Issue No. 600
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22 - 28 August 2002 Issue No. 600 Opinion |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
The Kagan thesis (1)
Mohamed Sid-Ahmed investigates, in three installments, a new set of ideas put forward by American scholar Robert Kagan
Of basic dissimilarity
"It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world. On the all-important question of power, American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power. It is moving beyond power into a self- contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realisation of Kant's 'perpetual peace'. The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defence and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might". That is the opening statement of Robert Kagan's essay, Power and Weakness, recently published in the American magazine Policy Review (no.113), which has been described as no less important a document than Fukuyama's essay on the "end of history" and Huntington's on the "clash of civilisations".
The conventional view is that the US and Europe, both under the NATO umbrella, are fundamentally similar political entities. Kagan challenges this view and argues that each of the two wings of the Western Alliance cannot, on the one hand, do without the other, though they are bound, on the other hand, to move further away from the other. His provocative thesis casts light on the nature of the very special relationship between the Old World and the New, a relationship that is symbiotic and antagonistic at one and the same time. It is an aspect that has not been sufficiently explored and one that could lead to unexpected developments.
Europeans argue that the US resorts to force more quickly and, compared with Europe, is less patient with diplomacy. Americans generally see the world as divided between good an evil, between friends and enemies, while Europeans see a more complex picture. When confronting real or potential adversaries, Americans generally favour policies of coercion over those of persuasion, and are more inclined to wield the stick than proffer the carrot, placing greater trust in punitive measures than in incentives to achieve their policy goals. Americans tend to seek finality in international affairs: they want problems solved, threats eliminated. They are less inclined to act through institutions such as the United Nations.
The European problem-solving approach is more nuanced. Europeans are more tolerant of failure and generally favour peaceful responses to problems, preferring negotiation, diplomacy and persuasion to coercion. They are quicker to appeal to international law, international conventions and international opinion to adjudicate disputes. They often emphasise process over result, believing that ultimately process can become substance.
What is the source of America and Europe's differing perspectives? According to Kagan the question has received little attention because, too often, "those in Europe who have pointed out to the difference have been more interested in assailing the US than in understanding why the US acts differently".
Throughout the last two centuries, and especially in recent decades, Americans and Europeans have traded perspectives, because of the dramatic shift in the power equation. Kagan reveals to us that in the 1990s, when Europe increased its collective annual expenditures for defence from $150 billion to $180 billion, the United States alone was spending $280 billion per year. Now the United States is heading towards spending- as much as $500 billion per year, and Europe has not the slightest intention of keeping up.
But, as Kagan writes, that is only part of the answer. For along with the natural consequences of the deepening transatlantic power gap (a quantitative distinction), there has also opened a broad ideological gap (a qualitative distinction). In overcoming European disunity and creating the European Union after World War II, Europe has developed a set of ideas and principles regarding the utility and morality of power different from the ideals and principles of Americans who have not shared their experience. The gap is greater than ever today, and appears to be growing at an alarming rate.
Kagan takes his assumption further and asserts that Europe has been militarily weak for a long time, but until fairly recently its weakness has been obscured. Europe lost its strategic centrality after the Cold War ended. But it took a few more years for the lingering image of European global power to fade. Huntington predicted that the coalescing of the European Union would be "the single most important move" in a worldwide reaction against American hegemony as the 21st century unfolds. For Huntington, the most significant thing about the creation of the European Union was the fact that it emerged on America's side in terms of a world marked by clashes between civilisations, not the fact that, despite the alliance between them, Europe and America became all the more different for a totally different set of reasons.
The end of the Cold War had a very different effect on the American side of the Atlantic. Fukuyama described it as "the end of History" while History was to acquire new dimensions with America's sizeable military arsenal, once barely sufficient to balance Soviet power, but now deployed in a world without a single formidable adversary. This "unipolar moment" made the US more willing than ever to use force abroad, to resuscitate History. With the check of Soviet power removed, the US was free to intervene wherever and whenever it chose. By widening the power gap the end of the cold War exacerbated Euro- American disparities still further.
Some Europeans argue that precisely because Europe has suffered so much in the past it has a higher tolerance for suffering than America and therefore a higher tolerance for threats. Kagan believes the opposite is true. The memory of their horrendous suffering in World War I made the British and French public more fearful of Nazi Germany, not more tolerant, and this attitude contributed significantly to the appeasement of the 1930s. A better explanation for Europe's greater tolerance for threats is Europe's relative weakness. Tolerance is also very much a realistic response in that Europe, because it is weak, actually faces fewer threats than the far more powerful US.
This perfectly normal psychology is helping to drive a wedge between the US and Europe today. Europeans have concluded, reasonably enough, that the threat posed by Saddam Hussein is more tolerable for them than the risk of removing him. But Americans, being stronger, have developed a lower threshold of tolerance for Saddam, especially after 11 September.
The differing threat perceptions in the US and Europe are not just matters of psychology, however. They are grounded in a practical reality that is another product of the disparity of power. If, during the Cold War, Europe, by necessity, made a major contribution to its own defence, today Europeans enjoy an unparalleled measure of "free security" because most of the likely threats are in regions outside Europe, where only the US can project effective force. Neither Iraq, nor Iran, nor North Korea, nor any other "rogue" state is primarily a European problem. Nor, certainly, is China. Both Europeans and Americans agree that these are primarily American problems that Washington seems hell-bent on resolving through the anarchic exercise of brute force.
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