The European Dream is a delicate Aristotelian balancing act between the desire for greater differentiation and deeper integration, the two poles that have characterized human development from the very beginning of the human journey. Negotiating the unfolding dialectic between differentiation and integration has been the central mission of every governing arrangement in history. Slaves and empires, subjects and kingdoms, citizens and states, and now persons and global governing institutions are each milestones along the evolutionary journey to greater individuation and integration of the human species. Universal human rights in the global age, like the earlier property rights regime of the nation-state era and the proprietary obligations of the feudal era, are the legal embodiment of the existing relationship between individuating and integrating forces. They are the connective tissue between the particular and the universal.
In every period of history, the struggle between individuating and integrating forces has been the core battleground of politics. Slaves want to be liberated, subjects want to be freed, citizens want to be represented, and persons want to be recognized. On the other hand, kingdoms want to rule, states want to govern, and multilevel governing institutions want to manage. Fealty codes, civil rights, political rights, social rights, and now human rights have each, in their own way, prescribed codes of behavior to maintain that sensitive balance between human differentiation and integration. And that is why people fight so passionately to articulate, secure, and shore up these codes. There is a deep unstated realization that they are the lifelines that connect the individual with the larger social forces at each stage of the human journey.
The new European Dream represents the next stage in the deepening human story of individuation and integration. The European Union is the first governing experiment to attempt an accommodation between the new forces of individuation and integration that are stretching human consciousness inward to the multiple identities of the post-modern persona and outward to the globalizing forces of the economy. Expect the struggle over human rights to broaden and deepen in Europe as hundreds of millions of people rethink their identities in an increasingly globalized society.
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Waging Peace
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MERICAN HARD-LINERS like to say that while the European Union might be an economic superpower, it is a political dwarf when it comes to the rough-and-tumble world of global geopolitics. It is fair to say that the conservative right, including most of the insiders in the Bush White House, loathe the “Brussels” mentality. There is the perception that the EU is soft, almost feminine in character, and unable and unwilling to fight for itself. Whenever the conversation turns to geopolitics in Washington, invariably the comment is made that Brussels whines about U.S. strong-arm tactics and bullying behavior but appears quite comfortable letting us sacrifice our young men and women in uniform around the world to protect European security interests.
Some say that the problem is that with the end of the Cold War, American and European interests have begun to diverge. The struggle to defend the West against Soviet aggression united our peoples in common cause for more than half a century. The fall of the Soviet Empire makes the American-European bond less salient. Moreover, now that the European Union rivals the U.S. in raw economic power, it’s understandable, argue “the realists,” that competitive pressures between the two superpowers create strains in the relationship and risk fissures in the Atlantic alliance. On the other hand, more moderate voices would argue that the American and European economies are so intertwined that, despite areas of contention, we have much more to gain than to lose by continuing close ties with our friends across the Atlantic.
My own belief is that the growing divide between America and Europe is more visceral than pragmatic. It has to do with very different sensibilities about how each superpower perceives its relationship to the world and the kind of vision of the future each holds.
Taking a Life
If we really want to understand how deep the chasm in thinking is between America’s perception of how to conduct foreign policy and the European Union’s, the best place to start is with analyzing the very different way each society views the question of capital punishment. It’s here that we come face-to-face with two very different ideas about whether the state can ever be justified in taking the life of a human being. Since war is all about taking lives and sacrificing lives, the European position on capital punishment offers insight into its approach to foreign policy and security matters.
No issue more unites Europeans than the question of capital punishment. For them, opposition to the death penalty is as deeply felt as opposition to slavery was for the American abolitionists of the nineteenth century. Indeed, for a society so used to muting its passions, Europeans express a raw emotional disgust of capital punishment that is not evident anywhere else in the world. Whenever a prisoner on death row in the United States is executed, it is barely noticed in America but elicits vehement protest across Europe. Make no mistake about it: Europeans are the abolitionists of the twenty-first century, and they are determined to evangelize the world and will not rest until capital punishment is abolished across the Earth.
Americans would find it incredible that candidate countries for EU membership must abolish capital punishment as a condition for entry into the Union. It tops the list of conditions for acceptance into the fold. Try to imagine the United States making opposition to the death penalty a condition for citizenship.
Why so fervent? Europeans have experienced, firsthand, so many human deaths and so much destruction at the hands of governments over the course of the twentieth century that the thought of the state retaining formal power to execute a human being is greeted with repulsion. More than 187 million human beings were killed in the century just passed, many of them in Europe.
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The death penalty, for Europeans, is a constant reminder of the dark side of their past, a period in which states regularly ordered the deaths of millions of human beings in the battlefields and in concentration camps stretching from Auschwitz to the Gulag.
In 1983, the Council of Europe adopted Protocol No. 6 to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, outlawing the death penalty, except in respect to acts committed in time of war or imminent threat of war. In 2002, the Council of Europe amended Protocol No. 6, barring the death penalty unconditionally, even including crimes committed during times of war or the imminent threat of war.
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The amended protocol has been the subject of growing controversy. Tempers flared between the U.S. and its European allies after the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks when France, the U.K., Spain, and Finland indicated that they would not extradite Al Qaeda terrorist suspects to the United States if they were tried under the proposed military tribunals and made subject to the death penalty.
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White House and State Department officials were livid, as were many Americans, at the prospect that a terrorist suspect, perhaps responsible for the brazen murder of three thousand people, would be afforded the legal protection of European countries.
Even if a person commits the most heinous of crimes against his fellow human beings, including genocide, he or she enjoys, in the official words of the European Union, “an inherent and inalienable dignity.”
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The death penalty, according to the EU, is “a denial of human dignity, which is a fundamental basis of the common heritage of the European Union as a union of shared values and principles.”
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That means that if Adolf Eichmann, for example, the architect of the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews and others, were to be tried today in Europe and found guilty, he would be spared the death penalty. (Eichmann was tried by an Israeli court in 1961 for crimes against humanity and found guilty and hanged in 1962.)
While many Americans oppose the death penalty and are as committed to its abolition as Europeans, the vast majority of Americans—two out of three—do not, and would likely argue that a mass murderer forfeits his or her right to be considered part of the human race.
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The Europeans see their position on the death penalty as going to the very heart of their new dream, and hope to convince the world of the righteousness of their cause. Here’s how the EU put it, in an official memorandum on the death penalty:
Long ago European countries, either in practice or in law, made a choice for humanity, abolishing the death penalty and thus fostering respect for human dignity. And this is an ultimate principle that the EU wishes to share with all countries, as it shares other common values and principles such as freedom, democracy, and the rule of law and safeguard of human rights. If it succeeds in reaching this goal, both the EU and those countries will have furthered the cause of humanity.”
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The EU memorandum goes on to say that it “invites the USA to equally embrace this cause.”
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The irony of all this is that the European Union, whose peoples have, for the most part, long ago eschewed any devout Christian affiliation, seem to be taking up where Christian doctrine left off, in regard to the inviolability of every human life.
Many Europeans might be reluctant to acknowledge their debt to Christianity, but the fact of the matter is that opposition to the death penalty is rooted in New Testament doctrine. In his Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says to the faithful, “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.”
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Christ goes even further, saying, “Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.”
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Contrast the European opposition to the death penalty with American sentiment. Here, in the most avowedly devout Christian country in the world, most Americans favor the Old Testament approach to punishment. Thirty-seven percent of those who favor the death penalty say they do so based on the Old Testament adage of “an eye for an eye.”
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Despite the fact that while dying on the cross, Christ pleaded with God to forgive his executioners, “for they know not what they do,” Americans are far less forgiving. American sentiment on crime is much more retributional in nature. Surveys show that many Americans believe that people sentenced to death deserve it. Some observers of the American psyche, including psychologist Richard Nisbett at the University of Michigan and psychologist Dov Cohen of the University of Illinois, believe that Americans’ predisposition for retribution stems, at least in part, from the need to protect possessions on the frontier when property rights were less secure.
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Every American youngster grows up watching Holly-wood Westerns where cattle rustlers are hunted down by sheriffs’ posses or vigilantes and hung from the nearest tree.
Europeans, on the other hand, deeply oppose the idea of retribution. The European Union makes clear that “capital punishment should not be seen as an appropriate way of compensating the suffering of crime victims’ families, as this view turns the justice system into a mere tool of illegitimate private vengeance.”
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At the heart of Christian doctrine is the belief in redemption—that even the worst sinner can be saved. The European Union embraces this most basic of Christian beliefs in its support of rehabilitation. The EU states that “maintaining capital punishment would not fit the philosophy of rehabilitation pursued in the criminal justice systems of all EU member states and according to which one of the penological aims of penalties is that of rehabilitating or resocializing the offender.”
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In fairness, it should be pointed out that rehabilitation continues to be the stated aim of the American penal system, and many Americans support that premise. But surveys show that many other Americans are beginning to turn away from that doctrine and are hardening their views on the role of the criminal justice system. The reversal in attitudes in just a few decades is striking, considering how basic the question of rehabilitation vs. retribution is to how a people define themselves and the moral codes by which they live. While Europe—and virtually the rest of the industrial world—has abolished capital punishment over the past three decades, America has gone in the opposite direction. Thirty-eight states now permit the death penalty, and in the past twenty-nine years, more than eight hundred people have been executed. More than 85 percent of the executions have occurred in the past decade alone.
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Americans’ support of the death penalty reflects not only our frontier tradition of swift and decisive Old Testament justice but also the American apocalyptic vision of a world divided between good and evil forces. In the end, good triumphs, but only if backed up by the righteous might of the state. While Europeans also recognize that there are bad guys in the world and that the might of the state occasionally has to be deployed to secure the general peace and welfare, they start from the premise that the imposition of state violence is a last resort and ought to be entertained only in the most extraordinary of circumstances.
It ought to be acknowledged that not all Europeans are opposed to the death penalty. A sizable number of people, in some countries, feel much like a majority of Americans do on the issue. But the political elite, opinion leaders, as well as the professional and middle class have long since tipped the scale in favor of abolition of state-sanctioned executions.