by Robert Kagan
The Postmodern Paradise
The answer lies somewhere in the realm of ideology, in European attitudes not just toward defense spending but toward power itself. Important as the power gap has been in shaping the respective strategic cultures of the United States and Europe, if the disparity of military capabilities were the only problem, the solution would be fairly straightforward. With a highly educated and productive population of almost 400 million people and a $9 trillion economy, Europe today has the wealth and technological capability to make itself more of a world power in military terms if Europeans wanted to become that kind of world power. They could easily spend twice as much as they are currently spending on defense if they believed it necessary to do so.[39] And closing the power gap between the United States and Europe would probably go some way toward closing the gap in strategic perceptions.
There is a cynical view current in American strategic circles that the Europeans simply enjoy the “free ride” they have gotten under the American security umbrella over the past six decades. Given America’s willingness to spend so much money protecting them, Europeans would rather spend their own money on social welfare programs, long vacations, and shorter workweeks. But there is more to the transatlantic gulf than a gap in military capabilities, and while Europe may be enjoying a free ride in terms of global security, there is more to Europe’s unwillingness to build up its military power than comfort with the present American guarantee. After all, the United States in the nineteenth century was the beneficiary of the British navy’s dominance of the Atlantic and the Caribbean. But that did not stop the United States from engaging in its own peacetime naval buildup in the 1880s and 1890s, a buildup that equipped it to launch and win the SpanishAmerican War, acquire the Philippines, and become a world power. Late-nineteenth-century Americans did not take comfort from their security; they were ambitious for more power.
Europeans today are not ambitious for power, and certainly not for military power. Europeans over the past half century have developed a genuinely different perspective on the role of power in international relations, a perspective that springs directly from their unique historical experience since the end of World War II. They have rejected the power politics that brought them such misery over the past century and more. This is a perspective on power that Americans do not and cannot share, inasmuch as the formative historical experiences on their side of the Atlantic have not been the same.
Consider again the qualities that make up the European strategic culture: the emphasis on negotiation, diplomacy, and commercial ties, on international law over the use of force, on seduction over coercion, on multilateralism over unilateralism. It is true that these are not traditionally European approaches to international relations when viewed from a long historical perspective. But they are a product of more recent European history. The modern European strategic culture represents a conscious rejection of the European past, a rejection of the evils of European Machtpolitik. It is a reflection of Europeans’ ardent and understandable desire never to return to that past. Who knows better than Europeans the dangers that arise from unbridled power politics, from an excessive reliance on military force, from policies produced by national egoism and ambition, even from balance of power and raison d’état? As German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer put it in a speech outlining his vision of the European future, “The core of the concept of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European balance-of-power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states that had emerged following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.”[40] The European Union is itself the product of an awful century of European warfare.
Of course, it was the “hegemonic ambitions” of one nation in particular that European integration was meant to contain. And it is the integration and taming of Germany that is the great accomplishment of Europe—viewed historically, perhaps the greatest feat of international politics ever achieved. Some Europeans recall, as Fischer does, the central role the United States played in solving the “German problem.” Fewer like to recall that the military destruction of Nazi Germany was the prerequisite for the European peace that followed. Instead, most Europeans like to believe that it was the transformation of the European mind and spirit that made possible the “new order.” The Europeans, who invented power politics, turned themselves into born-again idealists by an act of will, leaving behind them what Fischer called “the old system of balance with its continued national orientation, constraints of coalition, traditional interest-led politics and the permanent danger of nationalist ideologies and confrontations.”
Fischer stands near one end of the spectrum of European idealism. But this is not really a right-left issue in Europe. Fischer’s principal contention—that Europe has moved beyond the old system of power politics and discovered a new system for preserving peace in international relations—is widely shared across Europe. As senior British diplomat and EU official Robert Cooper has argued, Europe today lives in a “postmodern system” that does not rest on a balance of power but on “the rejection of force” and on “self-enforced rules of behavior.” In the “postmodern world,” writes Cooper, “raison d’état and the amorality of Machiavelli’s theories of statecraft . . . have been replaced by a moral consciousness” in international affairs.[41]
American realists might scoff at this idealism. Hans Morgenthau and George Kennan assumed that only naive Americans succumbed to such “Wilsonian” legalistic and moralistic fancies, not those war-tested, historically minded European Machiavels. But, really, why shouldn’t Europeans be idealistic about international affairs, at least as they are conducted in Europe’s “postmodern system”? Within the confines of Europe, the age-old laws of international relations have been repealed. Europeans have pursued their new order, freed from the laws and even the mentality of power politics. Europeans have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian world of perpetual peace.
In fact, the United States solved the Kantian paradox for the Europeans. Kant had argued that the only solution to the immoral horrors of the Hobbesian world was the creation of a world government. But he also feared that the “state of universal peace” made possible by world government would be an even greater threat to human freedom than the Hobbesian international order, inasmuch as such a government, with its monopoly of power, would become “the most horrible despotism.”[42] How nations could achieve perpetual peace without destroying human freedom was a problem Kant could not solve. But for Europe the problem was solved by the United States. By providing security from outside, the United States rendered it unnecessary for Europe’s supranational government to provide it. Europeans did not need power to achieve peace, and they do not need power to preserve it. European life during the more than five decades since the end of World War II has been shaped not by the brutal laws of power politics but by the unfolding of a geopolitical fantasy, a miracle of world-historical importance: The German lion has lain down with the French lamb. The conflict that ravaged Europe ever since the violent birth of Germany in the nineteenth century has been put to rest. The means by which this miracle has been achieved have understandably acquired something of a sacred mystique for Europeans, especially since the end of the Cold War. Diplomacy, negotiations, patience, the forging of economic ties, political engagement, the use of inducements rather than sanctions, compromise rather than confrontation, the taking of small steps and tempering ambitions for success—these were the tools of Franco-German rapprochement and hence the tools that made European integration possible. France, in particular, took the leap into the unknown, offering to pool first economic and then political sovereignty with its old German enemy as the best means of preventing future conflicts. Germany, in turn, ceded its own great power within Europe in the interest of reintegration.
The integration of Europe was not to be based on military deterrence or the balance of power. To the contrary, the miracle came from the rejection of military power and of its utility as an instrumen
t of international affairs—at least within the confines of Europe. During the Cold War, few Europeans doubted the need for military power to deter the Soviet Union. But the end of the Cold War, by removing even the external danger of the Soviet Union, allowed Europe’s new order, and its new idealism, to blossom fully into a grand plan for world order. Freed from the requirements of any military deterrence, internal or external, Europeans became still more confident that their way of settling international problems now had universal application. Their belief in the importance and relevance of security organizations like NATO diminished by equal measure.
“The genius of the founding fathers,” European Commission President Romano Prodi explained, “lay in translating extremely high political ambitions . . . into a series of more specific, almost technical decisions. This indirect approach made further action possible. Rapprochement took place gradually. From confrontation we moved to willingness to cooperate in the economic sphere and then on to integration.”[43] This is what many Europeans believe they have to offer the world: not power, but the transcendence of power. The “essence” of the European Union, writes Everts, is “all about subjecting inter-state relations to the rule of law,” and Europe’s experience of successful multilateral governance has, in turn, produced an ambition to convert the world.[44] Europe “has a role to play in world ‘governance,’ ” says Prodi, a role based on replicating the European experience on a global scale. In Europe “the rule of law has replaced the crude interplay of power . . . power politics have lost their influence.” And by “making a success of integration we are demonstrating to the world that it is possible to create a method for peace.” No doubt there are Britons, Germans, French, and others who would frown on such exuberant idealism. But many Europeans, including many in positions of power, routinely apply Europe’s experience to the rest of the world, and sometimes with the evangelic zeal of converts. The general European critique of the American approach to rogue regimes is based on this special European insight. Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Libya—these states may be dangerous and unpleasant, and even, if simplistic Americans insist, evil. But Germany was evil once, too. Might not an “indirect approach” work again, as it did in Europe? Might it not be possible once more to move from confrontation to rapprochement, beginning with cooperation in the economic sphere and then moving on to peaceful integration? Could not the formula that worked in Europe work again with Iran? Might it have even worked with Iraq? A great many Europeans have insisted that it might, and at less cost and risk than war. And Europe would apply its lesson to Israelis and Palestinians as well, for, after all, as EU Commissioner Chris Patten argues, “European integration shows that compromise and reconciliation is possible after generations of prejudice, war and suffering.”[45] The transmission of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe’s new mission civilisatrice. Just as Americans have always believed that they had discovered the secret to human happiness and wished to export it to the rest of the world, so Europeans have a new mission born of their own discovery of perpetual peace.
Thus we arrive at what may be the most important reason for the divergence in views between Europe and the United States. America’s power and its willingness to exercise that power—unilaterally if necessary—constitute a threat to Europe’s new sense of mission. Perhaps it is the greatest threat. American policymakers have found it hard to believe, but leading officials and politicians in Europe really have worried more about how the United States might handle or mishandle the problem of Iraq—by undertaking unilateral and extralegal military action—than they have ever worried about Iraq itself and Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction. And while it is true that they have feared such action might destabilize the Middle East and lead to the unnecessary loss of life, there has always been a deeper concern.[46] Such American action, even if successful, is an assault on the essence of “postmodern” Europe. It is an assault on Europe’s new ideals, a denial of their universal validity, much as the monarchies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe were an assault on American republican ideals. Americans ought to be the first to understand that a threat to one’s beliefs can be as frightening as a threat to one’s physical security.
As Americans have for two centuries, Europeans speak with great confidence of the superiority of their global understanding, the wisdom they have to offer other nations about conflict resolution, and their way of addressing international problems. But just as in the first decade of the American republic, there is a hint of insecurity in the European claim to success, an evident need to have their success affirmed and their views accepted by other nations, particularly by the United States. After all, to deny the validity of the new European idealism is to raise profound doubts about the viability of the European project. If international problems cannot, in fact, be settled the European way, wouldn’t that suggest that Europe itself may eventually fall short of a solution, with all the horrors this implies? That is one reason Europeans were so adamant about preserving the universal applicability of the International Criminal Court. For the United States to demand immunity, a double standard for the powerful, is to undermine the very principle Europeans are trying to establish—that all nations, strong and weak, are equal under the law and all must abide by the law. If this principle can be flouted, even by the benevolent superpower, then what happens to the European Union, which depends for its very existence on common obedience to the laws of Europe? If international law does not reign supreme, is Europe doomed to return to its past?
And, of course, it is precisely this fear of sliding backward that still hangs over Europeans, even as Europe moves forward. Europeans, particularly the French and the Germans, are not entirely sure that the problem once known as the “German problem” really has been solved. Neither France under François Mitterrand nor Britain under Margaret Thatcher was pleased at the prospect of German reunification after the end of the Cold War; each had to be coaxed along and reassured by the Americans, just as British and French leaders had been coaxed along to accept German reintegration four decades before. As their various and often very different proposals for the future constitution of Europe suggest, the French are still not confident they can trust the Germans, and the Germans are still not sure they can trust themselves. Nearly six decades after the end of World War II, a French official can still remark: “People say, ‘It is a terrible thing that Germany is not working.’ But I say, ‘Really? When Germany is working, six months later it is usually marching down the Champs Elysees.’ ”[47] Buried not very deeply beneath the surface of such jokes lies a genuine, lingering trepidation about a Germany that is still too big for the European continent. Last summer, when German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder defied the Bush administration’s call for European support in Iraq, his insistence on dealing with such matters in “the German way” was perhaps even more unsettling to his European neighbors than it was to the United States. Ironically, even German pacifism and neutralism can frighten Europeans when a German leader speaks of “the German way.”
Such fears can at times hinder progress toward deeper integration, but they also have driven the European project forward despite innumerable obstacles. European integration is propelled forward in part by the Germans’ fears about themselves. The European project must succeed, Joschka Fischer warns, for how else can “the risks and temptations objectively inherent in Germany’s dimensions and central situation” be overcome?[48] Those historic German “temptations” play at the back of many a European mind. And every time Europe contemplates the use of military force, or is forced to do so by the United States, there is no avoiding at least momentary consideration of what effect such a military action might have on the “German question” that seems never entirely to disappear.
Perhaps it is not just coincidence, therefore, that the amazing progress toward European integration in recent years has been accompanied not by the emergence of a European superpower but by a diminishing of European military capabilities
relative to the United States. Turning Europe into a global superpower capable of balancing the power of the United States may have been one of the original selling points of the European Union—an independent European foreign and defense policy was supposed to be one of the most important by-products of European integration. But, in truth, isn’t the ambition for European “power” something of an anachronism? It is an atavistic impulse, inconsistent with the ideals of postmodern Europe, whose very existence depends on the rejection of power politics. Whatever its architects may have intended, European integration has proved to be the enemy of European military power and, indeed, of an important European global role.
This phenomenon has manifested itself not only in flat or declining European defense budgets, but in other ways, too, even in the realm of “soft” power. European leaders talk of Europe’s essential role in the world. Prodi yearns “to make our voice heard, to make our actions count.”[49] And it is true that Europeans spend a great deal of money on foreign aid—more per capita, they like to point out, than does the United States. Europeans engage in overseas military missions, so long as the missions are mostly limited to peacekeeping. But while the EU periodically dips its fingers into troubled international waters in the Middle East or the Korean Peninsula, the truth is that EU foreign policy is probably the most anemic of all the products of European integration. As one sympathetic observer has noted, few European leaders “are giving it much time or energy.”[50] EU foreign policy initiatives tend to be shortlived and are rarely backed by sustained agreement on the part of the various European powers. That is one reason they are so easily rebuffed. In the Middle East, where so much European money goes to fund Palestinian and other Arab projects, it is still to the United States that Arabs and Israelis alike look for support, assistance, and a safe resolution of their conflict, not to Europe. All of Europe’s great economic power seems not to translate into diplomatic influence, in the Middle East or anywhere else where crises have a military component.[51]