The New Road to Serfdom

by Daniel Hannan

  Throughout the 1990s, the realization had been gradually dawning on Europeans that they no longer needed U.S. military protection. There was no more need even to pretend to defer to the nation whose nuclear guarantee had kept the Red Army from marching to the North Sea. It was possible for Europeans—especially if they banded together—to assert an altogether different foreign policy from that of the hyper-puissance.

  Different in what ways? Javier Solana, a former socialist minister from Spain who became the first man to aspire to run the EU’s foreign policy, defined its peculiar characteristics as follows:

  What are the elements? I would say compassion with those who suffer; peace and reconciliation through integration; a strong attachment to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law; a spirit of compromise, plus a commitment to promote in a pragmatic way a rules-based international system. But also a sense that history and culture are central to how the world works and therefore how we should engage with it. When Americans say “that is history,” they often mean it is no longer relevant. When Europeans say “that is history,” they usually mean the opposite.

  You get the picture. Europeans are smart, sophisticated, sensitive. They understand the past. They rely on force of argument, not force of arms. They keep the rules.

  Americans, by implication, are the reverse of all these things. They favor Machtpolitik over Moralpolitik. They throw their weight around. They blunder in, with little sensitivity toward local conditions. They stick to the rules only when it suits them. They are, if not wholly uninterested in democracy and human rights, certainly willing to trample over them in pursuit of immediate gain.

  Americans, of course, were at the same time evolving their own converse stereotype. Europeans in general, and Frenchmen in particular, were ingrates, who had accepted American protection for forty years, and were now driven by a pathological need to bite the hand that freed them. As the Euro-enthusiast British writer Tim Garton Ash put it:

  The current stereotype of Europeans is easily summarized. Europeans are wimps. They are weak, petulant, hypocritical, disunited, duplicitous, sometimes anti-Semitic, and often anti-American appeasers. In a word: “Euroweenies.” Their values and their spines have dissolved in a lukewarm bath of multilateral, transnational, secular, and postmodern fudge. They jeer from the sidelines while the United States does the hard and dirty business of keeping the world safe for Europeans. Americans, by contrast, are strong, principled defenders of freedom, standing tall in the patriotic service of the world’s last truly sovereign nation-state.

  The invasion of Iraq confirmed the prejudices of both sides. As Europeans saw it, a clique of neo-cons had told lies about Saddam’s weapons program in order to drag the world into a ruinous war, whose true purpose was to establish an American garrison in an oil-rich region and win contracts for Dick Cheney’s buddies.

  Americans, meanwhile, were shaken by the explosion of anti-U.S. sentiment in countries that they had until then regarded as allies. Even those who had voted against George W. Bush were taken aback to see their head of state portrayed as a worse dictator than Saddam Hussein. Even those who had opposed the invasion didn’t much care to see it being described as a Jewish plot (“rootless cosmopolitan,” “Zionist,” now “neo-con”: the code word changes from generation to generation).

  Kagan’s sound bite attracted a great deal of attention in Europe. It was understood as the dismissive snort of a braggart, a typical example of neo-con swaggering. Needless to say, few of the critics had read the accompanying book. If they had, they would have found that Kagan still believes that there is such a thing as the West, is convinced that Europe and America can and should collaborate to mutual advantage, and lauds the process of European integration as a “miracle” and a “reason for enormous celebration.” Indeed, the book’s main flaw, as John Fonte of the Hudson Institute points out, is that it takes the EU at its own estimate, failing to understand the extent of its anti-democratic propensities.

  Nonetheless, very few Europeans dissented from the essential proposition that there was a fundamental cultural divergence between the United States and the EU, partly reflecting the simple reality of military imbalance, but also rooted in a difference of Weltanschauung: of how to look at the world. Both sides, in their own way, agreed. Americans really did feel they were from Mars, Europeans that they were from Venus.

  People naturally describe the divergence with different adjectives, depending on their point of view. America is prepared to back her ideals with actions, whereas Europe blusters. America stands up to bullies, whereas Europe appeases them. America keeps Europe safe while Europe sneers. Or, to turn it around, America defies international law while Europe tries to lead by example. America reacts to criticism with daisy-cutter bombs, Europe with persuasion. America seeks to pulverize those who disagree, Europe to win them over. Take your pick: It amounts to the same analysis.

  The most eloquent European answer to the Kagan thesis came in a book published in 2005 with the startling title Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century. Its author, a British think-tanker called Mark Leonard, is on the extreme end of the Euro-integrationist spectrum in Britain, but fairly representative of the political class of the EU as a whole.

  His proposition is that world leadership will shift to the EU because of Europe’s different understanding of power and interest. Instead of attacking its adversaries, the EU seeks to draw them into a nexus of common interest. Its weapons are not bombs and missiles, but trade accords and human rights codes. The worst threat that it holds over recalcitrant neighbors is not that it will invade them, but that it will ignore them. It was precisely in the hope of attracting the sympathetic attention of Brussels, argues Leonard, that Serbia gave up its war criminals for international trial, that Poland liberalized its abortion law, that Turkey strengthened the rights of its Kurdish minority.

  One by one, nations are being drawn into what he calls “the Eurosphere.” Balkan and even Caucasian states aspire to eventual membership. And more distant nations—the EU’s Mediterranean neighbors in the Maghreb and the Levant, the former colonies of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the republics that once made up the USSR—are increasingly dependent on EU trade, aid, investment, and political patronage.

  Where Washington simply writes checks to such allies as Colombia, Brussels aims for a complete transformation of society: It encourages democratic and liberal reforms so that the governments of its allies will want to support the EU. And because the EU is not a superpower, but a network of states, its rise will not attract envy or encourage the formation of hostile coalitions.

  It’s a tremendously appealing thesis: taut, logical, and consistent. The trouble is that it isn’t true. Once again, we are in the world of the Cartesian malicious demon: an EU that exists between the covers of books, but that bears no relation to the actual one.

  The EU, Leonard contends, is a force for “democracy, human rights and the protection of minorities.” Really? Where exactly? In Iran, where it is cozying up to murderous ayatollahs who, among other things, recently ordered the execution of a teenage girl? In Cuba, where it has withdrawn its support from anti-Castro dissidents? In China, where it has not only declared its willingness in principle to sell weapons to an aggressive tyranny, but is actively collaborating with the Communists on the creation of a satellite system, designed to challenge the “technological imperialism” of America’s GPS? In Palestine, where it’s funneling subsidies to Hamas, despite its own ban on funding terrorist organizations? Or perhaps within its own borders, where it has adopted a new constitutional settlement in defiance of the will of its citizens, clearly expressed in referendums?

  Leonard writes enthusiastically about the Lisbon Agenda and the EU’s competitiveness. But, again, this competitiveness is confined to a virtual world of Commission statements and summit communiqués. In the real world, businesses are struggling with the forty-eight-hour week, the Temporary Workers Directive, the Social Chapter, and the rest of the Eur
o-corporatist agenda. He goes on to predict that, in addition to its economic might, the EU will evolve a powerful military capacity because joint defense procurement projects will lead to economies of scale. He does not mention the supreme example of such joint procurement, the Eurofighter, perhaps the most useless, over-budget, redundant piece of military hardware ever.

  Countries within the EU, he writes, are better off than those outside, such as Norway. Yet Norway has a GDP per capita that is more than twice that in the EU. With high growth and negligible unemployment, Norwegians appear to be managing very nicely without Brussels. Do they lack influence in the world? Hardly. Their diplomats have led the way in brokering peace in the Middle East, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia.

  The Euro-enthusiast thesis requires that you push all such inconvenient facts out of your mind. You are invited to take the EU at its word, rather than looking at its deeds. It is enough, for example, to be told that the Constitution commits the EU to democracy and the rule of law. Never mind that the Constitution of, say, East Germany, made similar noises. We are asked, in short, to engage in a massive collective suspension of disbelief. Is unemployment in the EU high? Never mind: We’ve just published a resolution condemning it. Is corruption rife? We’ve just set up a study group to tackle it. As in the old Eastern bloc, the gap between the official version and real life keeps getting wider.

  This point cannot be stressed too strongly. All nations, like all individuals, sometimes engage in hypocrisy. And, in a sense, it’s a good thing they do: Hypocrisy, after all, is a recognition that you could be doing better, a realization that your actions don’t meet your aspirations.

  What we see in the EU, however, is something on an altogether different scale: a creed of official self-deceit in which leaders trot out slogans that they don’t expect anyone to believe.

  __________

  Consider the difference in approach to greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t want to get into the whole global warming debate, which could fill a book larger than this one. My point isn’t about the rights and wrongs of carbon emissions. It’s about the connection between rhetoric and reality.

  Of all the actions of the Bush administration, the one that attracted the most opprobrium in Europe, more even than the Iraq War, was withdrawing from the Kyoto Protocol. And, sure enough, the United States has since produced about 22 percent more carbon than the treaty had envisaged. But many European countries have worse records. Austria, Denmark, and Spain are among the states that have exceeded their quotas by substantially more than the United States. Yet, for some reason, they have escaped criticism. European sensibility requires that people pretend to go along with these supra-national projects, even if they then do nothing about it.

  Which, of course, is what the current U.S. administration is now doing. Climate change science is a complex and difficult field, but we can say with some confidence that the proposed cap-and-trade legislation will have a negligible impact. We can say this because even the strongest supporters of emissions cuts insist that the planet will continue to heat almost to the same extent with the legislation. They support it, in other words, not because they think it will make a significant difference, but as a statement of good intention, a sign that the United States is trying to do the right thing.

  The cap-and-trade legislation is a further example of the Europeanization of the United States, but not just in the way that critics usually mean. Its European nature resides not only in the fact that it will lead to more regulation and slower growth but also in the fact that American legislators, like their European counterparts, are now engaging in declamatory lawmaking.

  The Atlantic splits over foreign policy partly reflect the extent to which policymakers are prepared honestly to declare their objectives. Every state, one supposes, operates on the basis of both Realpolitik and morality. Both the EU and the United States seek to export their values, including human rights and the rule of law, and do so from a combination of selfish and altruistic motives. The difference is that Americans are less likely to euphemize what they do.

  There was shock in Europe when Donald Rumsfeld, asked why the United States was using cluster bombs against militants in Afghanistan, replied, “To try to kill them.” Most Europeans, certainly in those early days, backed military action against the Taliban. And, of course, they understood that military action involves fatalities. But they didn’t like to hear it spelled out.

  This difference isn’t merely the stuff of diplomatic awkwardness. It goes to the heart of what is wrong with the European project—and of why Americans should be wary about the Europeanization of their own polity. There is an old chestnut about a British civil servant telling a politician, “It might work very well in practice, minister, but it doesn’t work in theory.” That sentiment has been lifted to become the ruling principle of the EU. Never mind how many unpleasant dictators we cuddle up to. Never mind how casually we disregard democracy within our own borders. We’re still the good guys: Just read our latest resolution on human rights.

  Words matter more than actions, motives than outcomes. Indeed, the very effectiveness of unilateral U.S. action can offend European sensibilities. When the 2004 tsunami devastated several countries around the Indian Ocean, the United States, along with India, Japan, and Australia, began a massive relief operation, while the EU held press conferences about surveying the damage. Clare Short, then the International Aid Minister in Britain’s Labour Government, didn’t much care to see American humanitarian assistance: “I think this initiative from America to set up four countries claiming to coordinate sounds like yet another attempt to undermine the UN,” she told the BBC. “Only really the UN can do that job. It is the only body that has the moral authority.” Never mind that the UN had not, at that stage, done anything: The moral authority was what mattered.

  Of course, moral authority is best purchased with someone else’s money. I shall never forget the debate in the European Parliament that followed the 2004 catastrophe. MEPs began an aggressive auction to demonstrate their compassion.

  “Let’s pledge a million euros for immediate disaster relief,” one would say. “A million?” the next would declaim. “Pah! We must give at least five million!” “With great respect to my two colleagues who have just spoken,” a third would say, “I am not sure they grasp the extent of the devastation. Five million might do as emergency aid, but the cleanup will cost a minimum of fifty million.”

  And so it went on, each speaker attracting warm applause from Euro-MPs who felt warm about the fact that they were applauding. Then an Italian Christian Democrat, a gently mannered Catholic, rose with a suggestion. Why didn’t we make a personal gesture? Why didn’t each colleague contribute a single day’s attendance allowance to the relief fund?

  Immediately the warmth drained from the room. Those who had been hoarsely cheering the allocation of gazillions of their constituents’ money were stony at the thought of chipping in €290 of their own (on top of their salaries and various other perks, MEPs get paid for turning up and signing the attendance register). The poor Italian sat down to one of the most hostile silences I can remember, and the idea was immediately dropped.

  Contemplate that scene, and you will descry an elemental truth of politics—indeed, of humanity. People treat their own resources differently from other people’s. There are, as Milton Friedman observed, two kinds of money in the world: your money and my money. And, in Brussels, it’s all your money.

  I can perhaps best summarize what’s wrong with European gesture politics by adapting a famous observation by P. J. O’Rourke, who wrote that the only political observation he could confidently make was that God was a Republican and Santa Claus a Democrat. By the same token, then I suspect that God is a Euro-skeptic, and Santa Claus a Euro-enthusiast.

  God comes across a pretty stiff sort, a stickler for rules. He disapproves of waste and extravagance. He dislikes idleness. He has little time for the Utopian schemes and overblown ambitions of His creatures. In fac
t, when a previous generation of men united behind a presumptuous plan for supra-national integration, He took a very dim view indeed:

  And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded. And the Lord said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech. So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

  Now Santa Claus is a very different proposition. He’s jolly and generous and likeable. He might know who’s been good and who naughty, but he never does anything about it. Everyone gets the goodies, regardless of desert.

  Santa Claus, in short, is preferable to God in every way. Except one. There’s no such thing as Santa Claus.

  __________

  Let’s take a closer look at the areas where I identified that the EU was failing to actualize its frequently stated commitment to human rights: Iran, Cuba, China, Gaza. In all these cases, there is a sharp divergence between American and European policy. To simplify, American policy is to cold-shoulder the dictators and encourage their democratic opponents, while European policy is to engage with the dictators in the hope of encouraging reform. The United States is chiefly concerned with the ballot box, the EU with regional stability.

  Once again, what we see is a consequence of the DNA encoded at Philadelphia; what Richard Dawkins would perhaps call “an extended phenotype.” The United States was founded in a democratic revolt against a distant government. Like all nations, it treasures and re-tells its founding story. Unsurprisingly, then, its natural prejudice is toward self-determination and democratic accountability.