Of Power in Paradise: An Answer to Kagan
- Of Power in Paradise: An Answer to Kagan
The European-American relations “business” has for decades been predictably dull, marked by periodic conferences, articles and speeches about “shared values”, a “special transatlantic relationship” and “partnerships in leadership”. Over and over, we have earnestly reaffirmed our affinity for one another, and sung the praises of this essential alliance on many different levels.
All that seems to have been to little avail, however, in preventing the fallout of last year between the US on the one hand and France and Germany on the other over the war in Iraq.1 To professional relationship watchers, the intensity and depth of this latest dispute and bad feeling is truly worrying. While we have weathered many disagreements in the past – the Suez Crisis, Olympic boycotts, Pershing missiles, various trade disputes - this one seems, finally, to be tearing “the West” apart. What exactly is going on here?
Robert Kagan created quite a stir in early 2003 with his proposed answer to this question. In his seminal essay Of Paradise and Power, he draws a fairly convincing picture of a growing postwar ideological gap between a rule-bound, multilateralist and “Kantian” Europe and a power-driven, unilateralist “Hobbesian” America. Viewed through his philosophical template, the recent disagreements over Iraq are most properly viewed as only one particularly visible illustration of two societies growing irreversibly apart. Because our philosophical foundations (and frameworks) are fundamentally different, that gap can only grow with time.
The fundamental argument
According to Kagan, the “new” fundamentally peaceful Europe has made a clean break from its pre-WWII past. Finally learning from centuries of bloody internal warfare and external failed colonialism, the nations of the European Union have now wholeheartedly embraced an international rule of law, and look to an empowered United Nations to enforce that rule and to provide a defensible normative foundation under the international society of nations. The old balance-of-power mechanisms of the Peace of Westphalia have been transcended, and the new Europe is now well advanced in its project of an unprecedented peaceful “postmodern” economic union. It is indeed a society built on reason and on humanity: a true Kantian “Kingdom of Ends”.2
In contrast, the newly confident (if also traumatized) United States of America, formerly the great hope of the Enlightenment Europeans, has chosen a markedly different path. America, after September 11, 2001, has a whole new set of fears, and now only seeks to defend itself, in isolation if need be and in alliance if possible. Under its more Hobbesian view of the world, it is the only nation capable of enforcing any kind of civilized world order, and of protecting the professed shared values of the West. As such, in missions like Iraq, it is only stepping up to the plate and serving as a necessary if unwilling Sovereign, keeping the peace for all and using its awesome and unique military power to prevent a worldwide descent into a truly nasty and brutish international environment.
The mindsets of each of these powers can thus only be understood when considered within their particular context. The respective views of the world are fundamentally different, and cannot really be reconciled. Perhaps, in the end, the division of labor is not so bad: Europe advances a civilized postmodern international order, and the US provides the military muscle to back that order up. In Kagan’s pithy phrase, “America makes the dinner while Europe does the dishes.” While these arrangements may not be universally satisfying, they get the job done.
Throughout his essay, Kagan makes one important point which is eminently plausible. He points out that, first of all and more than anything, this disagreement is about power. As firmly entrenched as the two philosophical world views may be, things were not always this way. Indeed, in the not so distant past, the two positions were exactly reversed: the Americans were (naively) idealistic, and the Europeans much less sanguine about human nature and ready to use force to achieve their ends.
The difference, then and now, is power. In the centuries in which Europe enjoyed worldwide economic and military dominance, it did not hesitate...
