Many in the U.S. government would not subscribe to such overly heated rhetoric. Still, the reality is that the Bush doctrine, if taken to its logical extreme, does relegate all international covenants and commitments secondary to its sovereign right to be the ultimate arbiter of its country’s actions.
Divergent Views of the World
The U.S. foreign policy is light-years away from the foreign policy orientation of the twenty-five member states that make up the European Union. These countries have increasingly shed the historical legacy of nation-state sovereignty in favor of working in concert, under international laws, to which they are bound. The European Dream is one of inclusivity, not autonomy. They seek to live in a world governed by consensus. The “go it alone” policy of the U.S. is anathema to them because it threatens to unravel all of the painstaking small steps they have taken to pool their interests and share a collective destiny. They worry that U.S. flouting of international norms and agreements opens the door to the very Hobbesian world of “war of all against all” that they had hoped to leave behind in the ashes of the last world war.
Some will say, Hold on . . . Didn’t many European Union member nations act in possible violation of international law, not to mention the EU’s own governing principles, by joining the U.S. in its “coalition of the willing” in Iraq? Perhaps. But the interesting point was that the split inside the EU was the subject of much soul-searching in the aftermath of the Iraqi invasion. Instead of leading to irreconcilable fissures and the disaggregation of the Union, as some predicted it would, it had the opposite effect. Member states began asking how they might strengthen their common foreign and security policy to make sure that they didn’t suffer a repeat of the spectacle that unfolded in the days leading up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The sovereignty issue is what ultimately divides the U.S. and the EU, and an older American Dream from the new dream shared among most Europeans. To whom do we owe our ultimate allegiance? Where does authority lie in a globalized world? The U.S. is reverting back to an earlier era where allegiance is to the nation-state and final authority rests with the sovereign government. The state confers all rights upon its citizens and determines the nation’s role in the international community. There is no higher authority. Within the nation-state container, people are granted civil, political, and social rights, which allow them the opportunity to acquire property and pursue happiness.
The European Dream is far more cosmopolitan. While the EU member states retain a modicum of sovereignty, their citizenry are also bound to universal human rights that supersede sovereign state prerogatives. If the American doctrine of unqualified state sovereignty were to prevail, the whole notion of universal human rights, the very edifice upon which the new European Dream is built, would collapse. Universal human rights are a sham in a world where the highest authority rests with the sovereign state. If the nation-state is the ultimate sovereign authority, as many in the Bush Administration believe, then human rights can’t possibly be universal, because their very viability would depend on the whims and caprices of a territory-bound political institution.
It’s a strange paradox that in a world that is increasingly globalized and in which geographic boundaries of all sorts are loosening or disappearing altogether, the U.S. government is hardening its notion of sovereignty in contradistinction to everything going on around it. But that’s because dreams die hard. We are a people who don’t like to be told what to do by anyone. We like to think that we are capable of making our own way in the world without outside interference. We don’t even like our own government to tell us what we can and can’t do. Why would we be any more disposed to having a foreign power dictate the terms of our behavior? Our sense of self-reliance and autonomy runs deep, to the very marrow of our being.
The mere thought of being constrained by the will of others goes against the grain of the American spirit. Constraints are not our strong suit. In fact, it is the lack of constraints, the openness of the American way of life, that has allowed us to realize our dreams. Bowing to the will of others seems too subservient, too submissive for the American mind. President Bush, for whatever our European friends think of his intellectual credentials, understands the American psyche. In his State of the Union Address in 2003, President Bush told the American people that “the course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others.”
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Americans, by and large, have mixed feelings about international law. Polls show that a majority of Americans support our membership in the United Nations and favor the U.S. being party to international agreements. A comprehensive poll conducted by the German Marshall Fund in the fall of 2002—a year after the attacks on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon—found 61 percent of Americans favoring a multilateral approach to foreign policy, and 65 percent of Americans saying that the U.S. should invade Iraq only with UN approval and the support of its allies.
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I’d suggest, however, that American sentiment in this regard is thin compared to our friends in Europe. Just six months after the poll was conducted, a firm majority of Americans rallied behind President Bush’s decision to send troops into Iraq without a UN resolution. At the time of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, 72 percent of the American public said that they favored sending in troops, and only 25 percent said that they opposed the invasion.
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While some Americans took to the streets in protest, the numbers were relatively small compared to the outpouring of sentiment across Europe in opposition to the U.S. invasion.
The reality is that Americans are deeply divided on how best to conduct foreign policy. A sizable minority, primarily in the northeastern and northwestern regions of the country, think more like Europeans when it comes to foreign policy. Their views tend to be more cosmopolitan. The southern, southwestern, midwestern, and Rocky Mountain regions—whose population makes up a solid majority—are more likely to identify with America’s frontier mentality and favor a “go it alone” approach, if necessary, to secure American self-interests abroad.
Similarly, the German Marshall Fund reported that 75 percent of Americans believe global warming is a serious issue, and a majority favor the U.S. joining the EU in ratifying the Kyoto Protocol.
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Yet here, too, the reality is somewhat different. American voters are opposed to government legislation that would force automakers to increase fuel-efficiency standards if it meant having to drive smaller cars, and a majority oppose even a moderate increase in the gasoline tax—the U.S. has the lowest gasoline taxes of any major industrial country.
Or, consider the American view of the International Criminal Court. Seventy-one percent of the American people say they favor ratification of the treaty. Yet barely a whisper of disagreement could be heard on the hustings when the Clinton Administration signaled that U.S. approval of the agreement had to be conditional on American troops being immune from prosecution by the judicial body—which makes a mockery of the very idea of the institution.
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The vast majority of Americans agree with the Clinton Administration stance. While 71 percent of the French electorate, 65 percent of the German public, and 52 percent of the British people say the International Criminal Court should have authority to try their nation’s soldiers for war crimes, only 37 percent of Americans say the International Criminal Court should have jurisdiction over U.S. troops accused of war crimes.
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I have a hard time imagining the American public ever allowing the International Criminal Court to try American soldiers for war crimes.
Political scientist Francis Fukuyama writes that “Americans . . . tend not to see any source of democratic legitimacy higher than the nation-state.”
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Europeans think differently. While European states are ceding more and more sovereignty to the EU and international bodies, the U.S. is going the other way. That’s because Europeans feel that their freedom is enhanced by inclusivity and embeddedness with others, while Americans feel that transferring sovereign rights to extraterritorial agreements and institutions diminishes our sovereignty and results in loss of personal freedom.
What, then, does a European foreign and security policy look like? For beginners, it’s so utterly different from anything that came before it in human history that it requires a leap of human imagination to even entertain it. European foreign policy is built on spreading peace rather than amassing power.
Europeans reject the kind of power politics that has dominated foreign policy for centuries and has led to so much death and destruction in the world. European leaders ask rhetorically: Who knows better than us the terrible consequences that can result from nations attempting to assert their will over others by means of coercion and force? And to those who say that human behavior will never change, Europeans retort, Look at what we’ve accomplished in Europe. After centuries of fighting among ourselves, twenty-five nations have put down their arms, joined with one another, and vowed never to go to war with one another again. German foreign minister Joschka Fischer speaks for many in Europe who are determined to never again allow national rivalries to descend into open warfare. Looking back at the checkered history of the modern nation-state, Fischer says that Europe is now steering a different course into the future: “The core of the concept of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European balance-of-power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states that had emerged following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.”
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Fischer and other European leaders are committed to replacing the old ideology, steeped in the Hobbesian vision of a “war of all against all,” with a new vision of perpetual peace.
The new European Dream has ancient roots. In 1795, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant published an essay entitled
Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch.
Although it received little attention at the time, the piece was resurrected in the post-World War II era, and has become an almost biblical reference for the new European vanguard. Kant envisioned a “state of universal peace” brought about by the creation of “a world republic.” Kant believed that such a state would be possible once the nations of the world accepted representative forms of governance. The spread of democratic principles, thought Kant, encourages cooperation over conflict and lays the groundwork for a cosmopolitan order.
While Europeans don’t espouse a world government, they do believe that the deepening of the democratic impulse can lead to a new way for people to behave with one another—one based on mutual respect, empathy, and a recognition of “the other.” That’s why European leaders favor negotiation over ultimatums, reconciliation over recrimination, and cooperation over competition.
Romano Prodi, the president of the European Commission, says that the EU’s goal is to establish “a superpower on the European continent that stands equal to the United States.”
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Many American political observers worry that remarks like these signal a new era of conflict between Europe and America and warn that the United States needs to remain watchful and on guard lest Europe become a new hegemon and a threat to America’s self-interests. They misunderstand what Mr. Prodi means by the term “superpower.” Europeans have a very different idea in mind of what ought to constitute a superpower in a globalized society. Listen carefully to how President Prodi explains the success of the European experiment. He writes,
The genius of the founding fathers lay in translating extremely high political ambitions . . . into a series of more specific, almost technical decisions. This indirect approach made further action possible. Rapprochement took place gradually. From confrontation we moved to willingness to cooperate in the economic sphere and then on to integration.
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For Prodi and other European leaders, superpower status is derived from expanding cooperation rather than enlarging sovereignty. It’s not force of arms, but negotiating skills and openness to dialogue and conflict resolution that are the distinguishing characteristics of this new kind of superpower. That’s why “process” is so important to the new politics. The essence of the European Dream is the overcoming of brute power and the establishment of moral conscience as the operating principle governing the affairs of the human family.
Most Americans find such sentiments a bit gooey and unrealistic. Europeans say that the opposite is the case. The new Europe was not born of naïveté and inspired by Pollyannaish fantasies but, rather, developed out of a sense of utter repugnance at the kind of barbaric behavior human beings are capable of inflicting on their fellow human beings. The new European experiment is an attempt to transcend the worst vestiges of humanity’s past and is guided not by wishful thinking but by a sober assessment of the human condition.
Now that Europe has shown that its new approach to politics can work for twenty-five nations, representing 455 million human beings, it is anxious to share its experience with the rest of the world. President Prodi’s idea of a European superpower is something quite new and extraordinary. He believes that the European Union “has a role to play in world ‘governance’ ”—to make the European experience a model for the rest of the world to emulate. Prodi notes with pride that in Europe, “the rule of law has replaced the crude interplay of power . . . power politics have lost their influence.” He believes that by “making a success of integration we are demonstrating to the world that it is possible to create a method for peace.”
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In a survey of public opinion over whether the European Union should become a superpower, 65 percent of the European public said they favor the EU becoming a peer of the United States. But when asked why they favor such a course, the answer they gave was that it would allow Europe to more effectively cooperate rather than compete with the United States. Even in France, a country most Americans feel to be occasionally at odds with the U.S., 90 percent of the public favored the EU becoming a superpower, and the overwhelming majority said that if it were on a more equal footing with America, Europe would be able to work much more closely with the United States.
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