Does America live on Venus and Europe on Mars ?

Nous présentons le texte d'une conférence donnée le 3 octobre 2002, au Palais d'Egmont, à Bruxelles, devant la Conférence belgo-britannique, par le professeur Rik Coolsaet, Directeur des Études de Sécurité à l'Institut Royal des Relations Internationales (IRI) de Bruxelles. Le sujet en est l'état des relations entre l'Europe et les États-Unis.

(Rik Coolsaet est également professeur de relations internationales à l'université de Gand

Prof. Rik Coolsaet. Il a été direccteur de cabinet adjoint des ministres de la défense nationale et des affaires étrangères, successivement, durant la période 1988-1993.)

Does America live on Venus and Europe on Mars ?

When I mentioned the title of tonight’s intervention to my son, he immediately shot back and said I got it all wrong with my title. It should be the reverse, he said: it is Europe that lives on Venus and America on Mars – Venus being the goddess of love and Mars being the god of war and protector of Rome, a nation proud in war.

The father in me felt of course proud at his son’s knowledge of ancient mythology. But the political scientist was somewhat taken aback by the rapidity of the reaction, suggesting indeed that Bob Kagan’s now famous essay on ‘Power and Weakness’, published this summer and widely translated since, was right to the point.

But is it ?

I guess I do not have to dwell at length on Kagan’s argument. Put simply, he suggests that due to our different histories, but even more fundamentally as a result of the huge power gap between them, the world view and thus the strategic culture of Europeans and of Americans is now so divergent that we have parted ways. We, Europeans, have definitely opted for a peaceful, Kantian view as embodied in multilateralism. Americans on the other hand see themselves confronted with a lawless world where outlaws need to be deterred or destroyed, and often through the muzzle of a gun. And I would add, pre-emptively if possible.

Not only an American observer holds this view. Kagan’s argument sounds somewhat familiar for those who are acquainted with Robert Cooper’s elegant essay on ‘The Postmodern State’ or some of the recent speeches and interviews by leading Europeans, such as Chris Patten or Pascal Lamy.

I remember especially an interview commissioner Patten gave earlier this year in The Guardian, in which he describes our differences concerning terrorism as just one of a series of gaps now opening up between Europe and George W. Bush's United States: “While Europeans believe in tackling the root causes of terror, Washington seems keen only to eradicate the symptoms. While Europeans believe in ‘engaging’ potentially hostile nations, trying to bring them into the fold, Washington brands them as an ‘axis of evil’. While Europeans believe in acting together, multilaterally, the US seem ever more bent on acting alone.”

But the question still remains: is this analysis appropriate ? Does it provide some guidance in explaining today’s transatlantic debates on for instance Iraq.

I’m not convinced.

Let me first mention an anecdote. It goes back more than twenty years ago. We were then in the midst of the so-called missile crisis, as most of you will remember. A number of Europeans were invited to the Aspen Institute in Washington in order to discuss the transatlantic differences of opinion concerning the deployment of new nuclear missiles in Europe. At a given moment, Leslie Gelb, now president of the Council on Foreign Relations, summarised our discussions as follows: “You Europeans, you do not seem to realise that there is no gap between Europe and America, but… a canyon” Perhaps many then felt it thus, but in reality the canyon cannot not have been that deep, since it soon withered away, didn’t it ?

We all are familiar with the fact that since the sixties, a US-European crisis of confidence has regularly surfaced, called dramatic at the moment itself, only to disappear some time afterwards.

Let me, in a second remark, refer to the recent survey of European and American public opinion by the German Marshall Fund of the United States and the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations, released exactly one month ago. It found that despite reports of rising anti-Americanism in Europe and an impending transatlantic divide, Europeans and Americans view the world in broadly similar terms. The press release even asserted that: ‘Europeans like Americans and vice versa’. But it also said – and now we come closer to the argument I want to make – “like many Americans, they dislike certain aspects of US foreign policy.” “Like many Americans’ are the key words here.

To me, the real issue at hand, the real divide, is not some genetically induced difference between Europeans and Americans, but rather diverging views on the world that crosses right through European AND American elites, opinion makers, leaders and ultimately public opinion.

It is no hazard that today we face the same passionate discussion on the transatlantic partnership as we did in the 80s, but that largely withered away in the 90s: today’s administration is indeed the ideological heir to the Reagan-administration – not to the administration of Bush Sr. and even less of course to the Clinton-administration. The neoconservatives in office then and now offer a picture of America’s role in the world that is indeed far apart from common thinking in Europe, but it is equally far from mainstream and majority American thinking on the world, as seen by the recent survey I mentioned, but also by the annual surveys of the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs or by the Joseph Nye’s in the US.

This is the real canyon: between a conservative and a progressive view of the world, a unilateral or a multilateral approach, a hawkish vs a dovish, or whatever terms may be used to describe it, but not one between Americans on the hand and Europeans on the other.

In passing, I would like to draw your attention to the fact that Chris Patten too, in his Guardian interview, does not simply oppose Europeans and Americans, but Europeans and ‘Washington’ and that he speaks of the US as ‘George W. Bush's United States’. Since we are all aware of the British mastery of the English language, I imagine this is not the fruit of hazard.

I see no canyon whatsoever between the following two quotes:

1. Especially after September 11, we have seen ‘the dark side of globalisation’. Now we know where the huge injustices of the global economy can lead. We know, too, how important it is to handle failed states properly - and to prevent them failing in the first place. We have realised that we have to tackle ‘the root causes of terrorism and violence’.

2. Missing from the [American] public debate is discussion of the simple fact that lurking behind every terrorist act is a specific political antecedent. (…) There has been a remarkable reluctance in America to confront the more complex historical dimensions of this hatred. The inclination instead has been to rely on abstract assertions like terrorists ‘hate freedom’ or that their religious background makes them despise Western culture. To win the war on terrorism, one must therefore set two goals: first to destroy the terrorists and, second, to begin a political effort that focuses on the conditions that brought about their emergence.’

The author of the first quote is European, the second one is American: Chris Patten and Zbig Brzezinski.

Imagine we might agree on the conclusion that George W. Bush’s America, is not the real thing and the neoconservative’s agenda does not cover the real American national interest, where then does this lead us – since we can see, day after day, that they do have the real power and thus set the agenda.

Let me for a last time come back to Chris Patten: “I still hope that America will demonstrate that it has not gone on to unilateralist overdrive.” The task now is for Europe to raise its voice – “I don't think that keeping quiet, makes us good allies”.

Patten raises the point that it is our responsibility as Europeans to use our web of strategic partnerships and diplomatic relations to offer alternatives on a broad range of subjects, from the Middle East to global warming. Since the publication, two weeks ago, of president Bush’s National Security Strategy, we all the more need to come up with our own set of strategic priorities and methods to pursue these. At IRRI, the Royal Institute for International Relations, we will soon start working on Europe’s strategic blueprint.

Someone some day has indeed to come up with a new architecture of a world order based upon a common vision of world problems and managed by an institutional and rule-based multilateral system. The underlying dynamics of international relations and the challenges we thought of as extremely urgent on the eve of nine/eleven, have not suddenly disappeared. They are like tectonic shifts: slow moving and unfelt for decades, but sudden and devastating once they surface.

Perhaps, some of you will have seen a story in last week’s isue of Newsweek speculating on the rise of Europe as the new superpower. Europe’s economic might gives us this very responsability, proper to all great powers in history, to do our fair share in managing world affairs in a way we deem appropriate.

If Europeans do not offer such a vision, nobody else will. If Europeans do not cast off their intellectual laziness on this and start doing their homework, the present situation will last, like it or not, where we only get marching orders, but no common vision from Washington.

Today’s neoconservatives in Washington like deputies and junior partners. But in the somewhat longer term, America itself needs someone to speak up and demonstrate that another, less onesidedly muscular approach of the world is both possible and needed in order to assure some minimum international stability and human decency. Managing global order never rest solely upon American military primacy, however impressive it might look. It is simply not in America’s national DNA to impose a new Pax Romana on the world, as an American journalist wrote recently.

If we – Europeans and Americans – simply would surrender to the central belief of today’s Washington and view the world solely through the prism of terrorist threats, pre-emption and military might, the world will ultimately become an even less hospitable place to live in.

— Rik Coolsaet, Director of Security Studies

Royal Institute for International Relations, Brussels. — Belgo-British Conference, Egmont Palace, Brussels,3 October 2002