Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  To be fair, America’s bellicose intellectuals are not alone. In Europe Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish intellectual resistance to Communism, became an outspoken admirer of the embarrassingly Islamophobic Oriana Fallaci; Václav Havel joined the Washington-based Committee on the Present Danger (a recycled cold war-era organization originally dedicated to rooting out Communists, now pledged to fighting “the threat posed by global radical Islamist and fascist terrorist movements”); André Glucksmann in Paris contributed agitated essays to Le Figaro lambasting “universal Jihad,” Iranian “lust for power,” and radical Islam’s strategy of “green subversion.” All three enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq.

  In the European case, this trend is an unfortunate by-product of the intellectual revolution of the 1980s, especially in the former Communist East, when “human rights” displaced conventional political allegiances as the basis for collective action. The gains wrought by this transformation in the rhetoric of oppositional politics were considerable. But a price was paid all the same. A commitment to the abstract universalism of “rights”—and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimesin their name—can lead all too readily to the habit of casting every political choice in binary moral terms. In this light George Bush’s war against Terror, Evil, and Islamo-Fascism appears seductive and even familiar: Self-deluding foreigners readily mistake the U.S. President’s myopic rigidity for their own moral rectitude.

  But back home, America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end. In itself this is hardly a new departure, of course: We are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, “race,” “gender,” or “sexual orientation,” and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional identification but the sustained effort to transcend that identification in search of truth or the general interest.

  It is thus depressing to read some of the better-known and more avowedly “liberal” intellectuals in the contemporary USA exploiting their professional credibility to advance a partisan case. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Michael Walzer, two senior figures in the country’s philosophical establishment (she at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he at the Princeton Institute), both penned portentous essays purporting to demonstrate the justness of necessary wars—she in Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World (2003) a preemptive defense of the Iraq war; he more recently in a shameless defense of Israel’s bombardments of Lebanese civilians (“War Fair,” The New Republic, July 31, 2006). In today’s America, neoconservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig leaf. There really is no other difference between them.

  One of the particularly depressing ways in which liberal intellectuals have abdicated personal and ethical responsibility for the actions they now endorse can be seen in their failure to think independently about the Middle East. Not every liberal cheerleader for the Global War against Islamo-Fascism, or against Terror, or against Global Jihad, is an unreconstructed supporter of Likud: Christopher Hitchens, for one, is critical of Israel. But the marked enthusiasm with which so many American punditsand commentators and essayists have rolled over for Bush’s doctrine of preventive war; offered no criticism of the disproportionate use of air power on civilian targets in both Iraq and Lebanon; and stayed coyly silent in the face of Condoleezza Rice’s enthusiasm for the bloody “birth pangs of a new Middle East,” makes more sense when one recalls their backing for Israel: a country that for fifty years has rested its entire national strategy upon preventive wars, disproportionate retaliation, and efforts to redraw the map of the whole Middle East.

  Since its inception, the state of Israel has fought a number of wars of choice (indeed, the only exception was the Yom Kippur War of 1973). To be sure, these have been presented to the world as wars of necessity or self-defense; but Israel’s statesmen and generals have never been under any such illusion. Whether this approach has done Israel much good is debatable (for a clearheaded recent account that describes his country’s strategy of using wars of choice to “redraw” the map of its neighborhood as a resounding failure, see Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy [2006] by Shlomo Ben-Ami, a historian and former Israeli foreign minister). But the idea of a superpower behaving in a similar way— responding to terrorist threats or guerrilla incursions by flattening another country just to preserve its own deterrent credibility—is odd in the extreme. It is one thing for the U.S. unconditionally to underwrite Israel’s behavior (albeit in neither country’s interest). But for the U.S. to imitate Israel wholesale, to import that tiny country’s self-destructive, intemperate response to any hostility or opposition and to make it the leitmotif of American foreign policy: That is simply bizarre.

  George W. Bush’s Middle Eastern policy now tracks so closely to the Israeli precedent that it is very difficult to see daylight between the two. It is this surreal turn of events that helps explain the confusion and silence of American liberal thinking on this subject. Historically, liberals have been unsympathetic to “wars of choice” when undertaken or proposed by their own government. War, in the liberal imagination (and not only the liberal one), is a last resort, not a first option. But the United States now has an Israeli-style foreign policy, and thus America’s liberal intellectuals overwhelmingly support it.

  The contradictions to which this can lead are striking. Thus, to take just one instance: There is a blatant discrepancy between President Bush’s proclaimed desire to bring democracy to the Middle East, and his refusal to intervene when the only working instances of fragile democracy in action in the whole Arab world—in Palestine and Lebanon—were systematically shattered by America’s Israeli ally. This discrepancy, and the bad faith and hypocrisy that it seems to suggest, have become a staple of editorial pages and Internet blogs the world over, to America’s lasting discredit. But America’s leading liberal intellectuals have kept silent. To speak would be to choose: between the tactical logic of America’s new “war of movement” against Islamic Fascism and the strategic tradition of Israeli statecraft. This is not a choice that most American liberal commentators are even willing to acknowledge, much less make. And so they say nothing.

  This blind spot obscures and risks polluting and obliterating every traditional liberal concern and inhibition. How else can one explain the appalling cover illustration of the New Republic of August 7, 2006: a lurid depiction of Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah in the anti-Semitic style of Der Stürmer crossed with more than a touch of the “Dirty Jap” cartoons of World War II? How else is one to account for the convoluted, sophistic defense by Leon Wieseltier in the same journal of the killing of Arab children in Q’ana (“These are not tender times”)? But the blind spot is not just ethical, it is also political: If American liberals “didn’t realize” just why their war in Iraq would have the predictable effect of promoting terrorism, benefiting the Iranian ayatollahs, and turning Iraq into Lebanon, then we should not expect them to understand (or care) that Israel’s brutal overreaction risks turning Lebanon into Iraq.

  In his new book (Five Germanys I Have Known, 2006) Fritz Stern— coauthor of the 1988 New York Times text defending liberalism—writes of his concern about the condition of the liberal spirit in America today. It is with the extinction of that spirit, he notes, that the death of a republic begins. Stern, a historian and a refugee from Nazi Germany, speaks from authority in this matter. And he is surely correct. We don’t expect right-wingers to care very much about the health of a republic, particularly when they are assiduously engaged in the unilateral promotion of empire. And the ideological Left, while occasionally adept at analyzing the shortcomings of a liberal republ
ic, is typically not much interested in defending it.

  It is the liberals, then, who count. They are, as it might be, the canaries in the sulfurous mine shaft of modern democracy. And thus the alacrity with which many of America’s most prominent liberals have censored themselves in the name of the “war on terror,” the enthusiasm with which they have invented ideological and moral cover for war and war crimes and proffered that cover to their political enemies: All this is a bad sign. Liberal intellectuals used to be distinguished precisely by their efforts to think for themselves, rather than in the service of others. Intellectuals should not be smugly theorizing endless war, much less confidently promoting and excusing it. They should be engaged in disturbing the peace—their own above all.

  This essay was initially commissioned by a daily newspaper; but when it outgrew that venue, the London Review of Books was kind enough to accept it and indeed encouraged me to develop its argument at length. When it appeared in the LRB in September 2006, it aroused considerable animosity: not so much from its targets, even though some of them understandably resented being tarred with the brush of “useful idiocy,” as from leftist intellectuals who felt underappreciated in their continued opposition to President Bush. Letters to this effect duly appeared in the London Review of Books in vol. 28, no. xxi, November 2006, together with a reply from me indicating that I had restricted my discussion to intellectuals with significant public influence or readership, i.e., those who mattered.

  CHAPTER XXIII

  The Good Society: Europe vs. America

  Consider a mug of American coffee. It is found everywhere. It can be made by anyone. It is cheap—and refills are free. Being largely without flavor, it can be diluted to taste. What it lacks in allure it makes up in size. It is the most democratic method ever devised for introducing caffeine into human beings. Now take a cup of Italian espresso. It requires expensive equipment. Price-to-volume ratio is outrageous, suggesting indifference to the consumer and ignorance of the market. The aesthetic satisfaction accessory to the beverage far outweighs its metabolic impact. It is not a drink; it is an artifact.

  This contrast can stand for the differences between America and Europe—differences nowadays asserted with increased frequency and not a little acrimony on both sides of the Atlantic. The mutual criticisms are familiar. To American commentators Europe is “stagnant.” Its workers, employers, and regulations lack the flexibility and adaptability of their U.S. counterparts. The costs of European social welfare payments and public services are “unsustainable.” Europe’s aging and “cosseted” populations are underproductive and self-satisfied. In a globalized world, the “European social model” is a doomed mirage. This conclusion is typically drawn even by “liberal” American observers, who differ from conservative (and neoconservative) critics only in deriving no pleasure from it.

  To a growing number of Europeans, however, it is America that is in trouble and the “American way of life” that cannot be sustained. The American pursuit of wealth, size, and abundance—as material surrogates for happiness—is aesthetically unpleasing and ecologically catastrophic. The American economy is built on sand (or, more precisely, other people’s money). For many Americans the promise of a better future is a fading hope. Contemporary mass culture in the U.S. is squalid and meretricious. No wonder so many Americans turn to the church for solace.

  These perceptions constitute the real Atlantic gap, and they suggest that something has changed. In past decades it was conventionally assumed—whether with satisfaction or regret—that Europe and America were converging upon a single “Western” model of late capitalism, with the U.S., as usual, leading the way. The logic of scale and market, of efficiency and profit, would ineluctably trump local variations and inherited cultural constraints. Americanization (or globalization—the two treated as synonymous) was inevitable. The best—indeed the only—hope for local products and practices was that they would be swept up into the global vortex and repackaged as “international” commodities for universal consumption. Thus an archetypically Italian product—caffè espresso— would travel to the U.S., where it would metamorphose from an elite preference into a popular commodity, and then be repackaged and sold back to Europeans by an American chain store.

  But something has gone wrong with this story. It is not just that Starbucks has encountered unexpected foreign resistance to double-decaf-mocha-skim-latte-with-cinnamon (except, revealingly, in the United Kingdom), or that politically motivated Europeans are abjuring high-profile American commodities. It is becoming clear that America and Europe are not way stations on a historical production line, such that Europeans must expect to inherit or replicate the American experience after an appropriate time lag. They are actually quite distinct places, very possibly moving in divergent directions. There are even those—including the authors of two of the books under review—for whom it is not Europe but rather the United States that is trapped in the past.

  America’s cultural peculiarities (as seen from Europe) are well documented: the nation’s marked religiosity, its selective prurience,1 its affection for guns and prisons (the EU has 87 prisoners per 100,000 people; America has 685), and its embrace of the death penalty. As T. R. Reid puts it in The United States of Europe, “Yes, Americans put up huge billboards reading ‘Love Thy Neighbor,’ but they murder and rape their neighbors at rates that would shock any European nation.”21 But it is the curiosities of America’s economy, and its social costs, that are now attracting attention.

  Americans work much more than Europeans: According to the Organization for Economic Coorporation and Development (OECD), a typical employed American put in 1,877 hours in 2000, compared to 1,562 for his or her French counterpart. One American in three works more than fifty hours a week. Americans take fewer paid holidays than Europeans. Whereas Swedes get more than thirty paid days off work per year and even the Brits get an average of twenty-three, Americans can hope for something between four and ten, depending on where they live. Unemployment in the U.S. is lower than in many European countries (though since out-of-work Americans soon lose their rights to unemployment benefits and are taken off the registers, these statistics may be misleading). America, it seems, is better than Europe at creating jobs. So more American adults are at work, and they work much more than Europeans. What do they get for their efforts?

  Not much, unless they are well off. The U.S. is an excellent place to be rich. Back in 1980 the average American chief executive earned forty times as much as the average manufacturing employee. For the top tier of American CEOs, the ratio is now 475:1 and would be vastly greater if assets, not income, were taken into account. By way of comparison, the ratio in Britain is 24:1, in France 15:1, in Sweden 13:1.2 A privileged minority has access to the best medical treatment in the world. But forty-five million Americans have no health insurance at all (of the world’s developed countries, only the U.S. and South Africa do not offer universal medical coverage). According to the World Health Organization, the United States is number one in health spending per capita—and thirty-seventh in the quality of its service.

  As a consequence, Americans live shorter lives than Western Europeans. Their children are more likely to die in infancy: The U.S. ranks twenty-sixth among industrial nations in infant mortality, with a rate double that of Sweden, higher than Slovenia’s, and only just ahead of Lithuania’s—and this despite spending 15 percent of U.S. gross domestic product on “health care” (much of it siphoned off in the administrative costs of for-profit private networks). Sweden, by contrast, devotes just 8 percent of its GDP to health. The picture in education is very similar. In the aggregate, the United States spends much more on education than the nations of Western Europe; and it has by far the best research universities in the world. Yet a recent study suggests that for every dollar the U.S. spends on education it gets worse results than any other industrial nation. American children consistently underperform their European peers in both literacy and numeracy.3

  Very well,
you might conclude. Europeans are better—fairer—at distributing social goods. This is not news. But there can be no goods or services without wealth, and surely the one thing American capitalism is good at, and where leisure-bound, self-indulgent Europeans need to improve, is the dynamic generation of wealth. But this is by no means obvious today. Europeans work less: but when they do work they seem to put their time to better use. In 1970 GDP per hour in the EU was 35 percent below that of the U.S.; today the gap is less than 7 percent and closing fast. Productivity per hour of work in Italy, Austria, and Denmark is similar to that of the United States; but the U.S. is now distinctly out-performed in this key measure by Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, . . . and France.4

  America’s long-standing advantage in wages and productivity—the gift of size, location, and history alike—appears to be winding down, with attendant consequences for U.S. domination of the international business scene. The modern American economy is not just in hock to international bankers with a foreign debt of $3.3 trillion (28 percent of GDP); it is also increasingly foreign-owned. In the year 2000, European direct investment in the U.S. exceeded American investment in Europe by nearly two-fifths. Among dozens of emblematically “American” companies and products now owned by Europeans are Brooks Brothers, DKNY, Random House, Kent Cigarettes, Dove Soap, Chrysler, Bird’s Eye, Pennzoil, Baskin-Robbins, and the Los Angeles Dodgers.