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PBS Newshour Jan. 30, 2003:
European Rift with 4 European perspectives, very good dialogue between
the German and Polish panelists that should remind Americans that Europeans are
not shy about war, it’s just that they already had a lot of experience with continental
wars that tore their nations apart.
Maybe we should listen to that message. See http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/jan-june03/iraq_1-30.html Critical oversight below: Bronner, Assistant Editorial Page editor at
NYT, seems to ignore Eastern Europe in this essay. Even though Safire and other conservatives made a fuss about
world diplomacy using the Opinion pages in support of Bush’s war, those remarks
are not binding agreements. – Karen Why
Today's Europeans Object to America's Worldview
By Ethan Bronner, NYT, 01.31.03 @ http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/31/opinion/31FRI3.html PARIS — When you fly into the Basel airport, you have a
choice between two exits. One leads to Switzerland and Germany, the other to
France. Little effort is devoted to indicating which is which. There are fewer
armed guards visible than at any major airport in America. You can wander
accidentally into the wrong country. Considering that three different languages
are spoken within a mile and that the Rhine River nearby flowed for centuries
with the blood of conflict, the airport's casual borders are a reminder of what
contemporary Europe has become — a near-haven of harmonious coexistence. That's easy to forget but vital to remember, because it goes
to the heart of what is gnawing at the European-American relationship these
days. Eight European leaders may have backed President Bush's approach to Iraq in an op-ed article published yesterday in The Wall Street
Journal and a number of European papers, but most Europeans tend to think Americans have too
harsh a view of the world,
relying on force in international relations where diplomacy and commerce would
do. Americans often consider the Europeans craven appeasers who prefer to buy
off an enemy rather than confront him.
As war with
Saddam Hussein looms, this divide is affecting nearly every trans-Atlantic
interaction.
Oddly, it represents a reversal of roles. Not many
generations ago, Americans came to Europe for a firsthand look at power and its
trappings — how to dress and how to eat when you are in charge of civilization.
The Americans were the wide-eyed ones, the Europeans the hard-bitten
sophisticates. Those images remain. Most recently, when the Soviet Union
collapsed, it was an American theorist who said that we were witnessing the end
of history through the triumph of a singular viewpoint. Europeans scoffed at
his naïveté. Yet if you want to find a place where
history actually seems to have come to an end, where there are no longer armed
conflicts aimed at redrawing maps and redistributing wealth, it is in the
well-groomed, cosmopolitan and militarily weak Europe of the 21st century. The change has been so quick that it gets overlooked. When
Germany and France, at a celebration of their 40-year friendship pact this
month, jointly raised their voices in opposition to early military action in
Iraq, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld angrily dismissed them as "old
Europe." He got it precisely backward. Aversion to war is what defines not
the old Europe but the new one, where disagreements are settled by multilingual
summit talks over dinners of snails and duck, and high-speed trains zip you
from Paris to Brussels without the need ever to show a passport or exchange
currency. The big dispute in Europe is over how much to subsidize farmers. Of
course, Europeans live in a paradise of modern convenience and cultural
tradition at least in part because they have handed over responsibility for
military engagement to the Americans. This makes for a paradox that has been pointed out by Robert
Kagan in the journal Policy Review. Europeans want to maintain the role they
have long enjoyed — leading the world debate. But without the power to back up
your perspective, such leadership can prove elusive. This produces a second paradox. The Europeans are persuaded that their newfound
coexistence is a model for the world and that the more Hobbesian American
approach represents a dangerous alternative. In other words, the disagreement
over Iraq is not only over specific policy choices but underlying worldviews.
The Europeans, and especially the French, in whose nation the phrase mission
civilisatrice (civilizing mission) originated, have long seen it as their role
to teach others how to live. Yet now the Americans talk about invading Iraq in
order to spread democracy in the Middle East. This has nurtured the conflict
between Europe and the Americans in a way that gives fresh meaning to the
phrase "clash of civilizations." At a recent conference in Brussels of Americans and
Europeans, the new Europe was much in evidence. The participants were not
discussing what European governments should do about Iraq. They were debating
what the United States should do.
It was clear that Europe could do very little without increasing its
military power. While that was
something many advocated, others remarked that if it did so, Europe might betray what it had become. An Italian member of the European Parliament, for example,
spoke of the phrase "Never
again."
Americans use it to mean preventing another Nazi Holocaust — no appeasement, no looking the other way at genocide. Europeans, he
said, also meant no
more war.
"The European public does not accept peace and war as two routes to the
same goal," he said. "Peace is itself a value. Just like life. That
is why we oppose the death penalty." One unstated concern Europeans clearly have about an
American-led war in Iraq is that it could render Europe and its civilizational
model irrelevant. That may sound purely self-interested, but in truth the European model is more
relevant than ever.
Through common economic interests, education and relentless talk, the Europeans
have forged a new
world for
themselves. Other regions should be so lucky. There is no escaping the fact that Europe needs to spend
more money on arms if it wants a serious role in foreign policy. But its ideas deserve a close hearing
in world affairs, as for example in the war on terror. Americans, after all, have become good at fighting terrorists
but not at fighting terrorism. As one German political scientist put it:
"You think we are
naïve for resisting the use of force.
We think you are naïve for failing to understand how to dry up the
sources of terror." Americans and Europeans may have switched places in recent decades as their power relation has shifted, but
in this debate it's an open question as to which are the realists. Outgoing mail scanned by
NAV 2002 |
