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Is There Still a West?: The Future of the Atlantic Alliance
 0826216986, 9780826216984, 0826216927, 9780826216922

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Is There Still a West?

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Is There Still a West? The Future of the Atlantic Alliance Edited by William Anthony Hay and Harvey Sicherman UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI PRESS | COLUMBIA AND LONDON

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Copyright © 2007 by The Curators of the University of Missouri University of Missouri Press, Columbia, Missouri 65201 Printed and bound in the United States of America All rights reserved 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Is there still a West? : the future of the Atlantic Alliance / edited by William Anthony Hay and Harvey Sicherman. p. cm. Summary: “Scholarly essay collection that considers whether “the West” is still a major force in international affairs or whether we face a new world of competing states and shifting alliances. In proposing possible counterterrorism strategies to define a shared Western security policy, they offer an alternative to neoconservative and liberal viewpoints”—Provided by publisher. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8262-1692-2 (hard cover : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8262-1692-7 (hard cover : alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8262-1698-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-8262-1698-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. International relations. 2. Security, International. 3. North Atlantic Treaty Organization. I. Hay, William Anthony, 1968– II. Sicherman, Harvey. JZ1242.I87 2007 355′.031091821—dc22 2006032112 This paper meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, Z39.48, 1984. Designer: foleydesign Typesetter: BookComp, Inc. Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc. Typefaces: Times New Roman, ITC Usherwood

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In memory of Robert Strausz-Hupé, scholar, diplomat, and man of the West

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Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 William Anthony Hay and Harvey Sicherman Humanitarian Democracy and the Postpolitical Temptation 14 Daniel J. Mahoney Europe’s Muslim Dilemma and Muslim Europe’s Choice 34 Zachary Shore Cultural Changes, Immigration, and Transatlantic Relations 59 Michael Radu A Sea Change in the Atlantic Economy? How the West Pulled Ahead of the Rest and Why It May Cease to Do So 89 Stephen A. Schuker What Kind of Western Economy? Or, An Expedition to Mars 125 Harold James

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Conflict within Cooperation: Western Security Relations, Past and Present 156 Douglas Porch A Western Way of War? A European Perspective 185 Jeremy Black Bibliography 207 About the Contributors 227 Index 231

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Acknowledgments

Is There Still a West? hosted by the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia on February 12–13, 2004. The editors gratefully acknowledge the support of the Smith-Richardson Foundation and its staff, especially Marin Strmecki and Nadia Schadlow, for their generous support of our project. In addition, both the conference and the book are part of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West, which has benefited from the generosity of the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the John M. Olin Foundation. Is There Still a West? The Future of the Atlantic Alliance is a natural subject for the Foreign Policy Research Institute. The Institute was founded by the late Ambassador Robert Strausz-Hupé, a great champion of partnership between Europeans and Americans. All of our work in this area is a tribute to his memory. Moreover, we have gained immensely from the guidance and participation of former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr. General Haig, onetime Supreme Commander of NATO and an Institute Trustee, is one of the greatest living experts on transatlantic relations. He delivered the keynote speech at the conference which may be read at www. fpri.org. Thanks are also due to David Eisenhower, James Hollifield, Barry Lowenkron, James Kurth, Bernard Munk, and John O’Sullivan who provided thoughtful commentary at the conference. We wish to thank our authors who successfully enlarged and updated their articles right into early 2006. On our own staff, we could not have done the work without the assistance of Jan Luxenberg and Miyano Horiuchi-Oka who coordinated

T H IS BO OK EM ERGED F ROM A CON F ER E NCE

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the original conference. Timothy Weaver went cheerfully well beyond the call of duty in preparing the final manuscript. Finally, Beverly Jarrett and Jane Lago at the University of Missouri Press also smoothed the path toward publication and working with them and their staff has been a pleasure.

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Is There Still a West?

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Introduction William Anthony Hay and Harvey Sicherman

T H E D I S S O L U T I O N O F T H E S OV I E T U N I O N O N D E C E M BE R 2 5, 19 91,

established the American-led North Atlantic Treaty Alliance as the arbiter of European security. Over the next decade, the alliance was extended to the borders of Ukraine and came to encompass much of the former Warsaw Pact. NATO also fought its first war to end the Serbian dictator Slobodan Milosevic’s depredations in Kosovo. Unity was the theme once more when the allies invoked their mutual obligation to aid the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001, on New York and Washington. Yet barely eighteen months later, what had come to be called the “Western Alliance” or, in short, “the West,” appeared in utter disarray. An open quarrel at the United Nations had developed into public vituperation. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s remark contrasting an “Old Europe” of France and Germany with the “New Europe” defined by former Warsaw Pact members such as Poland implied that the young and vigorous Europeans were pro-American while the old and decrepit were, well, old and decrepit. French President Jacques Chirac matched Rumsfeld when he told Time magazine that “any community with only one dominant power is a dangerous one and provokes reactions,” an exposition suggesting that America should resign from sole superpowerdom or face coalitions, perhaps led by France, to enforce multipolarity.1 Following the war in Iraq, President George W. Bush’s then national security adviser Condoleezza Rice raised the stakes when she purportedly expressed U.S. policy toward its European opponents as “Forgive Russia. Ignore Germany. Punish France.” 1. James Graff, “France Is Not a Pacifist Country,” Time, February 24, 2003. 1

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Meanwhile, the chattering classes—professors and pundits—on both sides of the Atlantic quickly identified “chasms,” unbridgeable gaps, and fundamental incompatibility that spelled doom for NATO and presaged the breakup or breakdown of the West. Soon even polite limits were exceeded. The European media portrayed Americans as grossly ignorant fanatics, dangerous to themselves and the rest of the world. A few pundits ventured into darker territory, alleging conspiracies either of “neo-conservatives” twisting American actions to Israeli purposes or fundamentalist Christians promoting a new crusade.2 Many of America’s own chatterers were also aghast at the Bush administration’s apparent disdain for “multilateralism,” and they echoed the complaints of their European counterparts. Both sides fed the fires when Bush supporters, including the aforementioned neo-cons, joined populist talk show hosts to express their disdain for the “Old World.” Europeans were depicted as overly sophisticated and hypercritical defeatists, true to their habitual appeasement of the barbarians at the gates or even inside the gates. If the Atlantic alliance, née the West, was not physically breaking up, then it seemed on the verge of a collective nervous breakdown. It appeared as if the lid had suddenly been lifted on a cauldron of boiling discontents that scalded all those within reach. Had the West come through all the wars and tension of the twentieth century to shatter over the way to dislodge a tyrant in Baghdad? Then, almost as suddenly as it blew up, the diplomatic aspect of the crisis blew over. Even before Bush’s reelection in November 2004, the German and French governments had been looking for ways to patch over the feud, and so had a Bush administration for whom the occupation of Iraq had gone unexpectedly sour. The surprising success of the Iraqi election on January 30, 2005, provided the context whereby America and the Europeans would rediscover each other’s virtues. By the time Rice, now Bush’s secretary of state, traveled to Paris in February 2005, the parties were ready to renew pledges of fidelity, if not reach complete agreement. “A new day has arrived,” proclaimed the French foreign minister. The Polish foreign minister, whose country stood firmly within Rumsfeld’s “New Europe,” told the Washington Post that Secretary Rice agreed with his view that “the unfortunate 2. Anatol Lieven, America Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism. Another “gentler and kinder” example may be found in Chris Patten, Cousins and Strangers: America, Britain and Europe in a New Century.

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concept of old and new Europe is a total misunderstanding.” Reminded of his remarks on Old Europe not long after Rice’s trip, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld quipped, “that was the old Rumsfeld.” And after “hearing from Europe . . . a desire to move on to the next chapter in the history of this great Alliance,” Rice delivered a political-philosophical talk to a select French audience intended to reinvigorate the common quest for freedom—most opportunely in the Middle East. Bush himself repeated these themes on his own trip a few weeks later, reiterating the North Atlantic Treaty’s “principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law” and reaffirming U.S. and European commitment to “renew our great alliance of freedom.”3 One can be sure, of course, that the great rift of 2003 will be succeeded by another, probably in the Middle East, where a large selection of opportunities for mishap is usually available. But, for the student of transatlantic relations, this episode illustrated what has always been true of the West and of the alliance itself. It is a nervous, high-strung operation of various proud states and sensitive peoples, yet sufficiently aware of common interests and a common destiny to overcome international crises. This truth was nicely illustrated even by the war in Iraq: unlike previous crises over the Middle East when the United States and its European allies hampered each other’s operation (e.g., lack of support for the pound sterling in 1956 or denial of air space in 1973), both France and Germany facilitated the U.S. invasion of Iraq by providing access to air space and logistical support. In that sense, the Iraqi crisis was marked more by diplomatic malpractice than by the earlier more severe mutual sabotage. It was almost as if the political leaders had decided to confine the damage to diplomatic and political levels. Yet there was damage not so easily repaired by the formal smiles of practiced politicians. President Bush in particular and the United States in general seemed more unpopular in Europe than even President Reagan during the heyday of the nuclear protests in the early 1980s when European governments joined with the United States despite massive public demonstrations against the deployment of American

3. Robin Wright, “European Bitterness over Iraq Dissipates,” Washington Post, February 6, 2005; “Bush’s Speech in Brussels,” New York Times, February 21, 2005; George W. Bush, speech at Concert Noble, Brussels, February 21, 2005. See also the report by David Ignatius, “Bush’s New Ally: France?” Washington Post, February 1, 2006, concerning private diplomatic contacts.

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missiles. And Americans are still easily frustrated by Europeans who lack both a will to act together and a decisive military capability. Moreover, even when the more hysterical effusions on transatlantic relations are overcome by renewed collaboration, a great residue of issues remain unsettled. Geopolitical circumstances have changed with the end of the Cold War; the new challenges lie abroad in areas such as the Middle East where the transatlantic record of cooperation is rather poor; and major religious and cultural issues have been accentuated by the Muslim migration to Europe, atop the evolution of American and European societies in different directions. The chapters in this book aim not simply to review transatlantic complaints but to take on the more important task of probing underlying difficulties. We seek to answer the question, “Is There Still a West?” Is there still a recognizable grouping of states bound by interests and reinforced by culture and history? Or, in the absence of a Soviet-style threat, are differing interests also reinforced by diverging values? Is this semi-permanent alliance a major, if not the major, force in leading what international order may be said to exist? Or do we face an alternative world of competing states, shifting allies, and surprise combinations? Accordingly, we set out to explore several dimensions of the relationship: the sources of the conflict within the West, the prospects for economic divergence, and the dynamics behind a workable security policy.

Conflicts within the West The first dimension involves conflicts within the West itself, concerned primarily with the meaning of Western identity and the relationship between culture and politics. Debates over the proposed standards for teaching in American schools during the early 1990s and protests against Stanford University’s Western Civilization curriculum highlight a development that came to the fore at the Cold War’s end. Many demands for a multicultural society reflect a rejection of the West rather than a sincere interest in engaging other cultures on their own terms or an appreciation of what Great Britain’s chief rabbi Jonathan Sacks calls “the dignity of difference.” Echoes of these culture wars can be seen elsewhere in the English-speaking world and in Continental Europe as well as in the United States. James Kurth, a leading international relations

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scholar and protégé of Samuel Huntington, argued that the real clash was to be found within the West itself, between those who upheld traditional Western civilization and those who rejected it. A conflict that had begun among intellectuals spread into the American body politic during the 1990s, and proponents of movements such as feminism and multiculturalism led the assault on core traditions and institutions of the West. Social changes throughout the developed world a generation earlier that Francis Fukuyama characterized as the “great disruption” laid the structural foundations for the phenomenon Kurth described.4 These cultural trends both in the United States and other Western societies have brought political consequences. Generational conflict highlighted by the protest movements of the 1960s gave an early hint of “culture wars” in the 1990s characterized by anti-Americanism and the rejection of traditional institutions. The post–Cold War project of “third way” politics, which successfully reformed center-left parties throughout the West in the 1990s, owed much to those whose formative experience was opposition to Vietnam and, more broadly, the Cold War. Germany offers an important example of this phenomenon. A recent article by Uwe Siemon-Netto exploring the “68ers” impact on German society highlights their roots in an earlier rejection of German and Western tradition that found expression in anti-Americanism. While he notes Germany’s special circumstances, much of the self-doubt among the Germans described by Siemon-Netto can be seen elsewhere in the West. Alan Charles Kors, for example, has explored the question of why key members of the Western intelligentsia remain skeptical toward —or even opposed to—Western ideas despite the obvious success of those ideas, and even though they themselves think according to Western categories.5 Such critics increasingly set the tone for public debate, raising alarms on whether their deep pessimism will undermine the self-confidence necessary for effective leadership.

4. Walter A. McDougall, “Whose History? Whose Standards?” 36–43; David Gress, From Plato to NATO: The Idea of the West and Its Opponents; Jonathan Sacks, The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations; James Kurth, “The Real Clash,” 3–15. Kurth charted the trajectory of the Western idea further and assessed its prospects in “Global Triumph or Western Twilight?” 333–41. Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstruction of Social Order. 5. Uwe Siemon-Netto, “Sonderweg: Closing of the German Mind,” 33–43; Alan Charles Kors, “Triumph without Self-Belief,” 343–56.

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Repudiation of Western identity also has consequences for public policy on immigration, education, and national security. The war on terrorism has brought to the fore that too many of the fifteen million Muslims living in the European Union (3.5 percent of the population) not only do not wish to become part of “Western culture” but hope to overthrow it. Numerous incidents of anti-Semitism—along with violent threats, murderous attacks on critics of Islam (such as the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh), and the head scarf controversy in France and Britain—promise civil strife. When combined with the secularization of formerly Christian Europe, some observers see a further widening of transatlantic differences if not the crash of European culture itself.6 Will a society admit immigrants who do not share its culture or who even repudiate its core values? Will schools teach patriotism and transmit a shared culture, or will they question its validity and the need for assimilation? How will governments respond to immigrant groups that provide a welcome environment for terrorist groups?

Economic Divergence A second dimension examines the economic differences arising from “globalization,” its meaning, and its discontents. Thomas Friedman captured the spirit of the new order by likening it to a one-hundred-yard dash run over and over again, with a new race each day. Free-market capitalism promoted efficiency, and globalization meant open borders would allow the maximum degree of competition and thereby ensure sustained growth.7 Still, as the economic historian Harold James points out, accelerated integration of global economic activity generates pressures that threaten the whole system. There is an unhappy precedent for these discontents: the late-nineteenth-century financial crises that inspired protectionist tariffs and ultimately, after World War I, “beggar thy neighbor” policies. Trade disputes among the United States, Europe, and leading Asian countries threaten similar results today. Moreover, 6. See, for example, Niall Ferguson, “The Widening Atlantic,” 42–46. 7. Thomas L. Friedman, “What the World Needs Now,” New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1999. Friedman provides a more complete discussion in this vein in The Lexus and the Olive Tree.

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the European Union itself faces a wrenching debate over whether the Franco-German welfare states, with their chronically high unemployment rates, can reform to meet the challenges of international competition. Finally, this pair of economic divergences, those within the West and those between the West and other regions, spills over into political and even military conflict. Tensions generated by globalization underscore the need for cooperation among advanced nations (i.e., the West) to contain conflict without sacrificing benefits. As for the United States and Europe, Philip Gordon argues persuasively that “despite their differences, in an age of globalization and mass terrorism, no two regions of the world have more in common nor have more to lose if they fail to stand together in an effort to promote common values and interests around the globe.”8

A Common Security Policy? That point draws attention to a third dimension of the question: Is there a West? Can there be a common Western security policy? What are the prospects for NATO and other key relationships? Debates over policy differences within the West are nothing new. An “end of NATO” industry thrived even at the height of the Cold War, and back issues of specialist journals on both sides of the Atlantic indicate the patterns of argument it produced. Could both sides trust each other to pursue the same goals and cooperate in achieving them? The need may be there, but instead a deliberately confrontational theme has emerged recently in U.S.-European relations. Recent tensions between the United States and its allies over Iraq suggest a deeper divergence between Western societies and not merely a quarrel over how to unseat a dangerous dictator. It can be seen on two levels. The rhetorical opposition to American “hyperpower” led 8. Harold James, The End of Globalization? Lessons from the Great Depression, 5; C. Fred Bergsten, “America’s Two-Front Economic Conflict,” 16–27; Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat; Roger Kimball, “Why the West?” 4–8; Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Huntington first presented the argument in an article for the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs before expanding it into a book. The next issue of Foreign Affairs featured responses by Robert Bartley, Fouad Ajami, and Jeanne Kirkpartick. Philip Gordon, “Bridging the Atlantic Divide,” 70–83.

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by French President Chirac suggested Europe as the counterweight to America. On a broader level, cultural differences between American and European societies produce divergent perspectives on specific issues ranging from food safety to economic policy to the death penalty. The depth of these divisions is arguable, although everyone agrees that they exist. Anne Applebaum and Anthony Blinken, for example, offer a persuasive case that European criticism of George W. Bush reflects a segment of opinion among social democratic politicians and journalists more than European views in general.9 The much-touted “values gap” fades on closer scrutiny, which shows popular European opinion to be closer to American attitudes toward the death penalty and aspects of economic policy than those of their own elites. Some American views in turn have moved closer to what has been described as a European position. Still the increasingly strident rhetoric over the Iraqi issue, broadened into a general conflict that casts the United States against Europe, may erode those similarities, especially if transatlantic differences are exploited for political gain. These difficulties may also be rooted in differing geopolitical views. Owen Harries warned in 1993 that a West structured around the NATO alliance reflected Cold War imperatives; the West existed as a political entity only as a result to a threat from the East. Removing the Soviet threat would bring other internal differences to the fore.10 Robert Kagan argues that the disparity in power between the United States and Europe creates essentially different outlooks. The United States relies on power politics because it operates “in the Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.” Europe, by contrast, has entered a different international order within its own geographic sphere governed by peaceful means of conflict resolution, and its attention had shifted from power politics to integrating Europe within a stable and prosperous order.11 The difference in perspective thus reinforced a capabilities gap seen during the Kosovo War in 1999 and makes it 9. Graff, “France Is Not a Pacifist Country”; Anne Applebaum, “The Myth of the Values Gap,” Slate.com, June 13, 2001, http://slate.msn.com/id/110221/; Antony Blinken, “The False Crisis over the Atlantic,” 35–48. 10. Owen Harries, “The Collapse of the ‘West,’ ” 41–53. 11. Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” 3–28. An expanded version appeared in Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.

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unlikely that Europe will upgrade its military. Kagan concluded that Americans must therefore accept that they see the world in different terms than Europeans and be prepared to act alone in defense of a liberal order while avoiding undue antagonism. That America and Europe might pursue very different and irreconcilable strategies excited a robust debate comparable to previous arguments during the Cold War over military strategy (massive retaliation, graduated response) and diplomacy (Ostpolitik, détente). But calmer voices were soon heard. Some, such as François Heisbourg, sought to revive the Cold War model for cooperation, arguing that a common strategy for the West is both necessary and possible. Others, such as Christoph Bertram, emphasized that although both necessity and expedience might favor unilateralism—especially since Europe lacks comparable military capabilities—such an approach by the United States cannot work over the long run: even America has limited resources and requires support for peacekeeping once that peace has been made. Far from the “unipolar moment” described by Charles Krauthammer, Bertram follows others within the European foreign policy establishment who insist that the war on terrorism had inaugurated an era of inclusiveness.12 In fact, the sobering-up process already underway has yielded some significant initiatives. The European Union and the United States worked together to help the Ukrainian people rescue their nascent democracy following a fraudulent election, despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s blatant preference for the corrupt result. Together, they have also emphasized the importance of a Russia that moves in a democratic direction. In the Middle East, France and the United States have joined to press Syria on its long-overdue withdrawal from Lebanon, a project that resonates deeply with most Lebanese. NATO has also agreed to train small numbers of Iraqi police, mostly outside Iraq. And, in an effort to avoid an Iraq-like dispute, the United States has joined in support of the British, French, and German overture to Iran, it being understood that should Iran not respond, they will wield a diplomatic stick together. Many of these efforts, like the Quartet project to assist Israel and the Palestinians along a “Road Map” toward a two-state solution, may yet 12. François Heisbourg, “How the West Could Be Won,” 145–55; Christoph Bertram, “Shaping a Congenial Environment,” 139–45; Charles Krauthammer, “The Unipolar Moment Revisited,” 5–17.

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come a cropper. But transatlantic policies that are identifiably “Western” indicate the Atlantic may be narrowing once more. For this to last, however, the necessity of common action will have to be lubricated by a greater harmony not only on objectives but also on ways and means. Of these objectives, several are easy to list: • Police, intelligence, and legal cooperation needed to defend the West against terrorism • The state-building talents in short supply for Afghanistan, Iraq, and the nascent Palestine • The prevention of a nuclear-armed Iran • Political and economic reform throughout the Middle East • Last, most recently, the worrying behavior of Putin’s Russia, while not approaching that of the Soviet Union, reminds the allies that a “Europe whole and free” remains a goal yet to be reached. This full plate of common problems clearly demands common solutions. Still, two vital obstacles must be surmounted before collective action can be taken. How do the allies work with each other? And who has what capabilities to do the job? E E E

Competing answers to these questions are offered by several essays in this volume. The editors, however, could not resist the temptation to offer a few of our own observations on (1) unilateral versus multilateral action (the future of NATO), and (2) differing military capabilities. First, while the Iraqi crisis gave birth to a toxic argument over unilateral versus multilateral action, the former ascribed to the United States, the latter to the European allies, this approach is grossly inaccurate. A mere glance at the map suffices to make the point that short of a bombing raid against an ill-defended state, the United States cannot act unilaterally abroad. So the issue for Washington is not acting alone but rather the identity of the coalition. Here the choice ranges from a coalition of two (say, France and the United States on Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon) to expanding to include others to a coalition of many—at its broadest the U.N. General Assembly. In between fall such organizations as the U.N. Security Council, NATO, and the E.U. Among these, NATO is the repository of the longest and most successful record of security collaboration. The old restriction on NATO—its European focus—began to loosen in the Balkans and disappeared when the alliance took control of the International Stability and Assistance Force in Afghanistan in the fall

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of 2004. As former NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson declared: “We are no longer debating whether to take NATO forces out-of-area but are already about the business of how to assure that NATO forces succeed there.”13 Too many analysts have also forgotten that Turkey remains part of NATO, and just as the country was on the front line during the Cold War, it is now also on the front line of the war on terrorism in the Middle East. Former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s call for a new forum that would allow the United States and the E.U. to sit together, rather than use NATO, belongs to the apparently inexhaustible fount of bad ideas.14 If NATO is not that forum, then why not? And what could conceivably be achieved by enlarging still yet the number of would-be partners who can contribute little to the pressing business at hand? No. NATO is the right forum. It must be used in preference to smaller formations that lack its political weight or larger ones that lack willpower except at the lowest common denominator of action. When it comes to military means, NATO should be the coalition of first resort. That raises the contentious second problem. For within the alliance, capabilities are very different. The NATO forces in Afghanistan are very small (fewer than thirty thousand), and still mostly American. This contrasts dramatically with the Bosnia-Kosovo deployments where the twenty-five to thirty thousand remaining troops are almost all European. Indeed, even if France and Germany had supported the Iraqi invasion, they lacked the wherewithal to deploy troops and, by all accounts, have less to offer today than a dozen years ago at the time of Desert Storm. In short, if the Europeans wish to play a greater role (whether in NATO or not), they will have to bolster their ability to project military power abroad. Such a rearmament will not have to replicate the American experiments with the so-called Revolution of Military Affairs, the gist of which is to magnify the firepower and accuracy of smaller units. As has been amply demonstrated in Iraq and, before that, the Balkans, for some situations there is no substitute for “boots on the ground.” The war against terrorism, especially against states implicated in the 13. Quoted in Thomas F. Lynch, III, “NATO Unbound: Out of Area Operations in the Greater Middle East,” 141–42. 14. Gerhard Schröder, “Transatlantic Relations Must Respond to Considerable Changes,” Speech to Munich Wehrkunde Conference, February 14, 2005.

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business, calls for reconstruction of politics and societies so that the dislodging of one regime does not simply delay a recurrence of the same problem. NATO, with its tradition of shared danger and shared responsibilities, has an important but useful record of specialization. Once it is understood that “breaking” the enemy’s forces in this kind of war means far more than battlefield set pieces, we can overcome the corrosive notion that America makes the mess so Europe can clean up.15 There is plenty of work to go around. There are great risks, of course, in trying to use NATO as the West’s main forum for a cohesive security policy. As former supreme commander of NATO, General Alexander M. Haig, Jr., put it, “NATO has a lot of unfinished business in Europe. We may overload it by adding to its burdens the coordinated campaign of the war against terrorism. Things can get worse . . . Yet there is little choice but to take the risks. When all is said and done, terrorists threaten the international order every bit as much as the dictators of old.”16 Alliances are born of necessity and nurtured by statesmen. The “West” remains a useful idea only if necessity and nurture are combined. We have plenty of necessity. Now is the time for nurture. Finally, the reader will find in the following pages an exploration of the themes laid out in the introduction and much more besides. A brief review will make the case: Daniel Mahoney opens the book with chapters discussing Western identity. What does “the West” mean and how did the concept gain currency as a framework for discussing relationships among states? The cultural and political consequences of demographic change have a major impact on the West as multiculturalism in the United States and Muslim immigration in Europe draw the core regions of the West apart. Zachary Shore examines the question of assimilating Muslim immigrants and offers thoughts on how it might be managed. Michael Radu addresses a different facet of demographic change with attention to terrorism and how immigration shapes political dynamics in Europe. What Americans view as a security problem, Radu points out, many Europeans face as a cultural challenge or problem of public order. These different perspectives generate tensions within the alliance. 15. See Laurent Guy, “Competing Visions for the U.S. Military,” 705–18. 16. Alexander M. Haig, Jr., “There Is a West,” FPRI Watch on the West, 5.1 (February 2004).

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Subsequent chapters bring underlying questions of identity together with economics and security policy. Harold James and Stephen Schuker argue that economic issues themselves are unlikely to divide the West. James pointed out that measures of gross domestic product from 1900 to the present indicate very little divergence within the West compared with the rest of the world. Schuker agrees that conflict within the West over technical economic questions really indicates political disagreement. But he also warns that the failure to reform European economies has created a gradual divergence as American trade shifts elsewhere, and this trend is more important for the future of the West than actual disagreements among Western states. Finally, Douglas Porch gives an overview of possible counter-terrorism strategies to define a shared Western security policy, noting that disputes among allies are a common pattern in the West. The typical response of conflict within cooperation ultimately gives way to cooperation, and recent disputes over Iraq indicate the historic pattern. Jeremy Black considers whether a distinctive Western “way of war” exists and what the question means for the alliance. The diversity of Western (and non-Western) military experience brings a variety of perspectives on war that must be reconciled for effective cooperation. Missions define forces, and since different missions follow from the priorities of governments, the real gap involves politics rather than weapons or doctrines. Bridging the gap requires political skill, and Black notes that alliances are dynamic entities with tensions that vary according to circumstances. Western powers are closer today in operational doctrine and training than in the late 1940s, and political differences are now far less acute.

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Humanitarian Democracy and the Postpolitical Temptation Daniel J. Mahoney

A DDR E S SI NG T H E C ON T ROV E R SI A L QU E ST ION OF T H E M E A N I NG

and future of the Western world is a daunting challenge, one that demands considerable knowledge and discernment on the historical, political, philosophical, and spiritual planes. But this question is far too fundamental to be left to specialists or addressed from the narrow perspective of policy analysis. Every citizen in the democratic West is obliged to reflect on the meaning of the Western inheritance and on the growing challenges to its integrity. The Western scholar must begin with the concerns of the informed and morally serious citizen and statesman. In his introduction to Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville famously wrote that he aimed “to see, not differently, but further than the parties.” To see further than the daily news and beyond the noise of partisans is a demanding task, and this essay on our Western discontents is guided by an appreciation of the wisdom and difficulty of Tocqueville’s injunction.

The Plural Sources of Western Liberty We can say little of importance about the prospects for the Western world unless we address what is represented by the term “the West.” What are the sources of the distinctive vitality of Western civilization? Nineteenth-century French liberal statesman-historian François Guizot located that vitality in the dynamic pluralism of a Western world which 14

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had avoided the stagnation that accompanied despotism in all its forms. Roman law and municipal freedom, the Christian religion, and the fierce independence of the barbarian tribes coalesced to form a dynamic, free, and intellectually vibrant civilization. In his magisterial The History of Civilization in Europe, originally published in 1828, Guizot argued that “the excessively predominating dominion of a single principle, of a single form, has been the cause of tyranny” in other civilizations, while “in Europe liberty has been the result of the variety of the elements of civilization, and of the state of struggle in which they have constantly existed.” It was this lively coexistence of social forms and contents of life that contributed to the “real and immense superiority” of European civilization.1 In contrast, modern Western democracies tend to define liberty in terms of the single imperative of consent, downplaying the plural traditions that were responsible for the human greatness of the Western world. We overemphasize individual autonomy and ignore the important role played by moral law in restraining rulers and reminding citizens of their larger obligations. In his writings on the Western tradition of political philosophy, Leo Strauss emphasized how the antagonism between Greek philosophy and biblical religion was of key importance in the development of Western civilization. In his view, the unresolvable tension between reason and revelation is the deepest source of the vitality of Western civilization. If this tension between what is represented by Jerusalem and Athens were ever definitively resolved, then Western civilization itself would be in jeopardy. The French medievalist Rémi Brague has broadened the Straussian dialectic of reason and revelation by highlighting the crucial role of Rome in mediating the tension between Jerusalem and Athens.2 Both pagan and Christian Rome opened up to outside influences, thus giving shape to a Europe whose sources (Jerusalem and Athens) were extrinsic to itself. Brague argues that Islamic civilization lacked a similar vehicle of openness: despite efforts to appropriate the Jewish patriarchs and prophets and Christ himself for the cause of Islam, its adherents were not encouraged or even allowed to confront Jewish and Christian scriptures on their own terms. And the famous falasifa (philosophers) of the Islamic 1. See François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, 31. 2. Remi Brague, Eccentric Culture: A Theory of Western Civilization.

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world did not integrate Greek philosophical wisdom and Koranic law so much as they cloaked Greek wisdom in an Islamic mantle that could never accommodate the autonomy of the philosophical enterprise. Whatever their other differences, Guizot, Strauss, and Brague all emphasize the plural, and even conflictual, sources of Western vitality and self-understanding. The West is the West because it resists the temptation to put an end to things, to resolve the human and political problem in a manner that dispenses with the complexity of the human soul.

The “Old” and “New” West Confront the Totalitarian Challenge But as everyone knows, the West is much more than the sum of its “premodern” sources and influences. The contemporary West is defined above all by adherence to democracy and democratic values. For two centuries now, the institutions and cultural life of what was once known as Christian civilization have been relentlessly transformed by the doctrine of human rights and by the combined effects of modern science, capitalist economic development, and technological progress. Auguste Comte was not wrong to see in the modern West the “avant-garde” of humanity, the harbinger of a promised reign of enlightenment and scientific progress that is in principle open to the whole human race (although the technocratic Comte was himself no friend of parliamentary or political liberties).3 In the nineteenth century the old and new dispensations awkwardly coexisted, and few citizens or statesmen appreciated the full nature or extent of the “democratic revolution” that was transforming the Western world. The tradition-minded consoled themselves by finding in the new democratic order the natural offspring and development of the principles of classical and Christian civilization. This theoretical syncretism moderated the pace of democratic transition and had eminently salutary political and cultural effects. Of course, revolutionary movements such as Marxism challenged the complacency of moderate liberalism in the name of a more consistent and “democratic” revolutionary atheism and humanism. But in the Anglo-American world, at least, moderate versions of the Enlightenment and older moral traditions

3. For a lucid analysis of Comte’s limitless disdain for representative institutions, see Raymond Aron’s 1960 essay “Sociologists and Representative Institutions.”

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and affirmations coexisted in relative peace. This situation could not persist indefinitely. The totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, though, had the paradoxical effect of obscuring the antitraditional character of modern rights-based liberalism. The inhuman assaults by communist and Nazi totalitarianism on the most elementary liberties and basic human values served to cast liberal constitutionalism in a comparatively favorable light and to increase the prestige of liberal democracy even among the most conservative Europeans. No less a moral authority than Pope Pius XII endorsed “Christian Democracy” in a famous allocution on the eve of the conclusion of World War II. French historian Alain Besançon has argued that twentieth-century totalitarianism served to remind decent Europeans of what the “old” Christian world and the “new” bourgeois or liberal order had in common.4 Both the old and new West were vulnerable to a virulent revolutionary nihilism that attacked everything that was solid or inherited. Faced with the unprecedented totalitarian negation of constitutionalism, the moral law, and the very ideas of unchanging truth and common humanity, liberals and conservatives rallied in support of a West that could draw upon both modern and premodern Western traditions. In the West’s death struggle with European totalitarianisms of the Left and the Right, defenders of the cause of Western liberty needed to affirm both the traditional sources of Western freedom and its claim to be the authentic representative of modern liberty. The rhetoric of the essentially conservative Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle is particularly instructive in this regard. In their writings and speeches, these two great statesmen of the twentieth century freely appealed to both traditional and modern features of the Western inheritance. They exhorted their compatriots to defend “liberal and Christian civilization” against what Herman Rauschnigg called “the revolution of nihilism.”5 They recognized that an antitotalitarian politics

4. See Alain Besançon, Trois tentations dans l’église. For a largely complementary analysis, see Gress, From Plato to NATO. 5. See Winston Churchill’s “Finest Hour” speech of June 18, 1940, as well as Charles de Gaulle’s Oxford University address of November 25, 1941, on “the Crisis of Civilization.” See also Herman Rauschning, The Revolution of Nihilism, Warning to the West for the most powerful conservative diagnosis of the nihilism at the heart of Nazi theory and practice.

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worth its salt must defend both the full range of individual and political liberties as well as the basic precepts of Christian ethics against the revolutionary nihilism of totalitarians who rejected the moral law in the name of the imperatives of race and class, of struggle and History.

1968 and the Birth of “Postmodern” Democracy An antitotalitarian consensus, rooted in the practical exigencies of resisting Soviet imperialism, dominated European political and intellectual life right up until the revolutionary upheavals of May 1968. That fateful year saw a shattering of the seemingly solid synthesis of the older European moral inheritance and the institutions and principles of modern liberty, a synthesis that had somehow survived all the tragic events of the terrible twentieth century. It revealed the fragility and the indispensability of this fruitful coexistence of the new and old dispensations. Americans too often forget that the year 1968 witnessed not only unprecedented unrest in the streets and on college campuses but also a truly global challenge to liberal civilization in the form of the so-called New Left. Denouncing the repressive character of bourgeois liberalism and bureaucratic state socialism alike, the New Left proclaimed a vision of “emancipatory” democracy freed from all political, cultural, economic, and moral constraints. Its animating spirit was antinomian and its political vision was infantile in its willful disregard of the hierarchies and the restraints, both external and internal, that are essential to every organized collectivity in any time or place. Student unrest, fueled by the agitation of the revolutionary Left, helped bring down the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson, but never came close to threatening the viability of the American political order. Things were different in France. The French “ultra-Left,” as it was then called, nearly succeeded in bringing down the presidency of Charles de Gaulle and the Fifth Republic with it. But in the midst of the revolutionary chaos, with universities occupied and industrial production suspended, de Gaulle rallied a silent majority and saved France from the only “totalitarian enterprise” (the Communist Party) that might have been able to pick up the political pieces after the “psychodrama” of May 1968. The movement thus conspicuously failed. But it was the crucial impetus for the “colonization” of social and cultural institutions

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recommended to the Left by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci as early as the 1920s. Antihumanist theorists such as Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Pierre Bourdieu, and Jacques Lacan became fashionable intellectual points of reference throughout the Western literary and academic worlds and beyond. A “culture of repudiation,” in Roger Scruton’s apt formulation, challenged the very idea of truth and of authoritative norms and social institutions. The “thought of 1968,” as Alain Renault and Luc Ferry have called it, inaugurated a bold cultural project to subvert or “deconstruct” all authoritative cultural, political, and religious traditions in the name of an emancipated “self” whose only moral injunction was the imperative of authenticity. As French social theorist Marcel Gauchet has put it, Western elites rejected every claim based on “heteronomous” or authoritative law in the name of liberation and autonomy.6 The vacuity of the “culture of repudiation” and its project of cultural and spiritual deconstruction is exemplified by the motto that dominated revolutionary discourse in Paris during May 1968: “it is forbidden to forbid.” There was nothing liberal about these anarchist affirmations, and there is nothing especially conservative about exposing the infantilism that lay behind them. Alas, it is no secret that liberals displayed something less than civic courage and intellectual self-confidence in responding to the challenge of the new antinomianism. The old antitotalitarian consensus collapsed at the intellectual level even if it continued to show a bit more vitality in the political sphere. Far too many liberals in both Europe and America averted their eyes from the existence of enemies on the Left. There were, of course, admirable exceptions. One was the great French political philosopher and sociologist Raymond Aron. In his later work, such as In Defense of Decadent Europe (1977) and his Memoirs (1983), Aron expressed deep forebodings about the future of a liberal Europe that was in the process of losing sight of the political virtues necessary to sustain liberal civilization. Liberals had forgotten that such authoritative institutions as the university, army, and church were indispensable to the moral and civic health of liberal communities. Aron spoke

6. Scruton, The West and the Rest, 68–83; Luc Ferry and Alain Renault, La Pensée 68; Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Manent, however, argues in The City of Man that this “postmodern” project of rejecting authoritative law has deep roots in modern Western political philosophy itself.

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of a “crisis of civilization” and the “decadence” of free and prosperous peoples who were bereft of civic spirit and martial virtue. In Penser la guerre: Clausewitz (1976) he wrote ruefully of the European desire to escape altogether from the demands of universal history, to proceed as if war and conflict were henceforth a definitive part of the “prehistory” of humankind. Aron insisted that, despite European wishful thinking to the contrary, history would continue “to write its letters in blood.” In his view, intellectuals who proclaimed the obsolescence of national sovereignty, of so-called high politics, lacked a sufficient “sense of history and tragedy.” Civilized life depends upon the willingness of free peoples to remain within History with a capital H, and a willingness to shed blood in its defense. The final paragraphs of Clausewitz are the cri de coeur of a good European who laments the failure of his contemporaries to have learned from the totalitarian challenge the deepest lessons about the fragility of political civilization: “Future men will feel other passions. But, today, how can I, as a Frenchman of Jewish origin, forget that France owes her liberation to the power of her allies, or that Israel owes her very existence to her arms and probably owes her future survival to her willingness—and, if need be, American willingness to fight again? Nor shall I feel guilty about this until the day when some great tribunal can at last decide who—Israeli or Palestinian—really has sole claim to a land held holy by all three religions of the Book.”7

“Depoliticization” and the Religion of Humanity It is no accident that Raymond Aron was both the most vocal and eloquent French critic of the events of May 1968 and the first important European thinker to describe and critique the massive “depoliticization” of contemporary Europe.8 Aron saw at work in those events a systematic ideological challenge to the moral foundations of liberal civilization. He understood well that respect for the dignity and liberties of human beings was the glory of Western civilization. But he also recognized that an apolitical individualism that eroded civic virtue was the enemy of 7. Raymond Aron, Penser la guerre, Clausewitz, 286. 8. Carl Schmitt had, however, already argued in The Concept of the Political, with clear antidemocratic intent, that liberalism was incompatible with a forthright recognition of the primordial political distinction between “friends and enemies.”

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liberty. His Tocquevillian forebodings about the future of liberal Europe failed to win the day, even if they helped inspire some of the best contemporary European reflection on that continent’s discontents. The spirit that dominates in “old Europe” today is far from Aronian. Aron was an unremitting defender of liberal democracy against the totalitarian temptation. While no conservative traditionalist, he nonetheless understood that if the West was to renew itself, it must continue to draw on broader and deeper cultural and spiritual resources than those provided by modern individualism or Enlightenment rationality. It must aspire to something more ennobling than the endless expansion of the rights and claims of aggrieved individuals and minorities. A West that is true to itself and capable of concerted collective action must judiciously draw upon the moral inheritance of the premodern Western tradition, the still-living attachments of many Europeans to the nation-states of the continent, and the commitment to political liberty that provides the indispensable framework for individual independence. But it has long been apparent that Europeans are less and less prone to think of themselves as national peoples belonging to a common civilization called the West. Little remains of a sense of reverence toward the European past, and they no longer identify or connect “democracy” with a millennium-old inheritance. Instead, their loyalty is to a “procedural” view of democracy that in principle recognizes no territorial boundaries or binding political attachments. Europeans increasingly aspire to a postpolitical or postnational social state that does not depend upon or defer to the spiritual or cultural traditions of the premodern Western tradition. In that sense, the revolutionary spirit of 1968 has become thoroughly routinized. To challenge it is to risk being denounced as a reactionary by the cultural guardians of ideological correctness.9 Despite the survival of genuine pockets of traditional religious affirmation throughout the continent, Europeans have for the most part attained a state of near perfect indifference toward the claims of revealed religion. The French political philosopher Pierre Manent suggests that a modernized form of Comte’s “religion of humanity” has for all intents and purposes become the common faith of post-1968 European democracy. If traditional religion made arduous 9. For a particularly egregious example of censoriousness in the name of the “values” of 1968, see Daniel Lindenberg, Le Rappel à l’ordre: en quête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires.

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demands on the moral conduct of human beings, if self-respecting political communities once depended upon the willingness of free peoples to fight and, if need be, to die for la patrie and the common good, the new humanitarianism makes few demands on its adherents. It is sufficient to reject ethnocentrism and to be wary of traditional morality, to show empathy for the weak and victimized wherever they be found (but preferably not those suffering under Islamic or communist despotisms), and to aspire to a nebulous global consciousness (and this from some of the fiercest critics of “globalization”). Deference to the moral authority of international organizations, no matter how ineffectual or illiberal, is also a requirement of the new humanitarianism. Traditional or Aristotelian philosophy argued that human beings had no access to the Universal as such except through the political and ethical life of particular political communities. What Leo Strauss called the “universal and homogenous state” was the enemy of both decent politics and sound philosophy. Our common humanity could only be affirmed through participation in discrete political communities that “put reasons and actions in common,” to cite an Aristotelian formulation often invoked by Pierre Manent. But as Manent has written in his magisterial analysis of modern politics, Cours familier de philosophie politique, “Modern humanity is impatient when it comes to all mediations.”10 We perceive politics as an external and oppressive imposition, one that gets in the way of the authenticity or immediacy of human experiences. The postmodern illusion is to believe that human beings can experience our humanity in abstraction from particular attachments and obligations, especially those associated with the political community. Political life depends, however, upon political forms such as the city, empire, or nation that provide the indispensable “body” within which common life unfolds. The great illusion of the contemporary European project, according to Manent, is that a post-totalitarian Europe can somehow experience all the benefits of human civilization without any longer having to live within any particular political form. But this desire to say “farewell to politics” is nothing more than what Raymond Aron called a “hope supported by faith.” If the nation is moribund as a 10. Pierre Manent, Cours familier de philosophie politique. An English translation of this work appeared in 2006 under the title A World beyond Politics? A Defense of the Nation-State, translated by Marc LePain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press).

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political form, then Europeans will have to create a new political form that can give shape to the European desire to live within a single human association. Otherwise, Europeans must expect to encounter all the tragic consequences that accompany depoliticization—unless, that is, they are willing to rest content with their status as dependents within an informal American empire that they never cease denouncing. In Manent’s judgment, the “humanitarian depoliticization” of modern life paradoxically poses no less a threat to the integrity of human beings than the more brutal “totalitarian superpoliticization” of society. In his view, Europe is at a great crossroads, defined by a still unresolved ambiguity. Europeans cannot decide whether they wish to build a new political form that can take its place among the powers of the world, offering itself as ally and rival to the United States, Russia, or China, or to live in a world without politics—a world that is “immediately human.” This desire to attain pure universality both undercuts the prospects for a political Europe and leads to thoroughgoing contempt for more traditional models of European identity. In their anxious desire to jettison the national form—or any political articulation of democracy, for that matter—Europeans first of all forget the considerable contribution made to the cause of European liberty by the old nation-states. “As a political body the nation in Europe has succeeded, in a manner comparable only to the ancient city, in realizing the articulation of the particular and the universal. Each great action and each great thought produced by one of our nations was a challenge to and a proposal for the other nations, a proposal by humanity for humanity.” But Manent adds that “our nations, like the Greek cities, ended up succumbing to the intensity with which each asserted its part in what Shakespeare called the ‘great quarrel.’ ”11 The depoliticization of Europe thus has deep roots in the European social crisis of the twentieth century. The self-immolation of bourgeois Europe between 1914 and 1918, the rise of unprecedented totalitarian political movements, and the outbreak of an even more devastating “total war” between 1939 and 1945 discredited the nation-state with

11. These quotations are taken from the final chapter of Cours familier de philosophie politique, as well as from Manent, “Democracy without Nations?” The Shakespeare allusion is to Titus Andronicus (“Hear me, grave fathers! noble tribunes, stay! For pity of mine age, whose youth was spent in dangerous wars, whilst you securely slept; for all my blood in Rome’s great quarrel shed.”)

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European elites. Europeans were thus tempted to throw out the baby with the bath water, to see in the national form only a cause of European self-destruction rather than an essential precondition of democratic self-government. Europeans have lost the habit and capacity to distinguish between humane and self-limiting patriotism and more ideological versions of nationalism. Thus French social scientist Emmanuel Todd can attack America and Israel as the principal “enemies of universalism” in the contemporary world.12 Like many contemporary European thinkers, Todd identifies universalism with an apolitical vision of equality and democratic humanitarianism. In this vision, the natural unity of diplomacy and strategy, of law and force of arms, is severed. Those who reject the chimera of a postmodern, postpolitical utopia are deemed the true enemies of democratic progress. Totalitarian Islam and other political manifestations of contemporary antiliberalism barely make an appearance in this fanciful depiction of the threats to a peaceful and stable international order. For the Emmanuel Todds of the world, the United States and Israel cannot stand for universal values precisely because both nations remain adamantly attached to the national form and to a territorial conception of democratic self-government. The origin of the diametrically opposed judgments of Americans and Europeans about the relationship of the democratic project to the territorial nation-state thus has less to do with the structural disparities between the American superpower and a militarily weak Europe than with the political and social crisis that dominated the first half of the European twentieth century. An exhausted Europe, still dependent on an American power whose moral legitimacy it increasingly denies, is all too tempted to leave behind a History that still writes its letters in blood. Even the tough liberal internationalism of British Prime Minister Tony Blair intimates that the European community’s present emphasis on transparency, law, and mutual security presages the future of the entire human race.13 If Europeans are confident of anything, it is that what Raymond Aron called “history as usual” is in the process of being left behind by the avant-garde of the human race. Like French political philosopher Benjamin Constant’s proclaiming war to be an 12. See Todd’s recently translated polemic After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, especially 101–22. 13. The writings of diplomat Robert Cooper, former special adviser to Tony Blair, are especially instructive in this regard.

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anachronism even as the wars of the Revolution and Empire continued to rage, so European elites want to believe that the wars and tyrannies of the twentieth century were a mere parenthesis that barely interrupted the forward march of history. Francis Fukuyama’s reflection on “the end of history” is positively sober compared to this unthinking confidence in the permanent transformation of the ways of the world.

The “Conservative Liberal” Dissent The most penetrating critics of the limits of contemporary humanitarianism are those European thinkers who have witnessed the relentless process of European depoliticization firsthand. Pierre Manent may be the most philosophically astute of these critics. But such diverse thinkers as the English Conservative philosopher and essayist Roger Scruton and the French sociologist and scholar of nationalism Dominique Schnapper have articulated remarkably complementary analyses of the intimate connection between democratic self-government and the vitality of the territorial nation-state. In The West and the Rest (2002), Scruton sketches a compelling account of the distinctive character of the Western political association. Only in the Western world was the political association defined in relative abstraction from membership in a specific ethnic group or religious community. This fecund abstraction of political citizenship from ethnic and religious identities had roots in the medieval separation of “the things of God” and “the things of Caesar” and would come to fruition in the early modern period with the rise of the secular territorial nation-state. “The goal and aspiration” of Western citizenship was a vision of political life in which “strangers” were held together by a “commitment to the defense of common territory and to the maintenance of the law that applies there.” Modern political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke identified the philosophical abstraction called the “social contract,” emphasizing the artificial and consensual character of modern citizenship and political life. But Scruton points out that “contractualism” is insufficient to account for either the origins of liberal civil society or the public-spiritedness necessary to sustain it. The philosophical conceit of a social contract among “free and equal” individuals fails to recognize the existence of all-too-real actual peoples, shaped by millennial-old Western traditions, who came together to form liberal political communities in the first place. In light

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of these considerations, Scruton excoriates the dogma of individual autonomy for its failure to take into account the affections and obligations that bind the living, the dead, and the unborn within any territorial jurisdiction. In a succinct formulation, Scruton exposes the Achilles’ heel of modern liberal political philosophy: “We can make sense of the social contract only on the basis of some . . . precontractual ‘we.’ ” Even in the United States, a political nation that takes particular pride in its constructed or artificial character, a preexisting people, sharing common mores and a deep commitment to republican liberty,14 already formed a “we” that was in a position to create a more perfect constitutional union in 1787 and 1788. Like Manent, Scruton upholds democracy as a political association that depends upon a preexisting national form “and the loyalties rooted in a common home and of the transgenerational society that resides there.” But unlike Manent, Scruton generally reserves the words “politics” or “political” to describe the contractual abstraction of modern citizenship. He rather problematically defines the nation as an essentially prepolitical phenomenon and inheritance. In her great essay on the modern idea of nationality, The Community of Citizens, published in French in 1994 and in English in 1998, Schnapper (who is Raymond Aron’s daughter) emphasizes the profound difference between the nation as a community of citizens and the ethnie, or racial and ethnic communities and identifications that exist within particular societies. She, too, stresses the “abstract” character of modern democratic citizenship. Her work confirms the paradox of modern individualism: modern democracy is the result of a self-consciously political project—one that took different but ultimately converging forms in Great Britain, the United States, and France—for creating a political society that transcends “concrete roots, and particular belongings and loyalties through citizenship.”15 But the new political society finally undermines its own raison d’être by giving rise to an apolitical individualism that contributes to “disenchanting” the political realm itself. Schnapper fears that the democratic nation risks becoming the political project to end political life itself. But she denies that human beings can subsist for long in a society without any public statement of common values and without public-spirited 14. See John Jay’s eloquent discussion of this point in Federalist Paper no. 2. 15. See Dominique Schnapper, The Community of Citizens: On the Modern Idea of Nationality.

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virtues that transcend the contemporary preoccupation with individual rights and ethnic or racial loyalties. For this reason, she resists the call of Jürgen Habermas and other left-of-center, antinationalist European thinkers for a new European “postnational constitutional patriotism” that leaves behind traditional patriotic affirmations. Like Manent and Scruton, she appreciates that human beings are political animals who need to live in concrete political communities and to assume the virtues appropriate to citizens. The European tradition of conservative liberalism, well represented by the likes of Manent, Scruton, and Schnapper, in no way rejects the achievements of modern liberty or the democratic affirmation of mankind’s common humanity. It readily recognizes the historical achievement that is the secular state and, against the multiculturalist temptation, defends the idea of a “community of citizens” that transcends tribal, ethnic, and religious loyalties. But conservative liberalism differs from contemporary academic liberalism in its recognition that democratic self-government can only flourish within the parameters established by a territorial state capable of drawing upon the loyalties, affections, traditions, and sacrifices of citizens who are attached to something much more substantial than an abstract idea of humanity. Conservative liberals appreciate that the aspiration toward universality becomes destructive of political civilization itself when it ignores the essential preconditions of democratic self-government. These include the territorial nation-state, the moral and intellectual inheritance of classical and biblical civilization, the mores that restrain individual self-assertion and allow free people to live together under the rule of law, and the civic spirit that leads free peoples to defend the “precious acquisition,”16 as Aron calls it, that is political liberty. Conservative liberals above all fear the depoliticization of the Western world. They do not defend cultural particularity or national “identity” per se, but rather the democratic self-government that is only possible within bounded political communities. As Manent writes, “the promise of moral progress contained in the contemporary humanitarian sensibility will remain sterile if we [Europeans] do not know how to design the political framework in which it would produce some real and durable effects.”17 Europeans are misguided if they believe they 16. Raymond Aron, In Defense of Decadent Europe, xviii. 17. Manent, Cours familier de philosophie politique, 341.

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have arrived at “the end of history” and can live in some perfected state of civilization without the mediating presence of politics.

The American Response If Europe is in danger of succumbing to a postpolitical temptation, America remains a vibrant, energetic, and self-confident national community. It still knows what it means to think and act politically in a dangerous world. But American foreign policy is not particularly marked by magnanimity toward allies or even by a keen appreciation of the common good of the Western world. It should welcome any moves, however tentative, toward a politically serious Europe. Instead, American politics today oscillates between open contempt for European weakness and deep suspicion of any challenge to American leadership within the Atlantic community. Old realists such as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had more sympathy for the positive features of European selfassertion. They overlooked much because they knew that the biggest danger facing Europe was the decline in its willingness to act in a spirited and politically effective way. They were far more worried about European defeatism and dependency than they were about French intransigence and prickliness, for example. They were therefore sensitive to the positive features of Gaullism—for instance, its profound sense of national honor, its refusal of pacifism, and its hatred of tyranny. Today, Americans must become able to distinguish between decent, if misguided, forms of political humanitarianism, full-fledged ideological anti-Americanism, and prudential disagreements about policy put forward by U.S. friends. Not all European critics of the U.S.-UK intervention in Iraq in the spring of 2003, for example, were soft utopians or ideologically inspired critics of the United States. Policy makers and citizens alike must appreciate that even some of the most sober and pro-American commentators in France, associates of Raymond Aron such as Jean-Claude Casanova and Alain Besançon, questioned the prudence of war with Iraq. One such critic is Nicolas Baverez, a distinguished economist and political commentator and author of the definitive biography of Aron. In his columns in Le Point, Baverez challenged the wisdom and morality of the doctrine of “preventive war” and dissented from the Bush administration’s claims about the threat posed to Middle Eastern stability and

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world security by a much weakened Baathist regime. But in his recent best-selling book La France qui tombe [France Falling], Baverez also takes to task European weakness, moralism, and hypocrisy in addressing questions of international politics. He exposes the remarkable affinities between the rhetoric of “peace at any price” that led Chamberlain and Daladier to abandon the Czechoslovakian democracy at Munich in September and October 1938 and Chirac’s feckless claim in the weeks leading up to the second Iraq war that “war is always the worst of solutions.” Too many commentators in France have applauded Foreign Minister de Villepin’s “diplomacy of the word” as a brilliant innovation in the world of diplomacy, a moral victory for international legal norms, and a blow to the Hobbesian self-assertion of the United States. But Baverez will have none of this. He demonstrates that President Chirac and Foreign Minister de Villepin have no legitimate claim to the mantle of Gaullism, that their “words of power without the means of power” leave France an isolated figure of ridicule. In Baverez’s estimation, Europe must commit to modernizing its armed forces for the sake of building a politically viable European project. But more fundamentally, he finds something profoundly immoral about diplomacy unsupported by the force of arms: “It remains very difficult to plead in a convincing manner against war when one no longer has the means at one’s disposal to make it.” French Aronians such as Baverez have also criticized French condescension toward the new democracies of East-Central Europe and the astonishing willingness of the Quai d’Orsay to overlook the criminality of a whole series of Third World despotisms. As Jean-Claude Casanova recently pointed out, de Gaulle refused to subordinate French sovereignty to the imperatives of international organization and repeatedly mocked the moral authority of the United Nations, which was to a large extent dominated by Third World and communist despotisms.18 For Baverez or Casanova, there is something surreal about a soi-disant Gaullism that purports to defend the independence of France by subordinating its freedom of action to an organization that is less than friendly to the cause of Western liberty. In light of these incisive European and French self-criticisms, the American political class must move beyond a haughty attitude of intellectual superiority toward all things European. Americans should 18. Nicolas Baverez, La France qui tombe, 64; “De Charles de Gaulle à Jacques Chirac,” Le Monde, July 25, 2003.

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listen to responsible French voices and not include them in too broad a stroke with crude purveyors of anti-Americanism. In the end, contempt for European weakness doesn’t add up to anything resembling a coherent policy. To be worthy of the leadership of the free world, the United States must aim to support politically responsible forces in Europe. It cannot proceed as if it can do without support from European friends and allies when that support will be indispensable in the long struggle with international terrorism. American immoderation only reinforces the destructive mentality of depoliticization that has taken hold of contemporary Europe.

Transcending the Transatlantic Divide There is no reason to believe that the growing divisions within the Western world will somehow just heal with time or that a renewed sense of Western solidarity will inevitably overcome the transatlantic divide that has opened up in recent decades. These disturbing divisions among old allies are related to a long-term process of European depoliticization and to profound structural differences in the capacities and responsibilities of each side. These differences show every indication of persisting and even accelerating in the decades to come. What, then, can be done to moderate these tendencies and trends and to restore a principled politics of prudence, in contradistinction to the false idealism and false realism that are so evident on both sides of the Atlantic? Europeans need to become more self-critical and less confident of their superiority to an American democracy that is still willing to take risks for the common cause of Western liberty. European statesmen need to relearn the idiom of national life and to become much more skeptical of abstract humanitarian claims and arguments. Endlessly invoking the “European” destiny of the old nations of the continent will not suffice: they must engage in the difficult process of reflection about Europe’s political character and responsibilities. Achieving a politically serious Europe will require a sustained civic conversation about its relationship to the old nation-states of the continent that, after all, were the pillars of European liberty and gave rise to the European project in the first place. Without such a civic conversation, the European political class invites an extremist backlash. It cannot continue to ignore the patriotic attachments that bind citizens, to suppress legitimate concerns

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about immigration from the non-Western world, and to refuse any serious examination of the ultimate compatibility of a “hard religion” such as Islam with the institutions and mores of liberal civilization.19 Continuing as at present invites social and political disaster. Nor should European elites continue to take for granted the obsolescence of war as a legitimate instrument for the preservation of the common good of a free political order. This historicist complacency and unexamined confidence that Europeans have ascended to a higher level of moral consciousness must yield to a renewed willingness to think through the political requirements of the common good. Traditional moral and political views cannot continue to be dismissed as undeserving of rational examination and discussion. Fortunately, the political deficit at the heart of the European project has already given rise to some political philosophizing of the first order. Perhaps an incipient revival of the European tradition of statesmanship will begin to translate some of these insights into a more balanced appreciation of the political requirements of democratic self-government. If man is a political animal, then depoliticization cannot persist indefinitely. It is hard to believe that bureaucratic administration will forever eclipse statesmanship or that new Adenauers and de Gaulles will never again grace the political landscape of a post-totalitarian Europe. The revival of the political fortunes of Europe will, however, depend upon a moral revolution of sorts: Europeans must stop “drugging themselves with humanitarianism,” to cite Pierre Manent’s arresting formulation.20 They must aim to see beyond the humanitarian horizons of a civilization that no longer has the ambition to leave its mark on universal history. For its part, the United States must overcome a more subtle antipolitical temptation. First and foremost, it must resist the allure of imperial hubris, overcoming the moralistic temptation of always identifying the American cause with that of humanity tout court. By any objective measure, America is the nation par excellence in today’s world. But too often Americans fail to appreciate or admit the particular character of their national aspirations. They tend to identify

19. See Pierre Manent, “Le Retour de la Nature,” Le Figaro, November 8, 2003. 20. Pierre Manent, “Current Problems of European Democracy,” Modern Age (Winter 2003): 15.

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all of their nation’s actions with the cause of humanity, and thus manage to combine extreme nationalism with an apolitical universalism. In this extreme universalist reading of America’s global mission, the American cause knows no boundaries because it is coextensive with humanity itself. The United States should certainly retain its attachment to universal principles of natural and political right and respect for its crucial role in sustaining liberty. But those universalist principles must be interpreted and applied in the light of sober prudence. To give one example, the United States cannot and should not force democracy on nations that lack its crucial historical and cultural prerequisites. George Will recently pointed out that it is fatuous to argue, as President Bush and Prime Minister Blair are prone to do, that it is “cultural condescension” to hold that democracy depends on specific political and cultural traditions.21 As no less an authority than Tocqueville argued in The Old Regime and the Revolution (1856), hatred of despotism does not necessarily prepare a people for the arduous responsibilities of political self-government. The intellectual alternatives are in no way exhausted by a cultural relativism that denies the universal value of political liberty, or a democratic “progressivism” that ignores the fragility of political civilization. Free peoples cannot do for others what others are unable or disinclined to do for themselves. The United States can also play its part in easing transatlantic tensions by avoiding unduly provocative rhetoric, eschewing Manichean discourse (such as on the “axis of evil”) that needlessly provokes international public opinion and makes it harder for Europeans to assume their political responsibilities. It makes no sense whatsoever to define U.S. policy as a crusade to “eliminate evil.”22 To do so is to ignore the “inventiveness of wickedness,” to cite Edmund Burke’s striking formulation from his Reflections on the Revolution in France. There are no uniform political solutions that hold true for every time and place and every diplomatic-strategic constellation. Today, the political philosopher would counsel a greater dose of restraint to an America still traumatized by the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and a recovery of political spiritedness on the part of Europeans who too often act as if 21. George F. Will, “Can We Make Iraq Democratic?” City Journal 14, no. 4 (Winter 2004). 22. David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror.

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they already live at “the end of history.” Only ideologues will find this advice to be contradictory. Political life demands the most judicious calibration of self-assertion and self-restraint. The essence of political wisdom is nothing less than conjugating the respective places of spiritedness and moderation in human affairs.

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Europe’s Muslim Dilemma and Muslim Europe’s Choice Zachary Shore

E U R O P E , H O M E T O S O M E F I F T E E N M I L L I O N M U S L I M S , FA C E S A

dilemma. Demographic trends reveal that, driven by high birth and immigration rates, Muslim populations in Europe will rise dramatically within the next generation. But Muslims have been poorly integrated into European societies. Unemployment, crime, and political disenfranchisement all far exceed national averages. If current trends continue and young Muslims remain alienated, radical Islam will find fertile ground across the continent. However, integrating Muslims into secular Europe has painful costs of its own, from enforcing legal and educational reforms to creating new levels of religious tolerance. Europe’s dilemma is a choice between two unpalatable options: domestic fragmentation, or wrenching social change. America has good reason to worry about Europe’s Muslim minority as radical Islam is rising. Al Qaeda cells, composed of alienated European Muslims, have been uncovered across the continent—too late to prevent the Madrid and London bombings. The 9/11 hijackers lived freely in Hamburg, aided by angry local Muslims. Some of the almost daily attacks on U.S. and European troops in Iraq are believed to come from foreign terrorists drawn from Europe’s disaffected Muslim minority. Arab-owned bookstores in London’s Edgware Road offer radical literature in English, much of it with a strong anti-American slant. This chapter is adapted in part from material in Zachary Shore, Breeding Bin Ladens: America, Islam, and the Future of Europe, forthcoming. 34

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The Muslim districts outside of Paris and Turkish enclaves around Berlin contain pockets of deep resentment over America’s foreign policies, especially those toward Palestine. If Europe’s Muslims remain unintegrated, Europe will face social fragmentation and America will find radical Islam expanding.

How Wide Is the Rift? The principal threat to the U.S.-European alliance is not the Iraq issue, nor is it differences over international treaties, genetically modified foods, or the death penalty. The greatest long-term challenge to transatlantic relations comes from Muslim Europe. Since the Bush administration came into office in 2001, many observers have cited values gaps, differing approaches to globalization, and the war on terror as evidence of increasing transatlantic tensions. But frequently, just behind the jibes lurks alarm at the rising numbers of European Muslims. Paris bestowed a rare award upon an American citizen by making him an honorary Parisian. The last time an American citizen received this honor was more than thirty years ago, when Paris embraced the artist Pablo Picasso. But the granting of this award was not heralded in the press as a welcome sign of renewed transatlantic amity. In fact, the event was scarcely reported at all. This is probably because the recipient, Mumia abu-Jamal, is a convicted murderer, currently sitting on death row. Known popularly simply as Mumia, the African American former journalist and convert to Islam was convicted in 1981 of murdering a white police officer in Philadelphia. In December 2001 his death sentence was overturned, but this decision has been appealed. The defendant maintains his innocence and his case has been championed by many on the far Left of the American political spectrum who see it as a clear case of racism and injustice. Mumia continues to speak out from prison against what he sees as a racist, elite power structure. To Bertrand Delanoe, the Socialist mayor of Paris, Abu-Jamal’s case is a symbol of the barbarity of America’s death penalty. At a public ceremony marking Mumia’s honorary citizenship, Mayor Delanoe declared, “As long as there is a place on this planet where one can be killed in the name of the community, we haven’t finished our work.” Angela Davis,

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a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz and a former Black Panther, supported Abu-Jamal’s attacks against American unilateralism, melding issues relating to U.S. foreign and domestic policy under George Bush with the particular case of Abu-Jamal. Davis asserts that the effort to free Abu-Jamal which have sprung up in countries around the world “takes on a new sense in the face of American unilateralism, the aggression against the Iraqi people, and the racist attacks against immigrants which can only further gnaw away at the vestiges of democracy in the United States.” To his supporters’ delight, Mayor Delanoe raised his fist in the air and declared, “Mumia is a Parisian!” For the far Left in America, Mumia’s case has long been about racism. For the Europeans, it has been about capital punishment. But today, in the context of transatlantic tensions, his case has become yet another measure of the deep animosity felt by growing numbers of Europeans toward America—though not necessarily toward Americans. It is difficult to say how Mumia’s Muslim credentials influenced his selection as an honorary citizen. When Mayor Delanoe declared Mumia a Parisian, was he making a subtle, or not so subtle, bow to Paris’s large and growing Muslim and African population? When President Chirac berated Bush’s Iraq policy while in Algiers, was he speaking to Algerians, to Americans, or to the five million Muslims back home in France? No doubt both politicians calculated their comments to appeal to many audiences. Of course, their attempt to whip up anti-Americanism did nothing to prevent the riots that engulfed Paris and other French cities in November 2005. The mayor of London has also played the anti-American card. Shortly before George W. Bush’s 2003 visit to England, Ken Livingston (once known as “Red Ken”) referred to Bush as “the greatest threat to life on this planet that we’ve most probably ever seen.” Surely he was playing on the significant anti-Bush sentiment felt among Londoners, but he may also have been speaking to London’s vast Muslim population, many of whom also see George Bush’s policies as a threat to their coreligionists around the world. Livingston argued that with two pounds of each London homeowner’s local taxes being spent on security, most Londoners would prefer to give four pounds for him not to come. (At the close of 2003, “Red Ken” was at last readmitted to the Labour Party after four years on the outside.) Mayor Livingston is scheduled to launch IslamExpo in July 2006, one year after the deadly London bombings by Muslim extremists. The exposition, consisting of lectures, debates, and

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stand-up comedy routines, intends to show Islam in a more positive light than has been possible in the shadow of fringe extremists.1 Of course, the enmity is not one-sided. Normally the Bush administration’s loudest criticisms of Europe arise from within the foreign policy– related departments: State, Defense, or the National Security Council. But not long ago a highly influential think-tank scholar and economic adviser to the administration, Grover Norquist, argued that while there are reasons it will not ultimately prevail over America in a “battle of ideologies,” Europe remains America’s only true rival for global dominance with its promise of a welfare state, its sizable population, a gross domestic product comparable to America’s, and its military capability. He charges that Europeans possess “a driving sense of envy and anger at being surpassed by the barbarians of the New World.”2 Norquist points to Europe’s demographics and integration problems as prime factors in the continent’s weakness. Although not an administration official, he may reflect some part of administration sentiment and a growing concern among influential Americans. And the sentiments reach wider still, seen especially among many in the American religious right. Rabbi Dennis Praeger, a longtime Los Angeles radio talk show host and frequent commentator on international affairs, recently contributed to a collection of essays on America’s role as a superpower. To gain a sense of how Praeger sees the divisions between Europe and the United States, consider first his opinion of American foreign policy: America is a light in this dark world . . . No other country approaches America as a force for good on planet Earth. If a meteor destroyed the United States at this time, the world would be overrun by cruelty. The world needs a policeman, just as individual countries need policemen and humanity should thank God every day that it is the United States of America that has the power and the moral will to be the world’s policeman and not France, or China, or Russia or any other country.3

1. “London to Host Historic Exhibition on Islam,” Islam Online, January 23, 2006, http://www.islamonline.net/English/News/2006-01/23/article06.shtml, accessed January 25, 2006. 2. Grover Norquist, “The New Fifth Column: Politico; European Challenge to American Dominance.” 3. Surya Das and Tony Campolo, eds., Spiritual Perspectives on America’s Role as a Superpower, 66.

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Turning to the Middle East, Praeger spells out frankly what may be a commonly held view in America. One of the differences between the New and Old Worlds, Praeger believes, is the opposing interpretation of which side is to blame for ongoing conflict: “America believes that little Israel needs to be supported in its battle for survival against those who wish to annihilate the Jewish state. Europe believes that America and Israel are the problem, not Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Islamists.”4 Praeger puts his finger on a key difference between Americans and Europeans. According to a survey of fifteen EU member states, an average of 60 percent of respondents ranked Israel as the greatest threat to world peace, followed by Iran, North Korea, and then the United States. The Greeks were the only exception, 88 percent of them ranking the United States as the greatest threat. When this poll’s findings were released in November 2003, European leaders rushed to distance themselves from the survey, calling the study anti-Semitic. However, in a May 2003 survey of world opinions by the Pew Research Center, pluralities or majorities in twenty out of twenty-one populations declared that they believe the United States favors Israel over the Palestinians too greatly. Americans are the only exception. Even Israelis believe America favors Israel too much, with 47 percent holding this view, while 38 percent say the policy is fair, and 11 percent think the United States favors the Palestinians too much. These divergent views between Americans and Europeans over the Middle East have potent implications for transatlantic relations. Many of Europe’s Muslims share their host nations’ views on Israel, but the vehemence within Muslim communities is typically more pronounced. Consider how the following excerpts inextricably link Israel’s actions to America. First, from the popular English-language Web site IslamicAwakening.net: The Zionist-controlled Western media is predominantly biased against the Muslims . . . What is happening in Palestine is the genocide of Muslims. . . . The only solution to the problem of Palestine is to learn to speak the language that the Zionists understand. . . . Rather than organize demonstrations, protests and petitions, Muslims in every country and city could direct their energies into providing military training for their youths. One 4. Ibid., 67.

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Europe’s Muslim Dilemma and Muslim Europe’s Choice / 39 has to give credit to Israel, in which every male and female over 18 knows how to operate firearms of all sorts and is militarily trained. As an example, many man-hours go into organizing a demonstration: posters, leaflets, publicity, money, placards and banners, permission, word-of-mouth, etc. This money and these man-hours might be better spent by the local Muslim community getting together and sending, for example, 20 of their youths to attend legal advanced firearms training courses in countries like the USA or other countries where such training can be obtained legally.5

The Muslim Council of Britain has repeatedly decried Israel’s actions in Palestine. In a March 22, 2004, press release the MCB’s GeneralSecretary Iqbal Sacranie declared: “We hold the international community and the U.S. directly responsible for allowing the Israeli Occupation Forces to continue with its policy of wanton killing and terrorizing of Palestinian civilians. No amount of military force and assassinations will bring about a Final Solution to the ‘Palestinian problem.’”6 E E E

Finally, IslamOnline.net regularly posts fatwas, often about Israel. Below are the words of one commentator, Sheikh Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, described as a prominent Muslim scholar, who declared that all money used to purchase American and Zionist goods “eventually becomes bullets to be fired at the hearts of brothers and children in Palestine.” He continued: American goods, exactly like “Israeli” goods, are forbidden. It is also forbidden to advertise these goods. America today is a second Israel. It totally supports the Zionist entity. The usurper could not do this without the support of America. Israel’s unjustified destruction and vandalism of everything has been using American money, American weapons, and the American veto. America has done this for decades without suffering the consequences of any

5. “Call to End Demonstrations against Israel,” IslamicAwakening.com, http:// www.islamicawakening.com/viewarticle.php?articleID=730, accessed February 13, 2006. 6. “MCB Condemns Israel’s Terrorist Murder of Shaykh Ahmad Yasin,” Muslim Council of Britain, Press Release, March 22, 2004, http://www.mcb.org.uk/media /presstext.php?ann;id=77, accessed February 13, 2006.

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punishment or protests about their oppressive and prejudiced position from the Islamic world. The time has come for the Muslim Ummah to say NO to America, NO to its companies, and NO to its goods, which swamp our markets.7

As Europe’s Muslims wax in number and gain political power, they will likely further divide the West over Middle Eastern politics. What can be said of the state of transatlantic relations in light of all these remarks? Is it rhetoric or reality? Do these comments, and the survey data behind them, represent only a blip in an otherwise solid relationship, or do they signify a long-term transformation in the offing, a deepening rift between America and Europe driven by Muslim opinion and focused in part on Israel? As Chou En-Lai purportedly replied when asked about the impact of the French Revolution, it’s too early to tell. But if we are to look into the future, let us consider what demographic changes Europe is likely to undergo and how these may shape transatlantic affairs.

Face of the Future It’s New Year’s Eve 2020 and you have been invited to a very unusual party. You are there with ninety-nine other people to celebrate the world’s great diversity. To underscore the party’s theme, the one hundred guests are selected to exactly mirror, on a microcosm scale, the ethnic composition of the world’s 7.8 billion people. Fifty-six guests come from Asia. Of these, nineteen are Chinese and seventeen Indians. Sixteen come from Africa, thirteen of those from the sub-Saharan region. Seven hail from Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, while five are from Western Europe. Only four are from the United States, and only three were born in the Middle East. The majority live in cities, reflecting the first time in human history that most of the earth’s inhabitants no longer toil in the countryside. As will be the case by 2050, sixteen guests will be age sixty-five or older. But offsetting this aging is the counter-trend—the next big baby boom will occur predominantly in Muslim states: Pakistan, Afghanistan, 7. “Yusuf Al-Qaradawi,” Wikiverse: A World of Knowledge, http://yusuf-al-qaradawi .wikiverse.org/#Qaradawi’s%20boycott%20fatwa, accessed February 13, 2006.

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Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and Iraq. So at this party, white Judeo-Christian Europeans will be older while the Asian Muslims will be young. Demographers are keenly aware of the many social issues that will be associated with this aging, but policy makers have yet to take precautionary measures. The number of elderly is rising sharply as life expectancy increases in the industrialized nations. The world’s median age today is roughly 24, but by 2050 it is projected to be 44, 53 to 55 in Germany and Japan. Western Europe and Japan will gray the most. Italy, for example, was projected to have its elderly population reach 19 percent in 2003, with Japan, Germany, and Spain following close behind. At the same time that Europe’s mortality is falling, so too is its birthrate. Ethnic Europeans are having fewer children, and consequently their populations are shrinking. And with them shrinks the labor force. By 2050, Japan is expected to see its workforce—those ages 16 to 64—decrease by an extraordinary 37 percent. Italy’s workforce will fall by an even greater 39 percent, and Germany’s by 18 percent. France and Great Britain will experience drops of 11 and 12 percent. Conversely, the United States’ workforce is expected to grow by 33 percent.8 What happens to societies with aging populations and shrinking numbers of workers? Someone has to support those who retire. In most industrialized countries today, the ratio of workers to pensioners is 4:1, but by 2050 that ratio may drop to just 2:1. A halving of workers to retirees will put enormous strains on societies with aging populations, and Europe will likely face some critical readjustments as a result. Policymakers could attempt to lessen the crisis by encouraging delayed retirements. Maintaining a graying workforce could increase productivity, but this would require a major shift in long-held social values that place a high premium on the ability to retire in one’s sixties. But even such a change may not suffice to support the elderly who cannot work. If Europeans hope to maintain their living standards in retirement, more younger workers will have to be found. During Germany’s postwar reconstruction and ensuing economic miracle, Turkey, Morocco, and Tunisia were eager to sign agreements with Germany encouraging their citizens to migrate as guest workers. As the Muslim countries faced difficult economic times, the guest 8. These statistics are drawn from an unclassified study compiled by the Strategic Assessments Group of the Office for Transnational Issues, Central Intelligence Agency.

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worker program offered a chance to reduce the number of unemployed young men at home while simultaneously increasing their foreign exchange reserves coming in the form of remittances these men sent to their families back home. As Muslim states in North Africa and the Middle East, as well as those in South Asia and Indonesia, have growing young populations but struggling economies, these states and their citizens will again aggressively seek labor opportunities. As in the past, Europe will be an attractive target. This does not mean that European states will necessarily encourage Muslim immigration to solve their labor shortage, but it does mean that migratory labor from the developing world, and particularly the Muslim world, will be drawn to Europe, not least because of prior migratory patterns. Muslim communities are already in place in France, Germany, Britain, and several other Western European countries, making their transition to a foreign land that much easier. Fifty-six percent of Europeans recently surveyed in a Eurobarometer poll said they realize that Europe must have more immigrants to solve its labor shortage. Recognizing the inevitability of Muslim immigration, EU Justice and Home Affairs Commissioner Antonio Vitorino has stated that Europe must attract immigrants to satisfy its labor shortage, but he admits that integrating Muslims has been particularly difficult.9 The beginnings of a backlash can already be detected. Holland, once a safe haven for refugees, recently decided to deport twenty-six thousand asylum seekers, many of them Muslim, in an effort to stem the tide of its burgeoning Muslim underclass. In 1953 the floods for which the Dutch lowlands are famous left some eighteen hundred people dead in their wake. In response, the Dutch erected a series of dikes and dams to prevent another such disaster. The Dutch dubbed the project the “Delta Plan.” Almost immediately following hurricane Katrina, American experts traveled to Holland to study its system of dams in preparation for the rebuilding of New Orleans. But Holland is currently erecting a new kind of Delta Plan, this time to block a flood of Muslim migrants. As of early 2004, the population of Rotterdam, Holland’s secondlargest city, was 50 percent foreign. That figure is expected to swell to 60 percent in just a decade. According to the new Delta Plan, no new 9. Christopher Caldwell, “Europe Needs Its Immigrants,” Financial Times, May 1, 2004; “EU Commissioner Says Europe Needs Immigrants,” BBC Monitoring, January 22, 2004.

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refugees may settle in Rotterdam for the next five years, and no immigrants will be permitted in unless they can demonstrate an income 20 percent above the minimum wage. No new low-cost housing projects will be erected, and proficiency in the Dutch language will be a prerequisite for residency. In the wake of Theo Van Gogh’s assassination at the hands of a Muslim extremist, the federal government has recently turned dramatically away from its once-lenient immigration policies. Even if the EU could attract sufficient numbers of non-Muslim workers and even if it could tighten its borders to keep Muslim migrants out—both of which would be challenging—Europe’s own Muslim populations are rising in number. Philip Martin has observed that the ethnic German population is projected to decline to 62 million by the year 2030, making foreigners 17 percent of the total population. The population of major cities such as Frankfurt and Stuttgart is expected to be 50 percent foreign within two generations. Other projections of even higher fertility rates among immigrants suggest that Germany will be 30 percent foreign by 2030.10 Many of these will be Muslims. If the European states choose to draw more heavily on this labor pool, then they will need to make citizens out of them. As more and more Muslims are enfranchised, their political power will continue to grow. What impact this voting bloc will have on domestic and foreign policies—if any Muslim voting pattern emerges—remains to be seen. But whether their political or economic power expands or not, Europe’s Muslims will have an increasingly significant impact on the continent, if only by force of their numbers alone. Of course, demographic projections must always be taken with a grain of salt. They extrapolate current trends, which could change. The U.S. Census Bureau, for example, has had to revise its predictions for South Africa. In 2000 it projected that that country’s population would rise by 6 million people in 2025, but with the wildfire spread of AIDS, the bureau now expects South Africa’s population instead to fall by 9 million by that year. Aside from unexpected outbreaks and natural disasters, there are other reasons to question the projected explosion of the Muslim birthrate. As minorities in a society enter into the middle class, they often adopt the reproductive patterns of the majority. If Europe’s Muslims improve their social and economic standing, it is possible that they will tend toward having fewer children than at present. So far, in the fourth generation 10. Philip L. Martin, “Germany: Reluctant Land of Immigration.”

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of postwar Muslim immigrant births, birthrates remain high. However, Muslims on the whole still represent part of the underclass, overrepresented in unemployment and earning lower wages. Many European Muslims are struggling second-class citizens, if they are citizens at all. If ethnic Europeans, concerned about the strains on the system resulting from rising numbers of European Muslims, want Muslims to have fewer children, then helping them to integrate and elevate themselves into society would be one useful step toward this end. Demographic pressures will produce what Stephen Castles has dubbed “an age of migration.” Castles, one of the leading scholars of international migration, predicts that this century will witness the greatest transfer of human capital in history. The principal factors likely to spur this new migration wave include a widening gap between rich and poor nations, increasing numbers of free trade agreements, and war. Demographic growth, Castles notes, has usually accompanied political conflict and war, and although international migration has long been a salient feature of human history, it has never been as pervasive or as socioeconomically significant as it is today. Although immigrants currently represent only 2 percent of world population, their ranks are almost certain to swell. Even at the 2 percent level, immigrants have a far greater impact than their numbers might suggest. They send home nearly $67 billion U.S. per year, and in many cases, such as for Mexico, their remittances constitute a critical income stream for their home country. Immigrants are also expanding their range of target countries. Beyond the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, migrants from poorer nations are traveling to Greece, Italy, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, as well as to oil-rich nations in the Middle East. And when migrants transplant themselves in sufficient numbers, they typically change their host country’s character. Most transnational migratory laborers are rural people, but they often settle in cities. This presents challenges not just for their own transition but also for the host country. Moreover, as Castles puts it, “The nation-state, as it has developed since the 18th century, is premised on the idea of cultural as well as political unity.”11

11. Stephen Castles, The Age of Migration: International Population Movements in the Modern World, 15.

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Demographic shifts and migratory patterns are two ineluctable pressures upon Europe in the twenty-first century. One other trend of concern involves the world’s ever-rising need for energy. As China and India continue to modernize at a dizzying pace, followed by other smaller but still burgeoning economies in Southeast Asia and beyond, their increased energy consumption will drive world market prices ever higher. Greater energy expenditures will reduce Europe’s available resources for other needs. Those cuts will most likely affect social services. Thus, the poorest in society, which typically includes recent immigrants, and which currently means the Muslim underclass, will suffer the most, a scenario certain only to exacerbate Europe’s integration dilemma. Doomsayers have long predicted the end of world oil resources, yet exploration has always unearthed previously undiscovered supplies. That may finally be changing. We may have reached the point where all of the earth’s major oil fields have been located. New sources may be found, but their yields are not expected to alter the overall downward trend. Assessing the debate among energy experts, Jeremy Rifkin, head of a Washington-based think tank on global trends, argues persuasively that even under the most optimistic scenarios, world oil supplies will peak within the next twenty to thirty years. Rifkin argues that although oil supplies will continue to be exploited, the simple law of supply and demand will drive prices significantly higher once it is clear that the supply peak has been reached. At that point a new influx of wealth will flow into that country which sits atop the largest supply.12 Saudi Arabia’s power in international affairs, Rifkin maintains, will reach new heights unmatched by the 1970s, when it wielded the oil embargo against America with devastating effectiveness. Flushed with even greater wealth, how will the Saudi kingdom spend its riches? Most likely it will continue to do what it has been doing for decades: namely, export its fundamentalist brand of Islam to the Muslim Diaspora, only more so. Europe’s Muslims, already beneficiaries of mosques and educational programs compliments of Saudi largesse, will probably become recipients of even greater amounts of Saudi petro dollars. These funds will be invested in more mosques, more training in Wahhabism,

12. Jeremy Rifkin, The Hydrogen Economy: The Creation of the World-Wide Energy Web and the Redistribution of Power on Earth.

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and closer ties between Europe’s Muslims and Saudi imams. In short, the rise in world oil prices could translate into greater Saudi influence among Europe’s Muslim millions. If, when that day arrives, Europe’s Muslims are still poorly integrated into European society, their susceptibility to extremist messages could prove explosive. In the face of such daunting pressures—high Muslim birthrates, global immigration patterns, the looming threat of shifting power balances, and rising energy costs—how can Europe best handle its Muslim issue? Oxford historian Timothy Garton Ash believes that Europe can learn much from America. Calling for a European version of “Californication,” Garton Ash believes the answer lies in intermarriage between ethnic Europeans and Muslim residents, as assimilation of the latter into the larger society will naturally follow: The other day, I walked into the Stanford students’ union foyer as an Islamic prayer meeting was just dispersing . . . if you had only heard a tape-recording of their conversations at parting you would not have been able to distinguish them . . . from any other American students. If there is a society on earth that can still perform the extraordinary feat of forging some sort of unity out of such diversity—e pluribus unum, as the coins say—it is America. In theory, it should be easier for Turks, Moroccans, Algerians and Pakistanis to feel at home in Europe than in America, because Europe is just a loose, diverse continent rather than a single nation. In practice, it’s the other way round. So we should learn from the Americans. What Europe needs is more Californication.13

Garton Ash is correct that California has, in part, achieved some degree of racial mixing and subsequent assimilation of diverse ethnic groups, but in America overall only 2 percent of marriages are interracial.14 Europe may be even more resistant to such a solution. Though Californication may have its merits, there are other options open to Europe. But before examining some of those policy options, we should first consider one of the major problems embedded in Europe’s Muslim

13. Timothy Garton Ash, “E Pluribus Unum, California Style,” The Guardian, August 14, 2003. 14. Jason Fields and Lynne M. Casper, “America’s Families and Living Arrangements.”

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dilemma. The current debate over Muslim head scarves underscores the pressing need to create integration strategies, and provides a window into the broader and more dangerous looming crisis.

Europe’s Headscarf Headaches In November of 2005, Americans and Europeans sat transfixed before their television screens, uncertain what to make of the explosive spate of car burnings convulsing Paris suburbs. After a series of missteps by French political leaders, the government promised (not for the first time) a substantial aid package to help lift France’s immigrants up from the underclass. While the entire episode puzzled casual observers, the car burnings were no surprise to those who had been following the situation in recent years. France, home to Europe’s largest number of Muslims, an estimated five million, has failed in the integration challenge. The predominantly immigrant ghettos surrounding several of France’s major cities are pockets of poverty tinged with an undercurrent of violence. These often alienated and frustrated minorities periodically experience upsurges of violence, with the November car burnings being the most dramatic to date. One source of their alienation has been the ongoing perception of discrimination not only in the labor market but also in the religious sphere. Symbols are like magic mirrors: people see in them what they want to see. A Confederate flag is a symbol of Southern pride to some, while to others it is a mark of oppression. To some a Christian cross represents resurrection, but to others it means persecution and pain. Symbols remind us of our unique experience with the larger issue they represent, and they reflect many of our deepest longings and fears. This could not be more true of the hijab, the Muslim headscarf and veil currently causing so much furor across the continent. Non-Muslim Europeans sometimes look upon the hijab and see 9/11. What Muslims see is more complex. In December 2003, the U.S. State Department released its annual Religious Freedom report to Congress. According to law, the State Department is required to review and assess the degree of religious freedom afforded to peoples in every country. This is the report that typically rounds up the usual suspects—China, Burma, Sudan, Iraq, and company—and rebukes them for not providing a more tolerant atmosphere

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for minority religious groups. But this year the American ambassadorat-large for religious freedom, John Hanford, could not avoid taking a shot at France. Earlier that same week, President Chirac, after hearing the report from an investigative committee he established, decided to ban all religious symbols from public schools. This ban includes Catholic crosses and Jewish skullcaps, but its true target was the Muslim headscarf. France’s headscarf headaches date back more than a decade, long before terrorists attacked New York. A 1989 survey revealed that 75 percent of French citizens opposed the wearing of veils in schools, with another 17 percent indifferent and only 6 percent in favor. Today, in the wake of 9/11 and a rising tide of Islamophobia across the continent, reactions have grown even more intense. France is founded on principles of separation of church and state. The wearing of religious symbols in public places, officials insist, threatens this fundamental value. French schools have expelled young girls for wearing the scarf, and mediators have been sent into schools to help defuse the recurrent conflicts. Until Chirac’s ban on all religious symbols, Catholic students were permitted to wear crosses and Jews their yarmulkes. The hypocrisy of this policy was never lost on France’s Muslims. Before the ban, Nour, a thirty-four-year-old Algerian, expressed her frustration with France’s discriminatory policy as follows: Honestly, you know, the secular school, it doesn’t miss celebrating Easter, and when they celebrate Easter, it doesn’t bother me. My daughter comes home with painted Easter eggs and everything; it’s pretty; it’s cute. There are classes that are over 80 percent Maghrebin in the suburbs, and they celebrate Easter, they celebrate Christmas, you see? And that’s not a problem for the secular school. And I don’t find that fair.15

Besma, a thirty-four-year-old Tunisian woman, pointed to Jewish freedoms. “There are schools in France, or universities in France, where there are no exams on Saturday because it’s the Jewish Sabbath in the public schools, and nobody talks about it.”16 15. Caitlin Killian, “The Other Side of the Veil: North African Women in France Respond to the Head Scarf Affair.” 16. Ibid.

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To many French Muslims, the previous state policy seemed both hypocritically anti-Muslim and unwisely backward in its effects on Muslim women. But Chirac’s ban did not remedy the situation. In fact, thousands of Muslim women flooded the streets of France to protest it. What they want is not to have all symbols banned, but to have all religious symbols welcomed. Reactions to the hijab among ethnic French have grown even more intense than in decades past. The common perception is that the veil’s increasing prevalence signifies a rise in Islamic extremism, making the scarf an enticing target for those who feel France’s traditional culture is under siege. Yet rarely do the headscarf opponents ask what motives lie behind the veil. Some women elect to wear scarves and veils even when it is not required. Rather than reflecting a rise in militancy, Muslim women choose to veil for a variety of reasons. Some wear the hijab to appear righteous and pure, thereby gaining respect within their local community. Other women find the hijab, unlike revealing Western dress, a coat of armor against the jeering comments and sexual harassment that sometimes come from men in public places. Some women veil for economic reasons: the hijab is economical (you need only two or three to complete your wardrobe), and it conceals one’s class, which Western clothes often expose. Older women sometimes veil simply to hide their graying hair. Of course, others are compelled to veil by their husbands and fathers, though this group appears to be in the minority. For these school-age girls, veiling is sometimes the only option, lest their parents forbid them from attending mixed-gender classes. In such cases, Chirac’s policy could prevent many women from getting an education, inhibiting their integration into French society. The motivations for veiling are manifold, from personal safety to religious conservatism, but rarely do they stem from political extremism. Above all, younger Muslim women are choosing to veil as a means of staking out their identity in a highly secular and often alienating society. Evidence of Europe’s secularity abounds, but two recent surveys put the matter in sharp relief. When asked two questions—whether they are members of a religious denomination and whether they attend services once a month or more—the results revealed a striking gap. In Britain, 83.4 percent confirmed affiliation with a particular religion, but only 18.9 percent said they attend services at least once per month or more. In Germany, 76.6 percent claimed religious affiliation, while

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only 30 percent attend regular services. And in France, a mere 57 percent identify with a particular religion, and an astonishing 12 percent say they attend services once per month or more.17 Church attendance is one indicator of religiosity, but notions about morality may be an even stronger measure. According to a Pew Research poll of more than sixteen thousand people in twenty countries in May 2003, majorities in most countries around the world, including the United States, say that it is necessary to believe in God in order to be a moral person. Europeans are more likely to maintain that one can be moral without God. Ethnic Europeans are not alone in their secularity. Many of Europe’s Muslims share their host nations’ low service attendance rates. Tariq Ramadan, a leading figure among Europe’s Muslims, estimates that at least 80 percent of Europe’s Muslims do not practice their religion regularly and do not perform their daily prayers, and that less than 40 percent attend the Friday mosque service. Ramadan and others, however, are quick to note the rising levels of religiosity among the youngest generation of European Muslims, those in their twenties and younger.18 Perhaps in response to their elders’ lack of religiosity and their society’s failure to integrate them, many younger Muslims are reclaiming their religion. Adopting the headscarf is one way of defining themselves on a continent that sometimes seems fanatically secular and from which they often feel excluded. At the root of Chirac’s ban lies the fear of Muslim extremism, but laying siege to a symbol will not secure the state, especially when that symbol rarely reflects the extremism he hopes to ban. French students have long worn crosses and skullcaps in school, yet the country has not collapsed. Chirac has permitted the wearing of discrete symbols, such as crosses worn under clothing, but rather than banning all conspicuous religious symbols as a means of excluding the Muslim garb, a wiser policy would be to include the hijab among acceptable symbols. This would do more to incorporate Muslims into French society, reducing everyone’s sense of siege. But fixating on the scarf only shrouds the deeper problems from view. Schoolgirls in headscarves do not threaten French stability, but millions of alienated Muslims just might. Instead of laying siege to symbols, 17. Jeff Chu, “O Father, Where Art Thou?” 18. Tariq Ramadan, To Be a European Muslim.

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European leaders should be devising coherent integration strategies for their Muslim millions. If they can focus on the substantive issues now, they can still avoid domestic fragmentation and wrenching social change. Change, of course, must come from both sides. Just as France and the other European states must develop integration strategies, so must their Muslim residents find ways of adapting better to European society. As divisive as the headscarf has been between ethnic Europeans and their Muslim residents, it has at times been even more divisive within the Muslim community. Samira Bellil was only thirteen when she experienced her first rape. She was living in one of the Paris suburbs that have become Muslim ghettos. Samira did not wear the hijab. She wore Western clothes and was drawn to stylish apparel. And in the depressed suburbs, electrified by an undercurrent of anger and frustration, she was an easy target of male aggression. Admiring a boy who led a local gang and wanting to be liked, Samira inadvertently became a fils a cave, or “cellar girl.” Cellar girls are young women who are repeatedly gang raped, shared by men as Samira put it, like recorded music you would loan to a friend. She was frequently beaten badly and found little chance of escape.19 Samira’s case is not unique. Many of the Muslim suburbs around France’s major cities are experiencing rising incidences of rape. Some Muslim women have found the hijab a talisman against sexual harassment, but others resist it, seeing it as an oppressive symbol of subjugation.20 Furious at the lack of support from French police and outraged at the government’s apparent lack of concern, several young rape victims have formed organizations to draw public attention to the problem. The Ni Putes, Ni Soumises (roughly translated, “neither whores nor servants”) movement has gained national attention for this cause, displaying enormous posters of rape victims on Bastille Day in Paris.21 Much of the anger inside the ghettos stems from socioeconomic failure. France’s Muslims, who originate mainly from the Maghreb, are vastly overrepresented in poverty, crime, and unemployment. Their

19. Samira Bellil, Dans l’Enfer des tournantes [In Gang Rape Hell]. 20. For an intriguing study of Muslim women’s motivations for veiling voluntarily see Arlene MacLeon, Accommodation Protest. 21. Christopher Dickey and Marie Valla, “Sexism in the Cites: Islamic Women in Paris Band Together against Abuse.”

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ranks consist mainly of Algerians, at approximately 1.5 million, followed by Moroccans at roughly 1 million, and some 350,000 Tunisians. France is home to the same number of asylum seekers. Not all of its Muslims are Arabs, for some 315,000 Turks also reside there. Unlike in Germany, where citizenship laws have historically been more restrictive, nearly half of France’s Muslims are citizens. Predominantly segregated in communities around major cities such as Paris (where 38 percent of France’s Muslims live) and Marseilles (which is one-quarter Muslim), these Muslims exist in ghettos of depressed neighborhoods, reinforcing their alienation from the larger society.22 In order to redress some of these economic disparities, the French government has engaged in a type of affirmative action since 1998, giving Muslim citizens—particularly the young—greater employment opportunities in the public sector.23 The government has also created antiracism organizations as a means of giving Muslims a political voice in nonreligious groups. Despite such proactive measures, progress has been limited. More than one thousand Islamic associations and ten Muslim cultural associations exist across France, as well as many ethnic organizations, which may include mostly Muslims. Although many of these groups focus on charitable or educational issues, there are also fundamentalist and Islamist groups that profit from the freedoms of a democratic state. Funded by the World Islamic League in Saudi Arabia, the Tabligh movement, like the Turkish Milli Goros movement, seeks a return to traditional Islamic ways, stricter observance of Islamic laws and customs, and an end to corrupt governments. If France’s Muslims are not integrated, membership in and support for the more extreme Islamic groups could easily grow. Like France, Germany has experienced considerable uncertainty over the headscarf issue. The wearing of Muslim dress in Germany’s public schools had been causing controversy for several years before September 2003, when Fereshta Ludin, an Afghan woman who had been working as a schoolteacher in Germany for several years, refused to remove her headscarf while in the classroom. Her case found its way to the German Supreme Court. The court ruled that preventing teachers 22. For more on the composition of France’s Muslims see Shireen Hunter, Islam: Europe’s Second Religion. 23. Ibid., 3–28.

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from wearing the veil was illegal under German federal law, but it permitted individual German states to make their own rulings on the issue. Four states immediately declared that they would enact headscarf bans, including Ludin’s own state of Baden-Wurtemberg. Banning symbols such as headscarves and veils has two damaging effects. First, it furthers the mistaken view that these symbols primarily represent political extremism and misses the complex and varied meanings behind the veil. Second, it distracts attention from the real and far more pressing need to redress the socioeconomic inequality of Europe’s Muslim underclass. Until the European states devise and implement coherent, long-term integration strategies, the continent risks further alienating a burgeoning minority. The repercussions of continued failure to integrate Muslims will likely include domestic fragmentation and increased Islamic extremism.

Policy Options Europe’s Muslim dilemma concerns the United States nearly as much as it does Europe. Given the dangers of Islamic extremism and its potential increase across the European continent, American and European officials should be joining forces to combat it. Below are a number of collaborative measures that would simultaneously provide opportunities for combating extremism while narrowing the current transatlantic divide.

Europe’s Muslims Need a Head Start America possesses a powerful secret weapon in the war on terror— one so secret that its creators haven’t yet realized it exists. But if Europe could obtain the weapon’s blueprints, it could combat the roots of terror, integrate its Muslim residents, and bolster transatlantic relations in a single strike. Best of all, deploying this weapon would be a naked act of preemption, one that the global community could admire. Launched in the United States in 1964, the Head Start program sought to provide early education for children of low-income families. Though targeted at the poorest classes, the program actually assisted many ethnic and racial minorities, as the problems of class and race are

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commonly intertwined. Head Start hoped to head off the social problems that often result from disproportionate school drop-out rates for minorities: higher unemployment, social alienation, petty and sometimes violent crime. Since the program’s founding, more than twenty million children have graduated from its courses, acquiring social and academic skills. While critics have charged that Head Start’s graduates have not performed as well as their more affluent peers, the program’s defenders note that the children have fared far better than their underprivileged counterparts who never experienced it. Although it has not remedied all the inequities of class and race, Head Start has had a positive impact on many of its participants and the society in which they live. If adapted to European needs, Head Start could play a critical role in uplifting Europe’s Muslim underclass. The critical point here is not to replicate Head Start or debate its merits in the United States, but to adapt it to Europe’s needs and make it work. Europe’s failure to integrate its Muslim residents is troubling, especially if, as some scholars believe, a trend exists among Europe’s younger Muslims toward a sense of pan-Islamism.24 Unlike their parents or grandparents, the younger generations find themselves identifying with Muslims around the world, particularly those seen as under siege, rather than with those hailing from their own countries of origin. As satellite television and the Internet bring the suffering of Muslims to Berlin and Paris living rooms, as news media graphically depict the embattlement of Muslims from Chechnya to Kosovo, from Albania to Bosnia, from Indonesia to Afghanistan, and from Palestine to Iraq, Europe’s younger Muslims may increasingly identify with those perceived victims, especially if they themselves feel alienated from European society. The combination of increased viewership of Turkish and Arabic channels on satellite television and Muslim parents who lack their host country’s language skills means that a new generation of Muslim children receive limited exposure to European languages and culture. In previous decades, immigrants had little choice but to learn the host nation’s language, but with the proliferation of modern global media, access to satellite TV and the Internet make it possible to remain more 24. Dr. Jocelyne Cesari of Harvard University expressed this opinion in interviews with the author in October 2002. Dr. Cesari has been studying trends among Europe’s Muslims for more than ten years and heads the Network on Comparative Research of Muslims and Islam in Europe.

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closely connected to foreign events, all in the mother tongue. Without an early immersion in the host country’s language and customs, Muslim children are more likely to leave school too soon, struggle finding work, and drift down the slippery slope of social alienation, and may in some instances turn to violence. To avert this slippery slope and keep Muslim children in school, Europe should enlist the aid of American Head Start administrators and teachers to establish Head Start for Muslim preschoolers, adapting the program to fit local needs. Classes may be held in local community centers and can cover a wide range of subjects, from language to nutrition to social etiquette and customs. In the past, Berlin and other German cities have created more specialized adult literacy programs for foreign-born workers. When organizers discovered that Muslim mothers were only attending programs that they could bring their children to, providing child-care facilities increased attendance. Wherever the classes are held, the program may have greater success if Muslim mothers are permitted to attend. Head Start teachers could be drawn from the Muslim community, particularly women possessing fluency in the host country’s language along with a strong knowledge of European customs. Employing Muslim women would give them a greater stake in European society and reduce their sense of alienation. Teachers could be assisted by the many student teachers seeking placements for their practicums, and in Germany by young men serving their Civildienst. This would enable young ethnic Europeans to interact closely with Muslims, creating greater familiarity with a culture that too often seems foreign and opaque. Of course, the program would require state funding at a time when many European economies remain flat. However, by drawing on labor from Civildienst men and student teachers, along with Muslim women, some of whom may wish to volunteer as aids, the labor costs of employing professional day-care workers could be reduced. If, at the outset, the program could resist the temptation to establish a cumbersome bureaucracy, administrative expenses could potentially be modest. Whatever the costs, if a European Head Start succeeds, the investments today will be far less than the costs of social fragmentation and unrest that could plague the continent in the future. By providing intensive early language, culture, and basic preschool education, many of the later difficulties Muslim children experience in school can be reduced. This is a long-term strategy that can have

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a palpable impact on integration fifteen to twenty years from now, just as the demographic pressures from rising Muslim birthrates will be imposing their greatest strains on European society. There are no guarantees that better integration will necessarily prevent terrorism. But the experience of other countries, including the United States, suggests that alienated minorities with little or no access to political power and who feel socially and economically disadvantaged often produce a fringe element that turns to violence. Sometimes the power of a single idea can be more effective than the shock and awe of overwhelming force. If Europe is to win the race against domestic fragmentation from a demographic time bomb, it must give its Muslim children a generous head start.

Tapping an Intelligence Pool The United States is blessed with tremendous wealth, and as a result it funnels much of that wealth into intelligence. The United States spends more than $30 billion each year on its intelligence community, more than what all but five other countries spend on their entire militaries. With such wealth at its disposal, the government has focused on high-tech intelligence gathering (SIGINT), from satellite imagery to telecommunication intercepts. The downside of the high-tech advantage is that America has neglected its human intelligence (HUMINT) capabilities. In other words, America needs more spies. With respect to Muslim nations, America suffers from a spy gap. Britain, France, and Germany possess some HUMINT advantages over the United States in parts of the Muslim world. There are remarkably few Arabic speakers in the U.S. government and its intelligence community—far fewer than are needed. No one outside of the CIA knows exactly how many Arab Americans it currently employs, but former CIA officials have publicly stated that America is lacking in this regard. One reason may be that America’s foreign policies toward the Arab world, and the Muslim world more generally, do not attract Arab Americans. While Chinese Americans, raised in a liberal, capitalist democracy, might be eager to work against the more threatening aspects of Communist China, many Arab Americans may perceive an extreme pro-Israel bias over decades of U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

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The post-9/11 Islamophobia and heightened scrutiny of Muslim Americans may have repelled potential recruits still further. A vast potential pool of American spies could be tapped not in America but in Europe. Europe’s Muslims—those who favor a secular, liberal democracy—could serve as the best informants on terrorist cells. They could infiltrate the more radical mosques of Hamburg, London, and Marseilles. They could report on the anti-American sermons being preached. And they could join terrorist cells to learn their plans and expose them before their violence is committed. The United States could also be outsourcing some of its HUMINT needs. Germany has operatives and agents in important regions where the United States is absent. German HUMINT in Tehran, Tashkent, and parts of the Arab world may often be superior to American sources. The United States should increase its intelligence-sharing with Germany by extending greater SIGINT access in return for on-the-ground information. At present America shares varying degrees of intelligence primarily with Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Its reluctance to extend intelligence-sharing agreements with Germany dates back to the Cold War, when fears that West Germany could be infiltrated by East German spies precluded stronger cooperation. Today those old concerns must be discarded. In light of new threats, America should be strengthening its intelligence-sharing arrangements with trusted allies. A limited exchange of SIGINT for HUMINT with Germany would be in America’s best interest.

Increase Aid in Kind Continuing to foster economic development in Muslim countries is a worthy goal that can have a positive impact on Europe’s Muslim dilemma. American and EU aid to Muslim states, including the Palestinian Authority, should naturally be conditional upon reform and the demonstrated combating of terrorist elements within their societies, but a greater percentage of aid should be given in kind. Rather than providing the funds to purchase computers or schoolbooks, the United States and European Union should provide the books and computers themselves, thereby precluding the possibility of those funds being mismanaged, aiding corruption, or being funneled toward terrorists. American and EU

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overseas development aid programs should act in tandem, determining who can provide particular aid in kind to particular states. The Bush administration’s new Millennium Challenge Account could be modified to include aid in kind, determined after discussions with EU representatives. If economic conditions and employment opportunities improve within Muslim states, the migration pressures upon Europe will lessen.

Establish Transatlantic Panel on Muslim Integration The United States and EU nations with significant Muslim populations (Germany, France, Britain, and Holland) should explore the linkages between disaffected, long-term resident Muslim populations and global/domestic terrorism. A panel of officials and scholars should be established to examine Muslim identity and integration issues in democratic societies and provide recommendations for engaging domestic Muslim residents. By comparing the experiences of various democratic governments with Muslim populations the panel should be able to offer practical solutions to address a common threat—the threat from disaffected Muslim minorities, whatever form it may take, be it domestic unrest, crime, unemployment, or extremism.

Conclusion Unless demographic trends are reversed, Europe must face the implications of a sharply rising Muslim population. To reduce the likelihood of social unrest and Islamic extremism, the United States and Europe must jointly devise integration strategies for Europe’s Muslim millions. The time to advance cooperative initiatives is now, before the rift in relations widens. There is still a West, though its face is inexorably changing. To reestablish the unity of the Cold War era, the United States and EU must cooperate on resolving Europe’s Muslim dilemma, for it is one of the few critical issues with the potential to fracture the West for good.

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Cultural Changes, Immigration, and Transatlantic Relations Michael Radu

You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state. — M I LT ON F R I E D M A N

F E W A MONG E V E N T H E MOST AT L A N T IC IST COM M E N TATOR S WOU L D

deny that a divergence of positions, if not outright conflict, has emerged between the United States and many of its NATO allies on key foreign policy matters. The debate involves European criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the American responses to terrorism, along with larger questions that include Europe’s role as a political power. Simply put, the debate is over the very nature and substance of the fifty-six-year-old transatlantic linkage. But why has the question emerged in such sharp terms now, and what is the role of Islamic terrorism in defining it? One answer is that divergent cultural, political, and demographic changes within both the United States and its NATO allies have gathered such a momentum as to raise serious questions over the very existence, let alone cultural and legal unity, of something called “the West.” One of the most important of those changes is the issue of immigration: its magnitude, nature, and, especially in Europe, its direct link to Islam and Islamism. Europeans often make a distinct assessment of Islamism, having had a different experience with it. Now that Islamist terrorism is the major focus of U.S. foreign policy, transatlantic disputes seem deeper than ever. This chapter examines the connection between cultural changes in Europe and the United States, the role immigration 59

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(especially Muslim) plays in that cultural change, and the resulting divergences in transatlantic views on terrorism and security in general. Since the end of the Cold War, Western Europe has relied on American security guarantees far less than it did before 1989. Anti-Americanism, which always remained in the intellectual and popular background in countries such as France and Spain, has also revived over the past decade and a half, as more European politicians are able to gain votes by criticizing the United States. Analysts have discussed ad infinitum how the end of the Soviet threat changed the Atlantic alliance, but few have considered the disparate impact of international migration. Mass immigration to the United States may not directly affect transatlantic relations, but its European counterpart has shaped public attitudes and policies in Western Europe. Immigration shadows domestic perceptions of foreign issues in Europe and the policy debates that follow, whether on Islamic terrorism in general or the more specific issues of Afghanistan or Iraq. Whether immigration is treated as a legal or a demographic and cultural matter, the differences between the two sides of the Atlantic regarding its nature, size, impact, and foreign policy implications are real and growing. The issue of immigration and border control is equally acute on both sides of the Atlantic, as evidenced by the domestic controversy stirred by President Bush’s policy statements on immigration and by the even more heated debates within the EU and its individual countries, but its roots, impact, and treatment are increasingly different.

Immigration, Cultural Change, and Cleavages Globalization brought migration of large populations from lessdeveloped or undeveloped countries to the First World countries and from undemocratic or repressive states to democratic or more open ones. The pattern holds true in the West as well as in other developed regions, such as Singapore, the other Asian “tigers,” and South Africa. It creates strikingly similar reactions in the receiving countries that include social, cultural, and increasingly political symptoms of rejection, most often expressed as pressure to control the influx by imposing various restrictions. When authorities in Singapore, Pretoria, Copenhagen, Paris, and Washington react in similar ways to mass immigration, a significant trend is clear that demands closer examination.

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In the case of Western Europe or, more precisely, the EU memberstates prior to the May 2004 expansion (the EU now includes Central and East Europe as well), two parallel developments have been in conflict, with immigration and its side-effect—terrorism—at the center. On the one hand, the EU is being pushed toward becoming a federation, with individual states losing more and more control over their sovereign attributes to the unelected Brussels bureaucracy, a process whose main engine is the Franco-German alliance, supported from the sidelines by Belgium and Luxembourg. Supranational institutions at the EU level routinely and legally supplant decisions made democratically at the national level. The result is a decline in states’ power, identity, and autonomy. Thus, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice, both based in Strasbourg, have increasingly become de facto tribunals of last resort for a variety of cases. Accordingly, Germany has been forced to accept women, and the United Kingdom gays, into their militaries, and ecologist vandals in the UK have obtained the “right” to public funds for their defense. Appeals were made in the late 1990s for “universal jurisdiction,” whereby any country could claim criminal jurisdiction over crimes committed outside their country, regardless of the victim or perpetrator’s nationality, on the rationale that some crimes are a threat to the entire world. Belgium, Netherlands, Spain, and Germany have already engaged in such exercises. The United States is not immune to this trend. Then U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor remarked at an October 2003 address at the Southern Center for International Studies in Atlanta, “I suspect that over time we will rely increasingly, or take notice at least increasingly, on international and foreign courts in examining domestic issues.” Justice O’Connor did not, however, speak for the entire court. Justice Antonin Scalia noted in his dissent in Lawrence v. Texas that the court “should not impose foreign moods, fads, or fashions on Americans.”1 Several factors operate against this trend toward centralization within the EU. To begin with, different perceptions of the impact of immigration, especially Muslim immigration, on national culture and identity have recently resulted in divergent immigration policies within 1. “Danger from Foreign Legal Precedent,” Editorial, Washington Times, March 25, 2004.

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the EU. Thus Denmark and the Netherlands have dramatically curtailed the number of asylum requests approved. At the same time, Spain has given amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in 2005. Such disparities have long-term implications, a fact recognized by the EU. Hence, a Vienna meeting of interior ministers in January 2006 decided to increase intracommunity cooperation on matters of refugees and asylum. The ministers noted that while in 2004 Austria granted refugee status to more than 50 percent of applicants, Greece only accepted 0.3 percent, and that while a Chechen asylum applicant had a 90 percent chance of success in Austria, he has virtually none in neighboring Slovakia.2 In addition, new members from Eastern Europe are protective of their newly recovered, postcommunist, and post–Warsaw Pact or Soviet Union sovereignty, and still perceive a security threat from Russia.3 Since only the United States can help them against this threat, they also insisted on joining NATO. Nationalism retains its potency, as separatist movements (especially in Spain) and nativist parties indicate in different ways. In addition, none of the new EU members has any experience with mass immigration, nor, judging by their history and recent statements, any desire to gain it. Eastern European national cultural identity also provides a counterweight to European institutions in Brussels. While many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), political pressure groups, and parties seek to preserve national or local cultural identity, their Brussels-supported counterparts—especially the “human rights” groups—seek to further dissolve, in the name of human rights, national sovereignty. Thus they strongly support the Strasbourg courts and their supranational jurisdictional claims. Relations between faith-based institutions and the broader society have also been developing differently on the two sides of the Atlantic. In the United States, religiosity is, if anything, on the rise. Many Christian denominations—particularly neo-Protestant groups—as well as nonChristian faiths, including Muslims, are growing. The balance between church and state, and increasingly religion in the public sphere itself,

2. Thomas Ferenczi, “L’afflux de réfugiés oblige les 25 à rapprocher leurs pratiques en matière d’accueil et d’expulsion,” Le Monde, January 14, 2006. 3. Those include, since 2004, Poland, the Czech and Slovak Republics, Hungary, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia, with Romania and Bulgaria scheduled to join in 2007.

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may seem under attack in the United States, but the assault comes from the unelected judiciary and struggles against both popular opinion and broader social trends. In Europe, despite some Christian denominations being “state religions” (the Church of England, or Lutheranism in Denmark, Sweden until 2000, and Norway), pervasive secularism has made these constitutional provisions practically irrelevant and thus unenforceable. When a state-paid Lutheran pastor in Denmark recently denied the basic tenets of Christianity, let alone Lutheranism, he received significant public support for his claim to continue to receive state salary—as his freedom-of-conscience “right.” The Right Reverend Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has consistently held to “progressive” positions on homosexual clergy and civil unions despite fundamental—and majority—theological challenges from conservative Canadian, American, and Third World dioceses.4 Meanwhile, fewer than 10 percent of Western Europeans attend church or practice their religion seriously. A recent Pew Research Center poll found that among EU members, only 11 percent of Czech, 21 percent of German, 27 percent of Italian, and 33 percent of British respondents consider religion important, compared to 59 percent of Americans, 91 percent of Pakistanis, 88 percent of Bangladeshis, 97 percent of Senegalese, and 65 percent of Turks.5 That the latter four made up a majority of immigrants to Western Europe cannot but signal potential conflict. Why is this relevant? Because it demonstrates the sharp contrast, and potential conflict, between the trend in Europe and the reality in countries that provide the bulk of its new immigrants. In 2004 the German polling firm GFK published a report confirming Europeans’ declining attachment to religion, noting that in every country, attachment to any religion is directly correlated to age: the younger the person, the less religious. Thus the percentage of Western Europeans ages fourteen to twenty-nine who identify themselves with a religion is 58 percent, against 76 percent in the fifty or older age cohort. In some countries, the 4. See Lizette Alvarez, “Fury, God and the Pastor’s Disbelief,” New York Times, July 8, 2003; “Anglican Church Head: Don’t Criticize ‘Gays,’ ” WorldNetDaily, December 1, 2004, http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE;ID=41707; “Church Should Accept Gays: Archbishop,” BBC News, May 27, 2003, http://news .bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk;news/2939422.stm. 5. “Among Wealthy Nations U.S. Stands Alone in Its Embrace of Religion,” Pew Global Attitudes Project Report, December 19, 2002, http://people-press.org/reports /display.php3?ReportID=167.

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Figure 1. Self-Identification as Religious

spread is even greater (see Figure 1).6 This development partly explains public attitudes toward the massive immigration of Muslims, who are widely, if not necessarily accurately, perceived by native Europeans as very religious. Academics in France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, and Spain almost unanimously claim that Islam is “the second largest religion in the country.” But that is true only if one assumes that most immigrant Muslims practice their faith. Indeed, if only practicing Christians and Muslims were considered, Islam may well be the largest religion in a number of European countries, such as France or the Netherlands. The traditional second-largest religion in some of those countries used to be Judaism, measured by the number of Jews, whether practicing or not. Mass immigration from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia has made Muslims much more numerous than Jews.7 Only a few decades back, Western Europeans saw Islam as a distant and exotic religion, with no European roots except in backward places 6. “Religion: A Personal Matter,” GFK (Centre for Market Research) Group, October 12, 2004, http://www.gfk.hr/press;en/religion.htm. 7. For Jewish emigration from France, see Shmuel Trigano, La Démission de la République: juifs et musulmans en France, especially 109–14.

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like Albania, Bosnia, or Turkey. But overwhelmingly Muslim immigration has introduced two interrelated challenges to Europe: (1) a strong religiosity in a native postreligious environment, and (2) a historically alien religion. In France, where sociological data is more comprehensive, perhaps as many as half of young, European-born Muslims (beurs) are nonpracticing—their “Islam” is often seen as a cultural tradition rather than a faith; they do not observe Ramadan or frequent mosques, and they smoke and drink. On the other hand, the trend among Muslims in Europe, especially the young, is toward a return to Islam and increased interest in religion and activism—in other words, re-Islamization. It should also be noted that most Muslim immigrants, many of them practicing, are settled in the same large metropolitan areas (Paris, Berlin, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London) where traditional Christian or Jewish religion is least practiced by the natives, thus sharpening the contrast.8 In the United States, on the other hand, religiosity is largely growing, with as many as 60 percent of Americans attending church services, even if its intensity varies regionally (the South’s “Bible Belt” comes to mind).9 One could hardly imagine a Western European head of government publicly mentioning his faith as a positive, as both President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry did during the 2004 presidential election campaign. Nor do religion and immigration in the United States present the same kind of cultural challenge they do in Western Europe. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of immigrants to the United States are Latin Americans and at least nominally Christian (usually Roman Catholic), thus adding to what is already the largest single denomination in the country, with up to 67 million members. During the past four decades, then, immigration has contributed to the deepening of cultural differences between Europe and the United States.

8. Gilles Kepel, The War for Muslim Minds: Islam and the West and Olivier Roy, L’Islam mondialisé. For a serious analysis of religious practice in France, see JeanneHélène Kaltenbach and Michèle Tribalat, La République et l’Islam. 9. The Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan notes, however, that this data may be inflated and suspects that only about 20 percent of Americans actually go to church one or more times a week. Many tell pollsters that they have gone to church even though they have not. It is not known whether this happens in other countries as well. See “How Many People Go Regularly to Weekly Religious Services?” Religious Tolerance.org, November 26, 2001, http://www.religioustolerance .org/rel;rate.htm.

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Immigration and Culture At the same time that religious practice is declining in Europe but remaining steady or growing in the United States, massive Muslim immigration to Europe—but not to the United States—makes the difference more pronounced and more politically relevant, partially explaining the discordant cultural changes between Europe/Canada and the United States. It is by now a truism that immigration in both Europe and the United States is virtually all of Third World origin. In the United States, reform legislation, especially the 1965 reforms, combined with the de facto loss of control over the Mexican and (to a lesser extent) Canadian borders, have put a virtual end to Western European immigration, with the exception of highly qualified professionals, numbering only a few thousand annually. Immigration from the Third World—especially Latin America, the Caribbean, and East Asia—has grown exponentially, now constituting more than 90 percent of all immigrants. However, the Chinese excepted, these immigrants come from countries with longstanding ties to the United States and are largely Christian. That applies to the largest immigrant element, Latin Americans (mostly Mexicans, Cubans, and Central Americans), as well as to Filipinos and, interestingly, even Arabs. Indeed, according to the U.S. Census, of the 1.2 million Arab Americans living here in 2002, some two-thirds are Christian-Palestinians and/or from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, the Arab areas with by far the largest proportion of Christians historically. That explains why there were only some 1.1 million Muslims in the United States as of 2004, the overwhelming majority of whom are not of Arab background. Indeed, the most reliable estimate of Arab Americans’ religious associations suggests that only 23 percent are Muslim, the rest being Roman or Maronite Catholics (43 percent), followed by Eastern Orthodox, or Copts, and Protestants. Indeed, USA Today notes that the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2000 report (the first ever as far as Arab Americans are concerned) doesn’t track religion, but suggests that “many Americans assume that Muslim means Arab, but surveys show that Arabs make up less than 25% of the Muslim population in the USA. Most Arabs in this country are Christian.”10 That is in distinct contrast 10. “The Arab Population 2000,” U.S. Census Bureau, issued December 2003, www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/c2kbr-23.pdf; U.S. Census Bureau data, n.d., www .census.gov (n.d.); Haya El Nasser, “U.S. Census Reports on Arab-Americans for First Time,” USA Today, November 20, 2003.

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to Europe, where aside from Lebanese Christians in France, the overwhelming majority of Arab immigrants (not to mention virtually all Turks, Pakistanis, and Bangladeshis) are indeed Muslim. While the huge influx of immigrants to the United States may raise issues of assimilation and integration, it has no significant direct impact on transatlantic ties. This is not only because the immigrants’ religion or the national interests of their country of origin, whether Mexico or the Philippines, do not present the same problem for America as they do for Western Europe but also because the United States has been a country of immigration from the start, whereas Western Europe (the UK and France being the prominent exceptions) and Eastern Europe even more so have historically been areas of emigration. Recent protests related to political cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed initially published in a Danish newspaper are a case in point. Following the September 2005 publication of the cartoons in the Danish Jyllands-Posten, a group of Muslim clerics from Denmark engaged in a long campaign of propaganda in the Middle East, complaining about both the cartoons, seen as insulting to Islam, and of their general situation.11 As a result, by early February 2006 mass anti-Danish demonstrations had erupted throughout the Islamic world, with Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, and French diplomatic missions being burned in Syria and Lebanon, citizens under attack in Gaza, and governmentencouraged economic boycotts in the Persian Gulf. The EU itself was forced to take a position, declaring that a boycott against Denmark is equivalent to one against the Union. By contrast, a few U.S. Muslims demonstrated peacefully in New York, and Washington expressed sympathy for Muslims. Just as immigration trends changed in the United States from the 1960s, equally dramatic changes occurred in Europe. Exceptional rates of economic growth and declining birthrates throughout what is now the EU led to high demand for labor, a demand that, as long as communism ruled Eastern Europe and kept those borders closed tight, could only be satisfied by non-Europeans. Once again, there was a major exception, Tito’s Yugoslavia, but one may point out that the large majority of “Yugoslav” emigrants to Western Europe prior to the civil wars of the early 1990s were Catholic Croats or Orthodox Serbs rather than 11. “Crisis in Denmark: Alienated Danish Muslims Sought Help from Arabs,” Spiegel Online, February 1, 2006, http://service.spiegel.de/cache/international/0,1518,398624,00 .html.

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Muslim Bosniaks and Kosovo Albanians, who only came to make up the overwhelming majority of westward emigrants after those wars. Economic trends, combined in some cases with a colonial history and the associated immigration privileges given to former colonial subjects—Commonwealth citizens in the case of the UK; citizens of former African colonies in the case of France (Algeria), the Netherlands (Surinamese and Moluccans), or Belgium (Congolese)—led to a huge influx of Third World immigrants to Western Europe. A huge majority of those were Muslims—Turks in Germany, Maghrebins in France, and Pakistanis, Indian (and East African Indian) Muslims, and Bangladeshis in the UK. Just as in the United States, through the combined efforts of pressure groups from the Left and elsewhere representing either human rights or business interests, border controls have increasingly collapsed, to the extent that today no one has a precise idea how many Muslims, let alone immigrants in general, are within the EU. There may be 20 million Muslims in Western Europe and the Balkans (1.3 million in Britain, 3.2 million in Germany, 4–5 million in France). However, large as their numbers are, the significant Muslim communities in Europe originate from only a handful of countries—basically Turkey (in Germany, and to a lesser extent the Netherlands and Belgium), the Indian subcontinent in the United Kingdom, and three Maghreb countries (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) in most other states. The European immigration figures are no better than the notoriously unreliable American ones. Thus, for Germany, one knows only that “According to experts working for the Catholic Church, there are some 1 million illegal immigrants in this country, with at least 200,000 in Berlin alone.”12 The best example of the difficulties encountered in estimating the number of Muslims is France itself, which is generally agreed to be the EU country with the largest Muslim population. Figures provided by politicians and the media have consistently fluctuated between 5 million and 7 million, but it now appears that those figures were based on rumor and the amount of noise made by self-proclaimed representatives of Muslims in France such as the UOIF (Union of Islamic Organizations of France). The UOIF is the fastest-growing and second-largest Muslim 12. Mechthild Küpper, “‘Why Not Let Them Work?’ Supporters Say It Would Make Sense to Regularize the Status of Illegal Immigrants,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 14, 2004.

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organization. It is closely associated with the radical Muslim Brotherhood, the ideological lodestar of Islamist radicalism in the world today, Al Qaeda included.13 Actually, French (and most European) census regulations forbid data collection on religion, so there should have been caution about these figures. Finally, in November 2003 a serious demographic study by Michelle Tribalat demonstrated that there are only 3.7 million possible Muslims in France. This would still make France the EU country with the largest Muslim population, but with nowhere near the numbers claimed by the UOIF or by politicians hunting for Muslim votes.14 Tribalat’s analysis is relevant for all the EU nations’ Muslim populations because of the universal European tendency—certainly obvious in the media—to associate ethnic origin with religion. Any reader of major media from Le Monde to El Pais to Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung or La Stampa could testify to this. While the two may generally correlate, other cases, such as Lebanese Arabs of the Maronite faith and Christian Palestinians, suggest the need for a more nuanced approach. Also, even in those countries where censuses allow designating religious faith, the individual’s religiosity is not taken into consideration. Coming from a majority Muslim country does not necessarily a practicing Muslim make in Europe—a French study of 1995 suggested that only a third of Muslims in France regularly attend mosque.15 Be that as it may, the total Muslim population of Europe—that is, natives of Muslim-majority countries and their first- and second-generation descendants born in Europe—is somewhere between 15 and 20 million. This is a very

13. “UOIF depends on the Union of Islamic Organizations in Europe (UIOE), based in London, and on its European Fatwa and Research Council, presided by Yusuf al-Qaradawi, resident of Qatar, who gives advice reminding the rules European Muslims must observe, such as the interdiction of marriages between Muslims and non-Muslims.” Besma Lahouri and Eric Conan, “Ce Qu’il ne faut plus accepter: la laïcité face à l’Islam,” L’Express, September 18, 2003. 14. Gilbert Charles and Besma Lahoun, “Les Vrais chiffres,” L’Express, April 12, 2003. Tribalat is coauthor of one of the best studies of the Muslim impact in France. See Kaltenbach and Tribalat, La République et l’Islam. See also Michael Radu, “Belgium, Islam and the Boomerang of ‘Multiculturalism’” (December 19, 2002), “British Fifth Column” (October 3, 2002), and “Vichy Thought Police” (September 20, 2002), www.frontpagemag.com. 15. Charles and Lahoun, “Les Vrais chiffres.” On the other hand, sociologist Farhad Khosrokhavar stated that only 20 percent of France’s 5 million Muslims are “religiously minded.” See Jon Henley, “French MPs Vote for Muslim Veil Ban in State Schools,” The Guardian, February 11, 2004.

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approximate figure, since it includes the unknown number of illegal immigrants, or sans papiers (undocumented), and census takers are often legally forbidden to even ask questions related to religion, as is the case in France. That is a large number—larger than the total population of such EU members as Greece, Belgium, and Denmark. At first glance, this appears a number large enough to make a political difference in countries with large Muslim populations such as France, Germany, the UK, the Netherlands, and Belgium. But the Muslim impact on EU politics or on individual EU member-state politics is less the result of the generally small Muslim voting power (although in isolated cases, such as the 2002 German election, the Turkish vote put Chancellor Gerhard Schröder over the top) than of political correctness on the part of intellectual and media elites. It is the national virulence of political correctness, and thus the influence of the elite Left, rather than the voting power of Muslims, many of whom are noncitizens, that is the best indicator of their influence on state policy and ultimately on transatlantic relations. In Germany, the immigrant Muslim population, which is estimated at around 3 million, is mostly Muslim—Turkish, Arab, Bosniak, and Albanian—and is growing, despite an unemployment rate of 10.4 percent (although there is also a labor shortage in some industries, such as construction and high tech). The reason for this apparently irrational growth (why migrate when there are no available jobs?) in Germany as elsewhere in Europe is the welfare state. Jobless or not, one gets more social aid from the state than one could gain by employment in Anatolia or Maghreb. To encourage Muslim integration, Gerhard Schröder’s government, a coalition of Social Democrats and Greens, reduced the wait between arrival and citizenship from fifteen to eight years, but half of the new citizens now still have dual citizenship.16 On the one hand, more and more European countries are tightening up their immigration policies, although, once again, there are differences in approach. Denmark has virtually closed its borders for nonEU immigrants, and the Netherlands is following that same path, as are (more slowly) Germany, France, and the United Kingdom. On the other hand, the Spanish Socialist government, despite being the main European destination of illegal migrants, decided in February 2005 to legalize some five hundred thousand of them, thus encouraging others. 16. Cécile Calla, “L’Immigration au coeur d’une guérilla parlementaire,” Le Figaro, January 15, 2004.

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It should be pointed out that the same contradiction characterizes the Bush administration’s approach to illegal immigration: promising to tighten border controls while de facto legalizing millions of illegal immigrants already in the country. The problem in the United States, and even more so in Europe, is that mass immigration from the Third World inevitably raises questions of cultural assimilation, identity, and especially security. The latter aspect is particularly relevant since 9/11 and even more so in Europe, where the overwhelming majority of immigrants (first- and second-generation) are Muslims.

Politics and Immigration There are two parallel developments on the European political scene, distinct but related. One is the rise of nationalist, anti-immigration parties, often and wrongly labeled “racist,” “xenophobe,” or “right wing” by the predominantly left-wing media and politicians. The National Front in France is a good example, but the Flemish Bloc (Vlaamse Blok) in Belgium, the late Pym Fortuyn’s party, the Livable Netherlands (Leefbaar Nederland); the Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti); and the Austrian Freedom Party (Freiheitliche Partei Österreichs) are all important—and some are now in national or local coalition governments. What is interesting is that these parties are not only anti-immigrant but also Euroskeptical. They are also, in economic or even social terms, far from conservative, let alone “far Right.” After all, Pym Fortuyn was an active gay and environmentalist militant, and most of the others advocate more of a welfare state and statist economics in general. What they are is nationalist and populist. On the other hand, Muslim parties are beginning to be formed by anti-assimilationist militants, in France and especially in Belgium. In France there is the Muslim Party of France (PMF), a small FrancoAlgerian group founded in 1997. Its leader, Mohamed Ennacer Latrèche, is a notorious anti-Semite who trained in Syria.17 Even more ominous are the developments in Belgium, especially in the country’s second-largest city, Antwerp, with a total population of more than half a million, of 17. Blandine Grosjean and Olivier Vogel, “Voile: main basse extrémiste sur l’opposition,” Liberation, January 3, 2004.

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which some thirty thousand are immigrant Muslims (many illegal) and twenty thousand are Jews, who make up one of the oldest (some four hundred years before the arrival of the Muslims), richest, and largest Jewish communities in Western Europe. There, in the last few months of 2003, under the pretext of the murder of an Arab by a deranged old Fleming, something called the European Arab League (LAE) started organizing “patrols” in the city, to “watch” over the “racist” police— echoes of Al Sharpton and his followers’ anti-police militancy in New York. LAE’s founder, Abu Jahjah, is the poster boy of everything that is wrong and dangerous in Western European Muslim communities— and Europe’s legal, political, and cultural inadequacies to answering that danger. Born in Lebanon in 1971, Abu Jahjah arrived in Belgium at the beginning of the 1990s claiming political asylum, due to alleged problems with southern Lebanon’s dominant terrorist group, Hezbollah. His application rejected, he took a simpler way to stay. He married a Flemish woman, got his Belgian citizenship, and promptly divorced. Then, at taxpayers’ expense, he studied political science at the Catholic University of Louvain, where he became a Socialist Party activist and union militant. From that fashionable political base, he founded, first, a pro-Arab group, El Rabita, which was later transformed into the LAE. Asked why he chose Antwerp for his activities, he answered that he was seeking “new cultures.” But according to the French newspaper Liberation, he sees the city as a “bastion of European Zionism” that he seeks to transform into a “Mecca of pro-Palestinian action.” Not surprisingly, LAE’s finances remain a “mystery.” Abu Jahjah’s immediate goal, in addition to preventing the local police from dealing with the disproportionate criminality among immigrant Muslims, is to “simply demand our rights to housing, employment . . . while preserving our Arab-Muslim identity.” All that because, as quoted in Liberation (December 16, 2002), the state “must accept the reality of multiculturalism.” That, presumably, means supporting the veils for girls, rejecting “pagan” science studies, providing taxpayerpaid special meals and vacations for Ramadan, offering lectures in the Quran, and, specifically, making Arabic an official language, in addition to Dutch, French, and German. All these are the logical extensions of “tolerance,” “multiculturalism,” and the culturally suicidal policies of the Brussels government.

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It is difficult to say how important such groups are, and figures are misleading. The PMF claims two thousand members, but has only around one hundred actually signed in. According to the police, however, the PMF was capable of attracting between ten thousand and twenty thousand people to a Paris demonstration in January 2004 protesting the proposed law banning the hijab in public institutions, especially schools.18

Assimilation, Integration, and Cultural Conflict Recently, in more and more American (and European) media outlets, one can read such news as the following: “Long a sea of tolerance that provided a buoyant platform for Muslim immigrants to preach a fundamentalist agenda, Europe seems only now to be waking up to the threat posed by some Muslims intent on bending their host societies to suit themselves.” Developments on the ground in Europe seem to confirm it. For instance, some 240,000 Algerians, quite a lot of them with radical Islamist leanings, are thought to have fled Algeria in the past decade. Fled what, and why? Obviously, the Algiers regime’s crackdown on murderous Islamism, which led to 120,000 victims. Only a minority of Muslims, albeit a growing one, favors Al Qaeda’s aims, let alone its methods. But a dedicated core of perhaps a thousand or so living in the West might be willing to die for their cause by blowing themselves up along with as many infidels as possible.19 Indeed, since 9/11, around 500 Muslim terrorist suspects have been arrested in Europe, 74 in Spain alone after March 11, 2004, and around 100 in the Middle East, about 50 in North Africa, and 40 in Latin America, compared to 150 in the post-9/11 United States. Just in the first month and a half of 2005, more than 100 Islamist suspects, most linked to recruiting networks of jihad fighters for Iraq, have been arrested in France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, and Belgium; 18. Cécilia Gabizon, “Près de vingt mille personnes pourraient défiler demain à Paris, les partisans du voile préparent leur manifestation,” Le Figaro, January 16, 2004. 19. Alexis Amory, “Europe Resisting Islam’s Dark Ages,” January 28, 2004, http:// frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=11918; “Islamist Terror in Europe: Tackling a Hydra,” The Economist, January 30, 2003.

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French, German, and British citizens have been captured or killed while engaged in terrorism in Iraq. To take the worst and the most spectacular case, Britain, with some 2 million Muslims in a population of about 60 million, is now the major ideological, recruiting, and financing center of Islamist radicals—that is, potential and real terrorists—in the West. Increasingly, they are a physical threat to the West as a whole, including Britain itself. It is first of all a matter of ideology: British-based Islamists openly recruited or legitimized (by issuing fatwa) Islamist terrorists in Algeria and Yemen. Thus Al Qaeda or jihad ideologues remained until recently free to operate in London, even though they were sentenced to life in prison or death in their countries of origin. They include Abu Qatada, an openly active religious legitimizer of the most murderous Algerian terrorist group, the Jamiyy’a Islamiyya Muslaha (Armed Islamic Group-GIA) and a recruiter for Al Qaeda;20 Abu Hamza, onetime imam of Finsbury Park Mosque in London; and Omar Bakri, a Syrian radical, UK citizen (on the basis of an asylum request), founder of the al-Muhajirun group, and the sponsor of yearly celebrations of the “magnificent 19” 9/11 terrorists. It took the bombings of July 7 for Abu Hamza to be finally put on trial for incitement to murder (he was sentenced on February 7, 2006, to seven years in prison), and for Omar Bakri to be refused reentry to the United Kingdom, but many others like them are still active in Britain. But Islamist activities in the United Kingdom went beyond providing ideological, fund-raising, and moral support. Nine British citizens were in Guantanamo at one time,21 most captured while fighting for the Taliban/Al Qaeda in Afghanistan; at least two were involved in suicide bombings in Israel; and some are involved in terrorist attacks against coalition (including British) forces in Iraq. It is precisely this pattern of British tolerance for the most extreme Islamist recruiters, legitimizers, and operatives that led the French to refer to “Londonistan”—a term

20. For an overall analysis of British Muslims’ activities, see Dominique Thomas, Le Londonistan: la voix du jihad; see also Michael Radu, “The Problem of Londonistan: Europe, Human Rights, and Terrorism,” FPRI E-note, April 12, 2002, http://www .fpri.org/enotes/americawar.20020412.radu.londonistan.html. Abu Qatada (whose real name is Sheikh Omar Mahmood Abu Omar), who was arrested in October 2002, was released on bail and under restricted terms in March 2005. 21. There were also seven French citizens and one each from Spain, Denmark, Sweden, and Belgium among the Guantanamo detainees, most of whom were released in 2004.

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that is still accurate, although less so than in the past, following some hardening of British antiterrorism legislation. It is important to note that not even the deadly July 7, 2005, bombings of London’s public transportation system convinced the British Parliament to decisively crack down on all radical clerics or to significantly extend detention periods for suspected terrorists. Indeed, the Blair government was twice defeated when it proposed such measures. “Londonistan” is primarily but not just a British phenomenon defined by French analysts. Indeed, French citizens or residents have been engaged in transnational terrorism, including some arrested and tried in Morocco and Pakistan (not to mention Algeria, the United States, and Russia), and some died in Afghanistan under the black flag of the Taliban. French Muslims, as well as a few based in Spain and in Scandinavian states, were also involved in terrorist attacks or plots at home and in Bosnia, Chechnya, and Afghanistan/Pakistan. It may seem surprising to some, but Western democracies—especially European ones—are now a better breeding ground for Islamist radicalism than the authoritarian regimes of the Arab and Muslim world. The reasons are obvious: tolerance and freedom of religion and speech. However, there are signs that European views of Muslim immigration and settled communities are changing. Only four years ago, Denmark and the Netherlands were widely seen as the most liberal EU members in terms of immigration, asylum acceptance, and social welfare benevolence for immigrants. Thus, the Muslim minority in the Netherlands, which represents 6 percent of the 16 million Dutch population, holds seven parliamentary seats out of 150, a record among other Muslim minorities in Europe.22 But after two spectacular assassinations, Dutch (and Danish) immigration laws are today among the most restrictive in the Western world, and the recent events in Denmark will, in all likelihood, lead to further restrictions. Anti-immigration opinion, more often than not associated with anti-Muslim sentiment, led to electoral success in Austria, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy, Belgium, and Switzerland for nationalist, anti-immigrant, or conservative parties that are routinely described by 22. “Anti-immigration EU Laws, Dutch Law Threatens 50,000 Muslim Immigrants,” Islam Online.net, June 15, 2002, http://www.islamonline.net/English/News /2002-06/15/article58.shtml.

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the media as “racist,” “xenophobic,” and “right-wing.” Some of their platforms might indeed be seen as based on irrational prejudice and false generalizations. But in most cases, they were a natural reaction to the mainstream political parties’ refusal to even admit that there is a Muslim integration and immigration problem, let alone to deal with it. Hence, the success of parties such as the German National Democratic Party (NDP) and its colleagues of the German People’s Union (DVU), both big winners in Germany’s Saxony and Brandenburg state elections in September 2004, and both of which are indeed racist and neo-Nazi. But most of the others are just expressing popular perceptions and fears that the mainstream parties, out of political correctness, have long avoided. They are anything but “right-wing”—they simply object, as most of the public does, to uncontrolled immigration and failed policies of assimilation. Politically incorrect as that may be, the “right-wing” parties now wielding power or influence in Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, and Belgium are basically former Social Democrats or Liberals who are aware of the negative aspects of immigration, such as growing criminality, welfare dependence, and rejection of integration, as opposed to their Social Democrat colleagues, who pretend that such phenomena do not exist. For instance, Dutch politician Geert Wilders, a former Liberal accused of racism and under a death threat from Islamists, is anything but. He simply points out that the number of immigrants, and specifically Muslim immigrants, in Holland are beyond the Dutch society’s ability to assimilate them.23 Indeed, the issue of absorbing the huge number of immigrants from Third World countries, overwhelmingly Muslims, is a truly panEuropean problem of increased immediacy, but one still approached at the national level, despite EU claims, or hopes, of seeking a uniform approach. The main problems facing all European societies dealing with a large and recent influx of Muslim immigrants is that of acculturation—how, if at all, Muslims see, accept, and adapt to the dominant culture of their new country. That reality was made abundantly clear by the riots that occurred in France in October/November 2005. While the riots were mostly directed to “the system” rather than based on religion, the fact remains that the perpetrators were largely Muslim, French-born but still completely alienated from French society. 23. Personal communication, Philadelphia, December 2004.

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Furthermore, there were attempts by Islamist elements to hijack the riots for their own purposes.24 In light of the specific nature of Islam and of Muslim immigrant groups and their descendants in Europe, three factors seem relevant: the role of local imams (religious leaders), that of Arab/Muslim governments and organizations they control, and outside ideological inputs. The role of imams: Imams transmit and spread interpretations of Islam to immigrant communities that, more and more, have lost contact with their country and culture of origin. That is especially true with young, second- and third-generation European Muslims, who are often in search of a new identity and thus receptive to outside influences— mostly represented by “imported” imams—imported because no European country has a functioning program of training native imams, although France is making some efforts in that sense. Hence, “France’s 5 million-strong Muslim community, Europe’s largest, is ministered to by between 1,000 and 1,500 imams. Only 10% of them are believed to be citizens, less than half speak French, [emphasis added] and ‘probably a majority’ are illegal immigrants. Most hail from abroad—40% from Morocco, 24% from Algeria, 16% from Turkey, and 6% from Tunisia.” Moreover, according to Abdellah Boussouf, an imam from Strasbourg, “The majority of imams preaching in France are self-taught or have had no formal religious education.”25 The situation is probably worse in Britain, where, at least until recently, immigration visas were freely given to Pakistani imams, a majority of whom had no formal or serious religious training and spoke no English or, for that matter, bothered to learn it once in the UK. The problem is different in Germany, where the majority of Muslims are of Turkish origin, and in most Turkish communities in Belgium, France, and Netherlands. There, most imams are sent from Turkey—a secular Muslim country—and vetted by Ankara’s Religious Affairs Directorate. They are thus unlikely to be fundamentalist. That said, however, there are dissident, anti-Ankara Turkish organizations actively proselytizing in Europe, ranging from Milli Gurus—an external branch of the former Islamist Party in Turkey—to smaller but more 24. Christophe Deloire, “Musulmans: les sous-traitants de la République,” Le Point, October 11, 2005. 25. Jon Henley, “France to Train Imams in ‘French Islam,’ ” The Guardian, April 23, 2004.

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dangerous groups like the Khilafat organization, made up of followers of Metin Kaplan, which seeks an Islamic state in Turkey. In October 2004 Germany finally extradited Kaplan to Turkey, thus demonstrating serious commitment to counterterrorism on the part of Interior Minister Otto Schilly, a former left-wing radical. And then there are freelance, self-proclaimed religious leaders, especially in the UK, people of known fundamentalist convictions who, while taking advantage of “human rights” and “political asylum” provisions of European law—including dependence on welfare payments—are actively indoctrinating local Muslim youths into fundamentalist, and indeed violent, jihadist doctrines, to be applied abroad or, less frequently, at home.26 Abu Hamza comes to mind: a welfaredependent, self-proclaimed jihadist, he was responsible for organizing and legitimizing kidnappings and murders in Yemen and recruited jihadists involved in terrorism in the United States, Chechnya, Yemen, and Algeria. The same applies to Abu Qatada and Omar Bakri—both of whom were expelled for religious radicalism by Saudi Arabia. It was only after changes in the law that Abu Hamza was arrested (and put on trial in 2006) and Abu Qatada interned at the end of 2004. Omar Bakri remains active in Lebanon. So far, only France has developed anything resembling a clear policy toward radical imams—expulsion or training in France—although the Dutch, Danish, and Austrian governments are also considering making local training of imams compulsory. Even in France, however, courts are not always supportive, as demonstrated by a recent case near Lyons involving Algerian-born Abdelkader Bouziane of Venissieux. An advocate of wife-beating and of stoning adulterers, he was expelled to Algeria a second time after a lower court declared the first expulsion illegal; not surprisingly—indeed typically—Bouziane was not trained as an imam, but lived on welfare with his two wives (despite polygamy being illegal in France) and sixteen children. In France, then, secularism is deeply entrenched. Nevertheless, solutions can be found, such 26. That seems to be a pattern. Islamist preachers in the UK, France, Germany, and elsewhere depend on public welfare, mostly because they have no skills or interest in holding jobs, have large families, are often polygamists (an illegal but tolerated practice in many European countries), and, more often than not, they were admitted as “asylum seekers” and hence are entitled to welfare, even when, like Omar Bakri of the UK, they were given asylum because they were expelled and “persecuted” for religious extremism in countries such as Saudi Arabia.

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as the recent French decision to prepare imams at Paris IV University (formerly the Sorbonne).27 Arab/Muslim governments: The Arab/Muslim governments with a large diaspora in Europe have consistently tried to retain control, or at least influence, over their citizens, often with the open support of European governments. For many Arab (Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia) and other Muslim (Turkey) governments, their former citizens and their descendants in Western Europe are seen as important economic and political assets, and thus as groups to be influenced or controlled. Thus, in France, the Paris Grand Mosque is traditionally controlled— and paid for at the level of 1.2 million euros per year—by the Algerian government.28 The largest Muslim organization in France, the National Federation of Muslims in France, is mostly Moroccan and mostly paid for and influenced—if not controlled—by Rabat. Not surprisingly, given how much Algiers and Rabat disagree with one another, the two groups are in harsh competition. Furthermore, Muslim (or at least Maghrebian and Turkish) governments have a clear stake in maintaining control over their citizens—hence their allowing, indeed encouraging, formally or not, dual citizenship and the remittances and travel it encourages back and forth. Most obvious is Morocco, whose king, Mohammed VI, has made it clear that he sees the millions of his nationals in Europe as remaining his permanent subjects. Algeria, Morocco, and to a lesser extent Turkey all fund and try to control the Muslim organizations, imams, and political leaders of their expatriate communities in Europe. For some European governments, at least until recently, it was convenient to deal with foreign capitals rather than the often disorganized and fragmented Muslim communities at home. What has changed during the past decade or so is that foreign governments have increasingly lost control over their diasporas, as more and more European Muslims are born in Europe and have increasingly tenuous ties to the countries of their parents’ origin. These Muslims of Europe are, instead, increasingly influenced by international groups and organizations, whose message is religious and ideological rather than ethnic or “racial.” 27. “L’Imam Bouziane renvoyé en Algérie,” Le Figaro, October 6, 2004; Cécilia Gabizon, “La Sorbonne va former des imams,” Le Figaro, March 10, 2005; Cécilia Gabizon, “Les Deux universités parisiennes sont pressenties pour dispenser un enseignement profane,” Le Figaro, December 7, 2004. 28. Xavier Ternisien, La France de mosquées, 46.

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Ideological influences: While major Muslim organizations in Europe are often controlled, subsidized, or influenced by or from foreign capitals (Rabat, Algiers, Ankara, to a lesser extent Tunis), by far the most important—and relevant—outside ideological influence on the European Muslim communities is that of Saudi Arabia and its Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. From Sarajevo to Rome one can see the Saudibuilt mosques and find organizations subsidized by Riyadh or the other Persian Gulf states and organizations. Since 9/11, such subsidies are coming less from Gulf official sources, directly or via charitable organizations, and more from wealthy individuals. The most important recipient in Europe is the French UOIF, the best organized and second most powerful Muslim NGO in France, closely associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. All but the first of these factors—the role of foreign-educated or indoctrinated imams—influencing the Muslim communities in Europe are of very limited impact in the United States, precisely because the Muslim immigrant community is so different in Europe than in the United States. In addition, the nature of, legal approach to, and numbers of Muslim immigrants on the two sides of the Atlantic are sharply different. Nowhere is this difference more obvious than on the issue of political asylum.

Asylum, Immigration, and Terrorism Indeed, if there is one concrete legal and behavioral difference between the United States and Europe regarding immigration, it is concerning asylum claims. The trend, lately, is downward—asylum applications to EU countries declined from 675,460 in 1992, during the violent break-up of Yugoslavia, to 396,700 in 1999, to 384,530 in 2003, and 83,462 in January through April 2004, according to Amnesty International. (Italy, the largest target of asylum seekers, is not included.) What is not trending downward is the use of “asylum” claims by economic migrants, mostly from Africa, even if those claims are so obviously phony that any judge would dismiss them. But then there is the appeal system, the Left media, the “victimhood” industry, the NGOs influence, etc. All of these apply to Europe as well as to the United States. Nevertheless, it is alleged that the number of asylum seekers coming to Europe has dropped from about 400,000 a year in

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the early 1990s to about 65,000 now. Migrants who made their way to Sicily dropped from 18,000 in 2002 to fewer than 9,700 in the first nine months of 2004. The case of the Netherlands is, again, a sign of the trend. Restrictions on asylum acceptance led to a drop in such requests from 43,560 in 2000 to 18,670 in 2002 to 10,000 in 2003, and the expulsion of 26,000 failed applicants in 2004.29 E E E

In the United States asylum claims are taken seriously and dismissed faster than in Europe, where they have become a standard method for millions of migrants to obtain residence or, at least, to tie the legal systems in knots—all with the dedicated help of self-defined human rights NGOs. More specifically, many asylum claims in Europe are made by known radical Islamists, some also known—and often tried and sentenced—terrorist recruiters and ideologues in their countries of origin. That was a pattern in Europe, as will be described, but seldom the case in the United States, and then by error rather than policy. The following cases of European tolerance for terrorist recruiters and leaders posing as refugees are far from isolated: • Hasan di Tiro of the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), an increasingly Islamist secessionist insurgent group in Indonesia’s Sumatra Island, is based in Norsborg, Sweden, as is Lukman B Lima, ideologue and deputy-president of the Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO), an Islamist/secessionist insurgent group in southern Thailand. • The entire family of Abimael Guzman, the jailed leader of Peru’s Shining Path, which was responsible for at least thirty thousand deaths between 1980 and 1992, is also ensconced in Sweden. • Faraj Ahmad Najmuddin, a.k.a. Mullah Krekar, founder of Ansar al Islam (a Kurdish affiliate of Al Qaeda that is responsible for many American deaths in Iraq), is safely ensconced in Norway.30 • Maryam Rajavi of Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK), a Marxist/Islamist terrorist and pro-Saddam group fighting Iran’s regime, lives in France. 29. “Dutch MPs Approve Asylum Exodus,” BBC News, February 17, 2004, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/3494627.stm. 30. See also Michael Radu, “Norway’s Terrorist Haven,” September 18, 2003, http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9910.

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• “Professor” José Maria Sison, founder and ideologue of the (Maoist) Philippine Communist Party and of its armed branch, the New People’s Army—which so far is responsible for more than thirty thousand fatalities—is now, and has been for many years, a safely and financially well-off beneficiary of the Dutch “asylum” and benevolent welfare systems. And then there is an entire plethora of Islamist recruiters—people who give the (absolutely necessary) religious legitimacy to Islamist terrorism all over the world, recruit followers, and collect funds. As already mentioned, most of those, albeit not all, are to be found in the UK—the likes of Abu Qatada, Abu Hamza, and Omar Bakri. Imagine the heads of Hamas, PKK, LTTE, or Shining Path being granted political asylum in the United States and receiving welfare payments; it is not a likely scenario. To begin comprehending this, one has to understand the European notion of asylum—it is given to a person persecuted in his/her country for religious, ethnic, or political reasons, no matter what those “political/religious beliefs” are. Thus the UK gave asylum to a Taliban leader because his group has been “persecuted” in Afghanistan since 2001—by, among others, British troops. But, of course, there are limits to this promiscuous interpretation of “persecution”: no European country would give asylum to an American Ku Klux Klan leader because the U.S. government “persecutes” him. Europe’s fair-trial and anti–capital punishment rules exacerbate the problem. Dozens, if not hundreds, of Islamist terrorists are being provided asylum in Europe because they were convicted in absentia by Egyptian, Algerian, or Jordanian courts that were deemed “unfair,” and often sentenced to death. The result is that people proved in court to be dangerous to their adoptive country as well as others are allowed to stay and continue their activities because expelling them or returning them to their countries of origin would submit them to unacceptable treatment. Hence some of the dangerous and active terrorist recruiters—Islamist and other—are given “asylum” because the alternative is having them subjected to the justice of their country of origin—the same country whose government they try to overthrow. Dutch and German courts have even gone as far as to release terrorist suspects—even when the judges themselves have publicly expressed their conviction that the accused were indeed guilty—because the prosecution could not produce exculpatory testimony from terrorist leaders

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in U.S. custody. In other words, if a terrorist suspect is declared innocent by a major terrorist leader, the testimony is automatically seen as valid—and without such testimony, regardless of the intelligence threat and common sense (how credible is a terrorist leader’s testimony?), he goes free. To make it worse, in Germany at least, such freed suspects cannot even be expelled. All of this is made even more serious when the sheer number of immigrants to Europe is clearly out of control. By 2003, 23 percent of the illegal immigrants entering the EU came through Spain, where some 850,000 out of a total of 2.5 million entered. Of those, 90 percent passed through the Madrid Airport, and the rest through boats to metropolitan Spain or the Canary Islands.31 How far this goes is demonstrated by the 250,000 Algerians now in the EU, mostly in the UK and mostly as asylum seekers since 1991. Why would an Algerian, whose second language may well be French, seek asylum in Britain rather than in France, where more than a million of his conationals already live? Could it be that the French, with excellent intelligence and a tragic experience with Algerian Islamist terrorism in France since the mid-1980s, screen them carefully, while the British do not? Indeed, why would an Algerian seek asylum in Britain by claiming persecution at home? Could it be because Islamists are losing a war with the secular Algerian regime that has produced some sixty thousand fatalities so far? Ultimately, as an analyst from the London-based Al-Hayat put it, the French specifically and Europeans in general are in a bind. Freedom of religion and tolerance of Islamism as a threat to a liberal system are in contradiction, as are Europe’s pro-Muslim policies in the Middle East and its attempts to regulate Islamic expression at home. Hence it was somewhat surprising for Chirac to take the anti-headscarf position he did late in 2003. As Abu Alaa Madi pointed out in Al-Hayat, there is a contradiction between French policy on Iraq and its domestic stand on the question of headscarves. Prohibitions on wearing headscarves in public shocked Arabs who welcomed French opposition to the Iraq War, because the headscarf is a public duty for Muslim women rather than merely a symbol of their faith. Banning it, Alaa Madi continues, is a racist position that shocked Muslims around the world, and distanced France from Islam to the detriment of French interests in the Arab 31. François Musseau, “L’Espagne, porte d’entrée de l’Europe,” Liberation, October 7, 2004.

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world.32 That is somewhat less than honest a claim, since the wearing of the hijab in public institutions is also banned in Tunisia, an Arab country, as well as in Turkey, a Muslim one. In this context, and not surprisingly, Americans in government and outside have been too quick to criticize French attempts to regulate Islam, as in the case of the hijab. John Hanford, the State Department’s roving ambassador for freedom of religion, expressed his concern that France was violating “a fundamental principle of religious freedom.” Republican Senator Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania called the law “further evidence of the postmodern culture in Europe. When you marginalize faith, you end up marginalizing the people of faith.” (In Britain, too, the measure was attacked by both the Foreign Office and the Archbishop of Canterbury.)33 On the other hand, in September 2003 the German Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe decided that a state cannot ban the wearing of the Islamic veil by a teacher, unless there is a law forbidding it. The result was that states with governments ranging from conservative Christian Democrats (Bavaria) to neocommunists/Social Democrats (Berlin) did officially ban the hijab—but not without complaints from the federal president, Johannes Rau, who thought that banning the hijab implies banning the Catholic schools nuns’ habits—a non sequitur, if ever there was one. Even in Belgium, a local municipality banned the burqa and Socialist and Liberal parliamentarians proposed legislation similar to that in France regarding the veil in public schools and hospitals.34 Restrictions are also increasingly being imposed on family reunification, especially in regard to foreign marriages. Denmark and the Netherlands have both imposed drastic restrictions on bringing foreign spouses, and similar concepts are being considered in France, Germany, and Italy. This is often in response to the most obvious example of integration failure: overwhelming majorities of Muslims in Europe, first-, second- and even third-generation, marry in their countries of origin and bring their spouses to Europe. In Britain, “three quarters of ethnic Pakistani and Bangladeshi children aged 0–4 have a mother 32. Abu Alaa Madi, “The Future of France’s Relation with Muslims,” Al-Hayat, January 13, 2004. 33. Christopher Caldwell, “Veiled Threat,” Weekly Standard, January 19, 2004. 34. Cécile Calla, “Allemagne: le débat sur les signes religieux relancé,” Le Figaro, January 6, 2004; “Des élus Belges réclament une loi ‘à la française’ sur le voile: le conseil européen de la fatwa menace,” Le Monde, January 8, 2004.

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born in her country of origin. 30% of all children born in Bradford are born to foreign mothers.” About two-thirds of Turks and Moroccans in the Netherlands said they would not want their daughters to marry a non-Muslim:35 According to organizations defending the rights of illegal residents and refugees, the number of immigrants affected by the new Dutch laws restricting immigration and regulating the status of asylum seekers, is between 46,000 and 116,000 people, more than half Muslims from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan. The Muslim minority is the most negatively affected by the new immigration laws, because most get married from their original countries and bring their wives and children along. Many Muslim families also prefer to let their children stay back home till the age of 18, to preserve their national identity and language. The new law will deprive them of such a possibility too.36

Ultimately, the issues of immigration, counterterrorism, and legal practice are impossible to disentangle, and they are all related to distinct views on the two sides of the Atlantic.

Views on Immigration Although the immigration issue is more serious and its political and demographic impact greater in most of Western Europe than in the United States, in some ways American reactions to mass immigration are equally confused and in some aspects suggest more serious problems. It would be inconceivable for a European state to allow naturalized citizens to vote using Arabic ballots, as the United States routinely does with Spanish and other languages. Affirmative action, when recently mentioned by then French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, died after facing criticism from across the political spectrum, while in the United

35. “Transnational marriage and the formation of Ghettoes,” Migration Watch UK, September 22, 2005, www.migrationwatchuk.org/pdfs/Transnational;marriage.pdf; “Living with Islam: The New Dutch Model?” The Economist, March 31, 2005. 36. “Anti-Immigration EU Laws, Dutch Law Threatens 50,000 Muslim Immigrants,” Islam Online.net, June 15, 2002, http://www.islamonline.net/English/News /2002-06/15/article58.shtml.

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States, many from politicians and state governments to universities and major corporations view it as not just legitimate and necessary but as an obligation of society. In American universities, many students view learning Spanish as necessary for their future in their own country, but few European university students are interested in learning Arabic. While the issue of asylum, and immigration in general, is only now becoming important in the American political discourse, it is increasingly a divisive issue in Europe. What is relevant for transatlantic relations, however, is the growing link between immigration and terrorism. The cultural differences between the United States’ Latin American (and Filipino) immigrants and Europe’s Islamic immigrants from North Africa and Turkey are striking. Mexicans and Central Americans in the United States commit more crimes per capita than natives, and some immigrant gangs—such as the mostly Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha or the Jamaican Posse—are especially violent. But their activities derive from criminal interest rather than a political agenda. In Europe, crime in immigrant Muslim communities is also rising, but an increasing part of it appears related to Islamist activities. The Moroccan Islamist perpetrators of the March 11, 2004, bombings in Madrid financed their operation through credit-card fraud and robberies; French Islamist terrorists seeking to recruit for Iraqi operations were involved in insurance fraud schemes.

Implications for U.S.-European Relations The very size of immigration to both the EU and the United States is bound to have serious domestic and, ultimately, foreign policy implications. Greek American or Armenian American lobbies against Turkey, not to mention the Israeli lobby, have long been taken for granted in Washington. Some Muslim voices in Europe have also exercised some influence on their governments’ policy vis-à-vis their countries of origin or Israel, and all that is part of any pluralistic democracy, annoying as it is to foreign policy professionals and occasionally damaging to national interest. However, when the pressure comes from within the culture, rather than from formal lobbies, the implications are far more lasting and serious. That is the new trend on both sides of the Atlantic, with millions and millions of Latin Americans in the United States and even more

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Muslims in Europe. These are no longer matters of ethnic lobbies but rather deep cultural changes, with long-term political mutations reflected in foreign policy as a result. In the United States, where there is a historic trend away from the traditional dominance of Northeastern elites and toward the South and West, it is no coincidence that all presidents since 1963 have come from areas less related, culturally and strategically, to Europe (Texas, Georgia, California, Arkansas). While international Islamic terrorism does confuse the picture right now, the trend is unmistakable: the U.S. foreign policy gravity center is moving away from Europe, and it invariably points south, to Latin America, eastward to the Greater Middle East, or west, to East Asia. In Europe, on the other hand, the presence of a critical mass of Muslims inevitably leads governments to give more attention to North Africa and the Middle East, and to do so from a very different perspective than Washington’s. A very good example, and a growing source of transatlantic disagreement, is the issue of anti-Semitism and its implications for Middle East policies. While the United States still sees Israel as the strategic-ally island in a Muslim sea, Europeans (Germany excluded for historic reasons) see the Israeli-Arab conflict through the prism of their demographics—when one has at least 3.5 million Muslims but just 600,000 Jews in France, a practical politician’s choices are limited indeed. Mutatis mutandi that applies to the UK as well—although not necessarily to Germany, whose mostly Turkish Muslim community is not particularly anti-Israeli or anti-Semitic.37 It is the apparently growing incidence of anti-Semitism, and its direct, if politically correct, pattern of avoidance, that represents the most immediate crisis in U.S.-European relations at this point, although not the most serious crisis. The entire issue has already been examined, especially in France, whose culture is largely and unfairly accused of wholesale anti-Semitism.38 The matter is complex, but contrary to some American opinions, “Europeans” are not anti-Semitic—certainly not the majority, and certainly not any government. There are anti-Semitic elements in France, Belgium, and Germany, but they are either on the fringes—old-style radical rightists and neo-Nazis—or, close to the 37. “A Berlin, intellectuels et politiques européens interrogent sur la résurgence de l’antisémitisme,” Le Monde, January 31, 2004. 38. Shmuel Trigano, La Démission de la Republique.

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point of this chapter, Muslim. Although most Europeans still deny that Muslim anti-Semitism is growing, the reality is that “the communities most resentful of Israel in Europe are Muslim. The perpetrators of antiSemitic incidents in France are not right-wing extremists protecting the ‘French race’ from Jewish contamination: The 400 or so anti-Semitic incidents documented in the country during 2001 have mostly been attributed to Muslim youth of North African origin.”39 It should also be pointed out that in Europe anti-Semitism is strongly reinforced by widespread anti-Americanism. Whether explicitly or not, at least in part due to the influence of their own growing Muslim populations, most European governments have generally adopted foreign policies friendly to the Palestinians, and the EU has been the largest donor to the Palestinian Authority. Whether that will continue after the violent anti-Danish and anti-French demonstrations in Gaza in February 2006 remains to be seen. It increasingly appears that Europe, like the United States, is reassessing its approach to immigration, moving from openness and tolerance to growing controls. It also appears that, unlike the United States, and beginning with the most tolerant countries (Netherlands, Denmark), there is growing anxiety in Europe regarding the immigrant Muslim population’s interest or ability to integrate.

39. Omer Taspinar, “Europe’s Muslim Street,” Foreign Policy, March 2003.

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A Sea Change in the Atlantic Economy? How the West Pulled Ahead of the Rest and Why It May Cease to Do So Stephen A. Schuker

A N OL D M A X I M OF I N T E R NAT IONA L R EL AT IONS HOL DS T H AT CO -

alitions fall apart when the threat from an outside adversary recedes. “We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies,” Lord Palmerston instructed the House of Commons in his mid–nineteenth century explication of balance-of-power diplomacy. “Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”1 Does Palmerston’s dictum still apply at the dawn of the twenty-first century? Optimists hope that it does not. A common cultural heritage, a web of institutional relationships, strong economic ties, and a historical memory of solidarity in the face of danger bind the Atlantic Community nations together. With all its ups and downs, the special relationship between the United States and Western Europe in NATO can boast a solid half-century run. Hence, as late as the middle 1990s, academic experts celebrated an “enduring alliance.”2 A decade later, the pendulum has swung the other way. A serious breach in the alliance has opened. Continental opinion has turned as Sources: Angus Maddison [Development Centre Studies, OECD], Monitoring the World Economy, 1820–1992; The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective; and The World Economy: Historical Statistics. For purposes of comparison, all values are expressed in 1990 international Geary-Khamis dollars. 1. Hansard, House of Commons, 3rd. series, vol. 97, column 122, March 1, 1848; also David Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 82–83. 2. Lawrence S. Kaplan, NATO and the United States: The Enduring Alliance. 89

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harshly against the United States as it did at the time of the Vietnam War or during the later controversy over installation of the Pershing II missiles.3 In 2002 France and Germany refused to countenance meaningful sanctions against Iraq in the United Nations; in 2003 they vociferously opposed American military action against the Iraqi regime. And when hostilities ended they declined to participate meaningfully in rebuilding that country. Of the larger West European countries, only Great Britain unreservedly supported the United States. The Spanish and Italian governments, which at first sent modest contingents, found themselves compelled by public opinion to reverse course. By 2005 the German authorities were releasing some purported terrorists for lack of evidence and granting early parole to others. The Italian authorities, meanwhile, had issued arrest warrants for CIA operatives. Europeans complained that the United States had moved the goalposts in the original war against terror. The American authorities considered the West Europeans preternaturally craven, even in such matters of presumed common interest as stopping Iran from building nuclear weapons. In early 2006, when Iran removed the seals from its uranium enrichment facilities and booted out inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Agency, West European foreign ministers reacted ineffectually and referred the matter to the United Nations.4 Were these mere epiphenomena, or auguries of a problematic future? Political scientists build predictive models on the basis of evidence at hand. Extrapolation from present events constitutes their stock and trade. Hence, many ascribe fundamental importance to the disputes of the past few years. Elizabeth Pond speaks of the “decay and threatened dissolution of the West.” Turning Churchill’s famous aphorism on its head, she warns that the hope of the world lies not only in the strength and will of the United States, but “in its good judgment as well.” In her interpretation, a “pox Americana” has needlessly offended Europeans of goodwill.5

3. Thomas Schwartz, Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam; Christopher Goscha and Maurice Vaïsse, La Guerre du Vietnam et l’Europe, 1963– 1973; Mark A. Lawrence, Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam; Jeffrey Herf, War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles. 4. For details, see the IAEA Web site, http://iaea.org. 5. Elizabeth Pond, Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance.

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Robert Kagan has dined out in influential circles propounding an alternate conception of inevitable estrangement. As he elucidates the respective approaches on the two sides of the Atlantic, American elites—and specifically the leading actors in the George W. Bush administration—conceive of the world as a brutish Hobbesian environment. In the final analysis, the Americans hold, they must resort to force in order to maintain stability, defend national interests, advance human rights when feasible, and curb rogue states bent on acquiring weapons of mass destruction. The American taxpayer must dig deep into his pockets in order to maintain a force structure that can achieve those goals. In practice, this translates into spending as much on the armed forces as the next fourteen nations combined. By contrast, the West Europeans, or at any rate the governments of “old Europe,” endeavor to make progress toward a Kantian-style perpetual peace by fostering a network of institutions for multilateral problem solving. Having luxuriated under the American military umbrella for more than half a century, West Europeans are captivated by the notion of security on the cheap. They want so far as possible to refer extra-European conflicts to the United Nations Security Council, to elaborate an independent foreign policy and defense mechanism within the European Union, and to win acceptance for an international criminal court claiming universal jurisdiction.6 It occasions no surprise that different ways of looking at the world should emerge, even among those sharing broadly congruent values, after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Just a decade ago, fashionable pundits professed to believe that the disappearance of the Soviet danger would usher in a brave new world without great-power conflict.7 Analysts of the realist school have always considered that notion a selfindulgent fantasy. Absent ideological or existential menace, realists expect medium-level powers to balance against a hegemon and 6. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, characteristically titled in translation, L’Europe face au nouvel ordre américain. I focus here on Pond and Kagan because their works function as synecdoches for larger schools of academic thought. Punditry on the subject of American-European relations has turned into a growth industry with low barriers to entry. Among recent works that have sparked extensive commentary in the mass media, two stand out. Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West, holds out measured hope for reconciliation; Bernard Henri Lévy, American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville, raises the question, “Has America gone mad?” 7. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man.

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smaller countries to draw what advantages they can as free riders in the system.8 The Bush administration’s determination to act preemptively, and when necessary unilaterally, against terrorist perils constitutes no radical departure in American foreign policy. Washington has acted preemptively and unilaterally on earlier occasions when a perceived threat to the national interest arose.9 Likewise, the administration’s rhetorical emphasis on the propagation of core democratic beliefs—principles of liberty and justice that are “right and true for all people everywhere”— is not new. It falls within a framework of thought going back to Puritan New England. James Kurth has labeled such crusading democracy the “Protestant deformation”—a proselytizing form of individualism shorn of its religious base. In the Third World, Kurth suggests, that peculiarly American ideology exerts a destabilizing effect because it undermines hierarchy and community.10 In any event, this latest iteration of neo-Wilsonian idealism makes most Europeans in their present temper squirm. The National Security strategy paper published in 2002 turned the notion of balance of power on its head. Through its willingness to use force, that document proclaimed with almost Wilhelminian hubris, “the United States demonstrates its resolve to maintain a balance of power that favors freedom.”11 Perhaps, as a number of critics argue, the robust tone of American foreign policy during the Bush era paid insufficient homage to the importance of “soft power.” That wily Habsburg reactionary, Prince Felix zu Schwarzenberg, remarked after his victory over the 1848 revolutionaries that “one can do an awful lot with bayonets, but one can’t sit on them.”12 Arguably, Washington policy makers could have done more to acknowledge the sour mood across the Atlantic, even when specific European criticisms seemed peevish and sanctimonious.

8. For a characteristic expression of that approach, see John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. 9. Melvyn P. Leffler, “9/11 and the Future of American Foreign Policy,” 1045–63, and “9/11 and American Foreign Policy.” 10. James Kurth, “The Protestant Deformation and American Foreign Policy.” 11. “The National Security Strategy of the United States,” New York Times, September 20, 2002. 12. Quoted by Paul W. Schroeder, “Konturen einer ‘Neuen Weltordnung’?” 124 Bergedorfer Gesprächsbeitrag, June 14, 2002, http://www.stiftung.koerber.de/bg /recherche/de.beitrag.php?id=19868.

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Nevertheless, no dispensation of soothing syrup can cure the ills of the Atlantic alliance without a rededication to shared values. The World War II generation has left the political stage. Younger Europeans possess no personal recollections of how an earlier cohort of American democratic idealists helped to reconstruct their societies and economies. They have no instinctive feelings of transatlantic solidarity. On a number of mutually reinforcing grounds, therefore, American and West European security interests may well diverge further, at the very least outside Europe. And that divergence carries risks at least as grave for Europe as for America. Marc Trachtenberg puts the case with monitory clarity: If France and Germany expect the United States to guarantee their security while continuing the hostile policies that they pursued in the Iraq imbroglio, they are, in the formulation of longtime New York Times columnist James Reston, “asking and expecting things that have never been and will never be.”13

II Economic and financial conflicts among Western countries do not lend themselves to such melodramatic treatment. Economic divergencies wax and wane within the Western alliance. They have neither caused the present misunderstanding, nor are they likely to contribute to divorce. In this case, past is prologue. Observers of secular fluctuations in the international economy over the course of the business cycle do well to keep in mind the dramatist Nestroy’s salient observation: “The chief characteristic of progress is that it appears to be greater than it really is.”14 In the long run, transformation of the world economy proves at least as powerful an engine of change as vicissitudes in the fortune of alliances. Yet economic change takes place on a slower and not wholly coordinated timetable. The relationship between economic predominance and political influence is complicated. Generalization proves 13. James Reston, “What People Do They Think We Are?” New York Times, January 21, 1963; quoted by Marc Trachtenberg, “The Iraq Crisis and the Future of the Western Alliance: An American View,” paper prepared for conference at the European University Institute, Florence, October 2003. 14. “Überhaupt hat der Fortschritt das an sich, daß er viel größer ausschaut, als er wirklich ist.” Johann Nestroy, Der Schützling (1847), in Sämtliche Werke, edited by Fritz Brukner, Otto Rommel, and Adolf Hoffmann, vol. 7, 216.

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hazardous, and often misleading. Douglas Hurd, the forceful British foreign secretary of the early 1990s, liked to say that through skilled diplomacy his nation could “punch above its weight” in international affairs.15 Hurd conflated analysis with nostalgia, perhaps, yet surely governments with clear goals and a well-oiled bureaucracy operate more effectively in the foreign policy arena than regimes without those advantages. On the other hand, over the course of several generations comparative economic performance inevitably determines the pecking order in the international hierarchy. Some members of the professoriat contend that the system of nationstates which has structured international relations since the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia is drawing to a close. Practitioners reply, to adapt Mark Twain’s aphorism, that reports of its death are exaggerated. In any event, past experience suggests that, without the presence of other factors, competition for resources does not necessarily lead to open hostilities under the Westphalian system. Conversely, a cooperative economic regime provides no more than a fragile barrier against the passions of ideology or religion. The bloody history of the twentieth century illustrates those precepts well. In 1910 the British political publicist Sir Norman Angell asserted that advanced industrial nations could no longer afford to engage in war against each other. The cost of modern armaments had become so great, he argued, that the civilized European powers would have to find a way to accommodate economic and imperial rivalries through peaceful means.16 Many internationally minded people agreed with Angell. The wish became father to the thought. Angell proved nonetheless an imperfect prophet. Not only did war break out among the major powers in 1914, but the cost of armaments and trade disruption constituted no bar to the opening of hostilities.17 Still, men under the sway of theocratic doctrine do not easily change their minds. Like French aristocrats under the Restoration king Charles X, 15. Quoted by Jonathan Mirsky, “As Others Speak Out against China, Britain Keeps Quiet,” International Herald Tribune, June 30, 1999; concept further elaborated in B. J. C. McKercher, Transition of Power, Britain’s Loss of Global Pre-eminence to the United States, 1930–1945. 16. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to Their Economic and Social Advantage. 17. David Stevenson, Armaments and the Coming of War: Europe, 1904–1914. Stevenson points out, moreover, that before 1914 none of the great powers spent anywhere near as large a fraction of gross national product on armaments as became normative by the late 1930s.

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Angell and his fellow utopians neither learned anything nor forgot anything as a result of the Great War. They placed their trust during the postwar era in efforts by the League of Nations to restore economic and financial harmony. The League, they hoped, could relieve the competition for raw materials, markets, and population outlets to which they attributed much international conflict.18 International bank cooperation would complete the virtuous circle.19 Hardly any of those collaborative endeavors survived the Great Depression intact. None could prevent a sharp reversal of the globalization that had knit the international economy together before World War I.20 All the same, the breakdown of economic cooperation had at most a marginal indirect effect on the second gathering storm. Few would contend in retrospect that Germany went to war in 1939 owing primarily to a need for Lebensraum or markets. Nor do most historians credit the theory that Japan could have solved its economic problems in the 1930s in no other way than by creating a so-called Co-Prosperity Sphere resting on brutal exploitation. Only a scattering of revisionists would maintain nowadays that economic rivalry determined the course of the Cold War between 1945 and 1990. These observations do not require adherence to any theoretical model. Both ideology and a struggle for resources help explain interstate conflict at various times in the past. For example, religious conviction largely motivated the medieval European crusaders against Islam. Religion inspired the Protestant and Catholic participants in the wars of the German Reformation. In contrast, countries along the Atlantic littoral came to blows in the sixteenth century over the silver and gold resources of Mexico and Peru. Britain and France squabbled ceaselessly in the eighteenth century over the riches of the West Indies

18. Norman Angell, The Fruits of Victory: A Sequel to “The Great Illusion,” and Raw Materials, Population Pressure, and War. For a more general account on the League of Nations, see F. S. Northedge, The League of Nations: Its Life and Times, 1920–1946; on its economic and financial functions see League of Nations, ed., World Organization, 1920–1940; also, Anthony M. Endres and Grant A. Fleming, International Organizations and the Analysis of Economic Policy, 1919–1950. 19. Steven V. O. Clarke, Central Bank Cooperation, 1924–1931; Gianni Toniolo and Piet Clement, Central Bank Cooperation at the Bank for International Settlements, 1930–1973. 20. Kevin H. O’Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy; Harold James, The End of Globalization? Lessons from the Great Depression.

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and the profits of worldwide empire. In the twentieth century, by contrast, no comparable example comes to mind. Major conflicts, it seems clear, turned on national rivalries, racial antipathies, ideological divergencies, or on some admixture of the three. In the current era, if past is prologue, religion and culture may again form the basis for a clash of civilizations.21 To sum up, in modern times economic strength frequently provides the margin of victory, but it does not explain why one side or the other lets loose the dogs of war. The cautious observer will neither underestimate, nor overestimate, the web of economic and financial institutions that has increasingly bound the developed world together since 1945.

III Increasing globalization before 1914 and again since 1950 has required all developed capitalist states to face common problems. Before World War II, however, they faced them more often within a competitive than a collaborative framework. Since 1945, the institutional scaffolding for collaboration has become progressively more elaborate. The transient disputes that erupt from time to time—for example, the failure of the Doha Round of trade liberalization, or the retaliatory sanctions that the United States and the European Union episodically impose upon each other—may well appear in retrospect as mere squeaks from the wheel of globalization. Parochial domestic interests always remain powerful in a world of nation-states. Yet the Western powers and those striving to join the West seem well on their way—through such institutions as the IMF, the World Bank, the GATT, the OECD, NAFTA, the G-8 meetings, and the still evolving European Union—to creating a liberal international economic order based on agreed codes of behavior.22 Without falling victim to a Whig view of history, we must account more for the relative success of the current free-market model than for its failures.

21. Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order; Salim Rashid, ed., The Clash of Civilizations? Asian Responses. 22. See Harold James, International Monetary Cooperation since Bretton Woods; John Gillingham, European Integration, 1950–2003: Superstate or New Market Economy?

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To explain the startling success of the free-market model that originated in England and gradually spread to Continental Europe and English offshoots, one must go back to the Middle Ages. In the year 1000 Western Europe could boast living standards no higher than those of the outside world. Indeed, since the fall of Rome, China, Japan, and the Arab civilizations of the southern Mediterranean littoral had surpassed the West in technology and some aspects of material culture. As Figures 1 and 2 indicate, combined gross domestic product grew three hundred– fold and per capita income thirteen-fold over the next millennium, but the locus of growth reversed. By 1820 the West (conventionally defined as the thirteen Western and Northern European countries and the four leading British offshoots) had attained per capita income twice that of the rest of the world. From the late eighteenth century to the last quarter of the twentieth, the curve measuring progress turned upward again. The West further differentiated itself from the rest of mankind in technological sophistication, health and life expectancy, social welfare, and other indices of economic performance.23 By 2000 the per capita income gap between the West and the rest had increased to seven times. This advance in human well-being arguably rates as the greatest achievement in the history of mankind. The United States and the richest European countries (as well as Japan and Singapore) currently enjoy average incomes twenty to thirty times greater than those of subSaharan Africa. It is nonetheless deemed good breeding to play down that accomplishment. According to a recent president of the American Historical Association, “our children and our students know, in these days of multiculturalism and of postcolonial studies, that Europe—that funny little peninsula jutting off the edge of Asia—is not the center of history.”24 Very possibly this distinguished scholar and the herd of independent minds who echo her analysis correctly perceive the contemporary sensibility. All the same, by objective standards the West has stood for the past several centuries as the unchallenged engine of global advance in every field, material and intellectual. Conventional accounts ascribe this unparalleled growth of the West to the adoption of convertible husbandry and other innovative agricultural 23. For specific figures and an explanatory scheme, see Angus Maddison, Monitoring the World Economy, 1820–1992; The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective; and The World Economy: Historical Statistics; also available at www.oecd.org. 24. Caroline Walker-Bynum, “The Last Eurocentric Generation.”

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Figure 1. The West and the Rest: Regional Growth Trends, c. 1000–1820

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Figure 2. The West and the Rest: The Market Economy Differential, 1820–2001

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techniques, the industrial and transportation revolutions, the willingness to invent or adopt new technology, and the settlement of fertile and relatively empty parts of the globe. Last, but not least, the liberalization of capital and labor markets allowed each nation to specialize according to the dictates of comparative advantage.25 All those factors formed part of a feedback process influencing the others. Fundamentally, however, the spectacular “take-off” of the West, to employ Walt Rostow’s phrase, figured as an artifact of Western culture and Western political institutions.26 “Culture” embraces far more than high culture, although roughly 80 percent of the world’s chief intellectual and artistic accomplishments between 1400 and 1950 came from four countries or areas alone—England, France, Germany, and Italy.27 Rather, Western Europe and the English-speaking offshoots elsewhere were unique in developing free markets, security of property, a predictable system of law, and parliamentary limitations on the exercise of arbitrary power. Western Europe in the seventeenth century experienced a scientific revolution that not merely discredited traditional authority, but also gave leaders in every field—from soil chemistry to political theory— the sense that they could master nature and improve on the wisdom of the ancients. Europeans stood prepared to borrow the technological innovations of other cultures and, whether they embraced the “Protestant ethic” or its Catholic variant, were not held back, as were Muslim lands, by a religion essentially hostile to scientific speculation.28 The turn toward less arbitrary government, particularly in England, fostered legal

25. For the origins of this idea, which remains as apposite today as in the early nineteenth century, see David Ricardo, Principles of Political Economy and Taxation. 26. I draw in the following discussion on a large literature: David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present and The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor; W. W. Rostow, The Stages of Economic Growth and Rich Countries and Poor Countries: Reflections on the Past, Lessons for the Future; and Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel Huntington, eds., Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress. Richard Pipes, Property and Freedom, lays particular emphasis on the institution of private property. Where respect for private property failed to develop, as in czarist Russia, the economic growth rate invariably lagged. 27. Charles A. Murray, Human Accomplishment: The Pursuit of Excellence in the Arts and Sciences, 800 B.C. to 1950. 28. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Talcott Parsons; R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism; cf. the comparison with Muslim society in Bernard Lewis, What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle East Response.

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predictability, and Englishmen learned to deal with each other on the basis of agreement and contract rather than force and hierarchy. Industrialization lay at the heart of a broader process of modernization and urbanization, in which citizens learned to tolerate economic dislocation, that is to say, what Joseph Schumpeter would categorize euphemistically as the process of “creative destruction.” Western cultures proved extraordinarily resourceful in permitting Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” to clear markets. Meanwhile, the “visible hand” of modern management facilitated continual, efficient redesign of the scale and scope of the individual firm.29 The inherent dynamism of modern capitalism has sustained an ongoing industrial revolution. Upward progress has mostly come gradually, through a pattern of stimulus and response in specific industrial sectors. Yet every generation or so a technological breakthrough leads to fundamental restructuring of the economy. Perhaps the upward arc might better be described as punctuated equilibrium than as revolution. Over time, new industries at the beginning of their product cycles proved transformative. Thus the textile, railroad, and engineering sectors supplied the impetus for growth in the early nineteenth century. Organic chemicals, electrical goods, and the internal combustion engine followed in the late nineteenth century. Consumer durables took the lead in the interwar years. And in our own day, information technology has effected a metamorphosis in the way firms do business. Up through the mid–twentieth century, only West European societies and their English-speaking offshoots mustered the stability to tolerate the strains inherent in such dynamism without unremitting social and cultural upheaval.30 Argentina stood as the single apparent exception: it outpaced Germany and fell just behind France in per capita income as late as 1929. Thereafter, however, Argentina fell prey to populist misrule and sank to East European levels.31 Argentina’s failure seemed

29. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business and Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism. 30. Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective. 31. For the statistics, see Maddison, The World Economy: Historical Statistics, Tables 1c, 3b-c, 4c. For analysis of Argentina’s self-inflicted wounds, see Luis Alberto Romero, A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century; for the regional context, Pedro Aspe Armella, Rudiger Dornbusch, and Maurice Obstfeld, eds., Financial Policies and World Capital Markets: The Problem of Latin American Countries; and Eul-Soo Pang, The International Political Economy of Transformation in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile since 1960.

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Figure 3. Globalization and Convergence, 1951–2001

to underscore the difficulties of cultural transmission from the Western core to other parts of the world. Then a startling change occurred. After 1950 Japan and other East Asian societies began to master the techniques of modernization, embracing the technology though not fully the ambient culture of the West. Figure 3 shows that substantial convergence has already taken place, with Singapore—the freest East Asian economy—surpassing France and Germany in the per capita income ratings. And China, although starting from a depressed level, has consistently registered a growth rate approaching 10 percent in recent years. The traditional Western countries—the United States as well as those in the European Union—face an unprecedented challenge. Whatever the case in the early modern period, the superior economic performance of West European and offshoot societies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries came only in small part from the expropriation of extra-European wealth.32 The facts do not sustain the claims of Hobson, Hilferding, Lenin, and their socialist compatriots that European wealth derived importantly from markets and investment opportunities in the Third World. Nor did imperialism conjure up an extra-European 32. Silver and gold inflows from Mexico and Peru, and profits derived from the West Indian sugar trade, require a different interpretation of capital formation in premodern Europe.

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proletariat to exploit. Almost everywhere, imperialism proved a losing proposition for advanced industrial powers, justifiable to taxpayers only on security grounds. The British directed 70 percent of their foreign investment to the United States and other developed countries, 20 percent to India, and no more than 10 percent to other backward areas.33 The allegation of underdevelopment theorists that British investors used their competitive advantage for direct investment overseas, thus distorting colonial economies, also turns out to lack foundation. Before 1914, the British (just like the French and Germans) devoted 70 percent of their overseas investment to railroads, roads, ports, and other infrastructure; they placed less than 10 percent in mining and agriculture. The transfer of European managerial skills and technology had more durable consequences than the export of capital.34 What’s more, gunboat diplomacy did not usually intimidate Third World borrowers into paying their debts. One generation after another of colonial borrowers managed to default and, after a brief hiatus, to regain access to capital markets in the métropole.35 Despite the profitless nature of imperialism over all, the international economy was highly politicized during the nineteenth century, just as it remains today. Some 40 percent of British exports were invisibles before 1914. As the British fell behind the Americans and Germans in technological prowess and managerial expertise, they compensated by centering trade finance, insurance, and shipping in the City of London. Scholars now acknowledge that the gold standard alone failed to provide the flawless mechanism for the automatic adjustment of international accounts that it was supposed to furnish before World War I. The visible hand of the London City actually coordinated the international economy. Under other circumstances, some other standard might conceivably have replaced gold as the primary medium of exchange. In fact, the French government advocated a European monetary union 33. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study; Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital; V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism; suitable correctives in D. K. Fieldhouse, Economics and Empire, 1830–1914; Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher with Alice Denny, Africa and the Victorians: The Climax of Imperialism; Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Problem of International Investment. 34. Mark Thomas, “L’Angleterre au coeur des financements internationaux,” in P. Artus et al., Le Financement de l’économie mondiale, 53–66, recapitulates and buttresses the original investigations of this subject by George Paish. 35. Charles Lipson, Standing Guard: Protecting Foreign Capital in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.

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based on a bimetallic standard in the 1860s. Although the British and Prussians vetoed the scheme, the British to defend the financial interests of the London City, the Prussians on narrowly political grounds, the general idea seemed less outlandish once deflation became an endemic problem in the mid-1870s.36 Deflation in turn undermined the doctrine of free trade, and the adoption of protective tariffs by Britain’s chief competitors underscored the frenetic economic nationalism of the pre-1914 era.37 All the same, globalization under Western aegis continued to gather momentum until a type of thirty years’ civil war broke out within the West in 1914. The process of globalization, whether measured by trade, capital, or labor flows, came to an abrupt stop.38 Economists are wont to blame a misguided attempt to restore the gold-exchange standard for the failure of Europe to recover from World War I and for the slide into the Great Depression. They claim that the return to gold at a point when precious metal production failed to keep pace with the volume of trade imparted a deflationary bias to the international economy. Adherence to gold also transmitted shocks from one country to another.39 However, the proponents of central bank cooperation could have devised a technical fix for the purported gold shortage through the instrumentality of special drawing rights.40 At bottom, monetary arrangements represent an implicit bargaining framework for organizing international economic relations. They may work more or less smoothly through the course of the business cycle. But when they break down altogether, they do so for political reasons. The international economy collapsed in the 1930s

36. Luca Einaudi, Money and Politics: European Monetary Unification and the International Gold Standard (1865–1873); Marc Flandreau, The Glitter of Gold: France, Bimetallism, and the Emergence of the International Gold Standard, 1848–1973; Marc Flandreau and Frédéric Zumer, The Making of Global Finance, 1880–1913. 37. Peter T. Marsh, Bargaining on Europe: Britain and the First Common Market, 1860–1892; Andrew Marrison, British Business and Protection, 1903–1932; Eugene Golob, The Méline Tariff: French Agriculture and Nationalist Economic Policy; Ivo Lambi, Free Trade and Protectionism in Germany, 1868–1879; Kenneth D. Barkin, The Controversy over German Industrialization, 1890–1902; Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., Opening America’s Market: U.S. Foreign Trade Policy since 1776. 38. Harold James, The End of Globalization. 39. Barry Eichengreen, Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression; Peter Temin, Lessons from the Great Depression. 40. Both Randolph Burgess, an economist attached to the 1929 Young Committee, and Per Jacobsson, chief economist at the Bank for International Settlements, crafted plausible schemes.

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because the leading nations of the Western world could not settle their domestic distributive controversies and foreign political conflicts.41 Many phenomena came together to reinforce the downward spiral. The rise of labor union power made it impossible for nations with a misaligned currency to reduce nominal wages. The government of Weimar Germany stood ready to risk systemic collapse in order to rid itself of reparations.42 Perhaps most important, the war had left international finance without an obvious hegemon. In Charles Kindleberger’s formulation, Great Britain no longer possessed the financial strength to serve as a buyer of distress goods, a counter-cyclical lender, and a discounter in a crisis. The United States felt no compulsion to act as a global stabilizer proportional to its economic means. Aside from their lingering disinclination to act outside the Western Hemisphere and their modest participation in international trade, Americans had not yet developed the financial institutions necessary to play that role.43 The Americans who largely conceived and imposed a better-grounded financial architecture in 1944–1946 resolved to avoid the mistakes of their interwar predecessors. Yet the Bretton Woods arrangements also reflected the discrete interests of the United States.44 By 1945 the United States had piled up two-thirds of world gold in Fort Knox and amassed almost half the planet’s undestroyed manufacturing capacity. Inevitably, the Bretton Woods system remained an American-centered system based on the use of the dollar as the sole reserve currency. The authorities in Washington liked to picture their country as a beneficent hegemon, but a hegemon nonetheless. They provided Western Europe with bountiful financial help in the decade after the war, but invariably on American terms. Privately, the Europeans—the British and French perhaps more than the Germans and Italians—resented it. Here official public memory departs from gritty reality. For example, State 41. Stephen A. Schuker, “The Gold-Exchange Standard: A Reinterpretation,” 77– 94. 42. Edward W. Bennett, Germany and the Diplomacy of the Financial Crisis, 1931; also Stephen A. Schuker, American “Reparations” to Germany, 1919–33: Implications for the Third-World Debt Crisis, chaps. 3–4; cf. Phillip Heyde, Das Ende der Reparationen: Deutschland, Frankreich, und der Youngplan, 1929–1932. 43. Charles P. Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939, xv, 288–305. 44. Alfred E. Eckes, Jr., A Search for Solvency: Bretton Woods and the International Monetary System, 1941–1971; Fred L. Block, The Origins of International Monetary Disorder: A Study of United States International Monetary Policy from World War II to the Present.

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Department planners had schemed since the 1930s to break down the Ottawa system of Imperial preferences and to impose the Open Door on the British Dominions. They ratcheted up the pressure in the 1946 stabilization loan to Britain and, despite tenacious resistance, over the medium term succeeded.45 And while the Marshall Plan has entered celebratory lore as a model of generosity, the Economic Cooperation Administration employed its leverage under the plan to force the pace of European integration.46 Paradoxically, World War II discredited those conservative European forces naturally sympathetic to the dynamic style of American free enterprise. In every Continental country, the extreme left dominated the wartime Resistance. According to the mythology of Socialists as well as Communists, big business had sold out to “fascism” before the war and collaborated with the Nazis during the hostilities on grounds of self-interest.47 Apprehensive of rough justice during the postwar purges, the scattered supporters of a market economy had to hide beneath the cassocks of Christian Democracy in order to remain politically viable.48 In England, meanwhile, Prime Minister Churchill had focused on military issues after 1940 and abandoned the key domestic ministries to his Labour coalition partners.49 Allied victory therefore brought to power in Britain, France, Benelux, Scandinavia, and elsewhere elements that favored central planning, nationalization of key industries, permanent controls over other aspects of economic life, and the diversion of resources from capital investment

45. Benjamin M. Rowland, Commercial Conflict and Foreign Policy: A Study in Anglo-American Relations, 1932–1938; Richard N. Gardner, Sterling-Dollar Diplomacy in Current Perspective: The Origins and Prospects of Our International Economic Order; L. S. Pressnell, External Economic Policy since the War: The Post-War Financial Settlement. 46. Michael J. Hogan, The Marshall Plan: America, Britain, and the Reconstruction of Western Europe, 1947–1952. 47. See, for example, Richard Vinen, The Politics of French Business: 1936–1945. Henry Turner has shown that, even in Germany, big businessmen, with some exceptions, nurtured grave reservations about Hitler from the start: German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. Nevertheless, during World War II, most educated Americans gained the opposite impression from the work of the underground Communist, Fritz L. Neumann, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism. 48. Peter Novick, The Resistance versus Vichy: The Purge of Collaborators in Liberated France; Marc Olivier Baruch, ed., Une Poignée de misérables: l’épuration de la société française après la Seconde Guerre Mondiale. 49. Paul Addison, The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War.

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to the elaboration of a welfare state. Many of those sympathizers with prewar Popular Front values stood well to the left of the American New Deal. Characteristically, they relied on a cohort of young economists who took their inspiration from John Maynard Keynes.50 Whether they originally meant to do so or not, left-wing governments promoted social stability by spreading the benefits of economic security and prosperity. Societies with diminished class conflict, an egalitarian income distribution, and access to secondary education for the masses proved resistant to the blandishments of Russian-style communism. Within a single generation, the working classes of Western Europe came to enjoy the multiple pleasures of the consumer society.51 On the other hand, a cradle-to-grave layering of health and welfare supports, social insurance, and bountiful pensions required crippling taxation and tended to crowd out private capital investment. Carried to excess, such policies were likely over time to hobble private-sector expansion and foster structural unemployment. These dangers did not become immediately apparent owing to the extraordinary rate of economic growth in Atlantic Community nations during the generation after the end of the war. That unprecedented era of prosperity sprang from a fortunate concatenation of circumstances. These included a backlog of readily applicable technology and the eagerness of business to innovate in the late 1940s, sound monetary policies and rapid advances in productivity during the 1950s, and unusually low energy and raw material prices that improved the terms of trade during the 1960s. In an era of neo-Keynesian self-confidence, however, advocates of the welfare state preferred to discern a “politics of productivity” in which sustained public spending and income redistribution had conjured up a virtuous circle of high aggregate demand.52

50. For the growing prestige of Keynesian thought among economists on both sides of the Atlantic, see Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, Volume 3, Fighting for Freedom, 1937–1946; and Robert M. Collins, The Business Response to Keynes, 1929–1964. Alec Cairncross and Nita Watts, The Economic Section, 1939–1961, show how uncritically even the best British government economists followed the holy grail of “planning.” 51. Critics tend to deprecate the embourgeoisement of the West European working class as a species of Americanization. See, for example, Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: American Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe. 52. See Charles S. Maier, “The Politics of Productivity: Foundations of American International Economic Policy”; also Maier’s restatement of the thesis with critical evaluations by Charles P. Kindleberger and Stephen A. Schuker in “The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Western Europe.”

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These disputes took place between the Left and the Right within each Western society, of course. Yet even Europeans who counted as friends of the United States began to speak, somewhat simplistically, of a basic divergence in values. “Western Europe was a vacuum, on either side of which were the two great dynamic forces of communism and American capitalism,” proclaimed the French planner Jean Monnet in 1949. “This vacuum could be filled either by one of these outside forces or by the development of a Western European ‘way of life.’” Monnet conceived that third way on the model of the British Labour government, which had “carried out a redistribution of wealth on a massive scale while at the same time retaining the freedom of the individual.”53 The defeated countries, Germany and Italy, resisted the blandishments of a cradle-to-grave safety net somewhat better than the putative victors during the recovery years immediately after the war. As Mancur Olson has pointed out, the weakening of such intermediate bodies as employers’ associations, labor unions, and consumer advocacy groups eased economic bottlenecks to the free flow of capital and labor.54 In Germany, through the early 1960s, so long as Ludwig Erhard headed the Economics Ministry, the Federal Republic promoted a type of progrowth model denominated Rhineland capitalism or the Social Market economy. In theory capital and labor were supposed to collaborate through a process of codetermination that both sides, and consumers as well, would find equitable.55 Figure 3 shows that defeated Germany closed the income gap with France during the 1950s. Nonetheless, in the final analysis, neither the cartelized heavy industries nor the Marxian Socialist labor unions of West Germany sincerely accepted the idea of a market economy encompassing an element of risk. Some German businessmen began to emulate the American entrepreneurial model, and AFL emissaries did what they could to influence forward-looking German unionists in a SocialDemocratic direction.56 Yet only a minority of middle-class Germans 53. Stephen A. Schuker, “The European Union from Jean Monnet to the Euro,” 23. 54. Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups and The Rise and Decline of Nations: Economic Growth, Stagflation, and Social Rigidities. 55. James C. Van Hook, Rebuilding Germany: The Creation of the Social Market Economy, 1945–1957; Alfred C. Mierzejewski, Ludwig Erhard: A Biography. 56. Volker R. Berghahn, The Americanization of West German Industry, 1945– 1973; Francis X. Gannon, Joseph D. Keenan, Labor’s Ambassador in War and Peace; also Ted Morgan, A Covert Life: Jay Lovestone: Communist, Anti-Communist, and Spymaster.

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(many of them enrolled in the small Free Democratic Party) embraced Erhard’s Ordo-Liberalism wholeheartedly. By the time the unreconstructed Socialist Willy Brandt became chancellor in 1969, Germany began to resemble other slow-growth, leisure-oriented European welfare states.57 With mixed-economy enthusiasts having prevailed almost everywhere, the 1970s figured as the high noon of “Eurosclerosis”—a progressive condition in which an aggregation of controls and regulations clogs the vital arteries of the economy. A spike in energy prices after 1973 and a reversal in the terms of trade between industrial exporters and commodity producers obscured the depth of the problem at first. Eventually it became clear that a culture of leisure and private satisfactions, overregulation of business, guaranteed employment and uncompetitive wages, short working hours and commodious welfare benefits resulted in a slowdown of economic growth.58 Still, many actors in the political process, particularly under Socialist governments, considered the trade-off preferable to the supposedly unrestrained capitalism on the other side of the Atlantic.

IV Meanwhile, the United States began in the 1960s to use its seigniorage over the world monetary system for unilateral advantage. Here again, defense of the West in the Cold War did not mean that the pecuniary interests of the Allied nations coincided. Coordination of security policies proves perfectly compatible with aggressive rivalry in the economic sphere. Under Bretton Woods rules, foreign central banks held dollars as the principal reserve against their own currency issue. The system worked smoothly so long as the United States dominated global industrial production and other countries experienced a dollar shortage, as they generally did up to the mid-1950s. Yet the Bretton Woods regime institutionalized no systemic check on American monetary expansion once the United States began, at the beginning of the 1960s, to run a chronic balance-of-payments deficit. Foreign central banks could either monetize their excess dollars at the risk of domestic inflation or sterilize 57. A. J. Nicholls, Freedom with Responsibility: The Social Market Economy in Germany, 1918–1963. 58. See, among other works, the essays in David Calleo and Claudia Morgenstern, eds., Recasting Europe’s Economies: National Strategies in the 1980s.

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them; in either case they would effectively have to write Washington a blank check. As Jacques Rueff and other advisers to President de Gaulle of France complained, the United States could meet its foreign requirements by inflating the monetary base of its trade partners.59 In 1961 the Kennedy administration sought to spur economic growth at home through a supply-side tax cut. Officials offered the justification that they would still aim at a “full employment balanced budget.” In practice this decision, taken when labor markets (except for the structurally unemployed) were already reasonably tight, imparted an inflationary bias to the economy. The federal government would run mounting deficits for the next generation. Imbued with a sense of invincibility verging on hubris, the Kennedy team sought to maintain the Pax Americana through overseas military outlays, generous foreign aid, and capital investment by U.S. multinationals, even though export revenues no longer covered those expenditures in full. Viewing the difficulty as temporary at first, the administration pressured Germany and Japan to contribute a larger share of the upkeep for U.S. troops overseas. Unfortunately, the problem turned out not to be temporary. Ever since World War II, the United States had enjoyed lower capital costs and higher labor productivity than its trade partners. Those advantages had eroded, although the broad public remained unaware how far the deterioration had gone.60 When the succeeding Johnson administration (1963–1969) attempted to finance Great Society social programs and an unpopular war in Vietnam without raising taxes, inflationary expectations exploded. Real wage increases exceeding productivity gains became embedded in the American economy, just as they did in West European economies at about the same time. The Kennedy Round of trade liberalization,

59. I draw for this section on David P. Calleo, The Imperious Economy; Francis J. Gavin, Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958–1971; and Hubert Zimmermann, Money and Security: Troops, Monetary Policy, and West Germany’s Relations with the United States and Britain, 1950–1971. Jacques Rueff enlarged on his position in The Balance of Payments and The Monetary Sin of the West. 60. Unionized workers in basic industries such as autos and steel had negotiated gold-plated contracts during an era when foreign firms could offer little competition. When European productivity recovered and East Asian skill levels rose, U.S. union leaders tenaciously defended their gains. Nelson Lichtenstein explains this process well in The Most Dangerous Man in Detroit: Walter Reuther and the Fate of American Labor.

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which officials had hoped would improve the basic balance, exposed a structural deficit instead. Moreover, Great Society legislation fostered changes in behavior among workers and businessmen that engendered stagflation. When Richard Nixon, the Republican victor in the 1968 election, tried to curb the twin budget and trade deficits, a deep recession ensued. After badly losing the midterm elections, Nixon sharply reversed course. He concluded that traditional sound-money policies had become politically infeasible.61 Nixon’s “New Economic Policy” of 1971 ended convertibility of the dollar into gold. The president’s fresh counselors realized that to jettison Bretton Woods at a stroke might disrupt trade relations and encourage the avarice of Third World raw-material producers. But they held it politically suicidal to pursue a restricted-growth policy at home for balance-of-payments reasons. They resolved to force some form of dollar devaluation and to redistribute defense burdens within the Western alliance. The era in which the United States could afford unilateral concessions to its partners closed. A White House adviser spoke of dispelling any “Marshall Plan psychology” that remained.62 However, Nixon’s gamble did not pay off. The breathing space that he secured proved insufficient to restructure the domestic economy for more productivity and less inflation. A variant of Eurosclerosis emerged on the Western side of the Atlantic. The social service bureaucracies that Nixon had inherited from his Great Society predecessors constituted an effective lobby for ever-increasing entitlement spending. The “silent majority” outside the Beltway may not have favored lavish outlays to end poverty by government fiat, but Congress took its cue from the opinion makers who did.63 In 1973–1974, moreover, oil producers and other rawmaterial suppliers jacked up prices and triggered deterioration in the terms of trade for all industrial countries. By this time, the Americans had induced their monetary partners to give up fixed exchange rates altogether, a development that free-market economists such as Milton Friedman had conveniently made intellectually respectable. During the 61. Allan J. Matusow, Nixon’s Economy: Booms, Busts, Dollars, and Votes. 62. Peter G. Peterson, later head of Lehman-Kuhn Loeb, coined this winged phrase in his candid state paper, The United States in a Changing World Economy. 63. Samuel P. Huntington theorizes in Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity, 324–26, that the United States has become an “unrepresentative democracy” in which the judiciary, public interest groups, the mass media, Hollywood, radical Protestant churches, and academics enjoy more clout than the voters at large.

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balance of the 1970s, the resourceful U.S. Treasury discovered ways to take advantage of floating rates. As interwar experience demonstrated, floating rates have always proved subject to political manipulation. Government economists prefer to talk in genteel tones about “leaning against the wind harder than the wind is blowing,” but the effect is much the same.64 During the Carter administration, Treasury officials made strenuous efforts to “talk the dollar down” in the hope of boosting domestic employment. They would, in this respect, provide a precedent for the George W. Bush Treasury in 2004–2006. In the 1970s, at least, the Europeans and Japanese found themselves obliged willy-nilly to tolerate those maneuvers. Oil prices were denominated in dollars. This happy circumstance provided the United States with leverage. Other industrial nations realized that, if the dollar were held below purchasing-power parity, the artificial exchange rate would diminish the price of their oil. When OPEC ratcheted up the oil price a second time in the late 1970s, Washington replied with another effective devaluation of the dollar. Eventually the Western countries and their OPEC interlocutors reached a standoff. The Arab nations possessed sufficient port facilities to import only a limited quantum of goods. They would have to place the rest of their excess profits in Western money-center banks for recycling to the Third World. Those banks often lent improvidently and suffered tremendous losses later in the 1980s. But that is another story, one outside the purview of American-European relations.65 This particular episode in beggar-thy-neighbor diplomacy did not come to an end until 1980. With the accession of Paul Volcker to the leadership of the Federal Reserve Board and the election of Ronald Reagan as president, anti-inflation forces at last secured the upper hand in Washington, at least temporarily. To sum up, the course of monetary affairs over the whole period, 1961 to 1981, exposed the severe domestic constraints limiting financial collaboration among Western countries that remained closely allied in the security sphere.

64. For this formulation, see Susan Howson, Sterling’s Managed Float: The Operation of the Exchange Equalization Account, 1932–39, 56. 65. For details, see Stephen A. Schuker, American “Reparations” to Germany, 1919–33, 120–47.

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V The history of European integration shows similarly that the path of economic cooperation proceeds by convoluted by-ways to an uncertain goal. No doubt the creation of the European Union rates in a fifty-year optic as a stunning success—the story of countless obscure compromises and obstacles overcome.66 The European Community built and solidified its institutions not by embracing the plans of visionaries such as Jean Monnet, but through a wearisome process of self-interested national bargaining. Monnet’s original brainchild for decision-making from the top down by a supranational elite, the 1950–1951 European Coal and Steel Community, encountered suspicions on all sides. It might well have run aground autonomously, even if the Continent had not rapidly switched from coal to oil as the fuel of choice.67 That the technocrats in Brussels presently seek to revive the Monnet model of manipulation by the elites will surely rank as an irony of history. The 1957 Treaty of Rome achieved greater permanence than the ECSC precisely because it rested on a finely calibrated practical deal between those who endeavored to protect domestic agricultural interests, especially the French, and those who sought wider markets for consumer goods, notably the Germans. The Inner Six met subsequent crises, including the admission of Britain, Denmark, and Ireland as well as trade agreements with the EFTA countries, through recurrent back-room political logrolling. The European Union marked time during the depressed 1970s. The reversal in the terms of trade between industrial products and commodities like oil shook the social compromises that had enabled transnational integration to proceed hand-in-hand with the perquisites of social welfare. Nevertheless, the drive toward closer linkages resumed with negotiation of the Single Market in 1984. The early successes of 66. I draw on Gillingham, European Integration, 1950–2003; Andrew Moravcsik, The Choice for Europe: Social Purpose and State Power from Messina to Maastricht; and, for the earlier period, on Alan S. Milward et al., The European Rescue of the Nation State; Anne Deighton and Alan S. Milward, eds., Widening, Deepening, and Acceleration: The European Economic Community, 1957–1963; and Keith Middlemas, Orchestrating Europe: The Informal Politics of the European Union, 1973–95. 67. François Duchêne, Jean Monnet: First Statesman of Interdependence; Eric Roussel, Jean Monnet, 1888–1979.

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Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and President Reagan in the United States, contrasted with the dismal failure of Pierre Mauroy’s Popular Front regime in France during 1981–1982, led the EC bureaucracy to reconsider business liberalization. EC Commission President Jacques Delors, although heretofore a strict votary of the Socialist line in Paris, began to soft-pedal industrial policy. He allowed Leon Brittan, the Thatcherite head of the EC Competition Directorate, to curb restrictive business practices and to enforce competition within a number of key economic sectors. Over the next decade the Community shifted its primary emphasis from promoting MITI-like industrial champions through statesubsidized research to neutral rule-making for the marketplace. In several crucial areas, it permitted the engine of private competition to drive growth from the bottom up. Corporatist and protectionist lobbies in the individual countries deprecated the new orientation, but for the moment they did not prevail. EU member states memorialized their intention to deepen the union with a 1992 decision to create a European central bank and common currency by the end of the millennium. Professional economists fretted over the Maastricht plan as technically hazardous without concomitant budgetary coordination. The politicians and the Brussels bureaucrats replied that EU countries (with the exception of Great Britain and the Scandinavian outliers) wished to set down a political marker. The euro would confirm their resolve to accept limitations on national sovereignty in a greater cause.68 It looked at first as if the politicians had the better of the argument. The launch of the euro took place on schedule. Its value leaped to a premium as central banks around the globe sought to diversify their hardcurrency holdings out of dollars. By 2005, however, it appeared that the economists had a point after all. France, Germany, and Italy, rather than setting an example, all thumbed their noses at the Growth and Stability Pact, which was supposed to limit the maximum fiscal deficit that EU members can run under common currency rules. Italy faced a particular dilemma because its small-scale, labor-intensive firms were steadily losing world market share at the prevailing exchange rate. All the same, the ultimate fate of the Maastricht vision for United Europe

68. Gillingham, European Integration, 149–302; Colette Mazzucelli, France and Germany at Maastricht: Politics and Negotiations to Create the European Union.

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must turn on reasonable adherence to the currency rules.69 The solution of this conundrum lies in the future. On balance the American government favored a stronger and deeper European Union. A United Europe need not conflict with American interests. Indeed, most U.S. specialists on Europe perceived clear advantage in having an enlarged “Western” economic sphere within which rule-based competition would prevail. In addition, a second plausible reserve currency would take pressure off the dollar. Unfortunately, the ambitious plans of the early 1990s for a liberalized EU have not worked out—at least not so far. The fresh approach of the Thatcherites has faded from institutional memory. The Brussels bureaucracy continues to crank out a myriad of regulations to govern the EU from the top down. The familiar special interests defend their turf, particularly in France and Germany, of necessity the locomotive countries in the Union.70 Outside limited fields of telecom, the high-tech boom of the past decade has failed to create firms with the scale and scope of their American and East Asian counterparts. European companies in the manufacturing and retail sectors have lagged the foreign competition in adapting information and communication technology (ICT) to improve factor productivity. The anticipated cross-border cooperation in biotechnology and nanotechnology has likewise not materialized to date. The French began to drag their feet on ending the compartmentalization of capital markets once it appeared that others would benefit at their expense. In a number of high-profile cases the antitrust team at Brussels headquarters has given the impression of scrutinizing merger proposals by American firms with disproportionate vigor. Under the impetus of Commissioner “Supermario” Monti at the Competition Directorate (1999–2004), the bureaucracy often chose to raise barriers rather than lower them. Monti’s successor, Neelie Kroes, arrived with a blare of trumpets and pleasing rhetoric, but has not changed fundamentals. The EU authorities have continued to tolerate member-state subsidies for Airbus (the European Aeronautic, Defense and Space Company) well beyond a semblance of fair transatlantic competition. They blocked a well-conceived merger between General Electric and Honeywell. And

69. Lionel Barber, “The European Stability Pact,” Financial Times, December 9, 2003. 70. David Calleo, ed., Europe’s Franco-German Engine.

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they so far exceeded U.S. Justice Department requirements in forcing Microsoft to eliminate parts of its browser that, in early 2006, the American firm charged lack of due process. Meanwhile, common agricultural policy—the CAP—continues to drain EU coffers to the detriment of more constructive uses of funds. The EU agriculture commissioner promises to slash trade-distorting farm subsidies by 70 percent before 2013, but sets a target date so far removed that it sounds suspiciously like the Greek Calends.71 EU countries have also erected an informal nontariff barrier against American agricultural products by spreading the impression, contrary to scientific evidence, that genetically modified foods are unsafe.72 In many respects, therefore, the EU has assumed a protectionist stance against the United States. In France, in accordance with a long tradition, the fear of American economic penetration has found particularly fertile soil. Characteristically, the president of the French National Library has mounted the barricades against the Web browser Google, warning of “the risk of a crushing domination by America in the definition of the idea that future generations will have of the world.”73 In 2004, the fifteen existing members of the European Union took a giant step in widening the bloc. With great fanfare, they admitted ten developing nations from Eastern and Southern Europe, thus raising the economic Iron Curtain, a residue of the Cold War. On a number of sensitive points, however, the Brussels authorities had never fully resolved the debate whether to deepen or widen the union first. Hence they stipulated transition arrangements that restricted agricultural subsidies for seven years to old members. They likewise limited legal migration for seven years. And they denied the newcomers participation in the Schengen Agreement for eliminating border checks. Thus despite much cheery rhetoric, the prospect of a “two-speed Europe” hove into view. Many East Europeans had hoped for economic flexibility

71. Franz Fischler, “Why Can’t America Be More Like Us?” Wall Street Journal, February, 19, 2004. 72. Henry I. Miller and Gregory Conko, The Frankenfood Myth. 73. Jean-Noël Jeanneney, “Quand Google défie l’Europe,” Le Monde, January 23, 2005. The fear of American economic and cultural imperialism has a long prehistory in France. For previous campaigns against Coca Cola, Hollywood film, and diverse consumer products, see Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization; and, on the general theme, Philippe Roger, L’Ennemi américain: généalogie de l’antiaméricanisme français.

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on the American model rather than a stockpile of ukases handed down from Brussels. A few voiced disillusionment with the terms on offer so far. Lamenting the barriers against Polish workers, Lech Wałęsa, founder of the Solidarity labor movement, wondered with pardonable exaggeration why the French for so many years “encouraged Poles to build capitalism when it turns out they are communists themselves.”74 Meanwhile, the venerable Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and his coterie of Paris énarques took on the task of elaborating a constitution. The Giscard team hoped to freeze French supremacy in place as the union continued to evolve.75 At length a 474-page tome issued forth, replete with declarations, appendices, and protocols. Giscard evidently sought to revivify a powerful supranational bureaucracy with a strong French accent, somewhat along the lines proposed in the early 1950s by Jean Monnet. In March 2005 he warned President Jacques Chirac against holding a referendum to ratify this monstrosity: “It is not possible,” he remarked cynically, “for anyone to understand the full text.”76 Chirac decided that legally he had to seek public approval, and the French voters rejected the document decisively. Shortly afterward, Dutch voters also withheld their imprimatur, and the other countries quietly pigeonholed the document. By the autumn of 2006, no one could foretell what substitute would emerge or whether it too would reflect a hypertrophic statist orientation.77

VI The present crisis of the European Union goes beyond the wording of its charter or the shape of its organization chart. Despite periodic excursions and alarums, the arrangement has usually worked tolerably well because it rested on a tacit Franco-German political understanding. Unwilling to

74. Interview with Gazeta Wyborcza, June 24, quoted in New York Times, June 26, 2005. 75. For a summary of these problems in short compass, see Robert J. Samuelson, “The European Predicament,” Washington Post, February 4, 2004. 76. Elaine Sciolino, “European Charter’s Architect Faults Chirac for Its Demise,” New York Times, June 15, 2005. 77. Some scholars display more optimism for a quick recovery of European institutions than does this writer. For a compendium of their views, see John Gillingham, Design for a New Europe.

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accept a place in the European queue proportionate to its population and resources, France has always sought to harness German economic power to achieve Continental supremacy. From immodest wartime beginnings through the end of his second reign in 1969, Charles de Gaulle imagined that he could conjure up a third force to hold the balance between the two “barbarous” superpowers.78 His successors cling to the same idea, though they express it with greater discretion. From the Adenauer era onward, the Germans stood prepared to subsidize France’s farmers, pick up the tab for its empire, and lavish development funds on lesser EU members as they joined. By disporting themselves as good Europeans, the leaders of the Bonn Republic aimed to efface the memory of Nazism and to regain political respectability. By one calculation, German taxpayers paid more to subsidize European integration than they had refused to pay in reparations after World War I.79 Other powers accepted German reunification in 1990 largely owing to this calculated generosity.80 Yet all good things must come to an end. Germany, and to a lesser extent Great Britain, can no longer afford, by a prudent calculation of advantage, to play Santa Claus to other EU members.81 Many observers now think of Germany as “the sick man of Europe.”82 Figure 3 indicates that since reunification the German economy has performed even more dismally than the sluggish economy of France. Chancellor Helmut Kohl made a fundamental error in 1990 when he ignored advice from the Bundesbank and agreed to exchange the GDR mark for the deutsche mark at par. At a stroke, this politically deft but economically

78. Schuker, “The European Union from Jean Monnet to the Euro,” 20–21; Georges-Henri Soutou, “Le Général de Gaulle et l’URSS, 1943–1945: idéologie ou équilibre européen,” Revue d’histoire diplomatique (1994/4): 303–55; Sir Pierson Dixon Memorandum of conversation with de Gaulle, “Visit of the Prime Minister to Rambouillet,” December 15–16, 1962, PREM 11/4230, Public Record Office. 79. Niall Ferguson, “The End of Europe?” American Enterprise Institute Bradley Lecture, March 1, 2004, www.aei.org. 80. Philip Zelikow and Condoleezza Rice, Germany Unified and Europe Transformed: A Study in Statecraft; Konrad H. Jarausch, The Rush to German Unity; Charles S. Maier, Dissolution: The Crisis of Communism and the End of East Germany. 81. Contrary to expectation, Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged in February 2006 that Germany would provide one billion euros in subsidies for the EU during the budget period 2007–2013; hence a reckoning is postponed for the moment. See Theo Sommer, “Kanzlerin: Auf ihren Reisen entwirft Angela Merkel eine neue Aussenpolitik,” Die Zeit, February 4, 2006. 82. The “sick man of Europe” is a play on historical memory. In the nineteenth century diplomats referred to the declining Ottoman Empire as “the sick man of Europe.”

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daft maneuver rendered all of East German industry unviable. German labor unions made things worse by insisting on a prompt equalization of wages in both parts of the reconfigured Bundesrepublik. The burdens of rebuilding infrastructure and subsidizing those rendered permanently unemployed in the East compounded the deeply embedded structural problems of the West German economy. Nevertheless, the main political parties and pressure groups have tenaciously resisted change. When, after long cogitation, Gerhard Schröder, chancellor of the Red-Green coalition, proposed a modest cut in corporate taxation, he felt compelled to close “loopholes” so that the macroeconomic effect would be close to zero. Schröder’s Christian Democratic successor, Angela Merkel, has done little better. Although Merkel squeaked out a small plurality in the 2005 elections, she had to form a Great Coalition with her SPD opponents in order to secure a majority in the Bundestag. Bowing to the political realities, she soon passed the word, “‘Neoliberalism’ is out; ‘Social justice’ is in.’”83 After ineffectual efforts to reform health care around the edges, Merkel turned to a familiar standby—higher indirect taxes. By the time that the United States recovered from a modest businesscycle downturn in 2004–2005, it became evident that “Eurosclerosis” was approaching crisis proportions in those EU countries adhering to the Franco-German welfare-state model. In 1998 Robert Mundell, intellectual father of the euro, had cautioned that monetary union alone would not solve the problem of underused resources and unemployment rates chronically exceeding 10 percent. Vexatious taxation of business, overregulation of labor and capital markets, and a social safety net that overshot the bounds of allocative efficiency, Mundell predicted, would exert a permanent drag on economic performance.84 Seven years later, the numbers had proved him right (see Figure 3). Since the mid-1990s the Continental states of “Old Europe” (Luxembourg excepted) have grown at roughly half the American rate, while the United States in turn has significantly lagged behind China and the East Asian “Tigers.” By contrast, those EU members that have grown satisfactorily (Ireland, the Scandinavian and Baltic countries, and to a lesser degree Great Britain)

83. Sommer, “Kanzlerin,” Die Zeit, February 4, 2006. 84. Mundell quoted in “Germany’s Epiphany,” Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2005.

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have done so by creating a favorable climate for investment. They have slashed corporate taxation, increased tax transparency, curbed regulation, and eased restrictions on hiring and firing.85 The temper of public opinion in Old Europe suggests that routine electoral change such as took place in Germany in 2005 will not provide the impetus for radical surgery on the welfare state. Not merely the political and intellectual elites, but also the mass of voters express a clear preference for keeping things as they are. Moreover, the leading Continental countries suffer from pervasive social and cultural ills that economic policy changes cannot solve in isolation. The work ethic in Western Europe appears to have declined.86 This applies particularly to the younger generation, even in Germany, where pride in work traditionally stood at the core of the culture.87 It is hard to quantify a subjective quality such as the preference for leisure. George Weigel enters the realm of speculation when he connects the purported sybaritic orientation of young West Europeans to a loss of religious faith rather than to generational change.88 About the numbers, however, little doubt obtains. Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the European Central Bank, points out that output per hour worked in the EU has almost converged with the U.S. level. Output per capita remains stuck, however, at two-thirds the U.S. level. Americans (and many East Asians) work on average close to two thousand hours a year, while the French and Germans work fewer than sixteen hundred hours.89 Management consultants also discern some qualitative decline of entrepreneurial spirit among the younger cohort of the West European bourgeoisie. Significant

85. In 2004–2005, articles on the Irish miracle appeared regularly in the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and other financial publications. For a quizzical reaction from a welfare-state perspective, see Lizette Alvarez, “Suddenly Rich, Poor Old Ireland Seems Bewildered,” New York Times, February 2, 2005. 86. In France, a paean to idleness on the job became a runaway bestseller in 2004: Corinne Maier, Bonjour paresse: de l’art et de la nécessité d’en faire le moins possible en entreprise. This slight effusion has no probative value as an index of workplace performance, but its stunning success casts light on the mentalité of a certain bookbuying public. 87. The work ethic used to form such an integral component of German workingclass culture that even the National Socialist regime took care to foster it on the shop floor as a way to minimize opposition. See Lutz Niethammer, ed., Lebensgeschichte und Sozialkultur im Ruhrgebiet: 1930 bis 1960. 88. George Weigel, The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics without God. 89. Jean-Claude Trichet, “Euro Vision,” Wall Street Journal, February 24, 2005.

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numbers of the rising generation express reluctance to take over small and medium-size businesses from their fathers.90 Yet more problematic, the principal European countries seem mired in an immigration trap. Citizens eligible for long-term unemployment payments will not take menial jobs. What’s more, European populations are aging and not reproducing themselves. The total fertility rate in the years 1995–2000 was 1.73 in France, 1.70 in Great Britain, 1.33 in Germany, 1.20 in Italy, and 1.10 in Spain. Muslim populations across the Mediterranean have birthrates several times higher.91 For the first time since Charles Martel repulsed the Islamic forces at the Battle of Tours in 732 A.D., North Africans have swarmed across the Pyrenees. Another stream of Muslim immigrants arrives in Germany from Turkey and the Balkans; still a third reaches England from the former British Empire. Nativists mutter that the tectonic plates of Africa are sliding under Europe. This is, however, an alarmist claim that fails to capture the complexity of Islamic immigration. Relatively secular Turks, the middleclass progeny of Punjabi shopkeepers forced out of British East Africa, and peasants from the Algerian bled vary drastically in average skill levels and potential for assimilation. The French, who in the past have insisted that immigrants swallow their civic culture whole, face the most acute difficulties. Owing to the high birthrate among immigrants and their progeny, one-quarter of school-age children in France now have a parent or grandparent of non-European origin. Radicalized youths in the Muslim banlieues disdain the “Infidel” way of life. Young men, more so than their female counterparts, decline to cultivate the skills that would enable them to enter the work force in any capacity. Many liken assimilation to “cultural rape.”92 In November 2005 riots swept the suburbs of Paris. In comparison, British Muslims have remained relatively quiescent. Still, when native-born suicide bombers blew up London trains and

90. I am indebted to Mark Fuller, chairman of Monitor Corporation, for this insight. In France, some critics also perceive growing obstacles to the circulation of elites at the very top of society. Reformers fear that entrance into the École Nationale d’Administration, which trains virtually all the top political and business leaders, is becoming a quasi-hereditary perquisite, “like the mandarins of medieval China.” John Carreyou, “Is Elite School France’s Failing?” Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2006. 91. United Nations Population Division, “World Population Prospects: The 2000 Revision,” Table 28 (February 2001), cited by Huntington, Who Are We? The fertility rate is 3.3 across North Africa, 5.2 in Iraq, and 6.1 in Saudi Arabia. 92. Fouad Ajami, “The Moor’s Last Laugh,” Wall Street Journal, March 22, 2004.

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buses in July 2005, 24 percent of British Muslims admitted to sympathy with the “feelings and motives” of those who carried out the attacks.93 Over the following year, moreover, Scotland Yard foiled a dozen new conspiracies in various stages of preparation. In the long run Europe requires young workers from abroad to fill out the domestic labor supply and to maintain the viability of pay-as-yougo retirement systems. But more immediately, the inflow of poorly educated and often unruly Muslims places a tremendous strain on social, medical, instructional, police, and carceral services. A vicious circle ensues. Middle-class Europeans must pay such high taxes to service the needs of the newcomers that they cannot afford to raise many children themselves. Still, the liberal elites of Western Europe accept the new immigration as a necessary, and largely ineluctable, consequence of globalization.94 President de Gaulle explained in 1959 that he had to cut Algeria loose because Muslims were unassimilable, and he could not stand to see his village, Colombey-les-Deux-Eglises, turn into Colombey-lesDeux-Mosqées.95 No politician to the left of Jean Le Pen’s National Front would dare to voice such sentiments today. Do Western Europe’s social problems, serious as they are, imperil the vital interests of the United States? Probably they do not. The pattern of U.S. trade has evolved. America’s leading trade partners at present are Canada, Mexico, China, and Japan. The prospects for future growth in trade and investment loom largest in East and South Asia. The urban populations of China and India offer a scarcely tapped supply of welleducated and technologically skilled workers. The Bush administration has also boosted hemispheric trade by signing a Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA). If it can persuade Congress and the ultranationalists of the Mercosur bloc to go along, it hopes eventually

93. Statistical survey in Daily Telegraph, July 23, 2005; nonquantitative investigation by David Leppard and Nick Fielding, “The Hate,” Sunday Times, July 10, 2005. 94. An immense literature has developed on this subject, most of it sympathetic to the immigrants. Among recent works, see Michael Bommes and Andrew Geddes, eds., Migration and the Welfare State in Contemporary Europe; Gabriel Poulalion, L’Europe contemporaine: consolidation et ouverture; Andrew Geddes, The Politics of Migration and Immigration in Europe; Paul A. Silverstein, Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation; Patrick R. Ireland, Becoming Europe: Immigration, Integration, and the Welfare State; Gallya Lahav, Immigration and Politics in the New Europe; Wayne A. Cornelius, Philip L. Martin, and James F. Hollifield, eds., Controlling Immigration: A Global Perspective; Kitty Calavita, Immigrants at the Margins: Law, Race, and Exclusion in Southern Europe. 95. Conversation of March 5, 1959, in Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle, vol. 1, 52.

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to create a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) as well.96 In Washington, economic and financial relations with EU nations have assumed a lower priority. In 2004–2006, for example, the U.S. Treasury, through so-called benign neglect, deliberately pushed the dollar down below purchasing-power parity against the euro and sterling. The EU, as a consequence, found its prospects for export-led growth diminished. The Treasury principally aimed by that maneuver to force China to revalue the renminbi—a task still incomplete. The ensuing difficulties for Europe rated as collateral damage, a second-order concern. François Heisbourg, director of a leading Paris think tank, proclaims that there are already two “Wests,” with the Atlantic Community headed for divorce.97 This neo-Gaullist conceit overestimates France’s powers of attraction. The recent East European adherents to the EU look for their economic model, as well as for their security, principally to the United States. Great Britain has no greater incentive to abandon the “special relationship” than it did on the eve of the 1944 Normandy landings, when Winston Churchill peremptorily explained the facts of geopolitical life to Charles de Gaulle. The Berlin-Paris flirtation has cooled somewhat since the return of the German Christian Democrats to office. Chancellor Merkel has already proclaimed that “European integration and Atlantic partnership are not at odds.” The Western alliance, in economic as well as security terms, will somehow stumble along. The United States and its European partners will continue their pattern of competitive cooperation in third countries, with the emphasis sometimes on competition and at other times on cooperation. Both areas will have to tack against the winds of globalization. Advances in digitization and telecommunications make it increasingly feasible for multinational corporations to shift both production and knowledge work to lands where they can find skilled labor at a competitive price.98 While the critics of globalization pretend that the process harms lessdeveloped countries, the statistics on balance contradict that view.99 96. Mercosur (Mercado Commún del Sur) currently includes Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay, but Venezuela and other Latin states where radicals have come to power are queuing up to become full voting members. 97. François Heisbourg, La Fin de l’occident: L’Amérique, l’Europe et le moyenorient. Heisbourg heads the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris. 98. C. K. Prahalad, “The Art of Outsourcing,” Wall Street Journal, June 8, 2005. 99. For a learned but intemperate recapitulation of antiglobalization views, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents.

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With capital as well as labor accessible across borders, firms in China, India, the Asian Tigers, and Eastern Europe find many opportunities to seize market share from their counterparts in the industrial West. Currently, some 63,000 multinational corporations bestride the global marketplace, compared with a mere 3,000 in 1990. Those multinationals, along with their 821,000 subsidiaries, produce one-quarter of the world’s gross industrial product and account for 70 percent of international trade. Significantly, the First World’s share of those corporations is steadily declining. In 1962 American companies constituted 60 percent of the largest multinationals. That figure has shrunk to 36 percent. The United States, Japan, France, Germany, and Britain together still provide a home base for 80 percent of the top five hundred multinationals, yet more of them shift their headquarters to the Third World every year.100 In fact, the definition of “the West” is changing at warp speed.101 The Heritage Foundation’s 2006 Index of Economic Freedom ranks twenty countries as free. Several would not have been considered a part of the industrial West half a century ago. Hong Kong and Singapore lead the pack, Iceland rates fifth, Estonia seventh, Chile fourteenth, and Cyprus sixteenth. The United States has declined to a three-way tie for ninth, largely owing to its high marginal corporate tax rates and government intrusions into private accounting under the Sarbanes-Oxley law. Great Britain and its Dominions, Ireland, and the Scandinavian states still count as free, but among the Continental nations in the old EU fifteen, only Luxembourg ranks high. The Netherlands, Austria, and Germany barely nudge over the free-state line. Among the old European Union fifteen, six have sunk into the “mostly free” category. France shows up in forty-fourth place, still ahead of the Cape Verde Islands and Uruguay, but below Armenia, Latvia, and Trinidad and Tobago.102 In the twenty-first century, “the West” is rapidly becoming a state of mind rather than a geographical location.

100. For the figures, see Medard Gabel and Henry Bruner, eds., Globalinc: An Atlas of the Multinational Corporation; also, International Labour Organization, “Multinational Corporations.” 101. On this theme, see Jeffrey E. Garten, The Big Ten: The Big Emerging Markets and How They Will Change Our Lives; and Clyde V. Prestowitz, Three Billion New Capitalists: The Great Shift of Wealth and Power to the East. 102. Kim R. Holmes, Marc A. Miles, and Mary Anastasia O’Grady, eds., 2006 Heritage Foundation Index of Economic Freedom.

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What Kind of Western Economy? Or, An Expedition to Mars Harold James

S OM E C H A P T E R S I N T H I S VOLU M E M A K E T H E CA SE T H AT T H E I DE A

of the “West” was a historically constructed and (by historians’ standards) quite short-lived phenomenon of the mid–twentieth century. In regard to the story of economic development, such an approach has a powerful appeal. The “West” as a distinctly different type of institutional framework for economic life in Western Europe and North America made sense in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, and in the face of the Soviet challenge in the early Cold War period. It was held together by a vision of free economic activity as well as institutions. Already by the early 1960s, it became clear that the historical moment of a North American and European uniqueness or of a particular “economic West” was passing. One date could be used as a symbolic milestone: 1961, when the Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), which originally had been conceived as a way of institutionalizing the Marshall Plan, was renamed (with the accession of Japan) as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). With this, it became a club of relatively advanced industrial countries that could be joined by other countries with previously quite different sorts of geopolitical descriptions: countries as diverse as Hungary, Mexico, and South Korea eventually became members. Over the course of the twentieth century, the industrial countries have experienced a substantial measure of convergence, which is clearly reflected in per capita gross domestic product or income statistics (see 125

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Figure 1: GDP per capita 1900–2000). Many of the often intensive and quite bitter debates about relative differences in economic performance (for instance, between the United States and European economies) revolve around measures of overall rather than per capita GDP and reflect differences of population growth, labor force participation, and migration experiences. This chapter examines in turn the fluctuating and occasionally ideological ways in which integration and globalization are seen by participants, policy-makers, and critics; the rivalry between an approach that takes globalization as its core theme and one that sees the world as the playground for hegemonic claims to imperial rule; the particular position of the United States in this system; the circumstances in which the globalization view breaks down and the costs of such globalization reversals; and the role of both large- and small-scale international conflict in that breakdown. The process of economic convergence that produced the widening of the West into a universal concept was facilitated by the movement across national frontiers of goods, capital, labor, ideas, and technologies. In short, it came about as a result of the phenomenon now widely referred to as “globalization.” In periods when obstacles were raised to the movement of economic factors (and also ideas)—above all in the interwar period of the twentieth century—the process of convergence

Figure 1. GDP per capita, 1900–2000 (in constant 1990 U.S. dollars)

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was halted and reversed. But convergence resumed for the Cold War “West” after 1948–1949, and then—after the political and economic upheavals of 1989–1991—more or less universally. By the 1990s, Russia, India, Mexico, and South Korea, with quite different trajectories for most of the past century and strong traditions of nationalist economic management, all became in an economic sense Western. They accepted a mix of commitments: to the rule of law, to democracy as a way of setting rules, and to free interchange (the market) as a way of optimizing outcomes within a secure system of property rights. The world had become “Western.” The new climate was neatly described in a famous exchange at a meeting on a U.S. battleship off the coast of Malta in December 1989 that is often held to mark the end of the Cold War. When U.S. Secretary of State James Baker talked about Germany and “Western values,” Mikhail Gorbachev, the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, asked why democracy and the market were “Western” and whether they were not values that “belonged to the whole of humanity”?1 The world established by political and market reforms continues to have a powerful appeal. However bad security relations are between what can now really be called the opposed sides of the Atlantic, or whatever spats there are across the Pacific on the value of the renminbi and the yen, there is a frequent hope that the strength and complexity of the economic interrelationship (a product of globalization) is so great as to offer a counterweight to the political tensions. Indeed, the reason that both sides in modern conflicts feel that they can afford to be rhetorically carried away is a function of the sense of interdependence, and that a really bad outcome is not possible. British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan for instance liked to tell President Kennedy that a “united Free World was more likely to be achieved through joint monetary and economic policies” than through political or military alliances. Advanced democracies do not go to war with each other, as they have too much to lose.2 Mercury, the god of commerce, has managed to send Mars, the god of 1. Mikhail Gorbachev, Gipfelgespräche: Geheime Protokolle aus Meiner Amtszeit, 128–29. 2. The Macmillan quote is cited in Alastair Horne, Macmillan, Volume II, 1957– 1986, 284. There is an extensive literature on the “democratic peace,” taking up an idea originally propounded by Kant. See Michael Doyle, “Kant, Liberal Legacies and Foreign Affairs,” 205–35; “Liberalism and World Politics,” 1151–69. Also Bruce Russett, Grasping the Democratic Peace: Principles for a Post–Cold War World.

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war, into exile. We feel very secure about this argument and its implications—maybe we feel too secure. There are periods in the past when greatly increasing prosperity attracted many commentators to similar arguments: in the mid–nineteenth century, before the Crimean war, or in the early twentieth century. In John Henry Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864), for instance, Newman uses the widely believed association between commerce and peace to reach a verdict on attempts at “expedients to arrest fierce wilful human nature in its onward course, and bring it into subjection”: ten years ago there was a hope that wars would cease for ever, under the influence of commercial enterprise and the reign of the useful and fine arts; but will anyone venture to say that there is any thing any where on this earth, which will afford a fulcrum to us, whereby to keep the earth from moving onwards?3

What was the origin of the fallacy Newman detected? If it were true that economics determines the way political and security relations work, then there would evidently be harmony between the major industrial countries. We would slide into a sort of Fukuyama post-histoire, a vision elaborated with power and clarity after 1989. This harmony is frequently evoked in the “globalization paradigm.” Many people, particularly those connected with the business world, repeatedly emphasize that the world is closely connected, and that political boundaries and political arguments are irrelevant to business logic. For all the political friction since September 11 and the Iraq war, there have been increased flows of funds and investments, and the economic connectivity has become greater rather than less. Many people who think of themselves as living in a globalization mind-set would like to operationalize this economic interconnectedness and make the fact of interdependent prosperity a building stone for better international relations. Is globalization the only show in town? The major alternative to the “globalization” worldview sees connectedness as producing unfair advantages and international relations as based on exploitation. One convenient way of labeling this alternative is “imperialism,” a word generally used with a critical intent. Labeling U.S. policy as “imperialism” became part of the standard rhetorical weaponry of an anti-American 3. Wilfred Ward, ed., Newman’s Apologia pro Vita Sua, 336–37.

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Left in Europe and elsewhere, as well as of critical voices in the United States. The school of diplomatic history under William Appleman Williams strongly engaged in this approach. In the 1990s the language of empire as a way of critiquing power, and especially American power, was revived: most significantly by the Italian philosopher of violent revolution from the 1970s, Toni Negri, who now became a guru for the anti-globalization Left. After 9/11, and especially after the Iraq war, this worldview produced a tremendous spate of books. In particular, the Roman analogy, which had already been floated after the Second World War, became very popular: critics saw the imperialization of the United States as an analogous process to the ending of the Roman Republic and its replacement by the Augustan empire.4 Curiously, however, this mostly critical literature began to be supplemented by normative suggestions that the United States should want to behave like an empire of the European past. At the conclusion of a stimulating survey of the story of the British empire, Niall Ferguson tried to draw “lessons for global power.” The United States, he concluded, first of all “can do a great deal to impose its preferred values on less technologically advanced societies.” The suggestion was that it would be drawn in through a series of interventions analogous to those of nineteenth-century Britain and would create a functioning imperial system without really willing or knowing it. (One famous phrase, coined by the great British historian J. R. Seeley, claims that the Victorian empire was put together in a fit of absence of mind). Michael Ignatieff, reflecting on the legacies of Bosnia and Rwanda, added an appeal for a dynamic human rights internationalism, which he termed “Empire Lite.”5 Most figures actually associated with the U.S. administration did not like the idea of taking up Caesar’s mantle or Victoria’s tiara. But 4. See especially William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament, along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative. The very generalized use of “Empire” and “Imperialism” as a way of understanding the modern world was presented in what became a cult book by Michael Hardt and Toni Negri, Empire. The recent books include: Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic; Benjamin R. Barber, Fear’s Empire: War, Terrorism, and Democracy; Michael Mann, Incoherent Empire; Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order. 5. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, 367; Michael Ignatieff, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.

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Vice-President Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynne, in 2003 sent out a Christmas card with a quotation from Benjamin Franklin: “And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?”6 The new discussion of imperialism as a model is quite perplexing. In particular, some committed institutional liberal internationalists such as John Ikenberry have pointed out that Empire Lite actually looks like old-fashioned liberal internationalism.7 What is new? The story of some of the human rights catastrophes of the 1990s, as well as of international terrorism, raises the obvious issue that there are many people who will go to considerable risks to undermine a liberal and tolerant international and national order. How, in the absence of a world government, can they be kept in line? Only by the application of force by the hegemon. Many readers will feel that it is possible to see both the worldviews presented here at the same time: that in the spirit of Empire Lite, rules without enforcement are bound to be ignored, and enforcement without fixed rules is likely to be widely rejected as tyrannical. Therefore, both rules and an enforcer (that is a state) are needed for stability and order. There is a well-established literature, based on the work of Charles Kindleberger and Robert Gilpin, which suggests that the nineteenthcentury liberal order only worked because of the benign hegemon and that after 1945 the United States learned this lesson.8 This is not, however, how most of the world sees the process of making politics in an integrated world. Generally, the rules approach demands a participation in the formulation of the binding rules of a broad group of countries, views, and interests. Without such participation, the rules began to lack legitimacy (unless it is generally agreed that the rules stem from a divinely created natural law order). The more a generalized relativism guides our approach to rule making, the more we insist on process as the way of creating legitimacy. But these processes are actually deeply divisive in practice, and the most intractable tussles

6. Jeffery F. Liss, “More to This Card than Season’s Greetings,” Washington Post, December 28, 2003. 7. See his collective review of a recent collection of this literature: G. John Ikenberry, “Illusions of Empire: Defining the New American Order,” 144–54. 8. See Charles Kindleberger, The World in Depression, 1929–1939; Robert Gilpin, The Political Economy of International Relations.

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of recent years arise out of arguments about the rule-making process in such institutions as the United Nations, the World Trade Organization (WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), or the European Union. There is in each of these cases a sort of expectations trap.9 International rule-making looks more crucial, so we have greater hopes about what international negotiation can produce. But the result is a compromise that is disappointing, and so there comes to be a substantial questioning of the legitimacy of the process. As a result, when our hopes of rules are disappointed, we react by seeing power in its full realpolitik nakedness. Realpolitik overrides rules, or, as a rather old British pun had it, Britannia waives the rules in order to rule the waves. The “imperialism” and the “globalization” models are overall interpretations of such power for their adherents that the other perspective simply disappears. The alternative is rejected as naive or ideological, as in Robert Kagan’s juxtaposition of the Mars and Venus views of American and Europeans.10 As approaches, they are like the optical illusions made famous by Maurits Cornelius Escher, where squares either pop out of a page or recede, but where the observer cannot be brought to see both phenomena at the same time. There is one perspective—or the other. Since 2001, there has been a definite retreat of the “globalization” paradigm. It is evident in a survey of Lexis-Nexis citations of the word “globalization” in major world newspapers, which shows a distinct falling off after 2001. On the other hand, there are more references to “empire” and “imperialism.”

II The clash of these interpretative models shapes responses to the major international economic issues of the day. Any economic order depends on systems of rules to set a framework for contracts: this is true on the international level as it is in national affairs. Globalization depends on rules. Its critics see rules as an expression of power relations. 9. See for instance, Harold James, “From Grandmotherliness to Governance: The Development of IMF Conditionality,” in Finance and Development, December 1998. 10. Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order.

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Figure 2. Lexis-Nexis citations of “globalization,” “imperialism” and “empire,” 1990–2003

The major current debates concern the world trading system, the order of corporate governance, and the world monetary order. All of these domains have recently become highly contentious. First, the commercial system: in the “globalization” view of the world, trade wars are destructive and dangerous. Globalizers are relieved when states draw back from the brink of confrontation, as recently in the case of the U.S. steel tariffs dispute. They believe the rationale for international economic institutions such as the GATT or the WTO lies in the enforcing of rules and procedures that might prevent the escalation of self-destructive responses to domestic political pressures. The likelihood of a WTO ruling against the steel tariffs thus helped the United States to have a better policy and give up on the unilateral imposition of the tariff. The “imperialism” model thinks that trade relations shape an unequal system of exchange and dominance, and that political force molds trade law and patterns of commerce. Aggressive trade policy is or can be used as an instrument of policy and can create new opportunities for the assertion of power and the development of economic muscle. The current trade order thus reflects the ability of the United States to impose its vision on the world, and other countries are compelled or cajoled into compliance by threats (for instance to use Super 301 of the

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1988 Trade and Competitiveness Act) or promises (of better access to U.S. markets). Second, corporate governance until very recently was thought to be strictly the domain of national governments and regulators. Over the past ten years, however, there has been a systematic attempt to engage international institutions in governance issues. This is partly because the legal framework of a modern economy is so complex that it would be needlessly complicated for national governments to work out all the rules required from scratch. In practice, when many states adopted market economies in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, they almost invariably either took over the legal systems of the European Community/European Union or of the United States.11 There are also obvious overlaps to issues concerned with trade law and to financial stability issues. In the wake of the 1997–1998 Asian financial crisis, international institutions and the U.S. government focused much of their analysis on misgovernance or “crony capitalism” as responsible for the crises in Asian economies. According to this analysis, crony capitalism had led to a misinvestment in unproductive enterprises and to moral hazard problems. International lenders and investors had chosen to lend by preference to borrowers who were politically well connected and whose debts thus carried an implicit government guarantee. Any reform program thus required a dismantling of corrupt structures and the institution of accounting and oversight mechanisms to guarantee greater corporate transparency. The most contentious issue in the Doha round of trade negotiations concerned rules for investment, which were often seen by developing countries as a way of producing one-sided benefits for industrial capital-exporting countries and interests. The tough position adopted by Japan and the EU on this issue (the so-called Singapore issue) was largely responsible for the breakdown of the Cancun ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization. In analyzing governance, it is hard to separate concern with overall rules from debates about self-interest: whether with the discussion of trade-related investment issues, or with the dismantling of crony capitalism. Critics pointed out that in practice improved transparency in domestic financial systems meant permitting market entry to large 11. See Joseph Weiler, “The Constitution of the Common Market Place: The Free Movement of Goods.”

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U.S. and EU institutions. American banks took dominant positions in Mexico and Korea, and Spanish banks in South America. After big corporate scandals emerged in the United States and other big industrial countries, much of the preaching to Asia in 1997–1998 looked outrageously hypocritical. Again, it could be portrayed easily as a mask for concrete interests and for the projection of power. Third, the international monetary order: in the “globalization” interpretation, the operation of the international economy requires a stable system of monetary rules. The system may take a diversity of forms. The restoration of the world monetary order after the breakdown of the interwar era and the Second World War took place on the basis of fixed exchange rates and restrictions on capital mobility. Modern globalization has developed on the basis of flexible exchange rates between major industrial economies and capital mobility. But both these orders are internally consistent and robust. The “imperialist” vision takes these rules and sees political advantage lurking behind them. Both the Bretton Woods system (the first postwar order of fixed exchange rates) and the modern international economy gave the United States an unfair position, or what General de Gaulle memorably termed an “exorbitant privilege.” “No domain,” de Gaulle explained to Alain Peyrefitte, “escapes from American imperialism. It takes all forms. The most insidious is that of the dollar.”12 The dollar was the key currency of both systems, with the result that Americans could finance their civilian consumption and their military imperialism with “OPM”: Other Peoples’ Money. In Bretton Woods, the United States financed capital outflows and military expenditures through a buildup of claims on the U.S. dollar. De Gaulle and his successors complained, but they failed to shake the reserve role of the dollar. Thus the United States in the 1980s and 1990s and especially since 2000 has been able to finance very large current account deficits as other countries build up surplus positions. The odd parallelism of the 1960s and the floating rates era leads those who are suspicious of the United States to spend considerable amounts of time and intellectual energy trying to devise new monetary orders and institutions that might enable them to pull off something of the American trick. In particular, the long story of European monetary integration 12. Alain Peyrefitte, C’était de Gaulle, 663.

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is permeated by what economic psychologists might term “dollar envy.” Many European currencies—especially the influential case of the deutsche mark—were devised so as to make the political use of the currency hard, in order to avoid some of the problems of the European past. The deutsche mark carried with it a restrictive vision of what a currency should be, and this was transferred to the euro. By contrast, the dollar seemed a “can do” currency, which could be harnessed by its political masters. The Werner Plan was drawn up as the Bretton Woods system started on its final crisis, the European Monetary System originated in part as a response to the perception that Jimmy Carter was abusing the world monetary system, and proponents of European Monetary Union in the 1990s sometimes (but not always) sounded an anti-American note. There is a growing tendency, especially where corporate governance and monetary issues are concerned, to reinterpret the world in power political terms—to see through the imperialism lens rather than that of globalization. This tendency especially in Europe, however, marks a deep sense of frustration about the geopolitics and geoeconomics of the new post–Cold War era. In the 1960s, the high point of the Gaullist critique, Europe could mount not only an intellectual critique but also a real challenge to the position of the United States and of the dollar. In 2002 it cannot, and the real challenges and threats to the stability of the system come from elsewhere.

III Such a survey of the rule-based vision of the world economy and its vicissitudes raises the question of how far and long the U.S. role in the system can continue, and of the extent to which it depends on the compliance and cooperation of others. The United States is unlike conventional historical empires in that its rule depends on cultural and above all economic influence rather than territorial domination. Indeed, Dominic Lieven pointed out in his wide-ranging survey Empire that the modern analogs of traditional empires are large, ramshackle multiethnic states such as India or Indonesia (or even the European Union) rather than the United States.13 13. Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals.

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The world economy after the Second World War was rebuilt on the basis of systems of rules and complex institution-building.14 One way of thinking about the economic story is to regard rule-building in two critical areas as moving in different ways. During the interwar period, international discussions on international cooperation foundered because trade negotiators believed that while tariff reduction and quota elimination might be desirable, there was no point in discussions until a stable monetary system had been created. Without stable monetary order, the use of trade measures to stem the export of pernicious deflation could be justified as a desirable second-best measure. On the other hand, the monetary discussions foundered because of reluctance to make agreements while the vicious spiral of trade protection was still underway. During the Second World War, the United States made it clear that it was not prepared to negotiate on trade liberalization that it saw as necessary to postwar peace, and as a result all the diplomacy concentrated on a framework of monetary rules (at Bretton Woods). Bretton Woods of course created institutions, the World Bank and the IMF, devised to implement the monetary order, but the intended third pillar (International Trade Organization [ITO]) was left until after the war, and in practice was only realized in the 1990s. The rule-based monetary order disintegrated in stages between 1968 and 1973, and after that the IMF’s functions changed very dramatically. Its major task turned out to be plugging market failures left by the newly invigorated capital markets: in practice a concerted attempt at crisis prevention and a great deal of experience in crisis resolution. A consensus gradually emerged for U.S. administrations that attempts at international monetary coordination were pointless and counterproductive: like the Bretton Woods order, they restrained monetary policy in a suboptimal way and led to undesired outcomes. Thus the experience of the 1978 Bonn summit or the 1985–1987 negotiations and semi-agreements about appropriate exchange rates were generally viewed as discrediting the idea of negotiating about exchange rates. The mantra of all administrations since the 1980s is that exchange rates are set by the market. 14. The classic account of the postwar order is by Richard Gardner, Sterling Dollar Diplomacy: The Origins and Prospects of Our International Economic Order. See now G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the Rebuilding of Order after Major Wars.

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The postwar period produced a great expansion of trade that is fundamental to the story of increased prosperity. Trade became institutionally more regulated. The GATT generalized bilateral agreements, then produced general tariff reductions in the 1960s Kennedy Round, and then became fully institutionalized as the WTO in 1996. Many observers are surprised by the apparent willingness of the United States to accept rules in this area at each stage of the development of a rule-based order. The story of trade opening can be read as a suspense drama, with a new twist to the narrative on almost every page. The GATT was a compromise. It achieved its biggest successes in the 1960s, largely at the cost of reducing its extent so as to exclude some of the most contentious trade items—textiles and agricultural products. By the 1970s, after the collapse of the Bretton Woods par value system, most writers agreed that the GATT was moribund. The Tokyo Round was protracted and spotty. In the mid-1980s the leading experts concluded that the GATT was “in a state of breakdown.” The ministerial meeting of 1982 had failed. The Uruguay Round looked doomed to failure as the United States and the European Community became locked in a politically complex struggle over agricultural pricing and subsidies. Even in 1993, on the eve of the final agreement of this round, a major text produced by a GATT official had as its theme “the weakening of a multilateral approach to trade relations,” “the creeping demise of GATT,” and the fact that “the GATT’s decline results from the accumulated actions of governments.” But then came the astonishing extension of multilateral principles to intellectual property, trade-related investment, and the creation of a more complete conflict resolutions procedure and the institutionalization of multilateralism in the World Trade Organization. At that time, the commentators were skeptically insisting that the United States would ignore the new institution, and instead continue a unilateral exercise of power through the application of Super 301. But when the first ruling came against the United States, the United States accepted it. In 1998 everyone gave reasons why the financial services agreement could not be realized. Then, apparently unpredictably, at the last moment it came about. Rules still ruled. In the earlier age of worries about globalization at the turn of the nineteenth century, a backlash began which in the end produced restrictions on migration and high levels of trade protection. When national protection became the major priority of most countries, in the 1920s and 1930s, the world became both poorer and less safe. There was a vicious

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cycle in which external forces were blamed for loss and disaster, and high levels of trade protection destroyed national prosperity. Most countries have avoided this sort of backlash in the second half of the twentieth century, although their citizens had the same angst. The changing of employment patterns is a constant accompaniment of growth. In the early 1970s and again in the 1980s U.S. workers and producers were upset about the loss of jobs to Japan. Some of the most skilled jobs in automobile manufacturing were lost; household appliances such as TVs were no longer made in the United States. On each occasion, the administration tried to respond to the job loss worries not by trade restrictions but by exchange rate alterations that would make the U.S. products more competitive: first the end of the gold convertibility of the dollar in 1971, and then in 1985 the Plaza agreement to depreciate the dollar. Monetary and exchange rate policy initiatives offered a way of absorbing adjustment pain. The focus of trade discontent was shifted to the monetary arena in a way that helped to undermine the legitimacy of institutional ways of regulating the international financial system. The use of monetary policy and exchange rate adjustment to deescalate trade conflict is harder today, since many of the countries whose products are entering the United States peg their own currencies to the dollar (see also the analysis offered in this volume by Stephen Schuker). Governments still feel that they need some response in an attempt to “feel the pain,” and to show that they are doing something. Like the Bush administration they adopt tariffs that may then be overruled by the WTO. In this way they do nothing very harmful, but point out to the electorate that their hands are tied by international agreements and institutions. But this sort of action itself then produces a new kind of backlash, against the international institutions. Trade problems are in fact routinely dealt with by shifting the emphasis to the monetary arena. The world has developed its institutional arrangements in the setting of globalization by making them harder in the trade arena and softer in the monetary one. In the future the offloading of adjustment problems to monetary policy will be more difficult (because of widespread Asian exchanger rate pegging) and the trade system will be in consequence more vulnerable. Can the post–Bretton Woods order blow up in a manner analogous to that of the disintegration of Bretton Woods? This is the fundamental fear of those who think U.S. current account deficits unsustainable and

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are worried about the way in which the United States attracts over an amazing three-quarters of net international capital inflows (in 2002: 75.5 percent). There is an obvious contrast with British imperial experience, and the resilience of the British Empire owed a great deal to its long-term current account surplus position from the mid–nineteenth century to the First World War. By contrast, Imperial Spain in its Golden Era in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had permanent deficits, financed by the extraction of precious metals. It deindustrialized and lost the basis for preeminence. There are two complementary ways of thinking about the balance of payments and hence of judging its sustainability. The first is that it is a reflection of the relative attraction of foreign assets for U.S. residents and of U.S. assets for those outside. The deficit is driven by the high demand for U.S. assets, and its sustainability depends on the continuance of this demand. One apparently odd fact makes the deficits more sustainable: the yield on U.S. assets for foreigners, the price paid by the United States for its borrowing, is substantially lower than the yield for Americans on their foreign holdings. This reflects not miscalculation or stupidity on the part of foreign investors, but a calculation in which they buy security in return for lower yields. The primary attraction of the United States as a destination for capital movement is the unique depth of its markets (which generate a financial security) and the political and security position of the country. This is why inflows to the United States may increase after global security shocks (as they did after September 11). The ability of the United States to finance its deficits depends on the continued perception that it is a high growth and high productivity economy and that it is politically and militarily secure. Conversely, the security of the United States depends on the continued inflow of capital, as a sudden adjustment would be unbearably painful and intolerable politically. The painfulness of adjustment will become apparent in considering the other way of thinking about the U.S. balance of payments position: a relationship between saving and investment in the United States. As long as investment is high and saving is low, the gap is financed from abroad. Low levels of saving reflect a high commitment to consumption. Contrary to popular assumption particularly outside the United States, this is not fundamentally the result of an addiction to outrageous forms of conspicuous consumption such as SUVs. (Though there are

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Figure 3. Capital Importers in 2002 (Source: IMF)

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some odd statistics that seem to bear parts of this thesis out: Americans spend more on jewelry today than on shoes.) But expenditure on food and clothing as a proportion of income has fallen quite dramatically over recent decades, expenditure on housing remains more or less constant, and the big growth has been in spending on education and health. Many academic economists (who have an obvious interest as educators) would like to reclassify these as forms of investment in human capital, and it is probably true that the continued innovative capacity of the United States depends on quality education. We can also get much or at least some benefit by attracting highly educated people from other parts of the world; and the export of people trained in American universities is a vital part of Joseph Nye’s idea of “soft power.”15 Another element of the overconsumption theory arises out of the contemplation of the link between fiscal issues and the current account. Government spending on the military is a form of consumption, and in the Vietnam era, in the Reagan defense buildup, and post-2001 this was a current issue in international discussions of the stability of the monetary and financial order. In all these cases, the defense buildup went hand-in-hand with domestically oriented fiscal expansion, to create the Great Society, or for Reagan and George W. Bush to cut taxes. It is as if the United States could not gather the domestic support for defense or war without buying social content at home. De Gaulle’s criticism of the United States seems a peculiarly timeless example of the European view of each of these incidents: “The United States is not capable of balancing its budget. It allows itself to have enormous debts. Since the dollar is the reference currency everywhere, it can cause others to suffer the effects of its poor management. This is not acceptable. This cannot last.”16 The “cannot last” issue is, however, the one that raises the link between the capacity to borrow and its dependence on continued economic dynamism. In the late-nineteenth-century era of open capital markets, inflows to high-growth countries (such as the United States or Australia) were sustained over very long periods of time. The question about sustainability then turns into one about the probability of continued growth rates that are higher than those of the rest 15. Joseph S. Nye, Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics. 16. Peyrefitte, de Gaulle, 664. See also Francis J. Gavin, Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958–1968, 121.

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of the industrialized world. For much of the 1990s foreign capital inflows reflected a foreign view that the peace dividend, fiscal prudence, and technological dynamism represented an ideal environment. In 2002, part of this environment clearly deteriorated. Growth rates are threatened by long-term fiscal problems arising both out of military commitments and the burdens of ensuring social security for an aging population: in this the United States shares (in a less extreme form) a problem that is also emerging in the aging industrial societies of Europe and Japan.17 Fiscal problems thus pose a long-term threat to the capacity of the United States to sustain growth and hence capital inflows. The world economic environment, however, is clearly not made by the United States alone. The likelihood of bad effects coming from crises elsewhere is increased by greater financial turbulence and also by the deinstitutionalization of international monetary relations as discussed above. To go back to the immediate post-1945 vision, Bretton Woods aimed at establishing an institution (the IMF) to manage reserves. Now reserve positions held at the IMF play a minor role, and the major holders of reserves are national central banks, as they were before the Second World War. On the other hand, explosive and contagious debt crises in the past have been in part a reflection of the policy mix in advanced industrial countries. In the early 1980s, or mid-1990s, high interest rates worldwide changed the debt dynamics and made previously tolerable levels of debt unsustainable and thus touched off creditor panics. In the modern scenario, the effects of expansive fiscal policies, not just in the United States but in many European countries, will be likely to result in real interest rate rises. In this setting, the buildup of large claims on the United States—especially in the form of the massive reserve holdings of Asian central banks—is a potential danger. Asian reserves now account for more than two-thirds of the world’s reserves, and Japan holds some $650 billion in U.S. (mostly Treasury) securities and China $420 billion. Of the U.S. government debt, 37.3 percent is now held abroad, compared with 4.7 percent in 1965 when General de Gaulle believed that he needed to 17. Lawrence Kotlikoff, Hans Fehr, and Sabine Jokisch, “The Developed World’s Demographic Transition—The Roles of Capital Flows, Immigration, and Policy,” National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper Number 10096, October 2003; Lawrence Kotlikoff and Niall Ferguson, “Going Critical.”

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criticize U.S. dollar politics. The danger today probably lies less in the political instrumentalization of these reserves (such as would be represented by a de Gaulle–like conversion of dollars into something else, probably euros). There might be a certain political attraction of such an anti-American action at particular moments, but it would be enormously costly for those who undertake it since it would push down the value of the dollar assets very quickly and substantially. The risk is that these reserves are unlikely to be held perpetually for economic rather than political reasons. The world of liberalized capital movements that evolved in the 1990s has seen remarkable shifts and reversals of direction of capital flows. So the question arises: what if Japan, or more probably China or (even more probably) India (which also has recently accumulated reserves very rapidly) needs to use them? This is an area where the costs of the deinstitutionalization of the international monetary system may become apparent. In the 1990s, contagious financial crises were handled by big IMF-coordinated rescue operations. The big capital account crises of the 1990s involved much larger amounts of support relative to previous crises. Mexico in 1995 drew 688 percent of its quota, Korea in 1997–1998 1,939 percent, Argentina in 2001 800 percent, and Turkey in 2002 1,330 percent. Before the 1990s, there had been an inclination to give too little in order to give incentives to program countries to make adjustments and reforms. When the emphasis shifted to reassuring nervous markets in a capital account crisis, the priorities were reversed, and stabilizing the expectations of the markets would involve the assurance of so much support that speculators could not take a position against a country or currency and hope to succeed. This function had an analogy to the role of central banks in national economies as lenders of last resort, an analogy that was controversially drawn by the IMF’s first managing director, Stanley Fischer. The parallel is sometimes made to the Colin Powell doctrine about military intervention: that it only makes sense if conducted with massive and overwhelming force. The aftermath of the big bailouts in the 1990s is acutely controversial. The immediate criticism, which was probably overstated, was that it produced a moral hazard problem. In the view of Milton Friedman, for instance, the 1995 Mexican program produced the Asian crisis of 1997 because investors assumed a fund guarantee. This may have been some part of investors’ calculations, but they were fundamentally impressed by the idea of an “East Asian miracle” that they should buy

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into. There is an analogy with the development of the stock market boom in industrial countries in the late 1990s: some of it may have been driven by the idea that central banks (and in particular the Federal Reserve) would support a certain level of the market, but mostly it was driven by a vision of a “New Economy.” The real problem came from the size of the rescue operations, the strain that these brought for the IMF’s resources, and the fact that as a result such operations could not be envisaged for a large number of countries simultaneously. This brought an element of intellectual incoherence to the whole approach, which was particularly visible in the stance of the United States. Paul O’Neill as Treasury secretary in the Bush administration repeatedly attacked the idea of “big bailouts” in principle, but then went on to advocate them very forcefully in particular cases, often in the face of resistance from other G-7 countries that wanted to interpret them as political opportunism. There is a likelihood that as India and China continue to grow and move toward the liberalization of the capital account, there will be repeats of the abrupt reversals of capital movements that afflicted many or indeed most emerging markets. High growth is usually—as it was in the nineteenth-century United States or in Korea since the 1960s—quite uneven and prone to sudden setbacks and crises of confidence. But the scale of potential reversals in India or China are so much greater than anything that the world dealt with in the 1990s that it is likely the world financial system will become more vulnerable than at any time since 1945. The United States will be unable to isolate itself from this general financial volatility. Historically, eras of volatility have tended to tip the balance against globalization.

IV The “globalization” view is not always popular, and seems to be subject to pendulum swings and backlashes. Some of the backlash stems from the political and social psychology inherent in globalization, and in particular in the resentments brought by changes in relative income and wealth. The late twentieth century largely saw the victory of the globalizers: with the result that they became quite secure about the inherent strength and resilience of the system. The sort of analysis that was given by

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Joseph Schumpeter began to look very dated.18 From the perspective of the middle of the twentieth century, he had offered on the one hand a celebration of the creative achievements of a liberal capitalistic world order, but on the other the prognosis that the resentments generated would bring down the system. Anti-globalization protest in the 1990s, while widespread, was—as even its militants recognized—intellectually incoherent and diffuse. The more rational anti-globalization figures insisted that they wanted a better or more just globalization, a unification of people rather than of capitalistic interests. But both the pro-globalizers and the anti-globalizers were overconfident about the stability of the globally integrated economy. One of the comfort blankets that modern people clutch is the idea that there was only ever one big simultaneous world depression, produced by such an odd confluence of causes as to be quite unique: the legacy of the First World War and of the financial settlement of reparations and war debt; the chaotic banking system of the largest economy of the world, the United States; and inexperience in handling monetary policy in a world that was still pining for metallic money. Since these circumstances were so unique, they can’t occur again. Historians should say that this reasoning may be quite wrong. A great deal of the historically informed literature on globalization makes the point that there were several previous eras of increased worldwide integration that came to a halt, and were reversed, with painful consequences. The most familiar precedent for modern globalization is that of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, which ended definitively with the interwar Great Depression. But there were also earlier epochs of integration: the Roman empire, the economic rebound of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries (the economic backdrop to the Renaissance), or the eighteenth century, in which improved technology and increased ease of communications opened the way to global empires (for Britain and France). All of these previous globalization episodes ended, almost always with wars. Bad policies can obviously wreck individual economies in a whole range of different ways, but systemic collapse is a product of militarized conflict. Globalization as an economic phenomenon depends on the movement across state boundaries of goods, labor, and capital.

18. Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy.

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Security concerns produce heightened worries about all these kinds of mobility. Trade may create a dependence on imports that leads to strategic vulnerability, and one of the oldest arguments for agricultural protection was the need for autarkic self-sufficiency in case of attack. Labor flows may camouflage the movement of spies or saboteurs. Thus, for instance, First World War Britain was gripped by panic about the numbers of Germans employed in London restaurants. Finally, capital controls have often been justified on grounds of national security. One way of destabilizing politics was to try to promote financial panic, and restrictions on capital mobility might be a way of generating increased immunity to speculative attack. There are obvious analogies in some of these past experiences to some of the threats to the economic order and to economic integration posed by the war on terror. Trade, financial flows, and labor movements are all vulnerable in the post–September 11 world. After September 11, every part of the package that had previously produced such unprecedented economic growth in many countries—the increased flow of people, goods, and capital—now seems to contain obvious threats to security. Students and visitors from poor and especially from Islamic countries might be “sleeper” terrorists; or they might become radicalized through their experience of Western liberalism, permissiveness, or the arbitrariness of the market economy. It soon became apparent that customs agencies scarcely controlled the shipment of goods any longer, and that explosives or even ABC weapons (atomic, biological, chemical) might easily be smuggled. The free flow of capital and complex bank transactions might be used to launder money and to supply funding for terrorist operations. It is natural and legitimate to suggest that all these areas should be subject to more intense controls in the face of security threats. But there is a danger of giving an absolute priority to the war against terrorism. Every sort of control also offers a possibility for abuse by people who want controls for other reasons: because skilled immigrant workers provide “unfair” competition; because too many goods are imported from cheap labor countries; or because capital movements are believed to be destabilizing, producing severe and contagious financial crises. A new debate about the security challenge offered the chance to present older demands for the protection of particular interests in a much more dramatic and compelling way. Protectionists of all sorts suddenly had a good story to tell about the harm done by international trade.

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Is the recurrent collapse of globalization and the phenomenon of war an accidental or coincidental linkage? There are two major ways in which war undermines globalization. The first, most obvious way (and the one that has been most studied), is simply the consequence of the cost of war considered in a broad sense: the problem of financing unproductive military activity, the disruption of commerce, the suspension of migration, and the freezing of capital movements because of security priorities. The second is the way in which armed conflict, even when its scope is quite small, provokes the emergence of new issues that produce international discord affecting other areas of international interaction. In this way, war challenges assumptions about the global distribution of economic and political power. The idea that war is costly and disrupts “normal commerce” is well understood in the classic literature of economics. Indeed, for those who experienced the wars of the American and French revolutions, how could it be otherwise? Adam Smith’s first volume of the Wealth of Nations (1776) closes at the end of Book III with the reflection that “the ordinary revolutions of war and government easily dry up the sources of that wealth which arises from commerce alone.”19 Such disruption arises most immediately and most obviously in the case of sustained and major conflict. Most periods of modern conflict have been accompanied by inflationary war finance and followed by sharp periods of deflation. The most obvious mechanism that made for postwar deflation is the effect of increased government expenditure on interest rates. An alternative way of thinking about this is as the destruction or wearing out of capital in wartime, and a consequently higher price of new capital. The rise in real long-term interest rates makes peacetime investment more expensive and depresses activity. This effect is enhanced if governments try to return to prewar exchange rate systems with prices and wages that have been boosted and distorted by the high levels of wartime demand. Almost all of the most dramatic historical episodes of sustained deflation followed in the aftermath of war. A sustained economic depression followed the American war of independence and accentuated the initial anti-commercial bias of the politics of the new Republic. After the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815) ended the Napoleonic wars, Europe had 19. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, I, 445.

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decades of deflation in which industrial investment was costly and the bankruptcy of entrepreneurs frequent. The aftermath of the 1860s civil wars (or wars of unification) in Italy, Germany, and the United States all included an immediate speculative bubble, then the bursting of the bubble (after 1873), with stock market price collapses, bankruptcies, and reduced investment. The First World War was also followed by a brief reconstruction boom in 1919, then by a collapse in the major Western economies in 1920–1921; one decade later came the Great Depression. Some of these classic effects in which war produces monetary instability are still very visible in the aftermath of the major international conflicts of the post-1945 era. Korea and Vietnam both produced inflationary surges, which initially reduced and then increased real interest rates, and which corresponded to investment surges and declines. The 1991 Gulf War no longer fits this pattern: both inflation and interest rates fell. It was followed by a brief recession, which is generally held by political analysts to have frustrated the reelection of President George H. W. Bush in the 1992 election. The 1990s war was simply too small-scale and cheap to have a major macroeconomic impact: this holds true for 2003 too. If there is a threat, it arises out of long-term developments in domestic spending which are characteristic of almost all industrial societies (see above). One explanation of the changing effects of war in very recent times is obvious: the cost of each war for the major superpower has been falling since the middle of the twentieth century. In 2002 dollars, the Second World War cost the United States $4,700 billion, Korea $400 billion, Vietnam $572 billion, the 1991 Gulf War $80 billion, and the actual fighting in the Iraq war of 2003 cost a little more than $20 billion.20 It would consequently be appropriate to expect a diminution of the purely fiscal impact of wars, and consequently of their deflationary legacy. If we just take a naive approach to the demand and supply for military action, falling costs should suggest increased demand and a new likelihood of the use of force to effect regime change. The less a war costs and the fewer the casualties, both military and civilian, the more likely it becomes. The declining willingness of advanced industrial societies to use force in the second half of the twentieth century, which has been noted by many observers from Edward Luttwak to Jeremy 20. Figures from “In Perspective: America’s Conflicts,” New York Times, April 20, 2003.

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Black,21 and which is sometimes attributed to the much larger political impact of casualty figures, is thus not likely to be a permanent phenomenon. Countries such as France, Britain, and the United States actually showed a surprising willingness to take casualties and to respond to calls to maintain order in remote parts of the world. As long as there is a clear technical military superiority, cases for a morally and politically appropriate use of force will continue to be quite powerful. Adam Smith made a similar point about some of the wars of the eighteenth century. The combination of technology, which made war between advanced and backward countries less costly for the advanced country, and new methods of spreading the financial burden of war through the sale of debt instruments was making war more likely. “In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies.”22 The same conclusion can be reached by a less cynical route. During the Cold War and the period of superpower tensions, wars were held in check by a widespread realization that the cost of their escalation would be too high. But since the end of the Cold War, there has been a proliferation of international conflicts as well as of threatening domestic conflicts as states break up. Hence the need for intervention. Some commentators have jumped already to the conclusion that it is wrong simply to think about the cost of military conflict, and that in particular the growing expense and political embarrassment of post-conflict Iraq precludes another such conflict. This reasoning is fallacious, because similar situations are highly likely to recur. We are internationally sensitive to human rights issues, and also to the potential of bad governments to destabilize whole regions. Both concerns are realistic and, I would add, creditable. They will necessarily lead to military engagements in sometimes expected and sometimes unexpected places. Moreover, it is possible to envisage more attention being paid in advance to the management of post-conflict situations in a manner which in the Iraq case was made impossible by the rush of events. 21. Edward Luttwak, “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare: The Obsolescence of Total War,” 109–22; Jeremy Black, Why Wars Happen and Warfare and the Western World 1882–1975. 22. Smith, Wealth of Nations, II, 455–56.

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V Wars also lead to questions about the legitimacy of rules that are essential in guiding economic interaction, both internationally and domestically. All wars, big or small, produce new problems and divisions. There has been a spillover from security concerns to economics. The most obvious type arises out of the financial legacies of wars and debates about reparations and war debts. Such debates poisoned the international economy in the 1920s (as Keynes predicted in The Economic Consequences of the Peace). They are presently recurring in the fierce debate about whether and how and what kind of prewar Saddam debt should be forgiven in order to help Iraq in reconstruction. One tradition of thinking about wars (and especially of the smallerscale wars of the classical late-nineteenth-century era of globalization) suggests that they have economic origins and that they are fought—especially in eras of globalization—because of a wish to control a greater share of global resources. This is familiar to historians and social scientists as the Hobson-Hilferding-Lenin interpretation of imperialism.23 It is largely wrong as an explanation of the origins of the wars, but very powerful in understanding the political response to them. This paradox arises because of other effects of eras of globalization. New opportunities to create new wealth mean radical changes in distributions. Large and apparently illegitimate increases in fortune provoke resentments and a populist reaction. There are clear historical precedents to the current worldwide wave of reaction against and rejection of what is now perceived as U.S.-style capitalism. Martin Luther’s protest against the universalism of the Renaissance world took the form of a protest against the “luxury” of long-distance and foreign trade: “But foreign trade, which brings from Calcutta and India and such places wares like costly silks, articles of gold and spices—which minister only to ostentation but serve no useful purpose, and which drain away the money of land and people—would not be permitted if we had proper government and princes.”24

23. The canonical texts are: J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study; Rudolf Hilferding, Das Finanzkapital; V. I. Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. For analyses, see David Fieldhouse, “Imperialism: An Historical Revision,” 187–209; Wolfgang J. Mommsen, Imperialismustheorien. 24. Martin Luther, “Trade and Usury.”

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The eighteenth century, in which both the French and the British East India Companies unfolded their activities to the full, spanning continents, qualifies by most measures as an era of globalization. The protests that the East India Companies excited, because of their global reach and their use of low-wage labor for some part of their production, have a very modern tone. Adam Smith showed how the activities of the East India Company in Bengal had reduced incomes and induced widespread famine. Here were unaccountable companies distributing luxury products that were unnecessary and that were believed by many Christian ministers to be morally pernicious. Smith concluded: “Such exclusive companies . . . are nuisances in every respect; always more or less inconvenient to the countries in which they are established, and destructive to those which have the misfortune to fall under their government.”25 The history of the United States began with an anti-globalization revolt directed against a particular company, not the British monarchy: the dumping of tea in Boston harbor was a protest not just against taxes but against the business practices of the East India Company. In the mother country, the outcry over the East India Company focused increasingly on what was then called “exorbitance”: the disproportionate remuneration of corporate executives. Warren Hastings, the governor general, was eventually impeached in public trial by the British parliament. In 1777 his pay had been ten thousand pounds, but he had sent home precisely this amount, and in 1778 he sent forty-five thousand pounds back home to England.26 The same sort of debates were repeated in the globalization phase of the late nineteenth century, where they were linked with a critique of imperialist war. The model of the imperialist war that the British liberal Hobson, and the Marxists who adapted his explanation, had in mind was the relatively short, nontotal war that characterized the era of high globalization. The Spanish-American War (1898) brought the United States into the international system. It was, unlike the sustained conflicts earlier in the nineteenth century, a very unequal conflict between the world’s fastest-growing and largest industrial economy and a very backward European imperial power. The United States deployed

25. See Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet and the Enlightenment, 27, 32, 73. Smith, Wealth of Nations, II, 158. 26. Lucy S. Sutherland, The East India Company in Eighteenth-Century Politics.

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274,000 soldiers, but only 379 were killed. It was soon followed by another unequal conflict, the British conquest of the Boers. Both these unequal wars were acutely controversial in domestic politics and could be interpreted as “land grabs,” demands for resources that were scarce: sugar from the Caribbean, diamonds (from the Kimberley field) and gold in southern Africa. At first the wars produced electorally successful nationalism, with the 1900 British “khaki election” producing a large Conservative and imperialist vote, and in the United States a surge of popularity for Roosevelt, who had been the hero of the 1898 war. Then there was a backlash, in which critics pointed out associations between war and personal gains of a small group of corrupt businessmen and financiers. In Britain, Leo Chiozza Money denounced the corruption of finance. The Liberals made much of the hypocrisy of the British government’s denunciation of the racial discrimination of the Boers while encouraging a massive Chinese immigration to provide labor for the development of southern Africa. They won a stunning electoral victory in 1906. The mood turned against the financiers who had bought the election of President McKinley in 1896. Roosevelt himself began to denounce “certain malefactors of great wealth” who had appropriated many of the gains produced by public action. Populists presented war and corporate scandal as going hand-in-hand. These wars also made international relations significantly more tense. The Boer War was one of the quite decisive moments in the growing breach between Britain and Germany, with the German Kaiser publicly supporting the Boers. The small conflicts thus set the stage for bigger and more global clashes, in which arguments over the distribution of spoils worsen the international climate. At these moments, the different sides begin to see the way they do business in a contrasting way that is quite at odds with the one world approach of the “globalization paradigm.” To stay with the pre–First World War example, prominent Germans began to attack the hypocritical “commercialism” of the British hegemon. They depicted themselves as the bearer of a more heroic and more noble sort of society, in which “heroes” rather than “traders” set the tone. Those who developed this distinction, notably the economist Werner Sombart, went on to argue that German businessmen too shared in this heroic quality, because they went about business in a different way and would sacrifice shortterm profit for long-term communal and national interest.

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In order to make business conform more to a supposedly superior national model, more control is needed. There are obvious parallels in recent times to the way in which reactions against market capitalism target ethnic or religious minorities who are held to have positions of unfair or undue influence. Amy Chua has recently produced a best seller documenting the backlashes against what she calls “market dominant ethno-national minorities”: Chinese in much of Asia, Indian in southern Africa, Lebanese in West Africa, Jewish in former Soviet Republics.27 In none of these cases is it likely that attacks on the minority and the subsequent looting and despoliation of it will lead to anything except poverty and disruption. Violent ethno-nationalism is a powerful and highly economically disruptive force, and is characteristic of periods of reaction against the globalization paradigm. The political tensions of today go hand-in-hand with a revived discussion of contrasting national models of capitalism and a new degree of skepticism about the “Anglo-Saxon model.” The new mood can be linked to wider economic and political concerns. In part, the European sensibility is the product of anxiety about the viability of small firms in an era of global competition. In part too, Europeans are naturally worried about the dismantling of the welfare state, and about the costs of their aging population and the consequences of their low birthrates. This debate produces defensive images of an order that needs to be protected and hostile visions of the outside world and its ethos. Enron has become a rallying cry of the anti-globalization movement. Business figures in Europe who tried to present themselves as advocates of an American-style capitalism or of “shareholder value” such as Thomas Middelhoff or Ron Sommer or Jean-Marie Messier were now excoriated as incompetent or corrupt (which in many cases, needless to say, they were). European executives were put on trial for agreeing to supposedly excessive compensation packages. It is important to note that the attempts to formulate new visions of nationally distinctive and anti-global capitalisms are not just a product of anti-American reactions to perceptions of American capitalism bending the rules. The increased concern within the United States with increasing control and regulation—manifested notably in the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act—is a part of the same reaction. But as with other 27. Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability.

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initiatives, the United States seeks to universalize the new approach, so that companies from other countries are obliged to accept the new U.S. regulatory approach if they wish to continue to do business in the United States. E E E

The capacity of relatively small conflicts to destroy large elements of international agreement and to promote new visions of national distinctiveness obviously is a familiar theme in 2004. But it is not a new one. The danger of escalating conflict disrupting globalization has historical precedents that go back much further than the world of late-nineteenthcentury globalization, when tensions coming out of the new imperialism led to the First World War. Three remarkable and rather contrasting books were published in 1776, the year of the signing of the American declaration of independence. The first volume of Edward Gibbon’s classic study of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was (by chance) published at the same time as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s attempt in Du contrat social to work out a completely new basis for democracy and participation in a world which in his eyes lacked consensus and community. Gibbon’s advice and Smith’s concern about war destroying commerce looks immediately relevant today, and quite alarming. Both Smith and Gibbon were thinking, in the wake of the humiliation of a global British commercial and military system, about the problems of what might be termed a reverse of globalization. Rousseau provided an exposition of the virtue of local ownership: a manifesto for egalitarianism and a globalization backlash. Gibbon begins with praise for the peaceful character of the Emperor Augustus, and of Roman realism and multilateralism: “Inclined to peace by his temper and situation, it was easy for him to discover that Rome, in her present exalted situation, had much less to hope than to fear from the chance of arms; and that, in the prosecution of remote wars, the undertaking became every day more difficult, the event more doubtful, the possession more precarious, and less beneficial.” This is a fine description of the attractions and perils of economic prosperity. However much the Emperor Augustus realized the pointlessness of distant wars, he actually did not have much choice. The wars were created out of the instability that inevitably swirls around success, or at least around successful imperial systems. Rome might have basked in consumer prosperity, but was sucked into and ultimately destroyed

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by a world of conflict. Gibbon even gave a neat account of the northern European response to Roman power: “The forests and morasses of Germany were filled with a hardy race of barbarians who . . . though, on the first attack, they seemed to yield to the weight of Roman power, they soon, by a signal act of despair, regained their independence, and reminded Augustus of the vicissitude of fortune.”28 The “globalization thesis” turned into the vision of imperialism that needed to be rebuffed and fought. There are many signs that we are at the beginning of a new era, in which the “globalization thesis” is being rolled back once more. In the new world, differences become important. Business leaders focus on the way they have “traditionally” done business. Individuals see risks coming from the outside rather than opportunities. Citizens detect corruption. Countries are willing to fight trade and currency wars, and to resist external interventions in corporate affairs. Political leaders focus on redesigning the trading and monetary system in order to alter the balance of political and economic power. In this world, conflict tends to escalate, and it destroys the basis of prosperity and international order. Its inhabitants think about Mars, not Mercury.

28. Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1–2.

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Conflict within Cooperation Western Security Relations, Past and Present Douglas Porch

T H E H U N G A R I A N S C H O L A R AU R E L KO L N A I O B S E RV E D I N 19 38 T H AT

democracy provided the fundamental characteristic differentiating “the West” from “the East”: “For Ancient Greeks ‘the West’ (or ‘Europe’) meant a society with a free constitution and self-government under recognized rules, where ‘law is king,’ whereas the ‘East’ (or ‘Asia’) signified theocratic societies under godlike rulers whom their subjects serve ‘like slaves.’” The idea of the West flows from its core principles—political freedom, limited government, religious tolerance, scientific reason, and individual rights—rather than from its geography. Behind European imperialism and its later American variants of global meliorism and Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic internationalism lies the assumption that the West has universal appeal from its association with modernity and prosperity. In this sense, everyone but the most stubborn jihadi who sees the West as decadent, rootless, materialistic, and corrupting might be converted to its values.1 Europe and North America, therefore, certainly both qualify as Western under Kolnai’s definition because they occupy the same periphery of history. 1. Kolnai is quoted in Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan, 44. Global meliorism “rests on the conviction that most of the phenomena that threaten us in this century . . . are in great parts the products of oppression and poverty . . . Meliorism assumes that the United States alone possesses the power, prestige, technical, wealth, altruism to reform whole nations.” Walter A. McDougall, Promised Land: The American Encounter with the World since 1776, 208. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies. 156

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Divisions between “old Europe” and the United States exposed by the Iraq War of 2003 caused some to question whether it is still useful for policy makers to rely on an underlying Western unity while managing differences over issues such as Iraq. Indeed, America’s decision to invade Iraq without the blessing of the United Nations and despite opposition from its major allies France and Germany, not to mention Russia, appeared to confirm U.S. willingness, even preference, to adopt a unilateralist approach to foreign policy and engage in preventative action. Nonetheless, filing the West’s obituary as an organizing principle for foreign policy initiatives may be premature. Disputes among Western allies are an old story, and foreign policy success follows most often when they stand together. Indeed, the differences between America and Europe exposed by the Iraq War are largely tactical, even personal, rather than a disagreement over fundamental values. The miscalculations recall, on a less drastic scale, 1914, when willful and inept leadership combined with the doctrine of preventive war to drive the July Crisis beyond the brink of resolution. This is not to suggest, however, that the differences over how to deal with Saddam Hussein did not reflect an evolution, even a revival, of attitudes and habits in foreign affairs in both Europe and America. The end of the Cold War and the United States’ unequaled military power have encouraged a resurgence of an eighteenth-century vision of American “exceptionalism,” unilateralism, and self-sufficiency in a foreign policy linked to Wilsonian morality. Many in Washington viewed a Europe preoccupied with its unifying mission, militarily weak, and chastened by its history of devastating twentieth-century wars as unable to undertake global responsibilities and hence increasingly irrelevant in foreign policy calculations.2 Europeans, on the other hand, saw the Bush administration’s rush to war as unnecessary and imprudent, and its refusal to consult with its major allies insulting. To some, these two conclusions were evidence that a surfeit of American power rather than WMD proliferation, failed states, international crime, or terrorism provided the central problem for the post–Cold War international order. French and German politicians attempted to leverage the surge of anti-Americanism that came out of the Iraq War, hoping to establish their countries as balances to U.S. power and capture the momentum 2. Elizabeth Pond, Friendly Fire: The Near-Death of the Transatlantic Alliance, x–xi.

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of EU reforms. Both efforts failed. Washington quietly abandoned the unilateralist approach to Iraq for the simple reason that it did not work, while French President Jacques Chirac’s power grab in Europe clearly blew up in his face.3 Two things must be kept in mind when analyzing the dispute between old Europe and the United States that broke cover under the Bush administration. First, the events of 9/11 constituted a truly nationalizing event in the United States. When disagreements over strategy arise within the Western coalition, the reflex is to lash out at one’s allies. The differences since 2003 can be seen as a continuation of traditional distrust between Europe and America that is as old as the American Republic itself, and that often erupted into bitter disputes during World War II and the Cold War. Second, in its essential respects, the debate over Iraq offered an opportunity to replay the struggle for mastery in Europe. The idea of who is truly European, hence Western, dates from the Enlightenment, when Western Europe, in the word of American historian Larry Wolff, “appropriated to itself the notion of ‘civilization.’” Where the Renaissance saw Europe as split along a frontier that separated the “civilized” south from the barbaric north, Enlightenment Paris seized the moral and intellectual high ground to declare itself superior to the undifferentiated “racial mish-mash, with strong Asiatic elements,” that lay to the East. This sense of Western Europe’s superiority constituted a “Philosophic Geography” that underpinned Napoleon’s and Hitler’s conquests of the quasi-civilized and economically backward East.4 The formation of the nation-state expanded the frontiers of Western civilization, as Poles, Czechs, and Hungarians developed national constructs to distinguish their nations from the “other” (Asiatic Russia). Croats, for instance, nurture a self-image of their country as a Western Catholic glacis that guards Europe’s southern frontiers from “Orientals” to the South. In 1946, Konrad Adenauer, the anti-Prussian Rhenish Catholic, had no doubt that Asia stood on the Elbe, that Europe had to be saved by those countries whose values he identified as most Western—England and France. In Adenauer’s view, Hitler’s claim to be the standard-bearer of Western civilization in the East was a travesty. Cologne was the border 3. Thomas Friedman, “Elephants Can’t Fly,” New York Times, January 29, 2004. 4. Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, 4–9, 370.

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town of the Roman Empire, delineating the limits of Western civilization. “Freedom and democracy defined the civilized Roman, Christian, Enlightened West,” writes Ian Buruma. “Asia meant orthodoxy, tyranny, and war. The Third Reich was Asia. Adenauer’s mission was to bring his Germany, western Germany, to the West, to cut out, as if it were a cancerous growth, the vestiges of Asia.” Adenauer, and ultimately Churchill in his “iron curtain” speech, had merely modified by a few hundred kilometers a similar assessment of the Marquis de Custine, who, in 1839, announced that “Siberia begins on the Vistula.”5 One of the endemic problems of the West, as Adenauer’s mission suggests, is that it requires constant defending, and that it holds together better when it can define a common agenda and strategy as it did during the Cold War. But disagreements about eligibility for membership in the Western club and what constitutes a proper Western response to threats are the rule more than the exception. Since the sixteenth century, the Western world felt the requirement to civilize the non-Western world. But European states also competed to stake out lands over which to exercise their influence. Although the West first coalesced against Nazism and Japanese militarism during the twentieth century and then stood together successfully to resist Asiatic communism, it underwent great tensions while doing so. Complex issues underpin the troubled relations that historically have strained Western harmony. They include traditional rivalries and clashes of interests; feelings of moral superiority based on culture, values, and experience that informs the conduct of both Europeans and Americans; and behavior patterns that replicate the power relationship between stronger and weaker alliance partners. But the debate over the idea of a West revives an old pattern rather than introducing something new. American neoconservatives, eager to categorize the Europeans as rich, diabetic socialists with strongly pacifist sympathies who lack the muscular will to prevail over the terrorist threat, are the lineal descendants of the Hemispherists, “Fortress America,” “America Firsters,” the anti-détente crowd of the 1970s, and even the first-strike evangelists. American unilateralism has certainly energized traditional left-wing anti-Americanism in Europe, but for Europe and America to declare their interests wholly incompatible, to dissolve their bond of common

5. Buruma, The Wages of Guilt, 13–14; Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe, 364–65.

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values in squabbles over the proper response to Al Qaeda or illusions about the benefits of military hardware to eradicate political uncertainty, and go their separate ways would be a disaster. In fact, the neoconservative campaign of European denigration can be traced to Washington’s Farewell Address. The youthful United States was not sure what it was. But the beginning of national identity was to decide what it was not—and that “not” was Europe. Europe had divided the North American continent, while Britain’s continued presence in North America threatened the fledgling United States’ existence. George Washington warned against entangling alliances, while Jefferson designed an Enlightenment vision for his new state unshackled by kings, aristocracies, national rivalries, and serial conflict, a vision communicated through Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. In America’s view, its own imperialism was decidedly anti-imperial, a fraternal imperialism based on a community of power imbued with higher moral standards than those of the Old World.6 The certainty that Europe was out to manipulate America and presume on its goodwill and boundless resources has long troubled the relationship between the two continents. While secretary of state, John Quincy Adams crafted the Monroe Doctrine to enshrine Washington’s and Jefferson’s unilateralist principle of no entangling alliances that would impinge on U.S. sovereignty or freedom of action. Wilson’s Fourteen Points were an attempt to break Europe’s cycle of wars by purging the Old World of, as Walter McDougall puts it, “greed, hubris, militarism, suppression of self-determination, secret diplomacy, and the idolatrous worship of the balance of power.” Wilson’s policy, which, Harper notes, George Kennan found motivated in American “moral pretentiousness, fatuous optimism, and a naive belief in universal progress,” combined with America’s headlock on Europe’s debt, proved disastrous after 1919. However, this did not inhibit Washington’s “America knows best” attitude in dealing with Europe. Franklin Roosevelt’s World War II assertion that the Allies had saved France, a nation that “was in the position of a little child unable to look out and fend for himself,” constituted a bold challenge to Charles de Gaulle, a man who had his own Joan of Arc complex. Despite the wartime affinity built up between Churchill and Roosevelt, Roosevelt had no intention 6. John Lamberton Harper, American Visions of Europe: Franklin D. Roosevelt, George F. Kennan, and Dean G. Acheson, 338, 25–26, 30.

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of shedding American blood to revive the British Empire. In his view the continent of Europe was peopled by scheming, ruthless politicians obsessed with provoking interminable conflict in a quest for marginal advantage over their neighbors. Consequently, he remained on the qui vive for British attempts to draw the United States into Europe’s quarrels. Likewise, he regarded the Free Poles as a gang of thugs whose mission in life was to sabotage U.S.-Soviet relations. His attempt to “retire” Europe from the world stage failed only because old Europe refused to go quietly, because Great Britain and the Soviet Union refused to go along, and because American public opinion was deeply troubled by his sell-out of Eastern Europe to Stalin.7 Europe reciprocated with a distrust of its own. The juxtaposition of religion and materialism in American life strikes deeply secular Europeans as baffling, evidence of an irrational and dangerously anachronistic mind-set. For Europeans, America’s provincialism and religiosity unite to encourage the logical fallacy that the United States projects some sort of universal value system that can transform the way the international system behaves. The idea that the rest of the world should emulate U.S. values strikes Europe as a disingenuous conceit born of naïveté and inexperience. De Gaulle branded American foreign policy as “will to power cloaked in idealism.”8 World War II marked a watershed in U.S.-European relations. Although Europe became the central front in the war between communism and the democratic, capitalistic West, the 1956 Suez Crisis underlined that Washington viewed European nations only as courtesy powers. Furthermore, the once martial and militarist Europe no longer had a weltpolitik, or even much of a worldview for that matter, beyond the fading imperial pretensions of France, Britain, and Portugal. The experience of two wars also infected Germany in particular with a practically terminal aversion to extraterritorial operations.9 Nevertheless, the Cold War resurrected the World War II vision of the West as a mutual dependency. Even if they often provided a framework for conflict within cooperation, the Marshall Plan and NATO both expressed this

7. McDougall, Promised Land, 59, 213, 217; FRUS Conferences at Washington and Casablanca, 1694–96, cited in Harper, American Visions, 90, 98–99, 129–31. 8. Harper, American Visions, 229. 9. Donald Abenheim, “Germany and the United States in the Age of Terror: Ideas, Domestic Politics, and the International System of States,” 64.

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view. Europe and the United States may not want to depend on each other, but ultimately they have to stick together. Quarrels characterized the marriage—Suez in 1956, de Gaulle’s withdrawal from the integrated military structure of NATO in 1966, the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and the debates in the 1980s over Euro missile deployment and U.S. engagement in Central America—but these disputes never reached a final divorce. Washington opposed European colonialism. Europe chastised U.S. adventurism, first in Korea, then in Vietnam, and later in the Persian Gulf during the early 1980s. Some Europeans argued in turn that by trying to replace Europe as the world’s policeman, the New World duplicates the mistakes of the Old. The Soviet Union’s collapse solidified the widening divergence in outlook and capabilities between Europe and the United States. The requirement for Atlantic solidarity seemed to recede, especially for a German left attracted to neutrality even during the Cold War.10 Europe’s inability to handle the breakup of Yugoslavia without American assistance and a desire among certain European states to offset the power of France and Germany by keeping America engaged both combined to make the United States an indispensable part of the struggle for mastery in Europe. Nevertheless, while quarrels over Bosnia in 1994–1995 and Kosovo in 1999 prefigured Atlantic friction, few were prepared for the magnitude of rancor that roiled the West in the run-up to the Iraq War of 2003.

Three Counterterrorism Strategies The Iraq War of 2003 offered an uncomfortable reminder to Europe that it might have cashed in its peace dividend a trifle early. At issue was a running feud between the two wings of the West over the nature of the terrorist threat and the strategies required to deal with it. In a November 2003 speech, former U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig outlined the three contending positions. The first, which he labeled the neoconservative school, “impressed above all by America’s military strength [and] persuaded . . . that such strength, allied to American ideals, can overwhelm any foe.” The second he called the globalization 10. Jeffrey Herf, War by Other Means: Soviet Power, West German Resistance, and the Battle of the Euromissiles, 24–26.

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school, which preaches “the gradual easing of international tensions through the beneficial spread of technology, communications, and finance.” Finally, multilateralists, “primarily European . . . [who] do not think that the struggle against terrorism is a war, and are afraid to use military force,” but argue for consultation and action through international institutions like the UN.11

Neoconservative The neoconservative position starts from the premise that the United States’ unequaled military power gives it the freedom and strategic reach to leverage its political power, as the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrated. Furthermore, America must build on this lead by striving to maintain military forces that are both technologically and operationally invincible, which is itself an old idea. Doing so will discourage competition from peer competitors, intimidate governments tempted to host terrorist organizations or engage in WMD proliferation, and maintain American military supremacy for decades. The combination of America military preeminence and the will to exercise its power allows the United States to take bold initiatives that, when combined with American values, can potentially change the momentum of international affairs. The neoconservative vision has several strengths. First, it is firmly rooted in American traditions of international relations. John Lewis Gaddis traces the preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony that characterize the Bush Doctrine back to the early decades of the Republic, when American statesmen, cued by John Quincy Adams, eschewed entangling alliances and preempted European land grabs in the Western Hemisphere by their own expansion and through the Monroe Doctrine to ensure hegemony on the North American continent. In the twentyfirst century the American traditions of preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony, rather than the passé national security doctrines of containment and deterrence, offer an offensive posture that signals to potential terrorists and their state sponsors that they face a first strike or subsequent retaliation from overwhelming U.S. power anywhere in the world. As Thomas Friedman put it, “removing the Taliban and Saddam sent the 11. Alexander M. Haig, Jr., “The Promise and Perils of Our Times.”

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message to every government in the area” that they would be held accountable for incubating intolerance. The Bush Doctrine has proved to be the very momentum changer that its advocates envisaged: Gaddafi’s campaign to bring Libya out of quarantine stretches back to the 1988 Lockerbie bombings, but Bush supporters argue that America’s willingness to use force in Afghanistan and Iraq caused him to bring his rehabilitation to a conclusion and encouraged Iran to allow in nuclear inspectors.12 Furthermore, an offensive approach to terrorism, including the invasion of Iraq, is genuinely popular with the American public, and hence translates into votes. It offers a robust, coherent doctrine, shorn of hypocritical obeisance to European sensitivities concerning global warming, international criminal courts, or land mines, to replace Clinton’s flaccid engagement and enlargement. These “American revivalists,” in the view of Walter Russell Mead, have captured the zeitgeist of a revolutionary new era of international diplomacy characterized by the decline of New Deal capitalism and liberal internationalism and the rise of millennial capitalism and born-again Wilsonianism. It appeals to America’s Jacksonian traditions of “defiant individualism,” American exceptionalism, and distrust of foreign policy elites that, in the inter national arena, encourages U.S. interests to be pursued without the constraints of old Europe’s reservations about the efficacy of war.13 The myriad intrigues and the molasses in the January 2004 diplomacy at international institutions such as the United Nations offered proof that the multilateralism which characterized American policy toward its Western European allies, beginning with Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and League of Nations, is ill-suited to America’s war on terror. Tedious, cantankerous powwows in a UN Security Council that has become “a retirement home for former world powers” in Mead’s words, and whose decision-making process proceeds at the speed of the most anti-American member, who out of fecklessness or weakness 12. John Lewis Gaddis, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, 16–26; Thomas L. Friedman, “War of Ideas, Part 5,” New York Times, January 22, 2004; Walter Russell Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War: America’s Grand Strategy in a World at Risk, 129. 13. Sixty-five percent of Americans believed in January 2004 that the decision to go to war in Iraq was the correct one. “Bush to Seek More Money to Fight Terrorism at Home,” New York Times, January 23, 2004. Gaddis, Surprise, Security, 89–91; Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War, 77, 84, 88–93, 97, 126.

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is prepared, in the words of Richard Perle, “to kiss the behinds of the mullahs” and then phone Washington when they run into trouble, are a tax that America need not pay when it is resolved to protect its vital interests. “For most Americans, multilateralism is a stick minorities use to attack majority policies they opposed in a high-minded and emotionally satisfying way,” Mead insists.14 The Bush Doctrine fits American strategic culture in that it plays on a traditional American desire for absolute security. “Americans generally tend to seek finality in international affairs,” writes Robert Kagan, summarizing the European view of U.S. diplomacy. “They want problems solved, threats eliminated.” The collapse of the Soviet Union terminated Europe’s strategic centrality in the struggle between communism and the West. Troubles in the Balkans in the 1990s showcased Europe’s diplomatic muddle, lack of self-confidence, and military dependence on the United States, “a classic problem of welfare dependency,” according to former State Department and Pentagon official E. Wayne Merry. “The incapacity to respond to threats leads not only to tolerance but sometimes to denial,” Kagan writes. American historian of Germany Jeffrey Herf insists that Europeans in general, and the German left in particular, misunderstand the dangers of appeasement and also act out of nostalgia for Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik and its philosophy of “transformation through proximity.” There is also a strong anticapitalist, antiglobalist sentiment on the European left which makes it reluctant to sign on to U.S. international initiatives. Indeed, 2002 proved that socialist German politicians can win elections simply by running against America.15 Why should any American president hand Jacques Chirac the veto on American action? Western European parochialism is a survival mechanism born of the fact that international action troubles the fragile political equilibrium required to resolve the many issues around European unity. It also contains fears that aggressive action in the Middle East will stoke the latent animosities and frustrations of an inassimilable Muslim population that has settled in Europe. The Iraq War was an uncomfortable reminder to 14. Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War, 94, 133, 136; Pond, Friendly Fire, 30; Richard Perle, “What Does the EU Know about the Fight on Terror, Mr. Patten?” The Sun, February 16, 2002. 15. E. Wayne Merry, “Therapy’s End: NATO Died with the Soviet Union. Get Over It,” 48; Jeffrey Herf, “Iraq and the German Left’s Forgotten Lessons of Anti-Fascism,” http://fesportal.fes.de., n.d.

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Europe that what Christopher Caldwell terms its “long holiday from doctrinal strife” is drawing to a close and what Kagan calls its “postmodern paradise” now stands under threat. “As the United States is a global power, a clash between America’s needs and Europe’s interests is inevitable,” writes Merry. “Iraq was merely the first instance.”16 Europe’s disinclination to exercise anything other than soft power in the international arena means that American diplomatic unilateralism makes perfect sense on the operational level as continental Europe has deliberately chosen to marginalize itself as a military power. Europe’s failure to trim back their generous social benefits to upgrade their military forces make them a drag on operations. Why rely in a crisis on European states that are unwilling or unable to act? NATO has become a burden because it absorbs U.S. forces better deployed elsewhere, discourages Europe from facing up to its military responsibilities, and serves only to inhibit U.S. military action.17 The neoconservative mantra is that the mission defines the coalition. This provides strategic flexibility for Washington that surges into action at the head of a coalition of the willing, collected more as diplomatic window-dressing than as a force multiplier. A final argument for the neoconservative approach is that, at roughly 3 percent of gross domestic product, the U.S. military buildup is affordable.

Globalism In a sense, the globalists offer the most central of Haig’s three diplomatic approaches, all of which share a Wilsonian faith that the projection of American values of democracy and free market economics offers a path toward a worldwide, universal culture. The differences among the groups are really those of strategy rather than goals. Essentially, the globalists argue that time, history, and technology are on the side of the West. The example of wealth, intellectual creativity, and the dynamism of Western culture projected by the mass media and the Internet combine to create a spontaneous combustion of emulation. Globalism offers 16. Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” 1, 3–5, 8, 12–14, 17; Christopher Caldwell, “In Europe, ‘Secular’ Doesn’t Quite Translate,” New York Times, December 21, 2003; Merry, “Therapy’s End,” 45. 17. Merry, “Therapy’s End,” 50.

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a path to modernization, prosperity, and stability that has a proven track record. After World War II, the Marshall and Dodge plans rehabilitated Western Europe and Japan along democratic, capitalist lines. The political stability and economic success of many non-Western countries, to include Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and increasingly India, who have found prosperity through democracy and free markets is infectious. Even the People’s Republic of China seems to realize that the democratization of technology, finance, and communications means that they must loosen up politically or risk, like Cuba or North Korea, being left behind in the sprint for global enrichment. The foreign policy benefits of globalism rest on Thomas Friedman’s “golden arches” theory of conflict prevention—no two countries with a McDonalds have ever fought a war with each other. And although the Kosovo conflict proved that even tyrants enjoy a Big Mac and fries, the faith that the more culturally and economically interconnected the countries, the less likely they are to go to war underpinned the Clinton administration’s strategy of engagement and enlargement. Globalists such as the financier George Soros have argued that 9/11 proves how far our welfare is intertwined with that of the rest of the world. So far so good. But critics accuse the globalists of parochialism and ditzy optimism, of discounting the importance cultural differences and the potential for push-back from groups who view Westernization as a dark plot to undermine the social and spiritual underpinnings of their societies. Globalization is a process. And simply encouraging it, as engagement and enlargement did, in the expectation that mimicry can generate a benign international environment, constitutes in Gaddis’s view “a well intentioned but shallow” argument, not a strategy with clear objectives. The spread of global markets actually churns traditional societies, lessens the control of states over their populations, stimulates organized crime, and contributes to the growing number of failed states. Nor is globalization seen as a level playing field, but one in which international institutions such as the World Trade Organization or the World Bank front for developed countries and international corporations to force ideologically based and painful “shock therapies” on underdeveloped countries. Meanwhile, the United States and the EU refuse to make tariff or immigration concessions that would allow poor countries to benefit from the “international market.” The result has been an economic and cultural backlash against globalization—riots, protectionist legislation, state-directed redistributive policies that are

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antiliberal, and attacks on individual rights, especially when the benefits of economic change go to racial or ethnic minorities.18 Globalization, therefore, has left many governments with the dilemma of how to modernize, hence Westernize, without giving up traditional values and cultures. Opposition to globalization has empowered traditionalist groups who view Westernization and modernization as the triumph of greed, materialism, and idolatry over tradition, spiritualism, and hierarchy. In states that have not been completely torn asunder, these groups employ democracy to roll back the very modernization that democracy is meant to encourage. What has been globalized, therefore, is often not Western values or free markets, but violence from terrorist groups rooted in radical Islam.19 Neoconservatives argue that the major globalist blind spot is the failure to recognize the requirement for military force to jump-start modernization. Harvard historian Niall Ferguson believes that the West’s struggle against Islamic fundamentalism cannot “safely be entrusted to Messrs Disney and McDonald.” To the contrary, historically, globalization has trailed in the wake of gunboats. The abolition of slavery and advancement of human rights, the flow of capital, labor, and culture, the establishment of transparent fiscal systems, relatively incorrupt government, and the rule of law required the muscle of “liberal empire.” In the post-imperial world, economic globalization is hindered by political fragmentation and terrorist violence that military force is calibrated to counter. The international community cannot afford to allow a few “spoilers” to stop progress in Afghanistan and Iraq. But it lacks the military power and the sense of purpose to do so. Therefore, the “White Man’s Burden” lapses by default to the United States.20

Multilateralism Alexander Haig characterized multilateralism (he called it “passives”), his third strategy, as “European,” force-averse, and hence 18. Gaddis, Surprise, Security, 77–79; William Early, “The Glass Half Empty: George Soros Has Lots of Ideas to Fill It Back Up”; Pat Sewell, “Global Inferno: Mixing Free Markets, Minority Domination, and Democracy Results in World on Fire.” Also, Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability. 19. Patricia Somlo, “Clash of Civilization Sheds Light on Post–Cold War”; Buruma and Margalit, Occidentalism, 102, 121, 126. 20. Ferguson, Empire, xvi, xxii–xxiii, 362–64.

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anemic. But preference for a policy that favors collaboration and consultation over unilateral action is not confined to Europe. The United States pursued a multilateralist foreign policy for most of the twentieth century. Gaddis points out that Theodore Roosevelt’s decision to build a navy and engage in the world balance-of-power game, Taft’s “dollar diplomacy,” which recognized the framework of international law, and Wilson’s abortive attempts to expand American values through international institutions such as the League of Nations recognized that growing U.S. military and commercial interests had rendered preemption, unilateralism, and hegemony an obsolete formula for U.S. interaction with the world. It was Franklin Roosevelt, however, who incorporated “unilateral interests within a multilateral framework.” In the process, he laid the groundwork for a multilateral system that would win both World War II and the Cold War.21 “Rejecting preemption while embracing multilateralism served the United States—and its allies—very well,” Gaddis writes. First, it is ideologically consistent with American values. Multilateralism, its advocates argue, is the application of the democratic process on the international level. Hence, multilateralism lies at the heart of the modernization, Westernization, and democratization of the world. It requires diplomacy. It may be slow, and it might require compromises. But the alternative, a unilateralist strategy that rejects consultation and consensus with close allies to project Western, modernizing, and democratic values, is contradictory, even hypocritical.22 Second, multilateralism has been enormously successful. Historically, cooperation has been the traditional way that the West has conducted its business in the twentieth century if it was to achieve any success. And while differing viewpoints and friction have been inevitable, when they became incapacitating, as in the aftermath of World War I, then the West found itself unable to defend its collective interests. America’s traditional strength, one inherited from Great Britain, has been the ability to leverage its military power and principled positions to form alliances. By standing together, the West won World War II and the Cold War. Germany, France, and Britain supported the

21. Gaddis, Surprise, Security, 38–42, 60. 22. Ibid., 61. In Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph Stiglitz argues that it is hypocritical of the Bush administration to take on the “White Man’s Burden” while rejecting the Kyoto Protocol, the ICC, and thumbing its nose at major NATO allies and the UN.

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Gulf War of 1991 and invoked NATO’s sacrosanct Article 5—an attack on one member is an attack on all—in the wake of 9/11. Europe wholeheartedly supported the Afghanistan invasion, and Germany has taken command of ISAF, which oversees peacekeeping operations there. Lost in the intramural Western squabble over the 2003 invasion of Iraq, according to Pond, “was both the actual extent of fundamental transatlantic agreement and the sober policy ground for European resistance for war.” NATO, like Germany, has continued to streamline its decision-making process and restructure forces available for “outof-area” missions. A growing NATO whose members share Western values is a potent asset to sacrifice just to revive a hoary, Federalist-era unilateral and preemptive strategy never crafted for a modern, globalized world. Closer allied consultation would have permitted verification of Colin Powell’s assessment of the threat posed by Saddam Hussein in his prosecutorial UN presentation, which turned out to be what Pond called a tissue of “crude forgeries, plagiarism from a student thesis, misrepresentation of the purpose of some key cylinders purchased by the Iraqis, and exaggerated reports from Iraqi exile groups close to the Pentagon hawks.”23 A sober threat assessment might have served us well before we sent troops into Iraq to eliminate nonexistent WMD and break Saddam’s phantom links to terrorist groups. Third, a coalition whose core is composed of America’s traditional allies, blessed by the UN or NATO, confers more legitimacy and stamina on operations carried out in the context of a global war on terror than does a cobbled-together coalition of the willing built from a constellation of marginal countries whose forces are poorly trained and coordinated, and who bring inadequate skill sets to the peacekeeping operation. The transformation of the culture of the Middle East is more

23. In April 1999, NATO approved the Combined Joint Task Force mechanism that allows members to decline to participate actively in specific missions if they do not feel that their vital interests are at stake. John C. Hulsman, “Getting Real: An Unromantic Look at the NATO Alliance,” 69, argues Germany gave significant military support to the United States and to Israel, even though it was not directly participating in the Iraq War of 2003. Also, at its November 2002 Prague summit, NATO approved out-of-area missions and a U.S. proposal to form an elite NATO Reaction Force (NRF) for deployments beyond Europe’s borders. In June 2003 the EU produced its first draft Joint Security Strategy that accepted America’s post-9/11 threat assessment, extended Europe’s “security zone,” and endorsed preventive and even, in extraordinary circumstances, preemptive military action similar to that spelled out in the U.S. National Security Strategy of 2002. Pond, Friendly Fire, 62, 65–66, 73, 88.

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likely to find acceptance when it is pursued by a broad coalition of Western powers than by a “coalition of the bought,” as Pond called it, that is, in Gaddis’s words, “more of a joke than a reality.”24 It gives us a better chance to succeed in the war on terror, in rebuilding Iraq, and in reorienting the culture of the Middle East. When things begin to go wrong, a “build it and they will come” approach to coalition management unravels, as coalition partners who are not unified by strong ties, vision, or common goals and interests bolt for the exits. Fourth, cooperation allows the West to not only draw more deeply on its assets but also capitalize on a greater range of military and nationbuilding skills. Military transformation has given the United States a hard-hitting military machine, but winning battles does not equate to winning wars. Indeed, retired Marine Corps General Anthony Zinni asks why the U.S. military keeps getting “stuck” in places such as Somalia and Iraq without the force structure to carry out post-conflict reconstruction. Either the military has to learn to partner with others to get it done, “or the military finally decides to change into something else beyond the breaking and the killing.”25 If NATO and the UN have to “do the dishes,” then that is a perfectly honorable and constructive, if badly labeled, role to play. These nations and international organizations can provide the peacekeepers and international cadre of police and civil servants required to support and sustain nation-building missions. Europe’s incorporation brings with it its own stabilizing ideology that, like America’s, springs from the Enlightenment and “lessons learned” from Europe’s violent past. “The transmission of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe’s new mission civilisatrice,” writes Kagan. “America’s power, and its willingness to exercise that power—unilaterally if necessary—represents a threat to Europe’s new sense of mission, perhaps its greatest threat . . . Such American action represents an attack on the essence of ‘postmodern’ Europe. It is an assault on Europe’s new ideals, and a denial of their universal validity . . . Americans ought to be able to understand that a threat to one’s beliefs can be as frightening as a threat to one’s sense of security.”26 24. Pond, Friendly Fire, 74; Gaddis, Surprise, Security, 98. 25. General Anthony Zinni, “How Do We Overhaul the Nation’s Defense to Win the Next War?” 1, 3. 26. Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” 12.

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E E E

Neoconservatives write off European strategic culture as too psychologically soft and militarily weak to effectively partner with the United States in the war on terror. But in the process they advertise neoconservative values as those of America in general, when in fact their “values” offer a mélange of vocal and well-organized specialinterest groups. Neoconservatives confuse style with substance by highlighting secondary issues such as differences in attitudes over the death penalty, health care, or gun control to be emblematic of an unbridgeable cultural divide, and ignore the potential benefits of what Joseph Nye calls Europe’s “soft power.” “When you are in a three-dimensional game, you will lose if you focus only on the interstate military board, and fail to notice the other boards, and the vertical connections among them,” Nye writes. Western cooperation offers a potential fusion of “Western” democratic ideals and potentially the right mix of power and persuasion. It may be, as Thomas Friedman believes, that the West needs on occasion to crush the world’s bad guys just to show that it means business, and to jump-start the debate in the Arab world about reform.27 But America as a stand-alone agent of smash-mouth military diplomacy offers a formula for failure in the Middle East. A properly managed cooperative approach would find adherents in Europe. Not all of Europe embraces the prospect of an American departure, especially those smaller states in Eastern Europe that fear Germany and France will dominate the EU. Even Atlanticist German Social Democrats believed Gerhard Schröder’s willingness to play the antiAmerican card in a tight election endangered long-standing GermanU.S. ties. Jacques Chirac’s attempt to use the surge of anti-Americanism triggered by the Iraq War to bolster his popularity, strengthen French power in Europe, and marginalize Britain clearly backfired. There are also voices in Europe that understand the world is a dangerous place where the West has an interest in acting in concert, even if this means, in the words of British commentator Robert Cooper, that “we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era—force, preemptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary.”28 27. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, “For Conservatives, Mission Accomplished,” New York Times, May 18, 2004; Pond, Friendly Fire, 4–5; Joseph S. Nye, The Paradox of American Power: Why the World’s Only Superpower Can’t Go It Alone, 39; Friedman, “War of Ideas, Part 5.” 28. Pond, Friendly Fire, 56–59; Friedman, “Elephants Can’t Fly”; Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” quoting Robert Cooper, 16.

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Neoconservatism and the Militarization of Strategy The final advantage of the multilateral approach is that it avoids the militarization of strategy inherent in the neoconservative formula. Neoconservative strategy suffers from what may be called the “Blitzkrieg fallacy”—the belief that political uncertainty can be eradicated through technological dominance. While technological superiority and operational finesse constitute important components of military effectiveness, they are hardly substitutes for a viable strategy. Indeed, as Michael Howard notes, proponents of Blitzkrieg warfare in World War II discovered the hard way that “technology had not in fact transformed the nature of strategy.” Likewise, the neoconservative arguments are grounded in a historic American desire for self-sufficiency in security matters combined with a tendency common among nuclear theorists to consider the activity of war and deterrence purely in technological terms, stripped of their sociopolitical dimensions.29 While there is nothing inherently wrong with seeking a military superiority grounded in technology, the so-called Bush administration Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) has actually undermined America’s strategic goals in the Middle East. First, technology is a two-way street that offers avenues of attack to the West’s enemies as well. While technology permits American forces to be catapulted into Afghanistan and contributes to their combat capabilities, it also allows terrorists to transfer funds, fly airplanes into buildings, and perhaps, in the future, plant dirty bombs in U.S. cities. Al Jazeera and the Internet spew images of Palestinian-Israeli violence, “melding in the heads of young Arabs and Muslims the notion that the biggest threat to their future is J.I.A.—‘Jews, Israel, and America,’” writes Thomas Friedman. Second, full-spectrum dominance ignores the interactive nature of war. Technology has a short shelf life before it is replicated or trumped. Western technological superiority may actually be destabilizing in that it encourages the weaker actor—the terrorist and/or the insurgent—to resort to surprise attacks as a way to gain psychological and strategic advantage, as well as to advertise his cause. For bad strategists such as Napoleon and Hitler, “shock and awe” failed because it became an end in itself. To focus on the sharp end of combat causes one to ignore the diplomatic and public preparation of the conflict and to neglect the

29. Michael Howard, “The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy,” 106–9.

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postwar environment. Intimidation unsoftened by reassuring rhetoric, Gaddis writes, is “like running your tachometer into its red zone. There may be times when you need to do it, but if you make it a habit you shouldn’t expect your vehicle to get you to where you want to go.” Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security adviser to President Carter, has observed that the reckless “with us or against us” approach that is positively contemptuous of the entreaties of “old Europe” has allowed Bush to isolate his critics “and to justify handling them accordingly.”30 However, a diplomacy informed by the principle Thucydides described as “your hatred is evidence of our power” seldom provides a formula for success over the long run. For it may be that Bush’s approach to counterterrorism suits the purpose of an administration that is less interested in winning the war on terror than in maintaining an offensive posture and gives the impression of momentum that intimidates enemies and allies alike. The attack on 9/11 traumatized America. It allowed the administration to focus American energies, and American attentions, on an external threat for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Commentator David Brooks, himself a conservative, has noted that the war on terror has allowed President Bush to offer, at least in his estimation, an “idealistic” and forceful international vision in part to mask a “prosaic” domestic agenda.31 Unfortunately, in Iraq the combination of low international support for the war, overreliance on shock-and-awe to solve intractable political problems, and a neglect of postwar planning allowed the enemies of the occupation to regroup and launch an insurgency that the American military was poorly configured to counter. This is because the RMA is based on a synergy of the “system of systems.” And when it fails, the potential for catastrophic collapse is high because there is no backup. The sad truth is that the RMA’s emphasis from its beginning in the Rumsfeld/ Wolfowitz Pentagon has favored the more “technological” navy and air force, while keeping the U.S. Army undersized and underinvested in civil affairs and military police, linguists, psy-ops, and intelligence specialists required for post-conflict and counterinsurgency operations. Indeed,

30. Thomas Friedman, “War of Ideas, Part 4,” New York Times, January 18, 2004; James J. Wirtz, “Theory of Surprise,” 103–6; Gaddis, Surprise, Security, 103; “2004—Just Another Year of Fighting Terrorism?” 31. Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner, 402; David Brooks, “Running on Reform,” New York Times, January 3, 2004.

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under the Bush administration, the army in particular is assigned an increasing task load that has stretched its resources thin and challenged it with missions of governance for which it was neither prepared, staffed, organized, nor supported. “The United States has simply not invested the resources—troops [of the right kind], money, expertise—necessary to provide the basic security and material foundations for a successful political transformation,” writes U.S. Army War College professor Jeffrey Record.32 Allies are not much help, largely because at least two of the most potentially useful ones were intentionally sidelined and insulted in the run-up to the Iraq War, but also because the sprint to develop weapons systems that will leave potential “peer competitors” in the dust has also guaranteed that our allies lack the technological or operational capabilities to operate with American forces, who must shoulder a larger share of the burden. Therefore, the unnoticed component within “coalition of the willing” has become the “mercenary” legion of civilian contractors who outnumber troops from official coalition partners. In sum, to reduce military superiority to hardware is to misunderstand the nature of military power. General Zinni questions whether military forces organized around the principle of technological superiority can successfully fight “these culture wars” in which America is now involved. One risk of betting the farm on technological superiority is that tactics take over for strategy, pushing aside “the importance of the political objective, and the readiness of the belligerent communities to endure the sacrifices involved in prolonging the war,” according to Howard. This means that the Bush strategy may not fit the terrain. “Terrorism can be a logical strategic choice for those who have no attractive alternatives,” Record warns. “It is well and good to counsel those with grievances to seek political solutions, but this is hardly useful advice if there is no political process available for doing so.” Former French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin agrees: “There is no military solution to terrorism,” he counsels. “You need to have a political strategy.”33 Some conservatives, including Mead and Brooks, have argued that the problem is not with the Bush doctrine per se, but with the muddle

32. Antulio J. Echevarria II, “An American Way of War or Way of Battle”; Jeffrey Record, “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism,” 32. 33. Zinni, “How Do We Overhaul?” 4; Howard, “The Forgotten Dimensions,” 113; Record, “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism,” 25; “2004—Just Another Year of Fighting Terrorism?”

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that has accompanied its implementation. Brilliant vision incompetently applied, of course, was the traditional defense of Schlieffen. Others, however, argue that Wilsonian faith in the transferability to the Middle East of American values, the single-minded reliance on shockand-awe to jump-start cultural transformation, and a tin-ear dismissal of European reservations about the wisdom of the Iraq War as evidence of U.S.-European cultural incompatibility, has caused the Bush administration to ignore what might be called the Franklin Roosevelt corollaries of international engagement—proclaimed interests must not exceed capabilities, and get your allies to do most of the fighting.34 Jeffrey Record argues that, in its search for “moral clarity” in the global war on terror, the Bush administration has sacrificed strategic clarity . . . and may have set the United States on a path of open-ended and unnecessary conflict with states and nonstate entities that pose no direct or imminent threat to the United States. . . . Of particular concern has been the conflation of al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat. . . . This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level, and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action.35

General Zinni wonders if the Bush White House has not embarked upon the Peninsular War of the early twenty-first century: “For decades more, you’re going to be fighting terrorists, you’re going to be fighting against failed or incapable states that are sanctuaries for problems. You’re going to try to rebuild nations. You’re going to deal with crises and threats that threaten our people and our property. And it’s all going to be mixed into one big bag.”36 Such a prediction, if realized, fits poorly with the Pentagon’s military-transformation strategy of substituting technology for manpower.

34. Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War, 141–43; John Tierney, “The Hawks Loudly Express Their Second Thoughts,” New York Times, May 16, 2004. Brooks argues that muddled operations in the pursuit of global objectives are quintessentially American: David Brooks, “In Iraq, America’s Shakeout Moment,” New York Times, May 18, 2004. Gaddis, Surprise, Security, 47. 35. Record, “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism,” v, 1, 23. 36. Zinni, “How Do We Overhaul?” 4.

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“The global war on terrorism, as currently defined and waged, is dangerously indiscriminate and ambitious,” Record insists. Although the Bush administration has called Iraq the “central front in the war on terror,” from the war’s inception critics have charged that it is a distracting, “strategically unfocused,” and ultimately debilitating detour that attacks no terrorist center of gravity, but instead has directed U.S. energies into a dead-end peripheral theater, overstretched U.S. capacities, degraded our relations with our traditional European partners and their populations to hitherto uncharted depths of unpleasantness, and left America vulnerable to initiatives of our enemies.37 Record notes that it has lumped into the “against us” category groups that, while terrorist, do not necessarily have the United States in their crosshairs. Mead, who believes President Bush correct to refocus away from traditionally Eurocentric American diplomacy and who argues that the Bush doctrine is really just “Clinton heavy,” has noted, however, that even before 9/11 the administration “seemed to take a perverse joy in trampling on European sensitivities.” Indeed, the war on terror appears conceived as a multifaceted offensive with plural targets that include Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein, the French (and, by extension, old Europe), the UN, the Kyoto Protocol, the International Criminal Court, international arms control agencies and weapons inspectors, and, it goes without saying, the Democrats. In the meantime, the giddy Wilsonian fantasy that Iraqis delivered from the clutches of an evil dictator, led by Westernized exiles, would embrace democracy with minimal U.S. guidance has degenerated into a nightmare insurgency that mocks Condoleezza Rice’s promise to replicate in Baghdad the post-1945 democratic transformation of Germany and Japan. Any rogue ruler or terrorist able to count must realize that with U.S. ground forces tied up in Iraq or in counterterrorism missions, U.S. strategic flexibility is pretty well stretched to the limit—so much for “momentum change” in the Middle East.38

37. For example, “ ‘What Is Necessary’: Bush Seeks $87 Billion More from Congress in Anti-Terror Funds,” Associated Press, September 8, 2003. Thomas Ricks, “Study Published by Army Criticizes War on Terror’s Scope,” Washington Post, January 12, 2004; Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War, 122. 38. Condoleezza Rice, “Transforming the Middle East,” Washington Post, August 7, 2002, quoted in Record, “Bounding the Global War on Terrorism,” 27. See also Douglas Porch, “Occupational Hazards: Myths of 1945 and U.S. Iraq Policy,” 35–47. Thom Shanker, “New Chief Sets Out to Redesign a Stretched-Thin Army,” New York Times, January 28, 2004.

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It is also likely that the occupation, combined with the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandals, have put U.S. civil-military relations at risk. What might be the long-term consequences of a policy that burdens the ground forces with new tasks—to include homeland security, counterinsurgency, and intelligence gathering under legally and morally challenging ground rules—that stretch the military’s traditional comfort zone, while insisting that technological upgrades will more than compensate for the lack of manpower and an ill-adapted force structure? The neoconservatives appear to forget that military power is a fragile thing. In 1965 the U.S. military looked extremely strong. Ten years later it was in disarray, in great part because its search-and-destroy strategy brought victory in Vietnam no closer, which ultimately cost it the support of the American people. The all-volunteer force offered a reconfiguration of the military structure designed in part to limit the impact of sagging civilian morale on military efficiency. But the Bush administration strategies are clearly stretching capabilities to the limit, and have brought on discussions of reintroducing conscription—the antithesis of “military transformation.” How long can this go on? After all, the premise of Charles J. Dunlap’s 1992 article, “The Origins of the Military Coup of 2012,”39 is that overtasking eventually pushes the U.S. military into rebellion. Rebellion comes closer when the military feels alienated from its parent society. Imperial warfare and counterinsurgency of the sort the United States is fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq traditionally have strongly politicized, and even brutalized, the forces that took part. This has been true even in the politically obedient British army. Charles de Gaulle’s greatest challenge came from officers of France’s imperial forces, disgruntled in large part because publicity over their brutal torture of Algerians alienated the French people. The Bush administration is taking a huge risk to assume that the U.S. military will remain immune from the political consequences of overextension, counterinsurgency, and intelligence-gathering in a highly charged partisan atmosphere, especially if the administration continues to punish those who tell “inconvenient truths.” Alberto R. Gonzales, the chief White House counsel who determined that the Geneva Conventions were too “quaint” and “obsolete” to apply to the war on terror, nonetheless felt that suspending legal restraints on military behavior “could undermine 39. Charles J. Dunlap, Jr., “The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012,” 2–20.

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U.S. military culture, which emphasizes maintaining the highest standards of conduct in combat, and could introduce an element of uncertainty in the status of adversaries.” The most celebrated war leader to determine that international conventions regulating the status of civilians and combatants were inapplicable in the sort of war he intended to fight was Adolf Hitler. The famous Kriegsgerichtsbarkeitserlas [Decree on Military Jurisdiction] and the Kommissarbefehl [Commissar Order] of May and June 1941 gave German soldiers in the Soviet Union a green light to wage a war of unprecedented and shameful barbarity that brought discredit on their country.40 The enshrinement of preemption in the 2002 National Security Strategy also marks a radical departure from the “consultative hegemony” anchored in deterrence and containment that characterized American strategy since FDR. The logic for such a strategy seems infallible: “Therapy will not work on these kinds of people,” President Bush declared of terrorists. “Treaties make no sense. There’s only one thing: Get them before they get us, stay on the offensive.” Furthermore, the WMDs available to the West’s enemies make a strategy of retaliation for violence done a luxury that no nation, least of all the United States, can afford. The ways of deliberative multilateral consultation are out of date, even dangerous. The U.S. message is that “old-fashioned power politics in an era of weapons of mass destruction is a sure road to ruin,” writes Mead.41 Furthermore, preemption, the conjoined twin of unilateralism, is as American as apple pie. A first problem with preemption is that it is a misnomer. “The advantage of preemption as a policy category,” according to Daniel Moran, “is that it seeks to shift moral responsibility to the other side, while seizing the military initiative for oneself. Its disadvantage is that it invites a demand for direct evidence that some sort of attack is impending.” One preempts an attack that is about to be launched, a blow that is about to fall. The Bush strategy can more accurately be described as preventive—that is, “take advantage of currently favorable conditions, in anticipation that those conditions may deteriorate in the future. . . . 40. Hew Strachan, The Politics of the British Army, especially chapters 5 and 8; Paul Krugman, “Where’s the Apology,” New York Times, January 30, 2004; “A Corrupted Culture,” Washington Post, May 20, 2004; Hamburg Institute for Social Research, Crimes of the German Wehrmacht: Dimensions of a War of Annihilation 1941–1944, 7. 41. Krugman, “Where’s the Apology?”; Mead, Power, Terror, Peace and War, 121.

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Saddam may be a special case even among the world’s rogues and desperados,” Professor Daniel Moran of the Naval Postgraduate School wrote before the war’s outbreak, “because his conduct is so nonlinear that one dare not wait to see what will happen next.” Saddam’s sin was not that he was about to attack the United States, but that he showed such appalling judgment.42 It may be, as Mead argues, that there was a rich case for a preventive war against Saddam Hussein in 2003 that Washington presented ineptly. But argument for preventative war is the acceptance of an inevitable war. The fact that several of the United States’ major NATO allies failed to buy the rationale for a precipitous rush toward regime change in Iraq and seemed justified when no WMDs or ties to international terrorism were revealed exposed two other dangers of preemption—illegitimacy and overextension. Franklin Roosevelt abandoned preemption as a strategy because he believed that force should not be divorced from morality. Gulf War II was the moment when the growing tensions between America and “old Europe” led to a parting of the ways. It was not simply that, from a European perspective, the most successful war is the one avoided. Preventive war has troubling resonances in old Europe. It had informed Schlieffen’s decision to attack France in 1914 before the Franco-Russian alliance could gain strength, and justified, at least in Hitler’s mind, Barbarossa in June 1941 (Hitler’s invasion of Denmark and Norway in April 1940, and his attack on France and the Low Countries in May and June of that year, can be defined as preemption.) It also has evoked troubling parallels in the United States. After all, the Japanese high command also argued that growing U.S. power in the Pacific required them to attack Pearl Harbor in December 1941 before the American navy became too strong. Mao told his generals in November 1950 that China must fight the United States sooner or later, and ordered them across the Yalu. It was the fear that a preventive attack on Soviet missile sites in Cuba would be compared to Pearl Harbor that convinced President Kennedy to opt for a blockade.43 Quite apart from Europe’s, and much of America’s, perception that George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq was like lighting a match in

42. Daniel Moran, “Deterrence and Preemption.” 43. Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War, 119–20. Accusations that Polk had initiated a preemptive war against Mexico to grab territory for pro-slavery interests split the Whig and Democratic parties and contributed to the Civil War. McKinley’s “preemption” in the Philippines, and the subsequent insurgency that followed, soured

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an Islamist gas factory, Europeans, and especially Germans, were concerned that the Bush decision to spurn the blessing of the UN flaunted the standards of international law. And, of course, spurning important allies, combined with military transformation, has exposed the third danger of prevention—overextension. Therefore, the obvious conclusion to draw from the Iraq experience is that the FDR rule still holds— prevention is legitimized and unilateral interests are best realized when pursued in a multilateral framework. The failure to find evidence of deployable WMDs in Iraq has killed unilateral preemption as a strategy. It has also severely wounded Washington’s ability to coordinate international action against terrorism or WMD proliferation.44 But this may be difficult to accomplish, because the Bush doctrine of preemption has not only roiled the Middle East but also threatens to destabilize Europe. To divide Europe into old and new was a deliberate ploy by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to marginalize the most democratic and liberal states in Europe and to pay back Chirac and Schröder in their own coin. It sent the signal that the historic defense bond between America and its closest allies had been downgraded, in Washington’s mind, to a nuisance. It also betrayed an ignorance of the importance of Germany in Central Europe. George Kennan argued after World War II that Germany anchored Central Europe from the linchpin of continental unity. Donald Abenheim writes: “The integration of German power into the international system of states became a symbol of peace and stability in the years from 1945 until 1990. It also drove the reconstruction and reorientation of Western Europe, which formed a reliable—and reliably democratic—ally for the United States during and after the Cold War.”45

Americans on the colonial venture. See Gaddis, Surprise, Security, 56–58. William Stueck, The Korean War: An International History, 98. On the Cuban missile crisis Gaddis disagrees with Mead, who argues that JFK’s threat to “preempt” convinced Khrushchev to withdraw the missiles. Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War, 114. “Indeed it’s obvious from the tapes Kennedy secretly made of his advisers’ deliberations that simply invoking the [Pearl Harbor] analogy was enough to sink the possibility that the United States might emulate it.” Gaddis, Surprise, Security, 63. 44. Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War, 123; Gaddis, Surprise, Security, 59–61; Ilan Berman, “The Bush Strategy at War”; Martin Walker, “And Now, the End of U.S. Unilateralism”; Steven R. Weisman, “U.S. and Allies in New Efforts to Get Along,” New York Times, February 11, 2004. 45. Kennan’s vision in 1949 was essentially Hitler’s “minus the Nazi ideology and vulgarity.” Harper, American Visions, 216; Abenheim, “Germany and the United States in the Age of Terror,” 65.

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“A weakening of its Atlantic ties may raise renewed fears about a Germany unbound in Europe,” writes Harvard’s Stephen F. Szabo. “Combined with the parochialism of the current generation of German leaders, the danger signs are abundant that the German question is about to return to center stage in a new form in Europe.”46 The fundamental neoconservative assumptions are of a yawning cultural divide in the West: Europe is a continent in demographic and economic decline, whose citizens, coddled by the state, are so averse to the use of hard power that their values have significantly departed from those of America. The fact that America’s major trade and defense interests lie elsewhere, that Europeans, ensconced in their postmodern dreamland, are blind to threats and difficult to mobilize for out-ofarea missions, means that America’s traditional Eurocentric focus in foreign policy is out of date. Needless to say, these assumptions are highly debatable. Indeed, several commentators have pointed out that the neoconservatives seem eager to impose their Venus versus Mars dichotomy as a way to hijack “American values” to justify the actions “of the most socially conservative and internationally unilateralist administration in Washington in more than twenty years.” It also serves neoconservative interests to present legitimate European, and American, objections to the Iraq War as symptomatic of a cultural divide. The risk is that, like preventive war, belief in the inevitable becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. “The Bush administration did more in three years to drive Germany into an anti-American bloc with France than Charles de Gaulle accomplished through a long and brilliant career,” writes Mead.47 Will Europe as a whole come to accept the Gaullist view that the world’s problems are not related to terrorism, rogue states, international crime, and WMDs, but to an excess of American power? Are generations of U.S.-European cooperation worth casting aside just to prove, as on Orwell’s Animal Farm, that some animals are more equal than others, especially as the Iraq War has showcased the limits of military power as well as its strengths? 46. Stephen F. Szabo, “The Return of the German Problem.” Even Mead, who is generally favorable to the Bush administration’s approach, cautions that “what the Bush team failed to realize is that Europe’s decline is a problem for American foreign policy, not an opportunity,” because it means that we can count less on support from countries that share our core values. Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War, 144. 47. Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War, 121; Philip Gordon, “Bridging the Atlantic Divide,” quoted in Pond, Friendly Fire, 5; Mead, Power, Terror, Peace, and War, 144.

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To administer and refurbish the world’s terrorist swamps, the West requires Europe’s resources, knowledge, and diplomatic support. To fight terrorists, the United States need Europe’s cooperation in police and intelligence. “To transform the world, you do actually need to engage in it,” Fareed Zakaria insists. This obligation to cooperate and divide tasks requires both parties to be more diplomatic. The same holds true for the UN. “The Bush Administration’s taste for unilateral action and its doctrine of preventive war pose a profound challenge to the U.N.’s founding principle of collective security and threaten the organization’s continued relevance,” concludes the New York Times. “America needs the United Nations as an effective partner in Iraq, not as a whipping boy for the administration’s continuing problems there.” There is evidence that this may be beginning to change. But U.S. belligerency has left the UN, and Europe, suspicious of administration motives.48 So, where is the rest of the West in all this? French and German leaders argued until recently that, in the words of EU external affairs commissioner Chris Patten, “you can’t expect European taxpayers—who felt particularly hostile to military intervention—to feel hugely enthusiastic about spending a large amount of money in Iraq.” But old Europe’s reluctance to underwrite Bush’s impetuous dash into Iraq seems to be passing. If the sensibilities of the international community can be satisfied and the occupation of Iraq legitimized with UN-led elections, then they may be willing to put the West back together again for the sake of Middle Eastern, European, and Western stability. For its part, Washington must realize that the mission-defines-the-coalition mentality will only mean “a return to the bad habits and messy, if not brutal, customs of the Atlantic burden-sharing fights of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s,” writes Abenheim.49 Despite differences in capabilities that color their approach to events, America and Europe do share a common set of core values. An alliance, like a business, should be run for the bad times. And now is a bad time. “If Americans were to decide that Europe was no more than an irritating irrelevancy,” Kagan writes, “would American society gradually become

48. New York Times Book Review, February 8, 2004; “A Wounded United Nations,” New York Times, January 2, 2004; Warren Hoge, “U.N. Prepares for Meeting about Iraq, Wary of U.S. Motives,” New York Times, January 18, 2004. 49. Quoted in “2003/04—A World Transformed by War?” Abenheim, “Germany and the United States in the Age of Terror,” 75–76.

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unmoored from what we now call the West? It is not a risk to be taken lightly, on either side of the Atlantic.” The blunt truth is that America needs all the help it can get from an international community that must realize that passivity is not a strategy for a peaceful world. The Bush administration must abandon its immature, condescending, chip-on-theshoulder attitude toward the United States’ European allies, and instead show a “decent respect for the opinion of mankind.” “In the short run, America has the power and the will to disregard Europe’s views,” writes Brzezinski. “It can prevail by using its military might and temporarily prompt reluctant European accommodation. But the European Union has the economic resources and financial means to make the critical difference to the [Middle East’s] long-run stability.” In fact, Brzezinski argues, the United States and the EU have every reason to cooperate to create a “regional roadmap” for the Middle East.50 The advantages of a more conciliatory stance and increased cooperation with old Europe and the UN are slowly dawning on the Potomac. In what reporter Barry Schweid calls an “ironic shift,” the Bush administration appeared keen to involve the UN in Iraq’s transition to democracy, after having insulted and vilified it.51 Much work remains to be done to create an institutional framework through which the West can operate. Rather than complain about the UN, Washington should work to reform it. The transformation of NATO into a “mini-UN” with outof-area capabilities must continue. If these opportunities are seized, in the end, the West’s tensions over Iraq will appear to historians as just another episode of conflict within cooperation.

50. Kagan, “Power and Weakness,” 19, 20; Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Hegemonic Quicksand,” 12, 13. 51. Barry Schweid, “Plans for Self-Rule in Iraq Revised,” Associated Press, January 17, 2004.

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A Western Way of War? A European Perspective Jeremy Black

T H E W E S T A PPE A R S U N D E R S E R I O U S C H A L L E N G E I N T H E M I L I TA RY

arena from its own divisions as serious capability gaps match contrasting post–Cold War strategic perspectives. Insofar as the European Union attempts to address the latter, its remedies tend toward challenging rather than supporting the United States. Many variations have been played around this theme, particularly since policy differences over Iraq arose into greater prominence in 2002–2003, but failure strikes a common note in all of them, whether the perspective is that of American and European multilateralists keen to maintain NATO and the Western alliance system, American unilateralists pleased to find backing for their policy prescriptions, European unilateralists anxious to distance themselves from American (and British) policy, or opponents of the West anxious to spot signs of its weakness.

Expenditure and Revolution in Military Affairs Enormous, and well-rehearsed, capability gaps and strategic differences exist between Europe and the United States that are growing and becoming more apparent. The defense buildup under President George W. Bush, driven forward as post-9/11 security concerns and related ambitious goals overcame fiscal prudence, has not been matched in Europe. Even before the Bush increase took full effect, the United States 185

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spent $295 billion on its military budget in 2000, compared to $162.5 billion among the seventeen NATO European powers.1 The quality of expenditure is also very different between the United States and Europe. With a culture that emphasizes technological solutions and paradigm leaps and an industrial base that is particularly suited to innovation, especially in information technology, the United States has invested heavily in research and development, creating an unmatched capability in military technology. As a result, the gap between American and allied militaries looks set to widen further. One sees this especially in the use of satellites and related high-speed technology. The satellite-based U.S. global-positioning system employed for surveillance and targeting is unmatched elsewhere and is being strengthened as the United States invests in a new network of spy satellites.2 Resource differences are crucially matched by doctrinal ones, as America’s allies are not as committed as the United States is to the concept of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). The gap between U.S. and European capabilities challenges the interoperability that is necessary in joint and coalition operations, and which is particularly important to the Americans, with their emphasis on technologically advanced weapons systems and sophisticated command-and-control methods. Indeed, American doctrine and practice treats interoperability both within and between militaries as a crucial aspect of capability.3

Problems of Analysis Policy disagreements since 9/11 have compounded the capabilities gap. Washington’s redefinition of national security policy showed little regard for international agreements and institutions while evidencing a new readiness to engage in preemptive action, and most other powers find these developments unwelcome. Meanwhile, European attentions 1. Figures from International Institute for Strategic Studies. 2. Robert H. Scales, Jr., Yellow Smoke: The Future of Land Warfare for America’s Military; D. A. Macgregor, Transformation under Fire: Revolutionizing How America Fights; W. K. Clark, Winning Modern Wars: Iraq, Terrorism, and the American Empire. 3. For example, Bruce Berkowitz, The New Face of War: How War Will Be Fought in the 21st Century; Norman Friedman, Terrorism, Afghanistan, and America’s New Way of War.

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focus on the project of creating an expanded and stronger European Union, an enterprise that has little room for direct American involvement. Important clashes in assumption and affinity exist between the United States and its European allies, not least over the Middle East, but also extending, for example, to Latin America and the future of Cuba after Fidel Castro leaves power. A caveat must be entered, however, before addressing the questions of military capability and the tasking that defines them. National attitudes and policies are all too easily reified and thus made to seem clearer and more obviously based on readily agreed upon national interests than they really are. Concepts as varied as zeitgeist, national interests, and strategic culture encourage reification for reasons that are actively misleading.4 Drawing on neo-Platonic assumptions about inherent reality, they assert a false coherence in order to provide clear building blocks for analytical purposes and to present those who hold different views as failing to understand the necessary course of action. Polemic masquerades as analysis, particularly at present, given the fascination of so much of the intellectual world with “discourse.” Typecasting domestic opponents as if they were non-nationals (i.e. Americans holding “European” values) also serves a political purpose within both the United States and Europe, and it marks an approach that reflects both crude partisan calculation and an organic theory of the state.5 Polemical attacks were linked in debate with claims about differing levels of national willingness to fight, and these seem to have at least some basis in fact as far as public opinion is concerned, although it is not the public nor the pundits who fight. Instead, one must accept that sophisticated societies—that is, to use a modernist working definition, societies containing a large percentage of the population able to engage in discussion about politics—will have a variety of views and a debate about policy. Politics change, either for institutional reasons as the terms of office for current leaders expire or because any one political party finds it difficult to maintain dominance in such societies for long: Portugal is not Paraguay, 4. Colin S. Gray, “Strategic Culture as Context: The First Generation of Theory Strikes Back.” 5. See, for example, the extensive works of Victor Davis Hanson including “A Futile Foreign Policy,” National Review (September 7, 2004): 45–47; “Europe’s Choice,” Wall Street Journal, August 4, 2004; and “Goodbye to Europe,” Commentary (October 2004): 21–25.

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nor Germany Gabon. So, talking of French or American interests or policy as if they are clear-cut and long-lasting ignores both the nature of politics and the character of recent history. The change in Madrid’s policy toward the United States, the Middle East, and the politics of the EU after Spain’s March 2004 election abruptly demonstrated this fact. Instead of seeing trends in terms of a clear contrast between the United States and Europe, it is also important to note major differences between the policies of the American government and those of another NATO power, Canada, which refused to send troops to Iraq. The modest role Canadian policy has played in American and European discussion of the crisis is illuminating, and it underlines the extent to which U.S. hegemony in the Americas does not permit Washington to dictate policy.

Military Capability The capability gap should not be held up either as evidence for, or the cause of, a breakdown in the West. Indeed, there has been a serious gap throughout the history of NATO since its establishment in 1949. The gap can be variously measured, but however defined, it was greater in the decade 1945–1955 than it is today. Germany’s military was abolished at the end of World War II, while the forces of France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Denmark, and Italy had already been ruined by the war. The French and Italian fleets, impressive forces in the 1930s, had been largely destroyed. Of the militaries that had not suffered war damage, Spain’s, although large, was essentially configured for internal control in both metropolitan Spain and its colonies, and Portugal’s for colonial policing, and both lacked technology. Britain, with the second-largest navy in the world, a conscript army, and, in the shape of the Indian Army, the largest volunteer army in the history of the world, still had a major military force, but lacked the financial capacity to maintain this position. The Cold War brought rearmament in Western Europe, particularly from the 1950s in Germany,6 but it had begun to a degree even in the late 1940s when European colonial powers sought to regain or defend their overseas positions. Although the British succeeded in the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), other European efforts generally did not. The 6. Spencer Mawby, Containing Germany: Britain and the Arming of the Federal Republic.

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Dutch failed in the Netherlands’ East Indies, and in Vietnam the French became heavily dependent on American financial support and were anyway unsuccessful. These overseas commitments did not accord with NATO’s pressure to focus on confrontation with the Soviet Union, and such conflicting interests created major tensions and specific policy disputes between the United States and Western European powers concerned with protecting their colonial positions.7 In the case of colonial disputes, the United States—superficially, ironically, given current emphases—had concerns about British and French commitments in the Islamic world. The United States preferred to focus on developing allied Islamic regimes, a policy that appeared successful in Iran, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. NATO refused to extend its sway to include Algeria, although, constitutionally, that country was part of metropolitan France, and the Americans became hostile to France’s attempt to preserve their position there. Furthermore, the Anglo-French-Israeli intervention against Egypt in the Suez Crisis in 1956 was countered by American opposition, including pressure on Britain’s oil supply and finances.8 When India attacked the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1961, the United States refused to provide support to its NATO ally. Thus, in policy terms, there were major differences in the late 1940s and 1950s, focused on American opposition to European colonial empires. An enormous capabilities gap existed within the West during the Cold War. Most Western European states could provide forces only for linear defense against the feared Soviet attack, and, with some qualifications, they had only inshore navies. Most of these states were weak in terms of strategic air power, airlift capacity, and aircraft carriers,9 and even weaker in terms of nuclear weapons and missiles. From Washington’s point of view, the gap did not pose an insuperable problem. The United States primarily required its European allies to contribute sufficient land forces for a linear defense to delay the Red Army and thereby to permit the Americans to apply their greater air and missile assets. Concerns developed, however, as the Americans, in part in response to Soviet operational doctrine, advanced the concept of Air Land Battle in the early

7. Norbert Wiggerhaus and Roland G. Foerster, eds., The Western Security Community: Common Problems and Conflicting National Interests during the Foundation Phase of the North Atlantic Alliance. 8. Diane B. Kunz, The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis. 9. Lawrence Sondhaus, Navies of Europe: 1815–2002, 275–337.

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1980s, because its requirements for mobility in attack and defense and for air-ground coordination required weaponry and an operational doctrine that most of the Europeans lacked and showed no signs of acquiring.10 The historic capabilities gaps persisted and have become more important with contrasting rates in signing on to the RMA, along with a shift in American concern from defense against the Soviet Union to securing a degree of force projection that most of the Western Europeans lack. Britain, France, and Italy are committed to developing aircraft carrier capability, but their progress in arranging airlift capability has been limited. The current German government under Gerhard Schröder in particular hesitated to expand force-projection capability on any scale.

Military Tasking The contrasts among Western powers in military capability, force structure, and doctrine partly reflect very different tasks each country assigns its military. Understanding the difference is crucial because tasks determine military doctrine, force structure, and weapons rather than the reverse. Although important variations exist among Western countries, and also among political parties within individual countries, Western Europe has not emphasized high-spectrum warfare to the extent seen in the United States. Instead, once the important stage of colonial anti-insurgency warfare ended in the mid-1970s, as Portugal and Spain abandoned their African colonies (Britain, unexpectedly, still had to defend a colony—the Falkland Islands—from external attack in 1982), the Western European militaries focused on the two other goals that had been important from the late 1940s: conventional defense against Soviet forces and serving as the ultimate arm of government authority. These were mostly garrison states contrasting with an expeditionary emphasis in the United States. Americans are apt to misunderstand the exceptional, not to say eccentric, character of their military and military history, both because they tend not to appreciate that the leading military and economic power is inherently exceptional, but more importantly because the regular American military has played little role in internal policing during

10. John L. Romjue, “The Evolution of American Army Doctrine.”

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the last hundred years. The National Guard is important as a buffer between the regular military and internal policing, but many aspects of American public culture serve the same object. America is a democratized society, as opposed to simply a democracy. If a general gains power, he does so, as Eisenhower did in 1952, at the ballot box. When retired General Wesley Clark lost in the presidential primaries in 2004, he did not turn to the barracks for support. As a consequence of this historical and doctrinal perspective— American history informing American policy—Americans often fail to appreciate the extent to which militaries elsewhere act as the arm of the state. This is even true of Britain, the European nation that is closest to the U.S. in its military professionalism and force-projection capability. From the late 1960s, a major requirement on the British military was support for policing in a campaign in Northern Ireland against nationalist terrorism subsidized by Libya and by private citizens in the United States, but, in addition, as recently as winter 2002–2003, the army had to be deployed in order to maintain vital services in the face of industrial strikes, including a threatened action by firefighters, and this situation affected British planning for operations against Iraq. In Britain the military’s domestic task is discharged by the use of a professional military, but across much of Western Europe the main domestic function of the military after World War II was served maintenance of conscription. The practice gave identity to the nation, but it also fulfilled an important domestic function, in states such as Italy and Germany that were suspicious of the right-wing tendencies of their officer corps, by ensuring a congruence between, on the one hand, civil society and civic politics and, on the other, military culture and practice. Commentators concerned about technological and doctrinal progress saw this “tasking” or priority as ridiculous, but in fact it was an appropriate response to the domestic fragility of postwar Europe. Between 1945 and 1985 there was a successful coup in Greece, an unsuccessful one in Spain, a revolution in Portugal in which the military played a major role, plans for a coup in Italy, and a crisis of control in France in 1968 in which the prospect of military intervention helped stiffen the government’s determination to persist against large-scale agitation. Furthermore, conscription appeared the best military solution when the task was to produce large numbers of troops to counter the size of the Eastern bloc forces; it also carried with it the political benefit that citizentroops could be expected to fight in defense of their homelands.

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The end of the Cold War removed the prime external military rationale of conscription, and, over a longer time scale, the domestic basis for conscription faded as a combination of hedonism and individualism in the West has eroded the willingness to serve, while the political rationale of countering a conservative officer corps declined as the latter were increasingly professional without the right-wing beliefs and activism of earlier decades. Over the last decade, conscription has declined markedly in Western Europe, especially, but not only, in France. Major political parties now share the goal of a fully volunteer, professionalized military rather than the civic militarism that underpins mass-conscript armies, and, as a result, the gap between the United States and Western Europe has noticeably diminished. Civic militarism and conscription play an important role in Finland and Switzerland, but those countries are not typical of European military culture, insofar as such a concept can be employed. A declining gap is also true of the aspirations for operational effectiveness held by and for the military. European military leaderships and governments, both Western and Eastern European, are committed to modernizing their forces to confront the post–Cold War world. Although expenditures are lower than in the United States, European military reformers have similar goals, especially flexibility and mobility in doctrine and operational method. Reform and modernization aim to give forces an out-of-area projection capability, so that, individually or collectively, European powers can intervene elsewhere. The United States shares that goal. Different assumptions operated during the Cold War, when the United States privileged collective defense against the Soviets in Central Europe. France demonstrated a continued ability to intervene in Africa, but Britain withdrew from “east of Suez” in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and, due to its anti-Soviet focus, faced considerable difficulties in responding to Argentinean aggression in 1982: the Royal Navy’s NATO-driven focus on anti-submarine capability in the North Atlantic combined with the use of submarine-based missiles for the British nuclear deterrent to diminish the out-of-area capability earlier provided by fleet carriers, which compromised the attempt to provide effective air cover for the recapture of the Falklands.11 11. Lawrence Freedman and Virginia Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War: The Falklands Conflict of 1982.

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Chaos in what had been Yugoslavia rapidly followed the end of the Cold War, and the ensuing Balkan wars encouraged calls for a European projection capability. So did the return of European forces to fighting “east of Suez,” seen with the two Iraq wars and post 9/11 operations in Afghanistan, for which NATO assumed responsibility in 2003, while concerns about Africa led to intervention by Britain in Sierra Leone (2000) and by France in Ivory Coast (2002). These efforts did not match the activities of the United States in scale, but the goals were similar and involved major commitments, most obviously by Britain in the two Iraq wars. In 2004, France joined the United States in intervening in Haiti, although the military subsequently faced severe pressure on its budget, specifically provisions made for extraordinary expenditures to cover the cost of unforeseen operations.

Policy Differences Political intention rather than military developments, then, prompt emphasis on a capabilities gap. It is the nature of alliances that powers differ, but in the 2003 Iraq crisis, the United States, at least publicly, propounded a one-way approach to alliances that dismayed many of its friends. President Bush’s “either you are with us or against us” approach rarely works well in the intricate web of politics. Extending the rhetoric of domestic politics to the complex nuances of international relations generally proves unfortunate, and public confrontations in 2003 provide a case in point. The French and German governments’ response to the Iraq crisis highlighted differences that appeared to be new, but there had always been tension between American policies outside Europe and the views of European governments. During the Cold War, the United States found these governments highly reluctant to offer support to American policies in the Far East. Thus, Harold Wilson rejected pressure from President Johnson in 1964 for a deployment of British troops in Vietnam. Britain’s January 1968 announcement of a withdrawal from east-of-Suez commitments angered Washington. Specific differences over the Middle East predated the end of the Cold War. For example, the willingness of NATO states to permit use of bases and overflying when the United States rearmed Israel during the Yom Kippur War in 1973 differed, as did attitudes to the American bombing of Libya. Clashes over policy toward Latin America, for example toward

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Cuba and Nicaragua, also occurred during the height of the Cold War. Yet these differences rarely touched on concerns fundamental to the Western alliance. Commentators’ current emphasis on crisis reflects in many cases a lack of memory and historical judgment, along with the fact that current differences relate to a challenge that has apparently collapsed the boundaries between the simplicities of domestic debate and the complexities of foreign affairs. It is not so much that many Americans have been killed—far more died in Vietnam—but rather that the war on terror does not seem containable to “out there”; which is paradoxical as, despite 9/11, only a small portion of terrorism, indeed of Islamic terrorism, over the last decade has taken place against American interests. While the scale of present differences between the United States and Europe should not be exaggerated, past experience also shows that future prospects are unclear. From the perspective of 2006, it is possible to sketch a short term in which America pursues a degree of interventionism using small, ad hoc “coalitions of the willing.” This policy will enjoy considerable international support, including from European governments, if, as in the Philippines, intervention is in support of a democratic government battling terrorism. There will be far less support for action against sovereign states, whether sponsors of terrorism or not, but the difficulty it had in managing an exit strategy in Iraq is likely to discourage the United States from attacking Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria, all of which are ruled by harmful, vicious, and hostile regimes. In much of the world there is no serious clash between the United States and Europe, including Canada. Western governments have similar goals in Africa, the Balkans, Latin America (excepting Cuba), and, most significantly, in trying to end the danger of the Kashmir conflict, which could lead to nuclear war between India and Pakistan. Similarly, despite protectionism on both sides of the Atlantic and very different policies on social welfare, there is a general commitment to capitalism and consumerism. This common basis offers the United States important resources that it should not neglect. European diplomacy can help develop links the United States does not wish to be seen pursuing, for example the possibility of engagement with the quixotic Libyan regime and, more problematically, its intolerant Iranian counterpart. Militarily, Europe also offers proficient force projection in areas where the United States prefers not to be committed, particularly West and Central Africa, as

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well as forces that are useful for stabilization in the Balkans, and possibly further east in the future—perhaps in the Caucasus or former Soviet Central Asia. NATO guarantees help secure Poland and the Baltic Republics against Russia, and, if it is unlikely that these guarantees would amount to much without American backing, it is equally the case that that backing depends in part on European willingness to contribute troops. As such, NATO acts as a political restraint on the German government’s willingness to develop closer links with Russia.

Asymmetrical Challenges Recasting the question to focus on complimentarity within the Western alliance rather than conflict points suggests that troops provide a better answer than technology. American populist assumptions, well ventilated by commentators, focus on conflict because they assume a hierarchy of military proficiency defined by technology. But this approach badly misreads military history and offers simply another version of the mechanization of the military imagination that has been so potent since the advent of the airplane and the tank. While seizing and developing every advantage that new weaponry can bring is obviously important, it is a mistake to imagine that a technological edge guarantees victory at low cost or even victory at all. Advantages in weaponry are valuable in symmetrical warfare, but even then a host of other factors intrude, including strategy, tactics, leadership, unit cohesion, and morale. American superiority in which these factors acted as a force multiplier for technology ensured victory against Iraq in 2003. Contextual issues, such as the respective determination of the powers engaged, also matters for compelling an adversary to accept defeat. Asymmetrical warfare gravely curtails the advantages conferred by superior weaponry.12 The United States has failed to recognize that the RMA could not ensure that those who were beaten accepted defeat, a crucial goal in able military planning. Iraq may have taught policy-makers this lesson and reminded them that war is a struggle of wills, not machines, and that triumph in battle is not sufficient unto victory. Asymmetrical conflicts have hitherto been more important post–Cold War

12. Stephen Biddle, “Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare.”

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missions than symmetrical conflicts, both because the United States and NATO lack a peer competitor and because war with China or Russia has been avoided. If confrontation with China becomes more serious, for example over Taiwan, then it is possible that 1990–c.2010 will be seen as an interim in between two periods of major great power rivalry. At present, however, tasking doctrine, procurement, and analysis must address the exigencies of asymmetrical conflict. Emphasizing asymmetrical warfare brings together two very different narratives of military history: the Western, technological one and a non-Western narrative that places less emphasis on technological proficiency. The recent “cultural turn” in strategic thought provides helpful context. In some respects, American military practice represents the apogee of a Western model of war-making, while its opponents’ approaches exemplify non-Western systems. The contrast draws into sharp focus the question of defining a Western way of war that reaches beyond the United States to encompass military forces from other developed countries within similar cultural assumptions. One must be wary, however, of a geographical or cultural reification of what is a more widespread military practice within as well as between systems—namely, the response of the weaker power. The latter classically focuses on developing an anti-strategy, anti-operational method, anti-tactics, and anti-weaponry designed to counter and lessen, if not nullify, the advantages of the stronger, and sometimes to use the very nature of the stronger in order to weaken it. Stronger powers may view the countermeasures of their weaker opponents as somehow unacceptable or certainly outside accepted practices, which then makes addressing those measures harder.

Force Projection and Combat Other problems besides the limits of technology in asymmetrical warfare constrain the effective use of American power. Treating the completely new level of military capability deployed by the United States in aggregate terms misunderstands the phenomenon. American superiority in force projection does not ensure superiority in combat, a contrast readily apparent during the Vietnam War.13 The United States could 13. Jeffrey J. Clarke, Advice and Support: The Final Years, 1965–1973, The United States Army in Vietnam.

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move large numbers of troops to Vietnam and support them there, but failed to inflict lasting defeat on their opponents in the field. Indeed, part of the conceptual problem affecting the modern discussion of military strength arises from the extent to which the capability gap in force projection is not matched in the fighting stage of conflict on land, a problem that is enhanced in the case of guerrilla and terrorist opposition. Changes generally summarized as the RMA seek to address this gap through technology. The use of guided airborne weaponry, for example, seeks to overcome the divide by directing precise force projection onto the battlefield, but the gap remains. Discussions of capability and forces must, therefore, remain alert to the specific context under consideration, and aggregate measures have limited value. Logistics mark a particular sphere of importance in which there are only limited signs at present of a RMA. The RMA’s particular spatial character has continued, and possibly accentuated, a division within the West between sea and land power as well as between the United States and Europe. American tasking, doctrine, and technology have reordered the relationship between sea and land. In the age of Western sea power—the age when Western powers dominated the seas that provided the main axis of their power, an age that reached its culmination with the total American defeat of the Japanese navy off the Philippines in 1944—the capacity of sea-borne power to dictate outcomes on land was limited, and thus the unbounded ability of Western powers (and Japan) to project power at sea was not matched by an ability to challenge (land) sovereignty.14 In World War II, carrier-based planes threatened to alter this relationship, but their payload was limited and postwar American and British plans to build super-carriers capable of carrying heavier bombers never reached fruition. Thus, air power remained primarily landbased. After the island-based American air assault on Japan in 1945, Western strategic power against the Soviet Union, in the shape of atomic weaponry, was initially allocated to heavy bomber units. In contrast, naval air power was largely for anti-ship purposes, especially for anti-submarine warfare. The Korean and Vietnam wars saw naval air forces used against land targets largely as an adjunct to land-based bomber capacity.

14. Ronald H. Spector, Eagle against the Sun: The American War with Japan.

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Intercontinental missiles took air power further, challenging the sovereignty of all states and prefiguring recent concerns about the potency and spread of WMD. The American (and British) deployment of submarine missile systems added a dramatic new dimension to naval power projection, but, short of nuclear war or confrontation, they had scant military effect. In particular, the deterrent capacity of such weaponry was of little value in asymmetrical warfare, or indeed in conventional conflict, other than by affecting the possibility that such conflict might escalate. Developments in military capability, however, follow multiple tracks, and maximization of force is not the only issue. Enhanced mobility and shifts in sub-nuclear weaponry as much as the development of seamounted weaponry for spreading mass destruction have raised the practical ability of sea-based forces to challenge their land counterparts over the last two decades. The growth of helicopter lift capacity improved mobility, while the introduction and extensive use of cruise missiles transformed conventional firepower. A focus on maritime force projection thus links the United States with the United Kingdom and France, rather than the other continental European powers or China. This perspective again highlights how missions and the political or cultural assumptions behind them shape forces available for use. Germany in particular tends to lack navalist interests and taskings, with major consequences for doctrine and procurement. This is a major shift from the pre-1914 situation, but scarcely one to be traced to modern circumstances since defeat of German navalism in World War I helped ensure Anglo-American dominance of the Atlantic thereafter.

Doctrinal Defects Important as navalism is to force projection, it does not ensure victory. Indeed, the belief that “further, better, more, faster” ensures success is a particular problem for societies that have a technological lead—for example, Britain in the early and mid-nineteenth century and the United States since the 1940s. Belief in the consequences of technological proficiency and progress is understandably strongest in societies that enjoy such a lead, but it brings overconfidence that superior technology always provides the answer without necessarily understanding

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the fundamental question at hand. Faith in weaponry and technology rather than hard analysis of their effectiveness in battle and for securing broader objectives frequently sets the assumptions behind analysis whether in military history, current doctrine, or plans for future procurement. Use of the language of best practice, which asks how anyone could not want to be part of the enhancement of capability made possible by the RMA, makes change appear far less problematic than it really is. It also underrates the role of perspective in deciding what to adopt and how to adapt as developments emerge. Furthermore, these models operate within a Western analytical culture that overrates the unitary character of best practice and assumes that change represents improvement and that modernization is the most pertinent form of change. It thus neglects the particular context that defines what works in a given situation. Fitness for purpose is a crucial concept when judging the applicability of weaponry, but analysts often frame the question badly by emphasizing the capacity for employing force over the ends sought. Ends, and thus the purpose for weapons, are culturally constructed, and notions of legitimacy play a major role in establishing both purpose and fitness in this process, and the connection between politics and force underlining the way in which the use of force cannot be separated from understanding politics. Whether the availability of force leads to particular politics remains unclear. Arguing that the more powerful member of an alliance will tend to take a more assertive role recasts the point, highlighting a tendency that will be accentuated if, as in the present case, that member is a, indeed the, superpower. Policy makers and analysts can overcome the defects of the machinebound doctrine of war by looking to forces that, lacking America’s technological lead, have pursued more appropriate doctrines for counterinsurgency and peacekeeping operations. Furthermore, a focus on machines has starved the U.S. military of personnel and, in particular, led to a dangerous run-down in the size of the army during the 1990s. This makes the contribution of allies more useful, especially for deterrent garrison functions and for peacekeeping and counterinsurgency work. The gap in capability encourages, indeed requires, cooperation for military reasons if the United States is to pursue active policies around the world. Whether there is the political will and skill to accept the consequences is less clear. Despite its wealth and military resources, the United States cannot act alone at an acceptable long-term cost. Alliances therefore serve an important role in securing American objectives and security.

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The fundamental issue in the military nature of the West involves diplomacy rather than military forces themselves, because bridging the gap created by divergent perspectives requires political skill. Diplomacy remains the key to effective alliance management, and thus to appropriate military planning.

Western Goals Although the key issues during the early 2000s of rogue states and terrorism will likely remain important, they are unlikely to dominate the agenda so completely over the long term. Even when it emerged, this agenda misled in some respects, as other conflicts and confrontations of great importance persisted, such as the war in Congo and serious rivalry between India and Pakistan. The dominant agenda of the early 2000s reflected American interests and commitments, demonstrating the extent to which the Western perception of developments (as of military history) can crowd out other developments worthy of attention. Whether this perception of terrorism as the main security will remain valid in future decades remains unclear, especially as China becomes a more prominent power. The majority of conflicts in the world do not involve Western powers and the question arises of how far they will feel it necessary to intervene. This has always been the case, other than during the brief heyday of Western imperialism. China is often discussed by theorists in terms of a likely future confrontation with the United States, not least on the basis of a neorealist assumption that states naturally expand and compete when they can, and that China’s ambitions will lead it to clash with the United States. A Sino-American conflict, however, is less plausible a scenario than a conflict with India, Japan, or Russia over China’s regional ambitions. Indeed, the United States then would have a choice over how far to intervene, just as it had choices over whether to intervene in the Chinese civil war, the Korean War, and possibly in support of Taiwan were the island to declare formal independence from China. This example serves as a reminder that the world international system involves a number of complex regional situations, with the United States taking the leading role not because it is able to dominate the other powers (as might be implied by the word “hegemony”), but rather because, aside from its largely uncontested regional dominance of the

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Americas and the Pacific, it is the sole state able to play a part in these other regional situations.

The Problems of Classification At this point, history and the future converge to underline the problem of conceiving of the relationship between force and legitimacy in Western terms; allowing of course for the great variety in defining legitimacy. Such a conception can be seen as central to modern discussion, as the theories and analytical terms employed are those of Western intellectual culture and legal analysis. Indeed, one way to present the interventionist wars of the 1990s and early 2000s was as conflict intended to preserve the normative structures that derive from Western assumptions. This was especially true of the language surrounding humanitarian interventions. Reality, however, defies ready classification, especially if in normative terms. The current scene is generally conceptualized in terms of a non-Western reaction against Western norms, but this underrates the distinctions between Western powers and norms and between their non-Western counterparts. If the West is understood in terms of societies of European origin, that encompasses, over the last century, the leading capitalist state (the United States), the leading imperial power (Britain), the center of communism (the Soviet Union), the standardbearer of National Socialism (Nazi Germany), as well as a variety of states ranging from Argentina to Bulgaria. It is implausible to see these states as taking part in a system bounded by common norms, and the reality challenges the notion of the Western way of war. Indeed, serious differences in goals and attitudes helped vitiate international cooperation and understanding. These differences could also limit successful war-making. Thus, the racial ethos of Nazi Germany led to harsh occupation policies that sapped consent and encouraged resistance, and therefore lessened the value of military success insofar as it was measured by the occupation of territory.15 Nazi practices also made war-exit a much harder goal, thus contributing to the situation already seen in World War I where German

15. Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich.

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tactical and operational proficiency were undermined by strategic flaws that in large part rested on assumptions of legitimacy simply resting on force and in no way being dependent on consent. These assumptions contrasted greatly with those in the United States and Britain. Military strength, with its power to intimidate and coerce, acted as facilitator to differences between Western powers, but was not inherently responsible for a failure to make international institutions work. In the case of the “non-West,” however, particularly with the foundation of the United Nations in 1945, although such institutions and the related practices of international law and human rights opened up to encompass states across the world, this extension did not transform preexisting Western-derived norms about international and domestic conflict. Nevertheless, these norms were challenged by practice. Thus, international politics and military developments share a common analytical problem, that of misleading norms. Indeed, much of the conceptual confusion with military analysis (as indeed with military history) stems from its focus on leading powers, with the corresponding assumption that other states seek to match, or at least copy aspects of, the leaders’ war-making capacity and methods: the notion of paradigm powers. Thus analysis of the United States today is linked with a more general conceptual problem: the misleading assumption of a unitary tasking and analytical methodology.

Judging the Time Scale These points may seem somewhat abstract and long-term. Indeed, the current crisis that emerged following the 9/11 attacks addresses an important issue in analysis that divides historians: the extent to which the pressures and consequences of particular crises affect what might otherwise seem to be long-term structures or trends. The specific manifestation of this would be the argument presented by neoconservatives and media spokesmen on the populist right in the United States that mistrust of American policy and, in particular, the intentions and methods of the Bush administration and its unilateralism has led to a movement within “European opinion” against not only the alliance but also out-of-area military capability. This argument can readily be unpicked and qualified. First, one would ask whether any such abstraction as “European opinion” exists.

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It is more accurate to say that the crisis has sapped left-of-center support for the alliance, even in the UK. Second, suspicion of the United States does not have to lead to a decline in commitment to the military. Logically, it should lead to the opposite, as the attempt is made to retain an effective independent voice in international relations. This has actually been the background to EU interest in military structures independent of NATO.

The Revolution in Attitudes to the Military Nevertheless, logic is not the prime factor in politics. At the often subliminal level of public attitudes, to the extent the latter can be identified, it appears that the current crisis has accentuated doubts about the validity of force and forcefulness. In short, it has contributed to a current of demobilization in attitudes that constitutes a prime factor in the revolution in attitudes toward military affairs that has been so noticeable since the 1960s. The shift is a matter of debate over alleged national characteristics, with claims that Europeans are less willing to fight and suffer than Americans, an argument sometimes phrased in terms of the degeneracy of particular societies. The accuracy of these claims is questionable, as military professionalism makes both the United States and Europe atypical, and it is unclear that polls about general social attitudes are a helpful guide other than about the constraints within which politicians feel that they operate. Although some polls suggest a greater American willingness to inflict as well as to suffer casualties, American fighting doctrine, with its emphasis on firepower, can be perceived both as aimed at maximizing advantages and as the consequence of a reluctance to close with the enemy. The extent to which the acceptance of taking casualties can be related to different practices in peacekeeping remains uncertain, while the entire issue is made difficult both because of varied practices between services, units, and individuals and because some commentators fail to appreciate that discussing different techniques of war-making offers no commentary on bravery or heroism. To return to the time-scale issue, if a long-term decline in bellicosity can be detected from the 1950s, the questions are the extent to which short-term factors contributed and of what consequences followed. Long-term factors such as the increase in individualism and hedonism

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and the decline in deference that characterized Western societies in the twentieth century and so far this century have to be set alongside short-term factors. These include opposition to particular conflicts (for example, Suez, Algeria, Vietnam), revulsion from the image of others (particularly World War I), and, in contrast, the ability to elicit support for others (especially World War II). The theme of the “Great Generation,” the Americans who fought in World War II, predated the current crisis, but it clearly also serves as an opportunity to suggest a similar effort in the present. It remains unclear whether, in practice, the current crisis will accentuate the long-term decline in Western (including American) bellicosity, or reverse it, and its impact on this trend may be its most important consequence in terms of military history. This interacts with the issue of military expenditure, as the emphasis on sophisticated (and costly) technology in part arises from a desire to keep both costs in human lives and the need for troops low. In short, rather than the RMA’s providing the motor of military change and constituting a revolution in military modernization, it is, at least in part, a confused response to the revolution in attitudes to the military. This development can be seen as providing a comparable background for the United States and the rest of the West, rather than distinguishing between them. This decline in Western bellicosity will prove a serious problem in the event of a protracted struggle with a major power, most obviously China. One of the major problems with the Iraq commitment in this regard is that it has weakened the prestige of Western military power. This prestige is far more important than is appreciated by those who focus on technology. Indeed, given that war is in large part about forcing those who are beaten to accept the verdict of battle, and, prior to that, about persuading opponents that they are being defeated, anything that lessens the ability to gain and use these psychological advantages and to translate material strength into such advantages is very serious. This has been the pattern for the West with the Islamic world. Soviet failure in Afghanistan lessened the prestige of Western war-making, Israeli setbacks in Lebanon and from the Palestinian Intifada diminished the reputation of the IDF, and the difficulties encountered in post-Saddam Iraq undermined the advantages gained by the rapid overthrow of his regime. Indeed, the problems after Gulf War II suggest that the strategy followed in Gulf War I was more successful, even though a flawed implementation left Hussein in power.

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Serious as these problems are in American relations with the Islamic world, they also have resonance elsewhere, with both (potential) allies and (potential) enemies. In the case of potential allies, the prestige of American war-making has been challenged. It is not simply that there is concern about the validity of the Bush administration’s foreign policy making but also that there is serious anxiety that if America leads the way militarily, the consequent story may well end in tears.

Conclusions Great powers are not overthrown as a result of defeats in expeditionary wars. American power survived the Vietnam War, just as Victorian Britain’s power survived the disastrous retreat from Kabul. Indeed, the United States can probably take a setback of this type with some frequency. Political skill, however, will lessen the chance of such defeats. Part of this skill rests on an understanding of military capability, and actual and potential allies can be valuable to a discussion about this.

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About the Contributors

Jeremy Black is Professor of History at the University of Exeter (UK) and Senior Fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is author or editor of more than fifty books, including Visions of the World: A History of Maps (London: Mitchell Beazley, 2003); World War Two: A Military History (New York: Routledge, 2002); and The British Seaborne Empire (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004). He is Editor of Archives, the journal of the British Records Association. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Durham (UK). William Anthony Hay is a Senior Fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute and Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi State University. After completing a Ph.D. in Modern European and International History at Virginia, he worked with the Presidential Oral History Project at UVA’s Miller Center of Public Affairs. He has also been a speechwriter on several national political campaigns in the United States and served as Executive Director of FPRI’s Center for the Study of America and the West prior to his appointment at Mississippi State. Current research interests include British and European politics and the history of transatlantic relations. He is author of The Whig Revival, 1808–1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). Harold James was educated at Cambridge University and was a Fellow of Peterhouse for eight years before coming to Princeton University in 1986. He is the author of many books, including most recently Europe Reborn: A History 1914–2000 (Harlow, England: Longman Pearson Education, 2003) and The End of Globalization: Lessons from the Great Depression (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001). 227

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He was also coauthor of a history of the commercial bank Deutsche Bank (Deutsche Bank, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995), and wrote The Deutsche Bank and the Nazi Economic War against the Jews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). He is Chairman of the Editorial Board of World Politics. Daniel Mahoney is Associate Professor of Politics, Assumption College. He is author of Bertrand de Jouvenel: Liberty, Power, and the Political Good (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2005) and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: The Ascent from Ideology (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). He received his Ph.D. from Catholic University of America. Douglas Porch is Professor of National Security Affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. A specialist in military history, Professor Porch’s books include Path to Victory: The Mediterranean Theatre in World War II (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004); The French Secret Services. From the Dreyfus Affair to Desert Storm (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); and The French Foreign Legion: A Complete History of the Legendary Fighting Force (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). He earned a Ph.D. from Corpus Christi College, Cambridge University. Michael Radu is a Senior Fellow at FPRI and Co-Chairman of FPRI’s Center on Terrorism, Counter-Terrorism, and Homeland Security. He has spent the last twenty years at FPRI studying terrorist and insurgent groups worldwide. He has consulted with various agencies of the U.S. government and is regularly interviewed by news media around the world. Dr. Radu is the author or editor of eight books on international affairs, including most recently Dangerous Neighborhood: Contemporary Issues in Turkey’s Foreign Relations (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 2003). He was a National Peace Fellow at the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, and he has monitored elections in Cambodia, Romania, Peru, and Guatemala. He received his Ph.D. in international relations from Columbia University. Stephen A. Schuker is William W. Corcoran Professor of History, University of Virginia. His books include Watch on the Rhine: The Rhineland and the Security of the West, 1914–1950 (in progress); American

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“Reparations” to Germany, 1919–1933: Implications for the Third World Debt Crisis (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988); and The End of French Predominance in Europe: The Financial Crisis of 1924 and the Adoption of the Dawes Plan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1976). He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University. Zachary Shore is a Research Fellow at the Institute of European Studies, University of California at Berkeley. He is author of What Hitler Knew: The Battle for Information in Nazi Foreign Policy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). He received his B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania and his doctorate from St. Anthony’s College, Oxford. His essays have appeared in The National Interest, Journal of Contemporary History, and Intelligence and National Security. Harvey Sicherman is President and Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He served as adviser to Secretaries of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr., James A. Baker, and George Shultz. Dr. Sicherman was also a consultant to Secretary of the Navy John F. Lehman, Jr. (1982–1987). After graduating with a B.A. from the University of Scranton, Dr. Sicherman earned his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. He has authored and edited numerous books and articles, including America the Vulnerable: Our Military Problems and How to Fix Them, coedited with John Lehman (Philadelphia: FPRI, 2002); “A Cautionary Tale: The U.S. and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” in Eagle Rules? Foreign Policy and American Primacy in the TwentyFirst Century, edited by Robert J. Lieber (New York: Prentice Hall, 2002); “Blurred Focus: U.S. Policy toward Russia in the Yeltsin Era,” in The Lost Equilibrium: International Relations in the Post-Soviet Era, edited by Oles and Bettie Smolansky (Bethlehem, Pa.: Lehigh University Press, 2000).

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Index Abenheim, Donald, 181, 183 Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandals, 178 Abu Hamza, 74, 78, 82 Abu Jahjah, 72 Abu-Jamal, Mumia, 35–36 Abu Qatada, 74, 74n20, 78, 82 Adams, John Quincy, 160, 163 Adenauer, Konrad, 118, 158–59 Affirmative action, 52, 85–86 Afghanistan: Muslim emigrants from, 85; and NATO, 10–11, 193; progress in, 168; Soviet failure in, 204; state building for, 10; Taliban/Al Qaeda in, 74, 75; terrorist attacks or plots in, 75; U.S. invasion of, 163–64, 170, 173, 178 AFL, 108 Africa: AIDS in, 43; asylum claims by migrants from, 80; colonialism in, 190, 192; European military policy on, 193, 194–95; historical growth trends in, 98, 99; military goals of the West on, 194; population of, as percentage of world population, 40–41. See also specific countries Agricultural policies, 116, 137 AIDS, 43 Airbus, 115 Ajami, Fouad, 7n8 Alaa Madi, Abu, 83 Algeria: and France, 122, 178, 189, 204; government of, and Europe’s

Muslims, 79; Islamist terrorists in, 74, 75, 78, 82; Muslim emigrants from, 68, 73, 77, 83; and NATO, 189 Al-Hayat, 83 Al Jazeera, 173 Al-Muhajirun group, 74 Al Qaeda, 34, 69, 73, 74, 81, 160, 177 Al-Quaradawi, Sheikh Yusuf, 39–40, 69n13 Althusser, Louis, 19 America. See United States American Historical Association, 97 American Revolution, 147 Amnesty International, 80 Angell, Sir Norman, 94–95 Animal Farm (Orwell), 182 Ansar al Islam, 81 Anti-Americanism, 1–4, 7–8, 28, 35–37, 60, 88, 128–29, 134–35, 159, 172, 182 Anti-globalization, 145, 151, 153, 165 Anti-Semitism, 6, 71, 87–88. See also Jews Antiterrorism. See Terrorism war Apologia pro Vita Sua (Newman), 128 Applebaum, Anne, 8 Arab Americans, 56–57, 66 Arab-Israeli War (1973), 162 Argentina: capital account crisis in, 143; economy of, 101–2, 143; and Falkland Islands, 192; and Mercosur, 123n96

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Aristotle, 22 Armed Islamic Group (GIA), 74 Armenia, 124 Aron, Raymond, 19–22, 24, 26, 27, 28 Arrests of terrorist suspects, 73, 74n20, 75, 78 Ash, Timothy Garton, 91n6 Asia: economy of, 102; energy consumption in, 45; historical growth trends in, 98, 99; modernization in, 45; population of, as percentage of world population, 40–41; and reserve holdings, 142–43; West versus East, 158–59; workforce in, 42, 122. See also specific countries Assimilation of Muslims, 76–80, 84–85 Asylum claims, 42–43, 62, 75, 78n26, 80–85 Atlantic alliance. See North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO); Western Alliance Augustus, Emperor, 154–55 Australia, 44, 57, 140, 141 Austria: Freedom Party in, 71; and Index of Economic Freedom, 124; nationalist, anti-immigration political parties in, 75–76; refugee/ asylum status granted by, 62 Baker, James, 127 Bakri, Omar, 74, 78, 78n26, 82 Balance-of-power diplomacy, 89, 92 Balkans, 10, 11, 121, 165, 193, 194, 195 Baltic countries, 119–20, 195 Bangladesh, 63 Bartley, Robert, 7n8 Baverez, Nicolas, 28–29 Belgium: anti-Semitism in, 87–88; arrests of terrorist suspects in, 73; burqa banned in, 84; crime in, 72; European Arab League (LAE) in, 72; Flemish Bloc in, 71; immigration policies of, 68; Jews in, 72; military of, 188; Muslims in, 68, 70, 71–72, 77, 84; nationalist,

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anti-immigration political parties in, 75–76; and universal jurisdiction, 61 Bellil, Samira, 51 Bertram, Christoph, 9 Besançon, Alain, 17, 28 Birthrates: of Europeans, 153; of Muslims in Europe, 43–44, 56, 121 Black, Jeremy, 13, 148–49, 185–205 Blair, Tony, 24, 32, 75 Blinken, Anthony, 8 Boer War, 152 Bosnia, 11, 75, 129, 162 Bourdieu, Pierre, 19 Boussouf, Abdellah, 77 Bouziane, Abdelkader, 78 Brague, Rémi, 15, 16 Brandt, Willy, 109, 165 Brazil, 123n96 Bretton Woods system, 105–6, 109, 111, 134–37, 142 Britain. See Great Britain/United Kingdom Brittan, Leon, 114 Brooks, David, 174, 175–76, 176n34 Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 174, 184 Bulgaria, 62n3 Burgess, Randolph, 104n40 Burke, Edmund, 32 Burma, 47–48 Buruma, Ian, 159 Bush, George H. W., 148 Bush, George W.: economic and trade policies of, 112, 122–23, 138, 141; European criticisms of, 8, 28–29, 36; foreign policy of, 1, 2, 32, 37, 91, 92, 177, 182, 182n46, 184, 205; and immigration policies, 60, 71; and Iraq War (2003), 28–29, 174–84, 193, 202; and Kyoto Protocol, 169n22, 177; and Millennium Challenge Account, 58; and multilateralism, 2; and NATO, 3; in presidential election campaign (2004), 65; reelection of (2004), 2; religion of, 65; and Revolution in Military Affairs

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Index / 233 (RMA), 11, 173–76, 185–86, 190, 195–97, 199; and September 11 terrorist attacks, 174; strategy of, regarding critics, 174; and terrorism war, 92, 174–84; and “White Man’s Burden,” 169n22 Bush Doctrine, 163–65, 177, 181 Caldwell, Christopher, 166 Californication, 46 Canada: intelligence gathering by, 57; and Iraq War (2003), 188; military policy of, 194; as target country of immigrants, 44; trade between U.S. and, 122; U.S. loss of control over border of, 66 Cape Verde Islands, 124 Capital importers, 139, 140 Capitalism: American-style capitalism, 153–54; communism versus, 108; “crony capitalism,” 133; historical development of, 96–109; New Deal capitalism, 164; reaction against and rejection of, 150, 153; and “shareholder value,” 153; Western commitment to, 194. See also Economic issues Capital punishment. See Death penalty Carter, Jimmy, 112, 135, 174 Casanova, Jean-Claude, 28, 29 Castles, Stephen, 44 Castro, Fidel, 187 Central Africa, 194–95 Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA), 122 Central American immigrants, 86 Cesari, Jocelyne, 54n24 Chamberlain, Neville, 29 Charles X, king of France, 94 Chechnya, 75, 78 Cheney, Dick and Lynne, 130 Chile, 124 China: business firms in, 124; civil war in, 200; economy of, 102, 119, 123, 144, 167; energy consumption in, 45; future conflict between U.S. and, 196, 200, 204; Mao in, 180;

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military of, 198; modernization in, 45; population of, as percentage of world population, 40–41; religious freedom in, 47–48; and reserve holdings, 142, 143; and revaluation of renminbi, 123; trade between U.S. and, 122; and U.S. securities, 142; workforce in, 122 Chirac, Jacques: and EU constitution by Giscard d’Estaing, 117; and headscarf and veil (hijab) controversy, 48, 49, 50, 83; and Iraq war, 29, 172; power grab in Europe by, 158; relationship between U.S. and, 1, 7–8, 165, 172, 181 Chou En-Lai, 40 Christianity. See Religion Chua, Amy, 153 Churchill, Winston, 17–18, 106, 123, 159, 160 CIA, 56, 90 Citizenship: meaning of, 25–27; of Muslims, 43, 52, 70, 79, 85; and voting rights, 70, 85 City of Man, The (Manent), 19n6 Clark, Wesley, 191 Clinton, Bill, 164, 167, 177 Cold War: and economic rivalry, 95; end of, 4, 60, 127, 157, 192, 193; and German Left, 162; and idea of the “West,” 125; and intelligence gathering, 57; and Latin America, 180, 181n43, 193–94; and military, 9, 188–89, 192–94; and NATO, 7, 8, 189; opposition to, 5; and Turkey, 11; and warfare, 149; and Western Alliance, 159, 161–62, 193–94. See also Korean War; Soviet Union; Vietnam War Colonialism. See Imperialism Common agricultural policy (CAP), 116 Communism and Communist Party, 17, 18, 106, 107, 108, 159 Community of Citizens, The (Schnapper), 26 Computer technology. See Internet Comte, Auguste, 16, 21

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Conflict resolution, 8–9 Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), 147 Conservative liberalism, 25–28 Constant, Benjamin, 24–25 Contractualism, 25–26 Cooper, Robert, 24n13, 172 Corporate governance, 133–34 Counter-terrorism strategies. See Terrorism war Cours familier de philosophie politique (Manent), 22 Crime: and death penalty, 8, 35–36; and Mumia case, 35–36; and Muslims in Europe, 51, 72, 86; in United States, 86 Cuba, 167, 180, 181n43, 187, 194 Culture of repudiation, 19 Culture wars, 4–6, 175 Custine, Marquis de, 159 Cyprus, 124 Czechoslovakia, 29 Czech Republic, 44, 62n3, 63 Daladier, Édouard, 29 Davis, Angela, 35–36 Death penalty, 8, 35–36, 82 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The (Gibbon), 154–55 Deconstruction, 19 De Gaulle, Charles: and Algeria, 122, 178; criticisms of U.S. by, 110, 134, 141, 142–43, 161, 182; and France as third force to balance superpowers, 118; and Roosevelt, 160; and United Nations, 29; and Western civilization, 17–18; withdrawal from NATO by, 162 Delanoe, Bertrand, 35, 36 Delors, Jacques, 114 Democracy: Aron on, 21; birth of “postmodern” democracy and 1968, 18–20; and conservative liberalism, 25–28; and definition of liberty, 15; and depoliticization of Europe, 20–25, 27, 30, 31; in EastCentral Europe, 29; enemies of, 24; and Europe generally, 21; and Iraq, 177, 184; and nation-states,

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234 23–24, 25; and New Left, 18–20; Pius XII on Christian Democracy, 17; and plural sources of Western liberty, 14–16; and Protestant deformation, 92; in Russia, 9, 127; Schnapper on, 26–27; Scruton on, 26; totalitarian challenge to, 16–18; in United States, 30; U.S. and U.K. propagation of, 32, 92 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 14 Demography. See Population Denmark: and asylum requests, 62, 75; cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in Danish newspaper, 67; as European Union (EU) member, 113; immigration policies of, 62, 70, 75, 84, 88; military of, 188; Muslims in, 67; nationalist, antiimmigration political parties in, 75–76; People’s Party in, 71; religion in, 63. See also Scandinavia Depoliticization of Europe, 20–25, 27, 30, 31 Derrida, Jacques, 19 Desert Storm, 11 De Villepin, Foreign Minister, 29 Dodge Plan, 167 Du contrat social (Rousseau), 154 Dunlap, Charles J., 178 East Asia: business firms in, 115, 124; economy of, 102, 119, 143; trade between U.S. and, 122; workforce in, 120 Eastern Europe: business firms in, 124; cultural identity of, 62; emigration from, 67; and European Union, 61, 62, 116–17, 123, 172; historical growth trends in, 98, 99; and Index of Economic Freedom, 124; military in, 191, 192; and NATO, 62; population of, as percentage of world population, 40–41; Russia as security threat for, 62; and Stalin, 161; as target country of immigrants, 44. See also Europe; and specific countries

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Index / 235 East Germany. See Germany East India Company, 151 Economic Consequences of Peace, The (Keynes), 150 Economic Cooperation Administration, 106 Economic issues: Bretton Woods system, 105–6, 109, 111, 134–37, 142; capital importers, 139, 140; in Europe, 96, 101–9, 113–24, 126; and European Union (EU), 96, 113–24; GDP per capita, 125–26; globalization versus imperialism views of, 128–35; gold standard, 103–4; and Great Depression, 95, 104–5, 145, 148; historical development of capitalism, 96–109; Index of Economic Freedom, 124; and Maastricht plan, 114–15; and mergers, 115–16; in Middle East, 10; multinational corporations, 123–24; and oil resources, 45–46, 111–12; overconsumption in U.S., 139, 141; relationship between political influence and economic predominance, 93–96; and United States, 97, 98, 99, 102, 105, 109–12, 119, 139–44; U.S. role in world economy, 135–44; and warfare, 147–50; and Western Alliance, 6–7, 13, 93–124; world monetary policy, 105–6, 109, 111, 123, 134–36, 138, 142–43, 145. See also Capitalism; Globalization; Imperialism; Trade policies; Workforce Education, 4, 6, 141 Egypt: Arab Americans from, 66; prosecution of Islamist terrorists in, 82; and Suez Crisis (1956), 161, 162, 189, 204 Eisenhower, Dwight, 191 Elderly, 41, 121, 142, 153 El Rabita, 72 Empire. See Imperialism Empire (Lieven), 135 Empire Lite, 129, 130 Employment. See Workforce

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Energy issues, 45–46, 109, 111–12, 113 England. See Great Britain/United Kingdom Enlightenment, 16–17, 21, 158, 160, 171 Enron, 153 Erhard, Ludwig, 108–9 Escher, Maurits Cornelius, 131 Estonia, 62n3, 124 Ethno-nationalism, 153 Euro, 114, 119, 123 Europe: and Afghanistan invasion, 170; arrests of terrorist suspects in, 73, 74n20; and asylum claims, 42–43, 62, 75, 78n26, 80–85; birthrates and fertility rates of Europeans, 121, 153; business and high-tech in, 115; and conflict resolution, 8–9; and conservative liberalism, 25–28; and culture wars, 4–6; and democracy, 21; depoliticization of, 20–25, 27, 30, 31; and economic issues in twentieth century, 96, 101–9, 113–24, 126; elderly in, 41, 142, 153; and “end of history,” 25, 27–28, 32–33; energy issues in, 45–46, 109; historical growth trends in, 97– 109; and humanitarianism, 21–25, 27, 28, 30, 31; illegal immigrants in, 62, 68, 70, 83; and immigration policies, 42–43, 61–65, 68, 70–71, 75, 84–85, 88; intelligence gathering in, 56–57; and Israel, 38, 87; and Kosovo War (1999), 8–9; and Marshall Plan, 106, 111, 125, 161–62, 167; military capabilities of, 8–9, 11, 29, 149, 172, 185–95, 203–5; and military tasking, 190–95; nationalist, antiimmigrant, or conservative parties in, 71, 75–76; nation-states of, 23–24, 158; nuclear protests in, during 1980s, 3–4; parochialism of, 165–67, 182; and plural sources of Western liberty, 14–16; population of, as percentage of

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Europe (continued) world population, 40–41; postmodern Europe, 171; religion in, 21–22, 48, 49–50, 63–65, 78, 120; Rumsfeld on Old Europe versus New Europe, 1, 2–3; scientific revolution in, 100; secularization of, 6, 49–50, 78, 120, 161; and security, 91; self-criticism needed by, 30–31; and soft power, 166, 172; and statesmanship, 31; and Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon, 9, 10; and terrorism war, 183; and transcending the transatlantic divide, 30–31; and values gap, 8, 35; and Western civilization, 17–18, 158–59; Western values of, 156, 183–84; workforce and labor shortage in, 41–42, 67–68, 120– 22, 120nn86–87. See also European Union (EU); Europe-United States relationship; Imperialism; Muslims in Europe; Western Alliance; and specific countries European Arab League (LAE), 72 European Central Bank, 120 European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), 113 European Community, 113–14, 137 European Court of Human Rights, 61, 62 European Court of Justice, 61, 62 European Free Trade Association (EFTA), 113 European Monetary System, 135 European Monetary Union, 135 European Union (EU): and agricultural policy, 116; and anti-Danish demonstrations by Muslims, 67; and asylum claims, 80–85; centralization trend within, 61, 62; constitution by Giscard d’Estaing for, 117; and Eastern Europe, 61, 62, 116–17, 123, 172; economic aid to Muslim countries from, 57–58; and economic issues, 96, 113–24, 126; and euro, 114, 119,

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123; foreign policy generally, 91; and Franco-German political understanding, 7, 117–18, 123; and globalization, 7; and human rights, 62; and immigration policies, 61–65; and Index of Economic Freedom, 124; and Iraq, 184, 185; and Israel, 38; Joint Security Strategy of, 170n23; membership of, 61, 62, 62n3, 113, 116–17; and mergers, 115–16; and military structures, 203; and Muslim population of Europe, 6, 42, 43, 58, 68–71; and Palestinian Authority, 88; and religion, 63; rule-making process in, 131; and Schengen Agreement for border checks, 116; Schröder on NATO versus, 11; and trade policies, 133; and transatlantic panel on Muslim integration, 58; and Ukrainian elections, 9; and United States, 115, 123, 185; and workforce, 120–21. See also Europe; and specific countries Europe-United States relationship: and anti-Americanism, 1–4, 7–8, 28, 35–37, 60, 88, 128–29, 134–35, 159, 172, 182; and Chirac, 1, 7–8, 165, 172, 181; criticism of U.S. by Europe, 1–4, 7–8, 28, 35–37, 38, 60, 88, 128–29, 134–35, 141, 158, 159, 172, 182; and de Gaulle, 110, 134, 141, 142–43, 161, 182; and European Union (EU), 115, 123, 185; and France, 1, 2–3, 7–8, 28, 29–30, 84, 110, 116, 116n73, 134, 141; history of, 160–62, 163; and Iraq War (2003), 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 28–29, 90, 157–58, 165–66, 172, 177, 181–83, 193; media portrayal of U.S. in Europe, 2; rivalry between U.S. and Europe, 37; and unilateralism of U.S., 9, 10, 157, 160, 163–66, 169, 179–81, 183, 185, 202; U.S. policy toward Europe, 1, 2–3, 7–8, 28, 29–30,

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Index / 237 37–38. See also Europe; United States; Western Alliance Eurosclerosis, 109, 119 Falkland Islands, 190, 192 Fatwas, 39–40 Feminism, 5 Ferguson, Niall, 129, 168 Ferry, Luc, 19 Filipino immigrants, 66, 67, 86 Finland, 192 Fischer, Stanley, 143 Food safety, 8, 35 Foreign Affairs, 7n8 Former Soviet Union, 40–41, 98, 99. See also specific countries Fortuyn, Pym, 71 Foucault, Michel, 19 France: and Africa, 192, 193; and Algeria, 122, 178, 189, 204; anti-Semitism in, 87–88; and Arab world, 83–84; arrests of terrorist suspects in, 73; asylum for terrorists in, 81; and bimetallism, 103–4; business and high-tech in, 115; citizenship of Muslims in, 52; Communist Party in, 18; crime in, 51; École Nationale d’Administration in, 121n90; economy of, 102, 126; and European Union (EU), 114, 117–18; fertility rate in, 121; Fifth Republic of, 18; and French Revolution, 40, 147; and Gulf War (1991), 169–70; headscarf and veil (hijab) controversy in, 6, 48–52, 73, 83–84; imams in, 77, 78–79, 78n26; immigration policies of, 68, 70, 83, 84; and imperialism, 95–96, 103, 145, 151, 189; and Index of Economic Freedom, 124; intellectual and artistic accomplishments of historically, 100; intelligence gathering by, 56; and Iran, 9; and Iraq War (2003), 3, 11, 28, 29, 83, 90, 157–58, 172, 183, 193; Islamic associations

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and Muslim organizations in, 52, 68–69, 71, 79, 80; Islamist terrorists in, 75, 86; Jews in, 48, 87; Mauroy’s Popular Front regime in, 114; military and military policy of, 149, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 198; and multipolarity, 1, 7–8; and Mumia’s case, 35–36; Muslims in, 6, 35, 42, 47–52, 58, 65, 68–71, 73, 75–80, 83–85, 87, 121; National Front in, 71; Paris car burnings in, 47; Paris Grand Mosque in, 79; poverty in, 51; relationship between U.S. and, 1, 2–3, 7–8, 28, 29–30, 84, 110, 116, 116n73, 134, 141; religion in, 50, 65, 69, 69n15; Restoration in, 94; riots (2005) in, 76–77, 121; schools in, 48; and Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon, 9, 10; ultra-Left of 1968 in, 18–19; unemployment in, 7, 51; and United Nations, 29; and Vietnam, 189; as welfare state compared with Germany, 7, 117–18, 123; workforce in, 41, 120, 120n86; and World Wars I and II, 160, 180 Franklin, Benjamin, 130 Free Aceh Movement (GAM), 81 Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), 122–23 French Revolution, 40, 147 Friedman, Milton, 59, 111, 143, 172 Friedman, Thomas, 6, 163–64, 167, 173 Fukuyama, Francis, 5, 25, 128 Fuller, Mark, 121n90 G-8 meetings, 96 Gaddafi, 164 Gaddis, John Lewis, 163, 167, 169, 171, 174, 181n43 Garton Ash, Timothy, 46 GATT, 96, 132, 137 Gauchet, Marcel, 19 Gays in military, 61 General Electric, 115 Geneva Conventions, 178

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Germany: adult literacy programs in, 55; and Afghanistan, 170; antiSemitism in, 87–88; arrests of terrorist suspects in, 73; and Boer War, 152; Bonn Republic of, 118; citizenship laws in, 52, 70; civil war (1860s) in, 148; counter-terrorism in, 78; and deutsche mark, 135; economy of, 102, 108–9, 118– 19, 126; elderly in, 41; elections in, 70, 120, 165; and European Union (EU), 114, 117–18; fertility rate in, 121; GDP per capita in, 126; guest workers in, 41–42; and Gulf War (1991), 169–70; headscarf and veil (hijab) controversy in, 52–53, 84; illegal immigrants in, 68; imams in, 77–78, 78n26; immigration policies of, 70, 84; and imperialism, 103; and Index of Economic Freedom, 124; intellectual and artistic accomplishments of historically, 100; intelligence gathering by, 56, 57; and Iran, 9; and Iraq War (2003), 3, 11, 90, 157–58, 170n23, 181, 183, 193; Kennan on importance of, 181; military of, 188, 190, 191, 198; Muslims in, 35, 41–42, 52–53, 58, 68, 70, 77–78, 87, 121; nationalist, anti-immigration political parties in, 76; Nazism in, 17, 106, 118, 159, 201–2; and Ostpolitik, 165; and parochialism, 182; population of, 43; release of terrorist suspects in, 82–83, 90; religion in, 49–50, 63, 64; reparations by, 105, 118, 145; reunification of, 118–19; and Russia, 195; schools in, 52–53; “68ers” impact on, 5; unemployment in, 7, 70; and universal jurisdiction, 61; and U.S. policy, 1, 2, 110; wars of German Reformation, 95; Weimar Germany, 105; as welfare state compared with France and, 7, 117–18, 123; women in military in, 61; workforce and labor shortage in, 41–42, 70, 120,

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238

120n87; and World Wars I and II, 95, 161, 173, 179, 180, 198, 201–2 GIA. See Armed Islamic Group Gibbon, Edward, 154–55 Gilpin, Robert, 130 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 117 Globalization: and association between commerce and peace, 127– 28; backlash and protests against, 137–38, 144–45, 151, 153, 167–68; and corporate governance, 133– 34; and economic convergence of the West, 126–28; and economic divergence, 6–7; and ethno-nationalism, 153; and European Union (EU), 7; historical trends in, 95, 96–109, 137–38, 144–46, 150–55; and immigration, 60; imperialism versus, 128–35, 155; Lexis-Nexis word search on, 131; and multinational corporations, 123–24; and security concerns, 145–46, 162–63, 166–68; and terrorism war, 162–63, 166–68; and transatlantic tensions generally, 35, 126; and warfare, 145–52, 155; and world monetary order, 134; and world trading system, 132 Global meliorism, 156, 156n1 Goa, 189 Gold standard, 103–4 Gonzales, Alberto R., 178–79 Google Web browser, 116 Gorbachev, Mikhail, 127 Gordon, Philip, 7 Gramsci, Antonio, 19 Great Britain/United Kingdom: Algerian immigrants in, 83; antiterrorism legislation in, 75; and asylum claims, 82; and Boer War, 152; as capital importer, 140; and culture wars, 4; ecologist vandals in, 61; economy of, 103–5, 119–20, 126; and European Union (EU), 113, 118; and Falkland Islands, 190, 192; fertility rate in, 121; gays in military in, 61; GDP per capita in, 126; and

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Index / 239 headscarf and veil (hijab) controversy in France, 84; imams and Islamist preachers in, 78, 78n26; immigration policies of, 68, 70; and imperialism, 95–96, 103, 129, 139, 145, 151, 188–89, 192; and Index of Economic Freedom, 124; intellectual and artistic accomplishments of historically, 100; intelligence gathering by, 56, 57; and Iran, 9; and Iraq wars, 28, 90, 169–70, 193; IslamExpo (2006) in, 36–37; Islamist radicals in, 74–75, 78, 82; London bombings (2005) in, 34, 36, 74, 75, 121–22; and Londonistan, 74–75; and Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), 188; military and military policy of, 61, 149, 188, 190, 191, 193, 197–98; Muslims in, 34, 36–37, 39, 42, 58, 68, 70, 74, 84–85, 87, 121–22; religion in, 49, 63, 64; and September 11 terrorist attacks in U.S., 34, 170; and Vietnam War, 193; workforce in, 41; and World Wars I and II, 123, 146, 160–61 Great Depression, 95, 104–5, 145, 148 Greece: and Israel, 38; political coup in, 191; refugee/asylum status granted by, 62; as target country of immigrants, 44 Greek philosophy, 15, 16, 22, 156 Gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, 125–26 Guantanamo detainees, 74, 74n21 Guizot, François, 14–15, 16 Gulf War (1991), 148, 169–70, 193, 204 Guzman, Abimael, 81 Habermas, Jürgen, 27 Haig, Alexander, 12, 162–63, 166, 168–69 Haiti, 193 Hanford, John, 48, 84 Hardt, Michael, 129n4 Harper, John Lamberton, 160

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Harris, Owen, 8 Hastings, Warren, 151 Hay, William Anthony, 1–13 Headscarf and veil (hijab) controversy, 6, 47–53, 73, 83–84 Head Start program, 53–56 Heisbourg, François, 9, 123 Herf, Jeffrey, 165 Heritage Foundation, 124 Hilferding, Rudolf, 102, 150 History of Civilization in Europe, The (Guizot), 15 Hitler, Adolf, 106n47, 158, 173, 179, 180, 181n45. See also Nazism Hobbes, Thomas, 25, 29 Hobson, J. A., 102, 150, 151 Holland. See Netherlands Honeywell, 115 Hong Kong, 124 Howard, Michael, 173, 175 Hulsman, John, 170n23 Humanitarianism, 21–25, 27, 28, 30, 31 Human rights, 62, 129, 130, 149, 168, 202 Hungary, 44, 62n3, 125 Huntington, Samuel P., 5, 7n8, 111n63 Hurd, Douglas, 94 Hurricane Katrina, 42 Hussein, Saddam, 157, 163–64, 170, 177, 180, 204 Iceland, 124 Ignatieff, Michael, 129 Ikenberry, John, 130 Imams, 77–79, 78n26 Immigration: and assimilation, integration, and cultural conflict, 73–80; asylum claims and, 42–43, 62, 75, 78n26, 80–85; and culture, 66–71; European policies on, 42– 43, 61–65, 68, 70–71, 75, 84–85, 88; and European Union, 61–65; and Europe’s labor shortage, 41–42, 67–68; and family reunification, 84–85; financial impact of immigrants on their home

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Immigration (continued) countries, 44; and globalization, 60; illegal immigrants in Europe, 62, 68, 70, 83; Latin American immigrants, 65, 66, 86; of Muslims to Europe, 4, 6, 12, 34–58, 64–65, 67–71, 121–22; nationalist, anti-immigrant, or conservative parties in Europe, 71–73, 75–76; and Netherlands, 42–43; and politics, 71–73; religion of immigrants, 63–65, 66, 67–68; and repudiation of Western identity, 6; target countries for, 44; to United States, 65–67, 86; U.S. policies on, 60, 66, 71, 85–86. See also Muslims in Europe Imperialism: and corporate governance, 133–34; as financial drain on European nations, 102–3; and France, 95–96, 103, 145, 151, 189, 192; globalization versus, 128–35, 155; and Great Britain, 95–96, 103, 129, 139, 145, 151, 188–89, 192; Hobson-Hilferding-Lenin interpretation of, 102, 150, 151; Lexis-Nexis word search on, 131; and United States, 128–31, 134, 160; and warfare, 151–52; and world monetary order, 134–35; and world trading system, 132–33 In Defense of Decadent Europe (Aron), 19 Index of Economic Freedom, 124 India: as British colony, 103; business firms in, 124; conflict between Pakistan and, 194, 200; democracy in, 127, 167; economy of, 144, 167; energy consumption in, 45; future conflict between U.S. and, 200; military in, 188; modernization in, 45; as multiethnic state, 135; Muslim emigrants from, 68; population of, as percentage of world population, 40–41; and Portuguese colony of Goa, 189; and reserve holdings,

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240 143; “Western” values of, 127; workforce in, 122 Individualism, 20–21, 26–27, 164, 203–4 Indonesia, 42, 81, 135 Integration of Muslims, 76–80, 84–85 Intelligence gathering, 56–57, 186 Intermarriage. See Marriage International Atomic Energy Agency, 90 International Criminal Court (ICC), 169n22, 177 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 96, 131, 136, 142, 143, 144 International Trade Organization (ITO), 136 Internet: Google Web browser, 116; IslamicAwakening.net, 38–39; IslamOnline.net, 39–40; Palestinian-Israeli violence on, 173; Turkish and Arabic channels on, 54–55 Iran: and European diplomacy, 194; Muslim emigrants from, 85; and nuclear weapons, 10, 90, 164; terrorist group fighting regime in, 81; as threat to world peace, 38; and United States, 189, 194; and Western Alliance, 9, 10 Iraq: and Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandals, 178; democracy for, 177, 184; and Desert Storm, 11; election of 2005 in, 2; and European Union (EU), 184; and Gulf War (1991), 148, 169–70, 193, 204; jihad fighters for, 73; Muslim emigrants from, 85; NATO training of Iraqi police, 9; progress in, 168; reconstruction of, 149, 150, 171; religious freedom in, 47–48; state building for, 10; terrorism in, 74. See also Iraq War (2003) Iraq War (2003): and Bush administration, 2, 28–29, 148, 164n13, 170, 174–84, 193, 194, 202; and Canada, 188; and Europe, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13, 28–29, 157–58, 165–66,

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Index / 241 177, 181–83, 193; exit strategy for and problems following, 2, 194, 204; financial cost of, 148; French and German policy on, 3, 11, 28, 29, 83, 90, 157–58, 170n23, 172, 183, 193; and Great Britain, 28, 90, 191, 193; and Italy, 90; and NATO, 180; and Russia, 157; and Spain, 90; and United Nations, 157, 164–65, 170, 181, 183; U.S. public opinion on, 164n13; U.S. victory in, 195 Ireland, 113, 119–20, 120n85, 124, 191 Islam: and cartoons of Prophet Mohammed in Danish newspaper, 67; compatibility of, with liberal civilization, 31; and fatwas about Israel and U.S., 39–40; and headscarf and veil (hijab) controversy, 6, 47–53, 73, 83–84; and imams, 77–79; and jihad ideologues, 73, 74, 78; medieval crusades against, 95; pan-Islamism, 54; philosophers of, 15–16; population statistics of Muslims, 6, 34–35, 41, 43, 52, 66, 68–72, 74, 75, 77; radical Islam and terrorism, 34–35, 74–75, 78, 81–82; religiosity of Muslims, 50, 64–65, 69, 69n15; as second-largest religion, 64; and support for Israel by U.S. and its Western allies, 38–39; Wahhabi interpretation of, 80. See also Muslims in Europe IslamExpo (2006) in, 36–37 IslamicAwakening.net, 38–39 Islamist Party (Turkey), 77 IslamOnline.net, 39–40 Israel: and Arab-Israeli War (1973), 162; and European Union, 38; and Europe’s Muslims, 38–39; fatwas about, 39–40; French view of, and universalism, 24; Internet images of Palestinian-Israeli violence, 173; Islamist suicide bombings in, 74; and Lebanon, 204; mili-

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tary setbacks for, 204; Quartet project for Palestinians and, 9–10; as threat to world peace, 38; U.S. support for, 38–39, 87, 193; violence against Palestinians by, 38–39; and Yom Kippur War (1973), 193 Italy: arrests of terrorist suspects in, 73; arrest warrants for CIA operatives in, 90; and asylum claims, 80; as capital importer, 140; civil war (1860s) in, 148; and EU Growth and Stability Pact, 114; fertility rate in, 121; GDP per capita in, 126; immigration policies of, 84; intellectual and artistic accomplishments of historically, 100; and Iraq War, 90; military of, 188, 190, 191; nationalist, antiimmigration political parties in, 75–76; religion in, 63; as target country of immigrants, 44; workforce in, 41 Ivory Coast, 193 Jacobsson, Per, 104n40 Jamaican Posse, 86 James, Harold, 6, 13, 125–55 Jamiyy’a Islamiyya Muslaha. See Armed Islamic Group Japan: and Co-Prosperity Sphere, 95; economy of, 97, 167; elderly in, 41, 142; future conflict between U.S. and, 200; historical growth trends in, 98, 99; militarism of, during twentieth century, 159; and OECD, 125; rehabilitation of, after World War II, 167; and reserve holdings, 142, 143; and trade policies, 122, 133; and U.S. military policy, 110; and U.S. securities, 142; workforce in, 41, 138; and World War II, 180, 197 Jay, John, 26n14 Jefferson, Thomas, 160 Jews, 48, 64, 65, 72, 87, 153. See also Anti-Semitism

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Jihad ideologues, 73, 74, 78 Jobs. See Workforce Johnson, Lyndon B., 18, 110–11, 141, 193 Jordan, 82 Kagan, Robert, 8–9, 91, 91n6, 131, 165, 166, 171, 183–84 Kant, Immanuel, 127n2 Kaplan, Metin, 78 Kashmir conflict, 194, 200 Katrina hurricane, 42 Kennan, George, 160, 181, 181n45 Kennedy, John F., 110, 127, 180, 181n43 Kerry, John, 65 Keynes, John Maynard, 107, 150 Khilafat organization, 78 Khrushchev, Nikita, 181n43 Kindleberger, Charles, 105, 130 Kirkpatrick, Jeanne, 7n8 Kissinger, Henry, 28 Kohl, Helmut, 118–19 Kolnai, Aurel, 156 Korea. See South Korea Korean War, 148, 162, 197, 200 Kors, Alan Charles, 5 Kosovo, 1, 8–9, 11, 162, 167 Krauthammer, Charles, 9 Krekar, Mullah, 81 Kroes, Neelie, 115 Kurth, James, 4–5, 92 Kyoto Protocol, 169n22, 177 Labor force. See Workforce Labor unions, 110n60 Lacan, Jacques, 19 LAE. See European Arab League La France qui tombe (Baverez), 29 Landes, David S., 100n26 Latin America: arrests of terrorist suspects in, 73; banks in South America, 134; and Cold War, 180, 181n43, 193–94; European policy on, 193–94; historical growth trends in, 98, 99; immigrants from, 65, 66, 67, 86; and Mercosur bloc, 122–23, 123n96; silver and

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242

gold resources of, 95, 102n32; U.S. policy on, 87. See also specific countries Latrèche, Mohamed Ennacer, 71 Latvia, 62n3, 124 Lawrence v. Texas, 61 League of Nations, 95, 164, 169 Lebanon: anti-Danish demonstrations in, 67; Arab Americans from, 66; Islamist terrorists in, 78; Israeli setbacks in, 204; Syria’s withdrawal from, 9, 10 Lenin, V. I., 102, 150 Le Pen, Jean, 122 Le Point, 28–29 Lévy, Bernard Henri, 91n6 Liberalism: compatibility of Islam with, 31; conservative liberalism, 25–28; and New Left, 18–20; Scruton on, 26; totalitarianism versus, 16–18 Liberation, 72 Liberty: Aron on, 27; definition of, 15; and European nation-states, 23; and individualism, 20–21; plural sources of Western liberty, 14–16; totalitarianism versus modern liberty, 17–18; and United States, 26 Libya, 164, 191, 193, 194 Lichtenstein, Nelson, 110n60 Lieven, Dominic, 135 Lima, Lukman B, 81 Lithuania, 62n3 Livingston, Ken, 36–37 Locke, John, 25 London bombings (2005), 34, 36, 74, 75, 121–22 Londonistan, 74–75 Ludin, Fereshta, 52–53 Luther, Martin, 150 Luttwak, Edward, 148 Luxembourg, 124 Maastricht plan, 114–15 Macmillan, Harold, 127 Madrid bombings (2004), 34, 86 Mahoney, Daniel J., 12, 14–33

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Index / 243 Maier, Corinne, 120n86 Malayan Emergency (1948–1960), 188 Malaysia, 167 Manent, Pierre, 19n6, 21–23, 25, 26, 27, 31 Mao Tsetung, 180 Mara Salvatrucha, 86 Marriage: and family reunification for Muslims, 84–85; foreign marriages of Muslims in Europe, 84–85; intermarriage in U.S., 46; intermarriage of Muslims in Europe, 46, 69n13 Marshall Plan, 106, 111, 125, 161–62, 167 Martel, Charles, 121 Martin, Philip, 43 Marxism, 16, 19 Mauroy, Pierre, 114 MCB. See Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) McDougall, Walter, 160 McKinley, William, 180–81n43 Mead, Walter Russell, 164–65, 175–76, 177, 179, 180, 181n43, 182n46 Meliorism, global, 156, 156n1 Memoirs (Aron), 19 Mercosur bloc, 122–23, 123n96 Mergers, 115–16 Merkel, Angela, 119, 123 Merry, E. Wayne, 165, 166 Messier, Jean-Marie, 153 Mexico: banks in, 134; capital account crisis in, 143; as capital importer, 140; democracy in, 127; financial impact of immigrants on, 44; immigrants from, 67, 86; and OECD, 125; Polk’s war against, 180n43; silver and gold resources of, 95, 102n32; trade between U.S. and, 122; U.S.-Mexico border, 66; “Western” values of, 127 Microsoft, 116 Middelhoff, Thomas, 153 Middle East: anti-Danish demonstrations in, 67; arrests of terrorist

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suspects in, 73; crises in, and U.S. and its European allies generally, 3, 7, 38–39; European policy on, 83, 87, 193; and Europe’s Muslims, 38–40; population of, as percentage of world population, 40–41; Quartet project for Israel and Palestinians, 9–10; reorientation of culture of, 10, 170–71, 176, 177; Syria’s withdrawal from Lebanon, 9, 10; as target country of immigrants, 44; terrorism war in, 11; threats to stability of, 28–29, 38–39; workforce in, 42. See also Gulf War (1991); Iraq War (2003); Terrorism war; and specific countries Migratory patterns. See Immigration Military: and Air Land Battle concept of U.S., 189–90; and asymmetrical warfare, 195–96; and Cold War, 9, 188–89, 192–94; and conscription, 191, 192; and diplomacy, 194, 199–200; European military capabilities, 8–9, 11, 29, 149, 172, 185–95, 197–98, 203–5; expenditures for, 141, 148, 166, 185–86, 204; and force projection and combat, 196–98; gays in, 61; NATO members’ military capabilities, 10–11; and navalism, 197, 198; neoconservatism and militarization of strategy, 173–84; policy differences on, in the West, 193–95; problems of analysis of military capability, 186–88; relationship between force and legitimacy, 201; revolution in attitudes toward, 203–5; Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) in U.S., 11, 173–76, 185–86, 190, 195–97, 199; tasks of, 190–93; and time-scale issue, 202–4; U.S. military strength, 157, 163–66, 171, 178–79, 185–86, 195–99, 203; weakening of prestige of Western military power, 204–5; Western goals for, 200–201; and West

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Military (continued) versus non-West, 201–2; and WMDs (weapons of mass destruction), 170, 179, 180, 181, 182, 198; women in German military, 61. See also Warfare; specific countries; specific wars Millennium Challenge Account, 58 Milli Goros/Gurus movement, 52, 77 Milosevic, Slobodan, 1 Mohammed VI, king of Morocco, 79 Monetary policy, 105–6, 109, 111, 123, 134–36, 138, 142–43, 145 Money, Leo Chiozza, 152 Monitor Corporation, 121n90 Monnet, Jean, 108, 113, 117 Monroe Doctrine, 160, 163 Monti, Commissioner “Supermario,” 115 Moran, Daniel, 179–80 Morocco, 68, 75, 77, 79, 85 Mujahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK), 81 Multiculturalism, 4–6, 12 Multilateralism, 2, 10–11, 91, 137, 163, 164–65, 168–71, 179, 185 Multinational corporations, 123–24 Mumia abu-Jamal, 35–36 Mundell, Robert, 119 Muslim Brotherhood, 69, 80 Muslim Council of Britain (MCB), 39 Muslim Party of France (PMF), 71, 73 Muslims in Europe: anti-Semitism of, 6, 71, 88; Arab/Muslim governments’ control of, 79; assimilation, integration, and cultural conflict of, 58, 73–80, 84–85; and asylum claims, 80–85; birthrates of, 43–44, 56, 121; citizenship of and voting rights for, 43, 52, 70, 79, 85; family reunification for, 84–85; future of, 40–47; and headscarf and veil (hijab) controversy, 6, 47–53, 73, 83–84; Head Start programs for

hay10ndx.indd 244

244 children of, 53–56; ideological influences on, 80; and imams, 77–79; as intelligence agents, 57; intermarriage of, 46; as members of Netherlands parliament, 75; political parties of, 71–73; population statistics on, 6, 34–35, 43, 52, 68–72, 74, 75, 77, 87; poverty of, 51; rape of Muslim women, 51; religiosity of, 50, 64–65; and rift in Western Alliance, 35–40; and transatlantic panel on Music integration, 58; and United States, 53–58. See also Islam; and specific countries Najmuddin, Faraj Ahmad, 81 Napoleon and Napoleonic wars, 147–48, 158, 173 National Federation of Muslims in France, 79 Nationalism and nation-states, 23–24, 25, 27, 31–32, 62, 71, 75–76, 94, 158 National security. See Security policy Navalism, 197, 198. See also Military Nazism, 17, 106, 118, 159, 201–2. See also Hitler, Adolf Negri, Toni, 129, 129n4 Neoconservatism, 160, 162, 163–66, 168, 172–84, 202 Nestroy, Johann, 93 Netherlands: arrests of terrorist suspects in, 73; dikes and dams (Delta Plan) in, 42; and EU constitution by Giscard d’Estaing, 117; immigration policies of, 42–43, 62, 68, 70, 73, 84, 85, 88; and Index of Economic Freedom, 124; Livable Netherlands party in, 71; military of, 188; Muslims in, 42–43, 58, 68, 70, 75, 77, 85; nationalist, anti-immigration political parties in, 75–76; and Netherlands East Indies, 189; refugees and asylum seekers in,

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Index / 245 42–43, 75, 81, 82–83, 85; release of terrorist suspects by, 82–83; religion in, 64; and transatlantic panel on Muslim integration, 58; and universal jurisdiction, 61 Netherlands East Indies, 189 Neumann, Fritz L., 106n47 New Left, 18–20 Newman, John Henry, 128 New York Times, 93, 183 New Zealand, 44, 57 Nicaragua, 194 Nixon, Richard, 28, 111 Norquist, Grover, 37 North Africa: arrests of terrorist suspects in, 73; economy of, 42; European policy on, 87; Muslim emigrants from, 42, 86, 88, 121 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 96 North Atlantic Treaty Alliance (NATO): and Afghanistan, 10, 193; and Balkans, 10; and Bush, 3, 169n22; and Cold War, 7, 8, 189; Combined Joint Task Force of, 170n23; cultural changes within members of, 59–60; de Gaulle’s withdrawal from, 162; and Eastern Europe, 62; as enduring alliance, 89; European focus of, 10; future of, and unilateral versus multilateral action, 10–11; and immigration policies, 59–60; and Iraq War (2003), 180; and Kosovo, 1, 11; membership of, 1, 11; and Middle East, 193; military capabilities of and expenditures by members of, 10–11, 186, 188–90, 192; and mutual dependency of the West, 161–62; Reaction Force of, and out-of-area capabilities, 170n23, 184; as restraint on Russia, 195; and rift in Western Alliance during 2003, 2, 89–90; Schröder on European Union versus, 11; and September 11 terrorist attacks in U.S., 1, 170; and Soviet Union’s

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dissolution, 1; and terrorism war, 12; training of Iraqi police by, 9; and United States, 166. See also Security policy; Western Alliance Northern Ireland, 191. See also Ireland North Korea, 38, 167, 194 Norway, 63, 81, 188. See also Scandinavia Nuclear weapons: and Iran, 10, 90, 164; protests against, in Europe, 3–4; and security policy, 173 Nye, Joseph, 141, 172 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 61 Oil resources, 45–46, 111–12 Old Regime and the Revolution, The (Tocqueville), 32 Olson, Mancur, 108 O’Neill, Paul, 144 OPEC, 112 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), 96, 125 Organization for European Economic Cooperation (OEEC), 125 Orwell, George, 182 Overconsumption, 139, 141 Pakistan: arrests of terrorist suspects in, 75; conflict between India and, 194, 200; religion in, 63; terrorist attacks or plots in, 75; and United States, 189 Palestinians: Christian Palestinians, 69; European policies toward, 88; and Israel, 38–39, 173, 204; and Muslims in Europe, 38–39; Quartet project for Israel and, 9–10; state building for nascent Palestine, 10; U.S. and EU economic aid to Palestinian Authority, 57–58, 88; U.S. support for, 38 Palmerston, Lord, 89 Pan-Islamism, 54 Paraguay, 123n96 Paris car burnings, 47

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Pattani United Liberation Organization (PULO), 81 Patten, Chris, 183 Pax Americana, 110 Penser la guerre: Clausewitz (Aron), 20 Perle, Richard, 165 Peru, 81, 95, 102n32 Peterson, Peter G., 111n62 Pew Research Center, 38, 50, 63 Peyrefitte, Alain, 134 Philippines, 82, 180–81n43, 197. See also Filipino immigrants Picasso, Pablo, 35 Pius XII, Pope, 17 Poland: and European Union, 62n3, 117; and NATO, 195; and Old Europe versus New Europe, 1, 2–3 Political asylum. See Asylum claims Political parties: Muslim parties, 71–73; nationalist, anti-immigrant, or conservative parties in Europe, 71, 75–76 Polk, James K., 180n43 Pond, Elizabeth, 90, 91n6, 170, 171 Population: aging of, 41, 121, 142, 153; birthrates of Muslim immigrants in Europe, 43–44, 56, 121; fertility rates in Europe, 121; Muslim population statistics in Europe, 6, 34–35, 43, 52, 66, 68–72, 74, 75, 77, 87; world population in 2020, 40–41 Porch, Douglas, 13, 156–84 Portugal: as capital importer, 140; colonies of, 189, 190; military of, 188, 191; revolution in, 191 Powell, Colin, 143, 170 Praeger, Rabbi Dennis, 37–38 Preemption strategy, 179–81, 180–81n43 Prussia, 103 Putin, Vladimir, 9, 10 Racism and Mumia case, 35–36 Radu, Michael, 12, 59–88 Rajavi, Maryam, 81 Ramadan, Tariq, 50

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246 Rape of Muslim women, 51 Rau, Johannes, 84 Rauschnigg, Herman, 17 Reagan, Ronald, 3, 112, 114, 141 Realpolitik, 131 Reason versus revelation, 15–16 Record, Jeffrey, 175, 176–77 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke), 32 Reformation, 95 Religion: of Arab Americans, 66; Biblical religion, 15–16; Christian Palestinians, 69; in Europe, 21–22, 48, 49–50, 63–65, 78, 120, 161; of immigrants, 63–65, 66, 67–68; Lebanese Arabs of Maronite faith, 69; State Department survey of religious freedom, 47–48; in United States, 50, 62–63, 65, 65n9, 161. See also Islam Renaissance, 145, 150, 158 Renault, Alain, 19 Reparations and war debt, 105, 118, 145, 150 Reston, James, 93 Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), 11, 173–76, 185–86, 190, 195–97, 199 Ricardo, David, 100n25 Rice, Condoleezza, 1, 2–3, 177 Rifkin, Jeremy, 45 Riyadh, 80 Robertson, Lord, 11 Romania, 62n3 Rome and Roman Empire, 15, 129, 145, 154–55 Roosevelt, Franklin, 160, 169, 176, 180, 181 Roosevelt, Theodore, 152, 169 Rostow, Walt, 100 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 154 Rueff, Jacques, 110 Rumsfeld, Donald, 1, 3, 174, 181 Russia: arrests of terrorist suspects in, 75; avoidance of war with, 196; democracy in, 9, 127; future conflict between U.S. and, 200; and Germany, 195; historical

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Index / 247 growth trends in, 98, 99; and Iraq War, 157; NATO as restraint on, 195; Putin in, 9, 10; as security threat for Eastern Europe, 62; U.S. policy on, 1; “Western” values of, 127. See also Soviet Union Rwanda, 129 Sacks, Jonathan, 4 Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha, 86 Santorum, Rick, 84 Sarbanes-Oxley law, 124, 153–54 Sarkozy, Nicolas, 85 Saudi Arabia, 45–46, 52, 78, 78n26, 80, 189 Scalia, Antonin, 61 Scandinavia, 75, 81, 119–20, 124. See also specific countries Scarves. See Headscarf and veil (hijab) controversy Schengen Agreement, 116 Schilly, Otto, 78 Schlieffen, Alfred von, 176, 180 Schnapper, Dominique, 25, 26–27 Schröder, Gerhard, 11, 70, 119, 172, 181, 190 Schuker, Stephen A., 13, 89–124, 138 Schumpeter, Joseph, 101, 145 Schwarzenberg, Prince Felix zu, 92 Schweid, Barry, 184 Scientific revolution, 100 Scruton, Roger, 19, 25–26, 27 Secularity of Europe, 6, 49–50, 78, 120, 161 Security policy: common security policy for Western Alliance, 7–13; and counter-terrorism strategies, 13, 78, 162–84; of Europe, 91; and globalism, 145–46, 162–63, 166–68; and Iraq War (2003), 164, 174–84; and multilateralism, 163, 168–71; NATO’s Joint Security Strategy, 170n23; and neoconservatism, 160, 162, 163–66, 168, 172–84, 202; and repudiation of Western identity, 6; and terrorism war, 146. See also North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)

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Seeley, J. R., 129 Senegal, 63 September 11 terrorist attacks, 1, 32, 34, 74, 158, 167, 170, 174 Serbia, 1 Shakespeare, William, 23, 23n11 Sharpton, Al, 72 Shining Path, 81 Shore, Zachary, 12, 34–58 Sicherman, Harvey, 1–13 Sicily, 81 Siemon-Netto, Uwe, 5 Sierra Leone, 193 Singapore, 60, 97, 102, 124, 167 Sison, José Maria, 82 Slovakia, 62 Slovak Republic, 62n3 Slovenia, 62n3 Smith, Adam, 101, 147, 149, 151, 154 Social contract, 25–26 Socialism, 106 Soft power, 141, 166, 172 Somalia, 171 Sombart, Werner, 152 Sommer, Ron, 153 Soros, George, 167 South Africa, 43, 60, 152 South America. See Latin America; and specific countries South Asia, 42, 122 Southeast Asia, 45 South Korea: banks in, 134; capital account crisis in, 143; democracy in, 127, 167; economy of, 102, 167; and OECD, 125; “Western” values of, 127 Soviet Union: and Afghanistan, 204; dissolution of, 1, 8, 91–92, 162, 165; and Eastern Europe, 161; and World War II, 179. See also Former Soviet Union; Russia Spain: amnesty to illegal immigrants in, 62, 70; arrests of terrorist suspects in, 73; as capital importer, 140; elderly in, 41; fertility rate in, 121; foreign policy of, after 2004 election, 187–88; illegal immigrants in, 62, 70, 83;

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Spain (continued) and imperialism, 139, 190; and Iraq War, 90; Islamist terrorists in, 75; Madrid bombings (2004) in, 34, 86; military of, 188, 191; separatist movements in, 62; and universal jurisdiction, 61; unsuccessful coup in, 191 Spanish-American War (1898), 151–52 Spies. See Intelligence gathering Stalin, Joseph, 161 Stanford University, 4 State Department, U.S. See U.S. State Department Statesmanship, 31 Stevenson, David, 94n17 Stiglitz, Joseph, 169n22 Strauss, Leo, 15, 16, 22 Sub-Saharan region of Africa, 40 Sudan, 47–48, 194 Suez Crisis (1956), 161, 162, 189, 204 Sweden, 63, 81, 126. See also Scandinavia Switzerland, 75–76, 192 Syria, 66, 67, 194 Szabo, Stephen F., 182 Tabligh movement, 52 Taft, William Howard, 169 Taiwan, 102, 167, 196, 200 Taliban, 74, 75, 82, 163–64 Technology: and Internet, 38–40, 54–55, 116, 173; Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), 11, 173–76, 185–86, 190, 195–97, 199; and warfare, 173–74, 195, 198–200, 204 Television, 54–55 Terrorism war: arrests of terrorist suspects, 73, 74n20, 75, 78; and Bush administration, 92, 174–84; and counter-terrorism strategies, 13, 78, 162–84; and Geneva Conventions, 178; globalist strategy for, 162–63, 166–68; and Guantanamo detainees, 74, 74n21; and London bombings (2005), 34, 36,

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74, 75, 121–22; multilateralism as approach to, 163, 164–65, 168–71, 179; and NATO, 12; neoconservative approach to, 162, 163–66, 168, 172–84; and Paris car burnings, 47; against radical Islam, 34–35, 74–75, 78, 81–82; and September 11 terrorist attacks, 1, 32, 34, 74, 158, 167, 170, 174; and states implicated in terrorism, 11–12; as threat to economic order and economic integration, 146; and transatlantic panel on Muslim integration, 58; and Turkey, 11; and Western Alliance, 7, 9, 10, 35, 164, 170–71, 183. See also Iraq War (2003) Thailand, 81 Thatcher, Margaret, 114 “Third way” politics, 5 Thucydides, 174 Tiro, Hasan di, 81 Tito, 67 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 14, 32 Todd, Emmanuel, 24 Totalitarianism, 16–18, 23 Trachtenberg, Marc, 93 Trade and Competitiveness Act (1988), 133 Trade policies: of Bush administration, 112, 122–23, 138, 141; and exchange rates, 136; international agreements on, 96, 110–11, 122–23, 132, 137; Luther on trade during Renaissance, 150; and multinational corporations, 124; and warfare, 145–46; and World Trade Organization (WTO), 131, 132, 133, 137, 138, 167 Treaty of Rome (1957), 113 Tribalat, Michelle, 69, 69n14 Trichet, Jean-Claude, 120 Trinidad and Tobago, 124 Tunisia, 68, 77, 79, 84, 85 Turkey: capital account crisis in, 143; extradition of Kaplan to, 78; government of, and Europe’s Muslims, 79; hijab banned in, 84;

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Index / 249 Islamist Party in, 77, 78; Khilafat organization in, 78; Milli Goros movement in, 52; Muslim emigrants from, 68, 77–78, 85, 86, 121; and NATO, 11; religion in, 63; and United States, 189 Turner, Henry, 106n47 Twain, Mark, 94 Ukraine, 1, 9 Unemployment. See Workforce Unilateralism, 9, 10, 157, 160, 163– 66, 169, 179–81, 183, 185, 202 Union of Islamic Organizations in Europe (UIOE), 69n13 Union of Islamic Organizations of France (UOIF), 68–69, 69n13, 80 Unipolar moment, 9 United Kingdom. See Great Britain/ United Kingdom United Nations: and Bush, 169n22, 183, 184; founding of, 202; and France, 29; General Assembly of, 10; and Iran’s nuclear weapons, 90; and Iraq’s transition to democracy, 184; and Iraq War, 157, 164–65, 170, 181, 183; rulemaking process in, 131; Security Council of, 10, 91, 164–65; and terrorism war, 163 United States: and Afghanistan, 11, 163–64, 170, 173, 178; and American Revolution, 147; Arab Americans in, 56–57, 66; asylum claims in, 81; and Bretton Woods system, 105–6, 109, 111, 134–37, 142; and Californication, 46; as capital importer, 139–42; capitalism in, 153–54, 164; and China, 200; civil war in, 148, 180n43; corporate scandals in, 134; crime in, 86; and culture wars, 4–5, 175; democracy in, 30; economic aid to Muslim countries from, 57–58; economy of, 97, 98, 99, 102, 105, 109–12, 119, 126, 139–44; education in, 4; and European Union (EU), 115; fatwas about, 39–40;

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foreign policy of, 1–4, 7–8, 28, 29–30, 32, 37–38, 87, 91, 92, 123, 128–31, 161, 169, 177, 182, 189, 205; Great Society programs in, 110–11; Head Start program in, 53–56; historical growth trends in, 98, 99; as “hyperpower,” 1, 7–8; immigration to and immigration policies of, 44, 60, 65–67, 71, 85–86; imperialism of, 128–31, 134, 160; and Index of Economic Freedom, 124; intelligence gathering by, 56–57, 186; intermarriage in, 46; and Iran, 9; and Israel, 38, 87, 193; labor unions in, 110n60; leading role of, in international system, 200–201; and liberty, 26; military expenditures of, 141, 148, 166, 185–86; military policy of, 11, 110, 141, 148, 149, 166, 171, 173–76, 178–79, 185–86, 189–90, 194; military strength of, 157, 163–66, 171, 178–79, 185–86, 195–99; military tasks in, 190–91; multiculturalism in, 4–5, 12; and Mumia case, 35–36; Muslims in, 56–57, 66, 80; and Muslims in Europe, 53–58; as national community, 28, 31–32; and NATO, 166; and neoconservatism, 160, 163–66, 168, 172–84, 202; New Left in, 18; overconsumption in, 139, 141; and Pax Americana, 110; political lobbies in, 86; population of, as percentage of world population, 40–41; and power politics, 8; religion in, 50, 62–63, 65, 65n9, 161; Sarbanes-Oxley law in, 124, 153–54; September 11 terrorist attacks in, 1, 32, 34, 74, 158, 167, 170, 174; and steel tariffs, 132; as threat to world peace, 38; trade policies of, 122–23, 132–33, 138; and transcending transatlantic divide, 31–32; and universalism, 24, 31–32; and values gap, 8, 35; and “White Man’s Burden,” 168, 169n22; workforce in, 41, 120,

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United States (continued) 138; and world economy, 135–44. See also Europe–United States relationship; Terrorism war; Western Alliance; specific presidents; specific wars U.S. Census Bureau, 66 U.S. Defense Department, 37 U.S. Federal Reserve Board, 112, 144 U.S. Justice Department, 116 U.S. National Security Council, 37 U.S. State Department, 37, 47–48, 84 U.S. Supreme Court, 61 U.S. Treasury, 112, 123, 144 Universalism, 24, 32 University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, 65n9 Uruguay, 123n96, 124 Values gap, 8, 35 Van Gogh, Theo, 6, 43 Veils. See Headscarf and veil (hijab) controversy Venezuela, 123n96 Vietnam War, 5, 90, 110, 141, 148, 162, 189, 193, 194, 196–97, 204, 205 Villepin, Dominique de, 175 Vitorino, Antonio, 42 Volcker, Paul, 112 Voting rights. See Citizenship Wahhabi interpretation of Islam, 80 Wałęsa, Lech, 117 Warfare: and air power, 197–98; Aron on, 20; and association between commerce and peace, 127–28; asymmetrical warfare, 195–96; casualties from, 148–49, 194, 203; Chirac on, 29; and Cold War, 149; Constant on, 24–25; cost of, 147–49; deflation following, 147–48; and economic issues, 147–50; and expenditure and revolution in military affairs, 185–86; force projection and com-

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250 bat, 196–98; and globalization, 145–52, 155; and “golden arches” theory of conflict prevention, 167; imperialist wars, 151–52; interventionist wars of 1990s and early 2000s, 201; and military capability, 185–95; and military tasking, 190–93; and navalism, 197, 198; and nuclear weapons, 3–4, 10, 90, 164, 173; relationship between force and legitimacy, 201; reparations and war debt after, 105, 118, 145, 150; and Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), 11, 173–76, 185–86, 190, 195–97, 199; and technology, 173–74, 195, 198–200, 204; and weakening of prestige of Western military power, 204–5; and Wilson’s Fourteen Points, 160; and weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), 170, 179, 180, 181, 182, 198. See also Military; specific wars War on terrorism. See Terrorism war Warsaw Pact, 1 Washington, George, 160 Washington Post, 2–3 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 147, 154 Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), 170, 179, 180, 181, 182, 198 Weigel, George, 120 Werner Plan, 135 West Africa, 194–95 Western Alliance: and Afghanistan, 10, 170; and birth of “postmodern” democracy and 1968, 18–20; Bush on, 3; and conflicts within the West generally, 4–6, 30; and culture wars, 4–6; and definition of “the West,” 124, 125, 156, 201; and democracy, 16–17; and depoliticization of Europe, 20–25; and diplomacy, 194, 199–200; and economy, 6–7, 13, 93–124; and immigration policies, 42–43, 59–88; and Iraq, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 13; and military, 8–11, 29, 149, 163–66, 172, 178–79, 185–

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Index / 251 205; and Muslim Europe, 34–58; norms of, 201–2; objectives of, 10; and plural sources of Western liberty, 14–16; and repudiation of Western identity, 4–6; rift in, 1–4, 89–93, 123; and security relations, 7–13, 156–84; and terrorism war, 7, 9–10; and totalitarian challenge, 16–18; and transcending the transatlantic divide, 30–33; and values gap, 8, 35. See also Europe-United States relationship; Globalization; North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Western civilization, 17–18, 158–59 Western Europe. See Europe; European Union (EU); Europe-United States relationship West Germany. See Germany Wilders, Geert, 76 Will, George, 32 Williams, Right Rev. Rowan, 63 Williams, William Appleman, 129 Wilson, Harold, 193 Wilson, Woodrow, 156, 157, 160, 164, 166, 169, 176 Wolff, Larry, 158 Wolfowitz, Paul, 174 Women: in German military, 61; headscarf and veil (hijab) controversy regarding Muslim women, 6, 47–53, 73, 83–84; rape of Muslim women, 51 Workforce: in Asia, 122; in Europe, 41–42, 70, 120–21, 120nn86–87;

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guest worker program in Germany, 41–42; in Japan, 41; and multinational corporations, 123–24; and unemployment, 7, 51, 70; in United States, 41, 120; during war, 146 World Bank, 96, 136, 167 World Islamic League, 52 World Trade Organization (WTO), 131, 132, 133, 137, 138, 167 World War I: beginning of, 94, 104, 157; economy following, 145, 148; Germany in, 198, 201–2; and Great Britain, 146; imperialism preceding, 154; and revulsion from image of others, 204; and Wilson’s Fourteen Points, 160 World War II: Blitzkrieg warfare in, 173; and Churchill, 106, 123, 160; financial cost of, 148; France in, 160; Germany in, 95, 173, 180, 201–2; Japan in, 180, World War II (continued) 197; Resistance during, 106; and Roosevelt, 160, 169; Soviet Union in, 179; U.S. in, 160, 169, 197, 204; as watershed in U.S.-European relations, 161 Yemen, Islamist terrorists in, 74, 78 Yom Kippur War (1973), 193 Yugoslavia, 67–68, 80, 162, 193 Zakaria, Fareed, 183 Zinni, Anthony, 171, 175, 176

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About the Editors

is Assistant Professor of History at Mississippi State University and a Senior Fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. He is the author of The Whig Revival, 1808–1830. He lives in West Point, Mississippi. H A RV E Y S I C H E R M A N is President of the Foreign Policy Research Institute and coeditor of America the Vulnerable: Our Military Problems and How to Fix Them. He lives in Philadelphia. W I L L I A M A N T H O N Y H AY

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