The end of history was supposed to be the victory of the values and institutions of the "West". But the tensions between the US and Europe, on issues such as the policy against Islamic terrorism and the attack on Iraq, are an expression of a fundamental rift in Western ideology: the US emphasizes the sovereignty of each country while Europe
By Francis Fukuyama
Photo: IP
Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and more general Islamic extremists - all of these are ideological challenges to Western liberal democracy, and in some respects they are even more difficult challenges than communism was. But in the long term it is difficult to see Islamic fundamentalism as a realistic alternative as a ruling ideology for societies in the real world. Not only is its appeal limited to non-Muslims, it also does not meet the aspirations of the large majority of Muslims themselves.
In the countries that have recently experienced life under a Muslim theocracy - Iran and Afghanistan - there is ample evidence that it has also become very unpopular.
While fanatical Muslims armed with weapons of mass destruction pose a serious threat in the short term, the longer term battle of ideas will not come from this direction. The 11/XNUMX terrorist attacks on the United States are a serious distraction, but eventually modernization and globalization will continue to be the central shaping principles of world politics.
But another important issue was raised, and that is - if "the West" is indeed a coherent concept, and if the United States and its foreign policy can themselves become the central issues in international politics.
After September 11, many spontaneous expressions of support for the United States and the Americans poured in from around the world, and European governments immediately sided with the United States in its "war on terror". But after America demonstrated its absolute military dominance when it successfully tried to drive al-Qaeda and the Taliban out of Afghanistan, new expressions of anti-Americanism began to flow.
After George Bush in his State of the Nation address in January denounced Iran, Iraq and North Korea as the "axis of evil", not only European intellectuals but also politicians in Europe and the European public as a whole began to criticize the United States on a wide variety of fronts.
Since the "Axis of Evil" speech
what is going on here The end of history was supposed to be the victory of Western values and institutions, not just American, and making liberal democracy and the market economy the only sustainable choices. In the Cold War, alliances based on common values of freedom and democracy fought together. However, a huge gap has opened up between American and European perceptions of the world, and the sense of shared values is eroding. Does the use of the term "the West" still make sense in the first decade of the 21st century? Is the fault line in the issue of globalization actually a dividing line not between the West and others but between the United States and all the rest?
The issues raised in the American-European disputes since the Axis of Evil speech usually revolve around the claim of American unilateralism and questions of international law. There is now a familiar list of European claims against American policy, which includes, among other things, the withdrawal of the Bush administration from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the fact that the United States has avoided ratifying the Rio Convention for the Protection of Biological Diversity, its withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and adopted the missile defense system, its opposition to the ban on the use of land mines, its treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners in the military camp in Guantanamo Bay, its opposition to new clauses in the Convention on Biological Warfare, and most recently its opposition to the International Criminal Court. For the Europeans, the most serious expression of American unilateralism is the declared intention of the Bush administration to bring about regime change in Iraq, even if the US has to invade Iraq alone.
The Axis of Evil speech did indicate a very important change in American foreign policy - from deterrence to active prevention of terrorism. This doctrine was further emphasized in Bush's speech at West Point in June, in which he declared that "the war on terror will not be won on the defense front." He continued: "We must transfer the fight to the enemy, disrupt his plans and confront the worst threats before they arise. In the world we have entered, the only way to security is through action."
According to the European perception, Europe strives to create an international order that is truly based on rules, and suitable for the conditions of the post-Cold War world. This world will be free from bitter ideological conflicts and large-scale military rivalry, a world that provides ample ground for consensus, dialogue and negotiation as means of conflict resolution. Europeans are driven by the declaration of an unbridled doctrine of preventive actions against terrorists or terrorist-sponsoring states, according to which the United States alone decides when and where to use force.
There is a deep principled issue here that guarantees that the transatlantic relations will continue to be sensitive in the years to come. The disagreement is not on the principles of liberal democracy but on the question of where lies the supreme source of the legitimacy of liberal democracy. Americans tend to see the constitutional democratic nation-state as the first source of democratic legitimacy. If any international body has legitimacy, it is because a democratic majority in the states has delegated legitimacy to it through a process of negotiation, contractual in nature. The signed parties can withdraw at any stage of the granting of legitimacy. Law and international organizations have no independent existence outside of this type of voluntary agreement between sovereign nation states.
In contrast, Europeans tend to believe that democratic legitimacy grows out of the will of an international community, much larger than any single nation-state. This international community is not embodied in any single constitutional democratic world order, but it delegates legitimacy to existing international institutions, which partially embody it. Thus, therefore, the peacekeeping forces in the former Yugoslavia, for example, are not just an expression of ad hoc arrangements between governments, but it is more correct to see them as moral expressions of the will and norms of the wider international community.
Europe prefers dialogue
One might be tempted to say that the rigid defense of national sovereignty of the type adopted by Republican Senator Jesse Helms is typical only of a certain part of the American right, and that the left has a tendency towards internationalism that is no less than that of the Europeans. This is largely true in the field of foreign and security policy, but it is completely untrue when it comes to the economic side of liberal internationalism. The American left does not grant the World Trade Organization, or any other body related to trade, any special status when it comes to legitimacy. He treats the World Trade Organization with great suspicion when he rejects a law on environmental or labor matters in the name of free trade. In these areas, American leftists are no less zealous for democratic sovereignty than rightists such as Helms.
The feature of American unilateralism and European multilateralism applies first and foremost to foreign and security policy issues, and beyond that also to environmental issues. In the economic field, the United States is deeply rooted in multilateral institutions, despite its dominant position in the world economy.
The entire European Union has a population of 375 million people and a GDP of close to 10 trillion dollars, this is compared to the United States, whose population is 280 million people and whose GDP is seven trillion dollars. Europe could certainly spend money on defense at a rate that would put it on par with the United States, but it chooses not to do so. Europe as a whole barely spends 130 billion dollars a year on defense, an amount that is constantly shrinking, compared to American defense expenditures, which amount to 300 billion dollars a year and are supposed to rise steeply. The increase in US defense spending that the Bush administration requested following 11/XNUMX is greater than Britain's entire defense budget.
Despite the turn to a more conservative direction in European politics in 2002, no right-wing candidate is running an election campaign on a platform of a significant increase in defense spending.
Europe's ability to deploy the power at its disposal is of course limited to a significant extent due to difficulties of joint action, arising from the current way of decision-making in the European Union. But its failure to establish a more usable military force is clearly a political issue.
Whether it's welfare, crime, regulation, education, or foreign policy, there are differences in approach that always set the United States apart from any other. The United States is consistently more individualistic, believing in free enterprise and equality than other democracies.
Europeans see the violent history of the first half of the 20th century as a direct consequence of the unbridled application of national sovereignty. The European Union they have been building for themselves since the 50s is deliberately designed to layer the sovereignties with many layers of rules, norms and restrictions to prevent a situation where they will ever spiral out of control again. While the European Union could have become a mechanism for accumulating power and exercising it outside the borders of Europe, most Europeans see the purpose of the Union precisely in transcending power politics.
Many Americans think the world has become a fundamentally more dangerous place since 11/XNUMX. They believe that once a leader like Saddam Hussein has a nuclear weapon, he will turn it over to terrorists. They believe it poses a threat to Western society as a whole. The dimensions of this threat are the driving force behind the new doctrine of preemptive action and the much greater willingness of the United States to use force unilaterally around the world.
In contrast, many Europeans believe that the September 11 attacks were a one-of-a-kind event in which Osama bin Laden got lucky and managed to strike big. But the likelihood that al-Qaeda will achieve similar successes in the future is small, in their opinion, given the high level of alertness and the protective and preventive measures adopted since then.
Europeans believe that the likelihood that Saddam will transfer nuclear weapons to terrorists is small, and that the deterrent factor continues to influence him. An invasion of Iraq is therefore not necessary; A policy of containment, which will operate as it has since the Gulf War, is sufficient. And finally, they tend to believe that Muslim terrorists do not pose an overall threat to the West but are focused on the United States because of American policies in the Middle East and the Gulf region.
The American-European rift that emerged in 2002 is not just a temporary problem, reflecting the style of the Bush administration or the situation in the world following September 11; It reflects fundamental disagreements regarding the place of democratic legitimacy within wider Western civilization.
The article is based on a lecture by Fukuyama, professor of international political economy at Johns Hopkins University in Washington, in Melburne
