Old Europe, New
Europe - The US illusions
By Tony Judt
Book Review-
The War over Iraq: Saddam's
Tyranny and America's Mission
by Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol
Encounter, 153 pp., $25.95
We are witnessing the dissolution of an international system. The core
of that system, and its spiritual heart, was the North Atlantic alliance:
not just the 1949 defense treaty but a penumbra of understandings and
agreements beginning with the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and spreading
through the United Nations and its agencies; the Bretton Woods accords
and the institutions they spawned; conventions on refugees, human rights,
genocide, arms control, war crimes, and much more besides. The merits
of this interlocking web of transnational cooperation and engagement
went well beyond the goal of containing and ultimately defeating communism.
Behind the new ordering of the world lay the memory of thirty calamitous
years of war, depression, domestic tyranny, and international anarchy,
as those who were present at its creation fully understood.
Thus the end of the cold
war did not make the postwar order redundant. Quite the contrary. In
a post-Communist world the fortunate lands of Western Europe and North
America were uniquely well placed to urge upon the rest of the world
the lessons of their own achievement: markets and democracy, yes, but
also the benefits of good-faith participation in the institutions and
practices of an integrated international community. That such a community
must retain the means and the will to punish its enemies was effectively
if belatedly illustrated in Bosnia and Kosovo (and, in the breach, in
Rwanda). As these episodes suggested, and September 11, 2001, confirmed,
only the United States has the resources and the determination to defend
the interdependent world that it did so much to foster; and it is America
that will always be the prime target of those who wish to see that world
die.
It is thus a tragedy of historical
proportions that America's own leaders are today corroding and dissolving
the links that bind the US to its closest allies in the international
community. The US is about to make war on Iraq for reasons that remain
obscure even to many of its own citizens. The war that they do understand,
the war on terrorism, has been unconvincingly rolled into the charge
sheet against one Arab tyrant. Washington is abuzz with big projects
to redraw the map of the Middle East; meanwhile the true Middle Eastern
crisis, in Israel and the Occupied Territories, has been subcontracted
to Ariel Sharon. After the war, in Iraq as in Afghanistan, Palestine,
and beyond, the US is going to need the help and cooperation (not to
mention the checkbooks) of its major European allies; and there will
be no lasting victory against Osama bin Laden or anyone else without
sustained international collaboration. This is not, you might conclude,
the moment for our leaders enthusiastically to set about the destruction
of the Western alliance; yet that is what they are now doing. (The enthusiasm
is well represented in The War over Iraq by Lawrence Kaplan and William
Kristol, which I shall discuss below.)
The Europeans are not innocent
in the matter. Decades of American nuclear reassurance induced unprecedented
military dystrophy. The Franco- German condominium of domination was
sooner or later bound to provoke a backlash among Europe's smaller nations.
The inability of the European Union to build a consensus on foreign
policy, much less a force with which to implement it, has handed Washington
a monopoly in the definition and resolution of international crises.
No one should be surprised if America's present leaders have chosen
to exercise it. What began some years ago as American frustration at
the Europeans' failure to organize and spend in their own defense has
now become a source of satisfaction for US hawks. The Europeans don't
agree with us? So what! We don't need them, and anyway what can they
do? They're feeling hurt and resentful in Brussels, or Paris, or Berlin?
Well, they've only themselves to blame. Remember Bosnia.
Yet today it is the Bush
administration that is resentful and frustrated: it turns out that the
French, at least, can actually do quite a lot. Together with the Belgians
and Germans in NATO, and the Russians and Chinese at the UN, they can
thwart, foil, delay, hinder, check, confound, embarrass, and above all
irritate the Americans. In the run-up to war in Iraq the US is now paying
the price for two years of contemptuous disdain for international opinion.
The lèse-majesté of the French in particular has driven
America's present leadership into unprecedented public expressions of
anger at its own allies for breaking ranks: in President Bush's deathless
words, "Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists."
Worse, it has led to paroxysms of sneering Europhobia in the US media,
shamelessly promoted by politicians and commentators who should know
better.
Two myths dominate public
discussion of Europe in America today. The first, which would be funny
but for the harm it is causing, is the notion of an "Old"
and a "New" Europe. When Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
proposed this distinction in January it was taken up with malicious
alacrity on the Pentagon cheerleading bench. In The Washington Post
Anne Applebaum enthusiastically seconded Rumsfeld: Britain, Italy, Spain,
Denmark, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic (the signatories to
a letter in The Wall Street Journal supporting President Bush) have
all "undergone liberalization and privatization" of their
economies, she wrote, bringing them closer to the American model. They,
not the "Old Europe" of France and Germany, can be counted
on in the future to speak for "Europe."
The idea that Italy has embarked
on "economic liberalization" will come as news to Italians,
but let that pass. The more egregious error is to suppose that "pro-American"
Europeans can be so conveniently distinguished from their "anti-American"
neighbors. In a recent poll by the Pew Research Center, Europeans were
asked whether they thought "the world would be more dangerous if
another country matched America militarily." The "Old European"
French and Germanslike the Britishtended to agree. The "New
European" Czechs and Poles were less worried at the prospect. The
same poll asked respondents whether they thought that "when differences
occur with America, it is because of [my country's] different values"
(a key indicator of cultural anti-Americanism): only 33 percent of French
respondents and 37 percent of Germans answered "yes." But
the figures for Britain were 41 percent; for Italy 44 percent; and for
the Czech Republic 62 percent (almost as high as the 66 percent of Indonesians
who feel the same way).
In Britain, the Daily Mirror,
a mass-market tabloid daily that has hitherto supported Tony Blair's
New Labour Party, ran a full-page front cover on January 6 mocking Blair's
position; in case you haven't noticed, it informed him, Bush's drive
to war with Iraq is about oil for America. Half the British electorate
opposes war with Saddam Hussein under any circumstances. In the Czech
Republic just 13 percent of the population would endorse an American
attack on Iraq without a UN mandate; the figure in Spain is identical.
In traditionally pro-American Poland there is even less enthusiasm:
just 4 percent of Poles would back a unilateralist war. In Spain, voters
from José Maria Aznar's own Popular Party overwhelmingly reject
his support for the war; his allies in Catalonia have joined Spain's
opposition parties in condemning "an unprovoked unilateral attack"
by the US on Iraq; and most Spaniards are adamantly opposed to a war
with Iraq even with a second UN resolution. As for American policy toward
Israel, opinion in "New European" Spain is distinctly less
supportive than opinion in the "Old" Europe of Germany or
France.
If America is to depend on
its "New" European friends, then, it had better lower its
expectations. Among the pro-US signatories singled out for praise by
Mr. Rumsfeld, Denmark spends just 1.6 percent of GNP on defense; Italy
1.5 percent; Spain a mere 1.4 percentless than half the defense
commitment of "Old European" France. The embattled Italian
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has many motives for getting photographed
next to a smiling George Bush; but one of them is to ensure that Italy
can hold on to its American security umbrella and avoid paying for its
own defense.
As for the East Europeans:
yes, they like America and will do its bidding if they can. The US will
always be able to bully a vulnerable country like Romania into backing
America against the International Criminal Court. But in the words of
one Central European foreign minister opposed to US intervention at
the time of the 1999 Kosovo action: "We didn't join NATO to fight
wars." In a recent survey, 69 percent of Poles (and 63 percent
of Italians) oppose any increased expenditure on defense to enhance
Europe's standing as a power in the world. If The New York Times is
right and George Bush now regards Poland, Britain, and Italy as his
chief European allies, thenTony Blair apartAmerica is leaning
on a rubber crutch.
And what of Germany? American
commentators have been so offended at Germany's willingness to "appease"
Saddam, so infuriated by Gerhard Schröder's lack of bellicose fervor
and his "ingratitude" toward America that few have stopped
to ask why so many Germans share Günter Grass's view that "the
President of the United States embodies the danger that faces us all."
Germany today is different. It does have a distinctively pacifist culture
(quite unlike, say, France). If there is to be war, many Germans feel,
let it be ohne mich (without me). This transformation is one of the
historic achievements of the men of "Old" Europe. When American
spokesmen express frustration at it, they might take a moment to reflect
on what it is they are askingthough at a time when Saddam Hussein
is casually compared to Adolf Hitler, and the US defense secretary can
call Germany a "pariah state" along with Cuba and Libya, this
may be too much to expect. But should we really be so quick to demand
martial enthusiasm of Germany?
A second Europhobic myth
now widely disseminated in the United States is more pernicious. It
is the claim that Europe is awash in anti-Semitism, that the ghosts
of Europe's judeophobic past are risen again, and that this atavistic
prejudice, Europe's original sin, explains widespread European criticism
of Israel, sympathy for the Arab world, and even support for Iraq. The
main source for these claims is a spate of attacks on Jews and Jewish
property in the spring of 2002, and some widely publicized opinion polls
purporting to demonstrate the return of anti-Jewish prejudice across
the European continent. American commentary on these data has in turn
emphasized the "anti-Israel" character of European media reports
from the Middle East.
To begin with the facts:
according to the American Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which has worked
harder than anyone to propagate the image of rampant European anti-Semitism,
there were twenty-two significant anti-Semitic incidents in France in
April 2002, and a further seven in Belgium; for the whole year 2002
the ADL catalogued forty-five such incidents in France, varying from
anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish-owned shops in Marseilles to Molotov
cocktails thrown into synagogues in Paris, Lyon, and elsewhere. But
the same ADL reported sixty anti-Semitic incidents on US college campuses
alone in 1999. Measured by everything from graffiti to violent assaults,
anti-Semitism has indeed been on the increase in some European countries
in recent years; but then so it has in America. The ADL recorded 1,606
anti-Semitic incidents in the United States in the year 2000, up from
900 in 1986. Even if anti-Semitic aggression in France, Belgium, and
elsewhere in Europe has been grievously underreported, there is no evidence
to suggest it is more widespread in Europe than in the US.
But what of attitudes? Evidence
from the European Union's Eurobarometer polls, the leading French polling
service SOFRES, and the ADL's own surveys all point in the same direction.
There is in many European countries, as in the US, a greater tolerance
for mild verbal anti-Semitism than in the past, and a continuing propensity
to believe longstanding stereotypes about Jews: e.g., that they have
a disproportionate influence in economic life. But the same polls confirm
that young people all over Europe are much less tolerant of prejudice
than their parents were. Among French youth especially, anti-Semitic
sentiment has steadily declined and is now negligible. An overwhelming
majority of young people questioned in France in January 2002 believe
that we should speak more, not less, of the Holocaust; and nearly nine
out of ten of them agreed that attacks on synagogues were "scandalous."
These figures are broadly comparable to results from similar surveys
taken in the US.
Most of the recent attacks
on Jews in Western Europe were the work of young Arabs or other Muslims,
as local commentators acknowledge.[10] Assaults on Jews in Europe are
driven by anger at the government of Israel, for whom European Jews
are a conven- ient local surrogate. The rhetorical armory of traditional
European anti-Semitismthe "Protocols of the Elders of Zion,"
Jews' purported eco- nomic power and conspiratorial net-works, even
blood libelshas been pressed into service by the press and television
in Cairo and elsewhere, with ugly effects all across the youthful Arab
diaspora.
The ADL asserts that all
this "confirms a new form of anti-Semitism taking hold in Europe.
This new anti-Semitism is fueled by anti-Israel sentiment and questions
the loyalty of Jewish citizens." That is nonsense. Gangs of unemployed
Arab youths in Paris suburbs like Garges-les-Gonesses surely regard
French Jews as representatives of Israel, but they are not much worried
about their patriotic shortcomings. As to Jewish loyalties: one leading
question in the ADL surveys"Do you believe Jews are more
likely to be loyal to Israel than to [your country]" elicits
a consistently higher positive response in the US than in Europe. It
is Americans, not Europeans, who are readier to assume that a Jew's
first loyalty might be to Israel.
The ADL and most American
commentators conclude from this that there is no longer any difference
between being "against" Israel and "against" Jews.
But this is palpably false. The highest level of pro-Palestinian sympathy
in Europe today is recorded in Denmark, a country which also registers
as one of the least anti-Semitic by the ADL's own criteria. Another
country with a high and increasing level of sympathy for the Palestinians
is the Netherlands; yet the Dutch have the lowest anti-Semitic "quotient"
in Europe and nearly half of them are "worried" about the
possible rise of anti-Semitism. Furthermore, it is the self-described
"left" in Europe that is most uncompromisingly pro-Palestinian,
while the "right" displays both anti-Arab and anti-Jewish
(but often pro-Israel) bias. Indeed, this is one of the few areas of
public life in which these labels still carry weight.
Overall, Europeans are more
likely to blame Israel than Palestinians for the present morass in the
Middle East, but only by a ratio of 27:20. Americans, by contrast, blame
Palestinians rather than Israel in the proportion of 42:17. This suggests
that Europeans' responses are considerably more balanced, which is what
one would expect: the European press, radio, and television provide
a fuller and fairer coverage of events in the Middle East than is available
to most Americans. As a consequence, Europeans are better than Americans
at distinguishing criticism of Israel from dislike of Jews.
One reason may be that some
of Europe's oldest and most fully accredited anti-Semites are publicly
sympathetic to Israel. Jean-Marie Le Pen, in an interview in the Israeli
daily Ha'aretz in April 2002, expressed his "understanding"
of Ariel Sharon's policies ("A war on terror is a brutal thing")comparable
in his opinion to France's no less justified antiterrorist practices
in Algeria forty years earlier. The gap separating Europeans from Americans
on the question of Israel and the Palestinians is the biggest impediment
to transatlantic understanding today. Seventy-two percent of Europeans
favor a Palestinian state against just 40 percent of Americans. On a
"warmth" scale of 1100, American feelings toward Israel
rate 55, whereas the European average is just 38and somewhat cooler
among the "New Euro- peans": revealingly, the British and
French give Israel the same score. It is the Poles who exhibit by far
the coolest feelings toward Israel (Donald Rumsfeld please note).
In recent weeks both these
American fables about Europe have been folded into an older prejudice
now given an ominous new twist: intense suspicion of France and the
French. France's procrastination at the UN has brought forth in the
US an unprecedented burst of rhetorical venom. This is something new.
When De Gaulle broke with the unified NATO command in 1966, Washingtonalong
with France's other allieswas annoyed and said so. But it would
not have occurred to American statesmen, diplomats, politicians, newspaper
editors, or television pundits that France had somehow "betrayed"
America, or that De Gaulle was a "coward" and the French were
ungrateful for the sacrifices Americans had made on their behalf and
should be punished accordingly. Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon
all respected De Gaulle in spite of his foibles, and he returned the
compliment.
Today, respectable columnists
demand that France be kicked off the Security Council for obstructing
the will of the US, and they remind their readers that if it had been
left to France "most Europeans today would be speaking either German
or Russian." Their colleagues in less-restrained publications "want
to kick the collective butts of France" for forgetting D-Day. Where
are the French when "American kids" come to rescue them, they
ask: first from Hitler, now from Saddam Hussein ("an equally vile
tyrant")? "Hiding. Chickening out. Proclaiming Vive les wimps!"
Part of a "European chorus of cowards." As a new bumper sticker
has it: "First Iraq, then France."
American vilification of
the French openly encouraged in the US Congress, where tasteless
anti-French jokes were publicly exchanged with Colin Powell during a
recent appearance theredegrades us, not them. I hold no brief
for the Élysée, which has a long history of cynical dealing
with dictators, from Jean-Bedel Bokassa to Robert Mugabe, including
Saddam Hussein along the way. And the Vichy years will be a stain on
France until the end of time. But talk of French "surrender monkeys"
comes a touch too glibly to American pundits, marinated in self-congratulatory
war movies from John Wayne to Mel Gibson.
In World War I, which the
French fought from start to finish, France lost three times as many
fighting men as America has lost in all its wars combined. In World
War II, the French armies holding off the Germans in MayJune 1940
suffered 124,000 dead and 200,000 wounded in six weeks, more than America
did in Korea and Vietnam combined. Until Hitler brought the US into
the war against him in December 1941, Washington maintained correct
diplomatic relations with the Nazi regime. Meanwhile the Einsatzgruppen
had been at work for six months slaughtering Jews on the Eastern Front,
and the Resistance was active in occupied France.
Fortunately we shall never
know how middle America would have responded if instructed by an occupying
power to persecute racial minorities in its midst. But even in the absence
of such mitigating circumstances the precedents are not comfortingremember
the Tulsa pogrom of May 1921, when at least 350 blacks were killed by
whites. Perhaps, too, Americans should hesitate before passing overhasty
judgments about "age-old" French anti-Semitism : by the end
of the nineteenth century France's elite École Normale Supérieure
was admitting (by open competition) brilliant young JewsLéon
Blum, Émile Durkheim, Henri Bergson, Daniel Halévy, and
dozens of otherswho would never have been allowed near some of
America's Ivy League colleges, then and for decades to come.
It is deeply saddening to have to restate these things. Perhaps they
are of no consequence. Why should it matter that Americans today think
so ill of France and Europe that America's leaders sneer ignorantly
at "Old" Europe and demagogic pundits urge their readers to
put out the ungrateful Eurotrash? After all, French anti-Americanism
is an old and silly story, too; but it has never seriously impeded transatlantic
relations and grand strategy. Are we not just seeing the compliment
returned, albeit at an unusually high volume?
I don't believe so. The Americans
who laid the framework for the only world most of us have ever known
George Marshall, Dean Acheson, George Kennan, Charles Bohlen, and the
presidents they servedknew what they wished to achieve and why
the EuropeanAmerican relationship was so crucial to them. Their
successors today have their own very different conviction. In their
view Europeans, and the various alliances and unions in which they are
entwined, are an irritating impediment to the pursuit of American interests.
The US has nothing to lose by offending or alienating these disposable
allies of conven- ience, and much to gain by tearing up the entangling
web of controls that the French and their ilk would weave around our
freedom of movement.
This position is unambiguously
stated in a new short book by Lawrence Kaplan and William Kristol, The
War over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission. Both men are
Washington-based journalists. But Kristol, who once gloried in the title
of chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle and is now a political
analyst for Fox TV, is also the editor of The Weekly Standard and one
of the "brains" behind the neoconservative turn in US foreign
policy. Kristol's views are shared by Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz,
and others in the power elite of the Bush administration, and he articulates
in only slightly restrained form the prejudices and impatience of the
White House leadership itself.
The War over Iraq is refreshingly
direct. Saddam is a bad man, he ought to be removed, and only the US
can do the job. But that is just the beginning. There will be many more
such tasks, indeed an infinity of them in coming years. If the US is
to perform them satisfactorily"to secure its safety and to
advance the cause of liberty"then it must cut loose from
the "world community" (always in scare quotes). People will
hate us for our "arrogance" and our power in any event, and
a more "restrained" American foreign policy won't appease
them, so why waste time talking about it? The foreign strategy of the
US must be "unapologetic, idealistic, assertive and well funded.
America must not only be the world's policeman or its sheriff, it must
be its beacon and guide."
What is wrong with this? In the first place, it displays breathtaking
ignorance of the real world, as ultra-"realist" scenarios
frequently do. Because it confidently equates American interest with
that of every right-thinking person on the planet, it is doomed to arouse
the very antagonism and enmity that provoke American intervention in
the first place (only a hardened European cynic would suggest that this
calculation has been silently incorporated into the equation). The authors,
like their political masters, unhesitatingly suppose both that America
can do as it wishes without listening to others, and that in so doing
it will unerringly echo the true interests and unspoken desires of friend
and foe alike. The first claim is broadly true. The second bespeaks
a callow provinciality.
Secondly, the Kristol/Wolfowitz/
Rumsfeld approach is morbidly self-defeating. Old-fashioned isolationism,
at least, is consistent: if we stay out of world affairs we won't have
to depend on anyone. So is genuine Wilsonian internationalism: we plan
to be at work in the world so we had better work with the world. A similar
consistency informs conventional Kissinger-style realpolitik: we have
interests and we want certain things, other countries are just like
us and they want certain things tooso let's make deals. But the
new "unilateralist internationalism" of the present administration
tries to square the circle: we do what we want in the world, but on
our own terms, indifferent to the desires of others when they don't
share our objectives.
Yet the more the US pursues
its "mission" in the world, the more it is going to need help,
in peacekeeping, nation-building, and facilitating cooperation among
our growing community of new-found friends. These are projects at which
modern America is not markedly adept and for which it depends heavily
on allies. Already, in Afghanistan and the Balkans, the German "pariah"
state alone provides 10,000 peacekeeping soldiers to secure the ground
won by American arms. US voters are famously allergic to tax increases.
They are unlikely to raise the sort of money needed to police and reconstruct
much of Western Asia, not to mention other zones of instability where
Kristol's "mission" may lead us. So who will pay? Japan? The
EU? The UN? Let us hope that their leaders don't look too closely at
Kaplan and Kristol's sneeringly unflattering remarks in their regard.
Some of what the authors
have to say about past failings is on target. The UN, like Western Europe,
vacillated shamefully over Bosnia and Kosovo. The Clinton administration,
like Bush senior before it, turned away from humanitarian crises in
the Balkans and Central Africa. If the US under Bush junior is now resolved
to fight brutal tyrants and armed political psychopaths, so much the
better for us all. But that certainly wasn't the case before September
11. Back then American conservatives were disengaging from the international
sphere at dizzying speedwho now remembers Condoleezza Rice's contemptuous
dismissal of "nation-building"? Why should America's friends
place their trust in this newfound commitment and expose themselves
to violent reprisals on its behalf?
No reasonable person could
object to the hot pursuit of Osama bin Laden. And there is a case, too,
for military action against an Iraq that refuses to disarm. But to extend
these into a mission statement for open-ended and unimpeded American
actions to transform the condition of half of humanity, at will and
in the teeth of international dissent; indeed, gleefully to anticipate,
as Kristol and Kaplan and others do, the prospect of such international
oppositionthis sounds too much like a practice in search of its
theory. It is also vitiated by one uncomfortably hard nugget of bad
faith.
"Israel" has one
of the longest index entries in this little book. "Palestine"
has none, though there is one lonely reference to the PLO, listed as
an Iraqi-supported terrorist group. Kristol and Kaplan go to considerable
lengths to emphasize the importance of Israel as an American strategic
partner in the new Middle East they envisage, and they offer as one
justification of a full-scale war on Iraq that this would improve Baghdad's
relations with Israel. But nowhere do they evince any concern for the
IsraelPalestine imbroglio itself: a rapidly burgeoning humanitarian
crisis, the single greatest source of instability and terrorism in the
region, and a festering object of disagreement and distrust between
the two sides of the Atlantic. The omission is glaring and revealing.
Unless Kristol and his political
mentors can explain why an ambitious new American international mission
to put the globe to rights is silent on Israel; why the newly empowered
American "hegemon" is curiously unable and unwilling to bring
any pressure to bear on one small client state in the world's most unstable
region, then few outside their own circle are going to take their "mission
statements" seriously. Why should the US administration and its
outriders care? For a reason that the men who constructed the postwar
international system would immediately have appreciated. If America
is not taken seriously; if it is obeyed rather than believed; if it
buys its friends and browbeats its allies; if its motives are suspect
and its standards double then all the overwhelming military power
of which Kristol and Kaplan so vaingloriously boast will afford it nothing.
The United States can go out and win not just the Mother of All Battles
but a whole matriarchal dynasty of Desert Storms; it will inherit the
windand worse besides.
So please, let us stop venting
our anxieties and insecurities in vituperative macho digs at Europe.
Whatever his motives, French President Jacques Chirac has been voicing
opinions shared by the overwhelming majority of Europeans and a sizable
minority of Americans, not to speak of most of the rest of the world.
To claim that he, and they, are either "with us or with the terrorists"
that disagreement is betrayal, dissent is treasonis, to
say the least, willfully imprudent. Whether we need the Europeans more
than they need us is an interesting question and one I shall take up
in a subsequent essay, but the United States has everything to lose
if Europeans fall to squabbling among themselves for American favors;
our leaders should be ashamed of themselves for gleefully encouraging
this.[19] As Aznar, Blair, and their collaborators wrote in their controversial
open letter of January 30, 2003, "Today more than ever, the transatlantic
bond is a guarantee of our freedom." This is as true today as it
was in 1947and it cuts both ways.
March 8, 2003