como rehén, por encima incluso de los centenares de muertos que provocan.

Más allá de la capacidad de Bin Laden y de sus subalternos para cambiar el resultado esperado de las elecciones españolas o para obtener la retirada de Irak del ejército de Madrid, en el movimiento salafista-yihadista encontramos la certeza de que España es desde la Andalucía musulmana "tierra del islam" para la eternidad y que allí es lícita la yihad contra los "ocupantes" no musulmanes cuyo asesinato está permitido. Dentro de esta lógica, el 11-M es tan sólo la primera batalla de una Reconquista al revés, cuyo horizonte es Europa.

Frente a esto también se inscribe la movilización de los ciudadanos franceses de origen o de confesión musulmana (sea cual sea su fe o creencia, para la que la República, al contrario que los Estados islámicos, les da la libertad) en apoyo de sus dos conciudadanos periodistas secuestrados en Irak y amenazados de muerte por otros salafistas-yihadistas si la ley sobre el laicismo en la escuela no era retirada. Con frecuencia nos hacemos preguntas sobre la incapacidad de los musulmanes no islamistas para hacer oír su voz: en este caso se ha expresado con fuerza y ha tenido un efecto de arrastre notable en las sociedades de Oriente Próximo, donde los secuestradores del llamado Ejército Islámico de Irak, al quedar en falso, han tenido que renunciar a ejecutar su amenaza.

La mayoría de nuestros conciudadanos europeos de origen musulmán, cuando tienen la sensación de una inserción satisfactoria en su entorno político, social, económico o cultural, no sienten la necesidad de convertir su confesión en una bandera de identidad más de lo que pueda sentirla la mayoría de sus compatriotas de origen católico, judío, protestante u otro. Esto deja el campo libre a los activistas religiosos radicales para introducirse, partiendo de ciudadelas confesionales exaltadas, en el tejido de asociaciones culturales o comunitarias de las cuales se proclaman los representantes (un fenómeno que no se limita al islam).

La reacción masiva frente al chantaje de los secuestradores también ha expresado el rechazo de una "sociedad civil de origen musulmán" francesa a verse representada por las corrientes surgidas de los Hermanos Musulmanes, quienes, a través de su preponderancia en el Consejo Francés del Culto Musulmán, dibujan día tras día los contornos confesionales de una fragmentación de la sociedad francesa en comunidades enraizadas en identidades religiosas defensivas y avivan las brasas de la cuestión del velo en la escuela, bandera de identidad por excelencia de esta fragmentación.

Mientras los grandes partidos franceses sigan con la política del avestruz y se nieguen en la práctica a presentar en una posición elegible en los comicios legislativos, base de la representación nacional, a unos candidatos con apellido de origen musulmán -sin que éstos tengan la vocación de ser "diputados de los moros" más que los diputados de origen judío son "diputados de los israelíes" o sus colegas de origen católico "diputados de los galos"-, esta representación nacional estará sesgada y los activistas comunitaristas islamistas tendrán vía libre.

En este terreno, la Francia republicana y asimiladora sufre un atraso paradójico frente al Reino Unido y Alemania. Sin embargo, no es poco lo que está en juego: se trata nada menos que de la capacidad de Europa para demostrar ante el mundo islámico que sus ciudadanos de origen musulmán son la primera generación surgida del universo del islam que participa en una sociedad democrática cuyos beneficios están vedados para la inmensa mayoría de los parientes que permanecen en la aldea en África. Todo el mundo en el Magreb, en África, en Pakistán o en Turquía tiene un primo en Marsella, Birmingham, Düsseldorf, Barcelona o Milán. Están pendientes de la evolu-

ción de este miembro de la familia, próxima o alejada, que participa al mismo nivel y en la realidad en el aggiornamento de la civilización musulmana heredada en contacto con la modernidad democrática en el mismo lugar en el que ésta se elabora (mientras que en la aldea esto se vive por poderes, a través de la televisión por satélite, Internet y sus efectos distorsionadores).

Con demasiada frecuencia, esta dimensión ejemplar también se ve lastrada por las dificultades para el ascenso social de los jóvenes pertenecientes a las últimas generaciones de inmigrantes, muchos de los cuales proceden de países musulmanes. El ámbito de este malestar es un terreno predilecto del movimiento islamista que se esfuerza en convertir el desánimo en un rechazo de la sociedad "impía" europea y en una cosificación defensiva a nivel de la identidad que se proyecta en una Umma -una comunidad de creyentes mesiánica- cuyo mecanismo no deja de recordar al internacionalismo proletario de antaño.

No nos extrañe que los supervivientes del comunismo y del izquierdismo en el viejo continente hayan establecido, tanto dentro del Foro Social Europeo (FSE) como en diversas asociaciones de barrios desfavorecidos -sobre todo en Vénissieux y en el gran Lyón-, una alianza con los paladines del velo en la escuela. El dinamismo militante de estos últimos transforma a los primeros en "compañeros de ruta" y pone crudamente en evidencia su carencia de un proyecto, como han demostrado los ataques ampliamente divulgados de una inglesa conversa y portadora del velo contra la "Francia racista e islamófoba" en los bancos del FSE de Londres, en octubre de 2004, después de que Tarik Ramadán tuviera un papel destacado en el Foro de París en otoño de 2003, en detrimento de los organizadores altermundialistas.

Esta batalla que se desarrolla en torno al futuro de los musulmanes en Europa y en la que la conquista de los medios de comunicación es una cuestión de poder crucial, ya que se trata también de una lucha de imágenes, se dirime ya con fuerza en torno a la cuestión turca. Por un lado, el efecto de atracción de Europa ha obligado al AKP (Partido de la Justicia y el Desarrollo), en el poder en Ankara -muchos de cuyos miembros salieron de la matriz de los Hermanos Musulmanes-, a disolver en el crisol democrático de Bruselas la ideología islamista que hacía que Erbakan, la figura tutelar del islamismo turco, describiese a Europa como un "club judeocristiano" al que oponía un M-8 que agrupase a los grandes países musulmanes.

Este factor se debe tanto a la presión del electorado del AKP, las clases ascendentes y piadosas de Anatolia deseosas de realizar las concesiones necesarias para fundirse en la prosperidad europea, como al tropismo europeo antiguo de las élites políticas turcas laicas que, a su vez, en gran número son europeas "de origen", ya que proceden de Rumelia (la antigua parte europea del Imperio Otomano), y se instalaron en la Turquía moderna durante los intercambios de población de los años veinte. Pero, por otro lado, la integración europea es también, según una irónica lógica de frentes invertidos, la ocasión para los islamistas turcos de luchar contra el laicismo surgido con Atatürk, utilizando las libertades civiles europeas para convertir en lícito y promover, por ejemplo, el velo en la Universidad turca, a la vez que aportan el apoyo de su masa demográfica a los Hermanos Musulmanes y salafistas franceses y demás europeos que luchan a favor del velo en la escuela.

Como todas la batallas políticas, la que implica al islam y a Europa no verá a los diferentes protagonistas "salir del hamman igual que entraron", como dice el proverbio árabe. Pero es necesario plantear los desafíos con claridad para que cada cual sepa cómo definirse y con quién identificarse.
Gilles Kepel es autor de Fitna, guerre au cœur de l’islam [Fitna, guerra en el corazón del islam] y es profesor de Ciencias Políticas, cátedra de Oriente Medio y Mediterráneo.

Publicado por maria teresa monica às 04:52 PM | Comentários (0)