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I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN by expressing my gratitude
to The Centre for Independent Studies and
its director, Greg Lindsay, for inviting
me to Australia and giving me the opportunity
to deliver the prestigious Bonython Lecture.
I follow in a line of extraordinarily distinguished
lecturers, and am humbled by the expectations
they have established. I would also like
to express a special word of gratitude to
Owen Harries, who, early on in his tenure
as editor of The National Interest, encouraged
me to write the article that eventually became
‘The End of History?’. It was he who gave
it prominence and encouraged debate over
it, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Like many Americans, I have been preoccupied
since September 11 trying to understand the
meaning of this event and how the world has
changed as a result of it. An accounting
has been demanded of me in particular, since
I argued 12 years ago that we had reached
the ‘end of history’. September 11 would
seem to qualify, prima facie, as an historical
event, and the fact that it was perpetrated
by a group of Islamic terrorists who reject
virtually all aspects of the modern, Western
world, lends credence, at least on the surface,
to Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’
hypothesis.
I have developed a standard answer to this
challenge, which incidentally will not be
the subject of my talk tonight. The standard
answer goes something like this. The ‘end
of history’ hypothesis was about the process
of modernisation. Progressive intellectuals
around the world spent much of the last century
and a half believing that historical progress
would result in an evolution of modern societies
toward socialism. In more recent years, they
have held that societies could modernise
and yet remain fundamentally different culturally.
My hypothesis was that there was such a thing
as a single, coherent modernisation process,
but that it led not to socialism or to a
variety of culturally-determined locations,
but rather to liberal democracy and market-oriented
economics as the only viable choices. The
process of modernisation was, moreover, a
universal one that would sooner or later
drag all societies in its train.
Understood in this fashion, September 11
represents a real challenge, but not an ultimately
convincing one. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda,
the Taliban, and radical Islamism more generally,
do in fact represent ideological challenges
to Western liberal democracy that are in
certain ways sharper than those offered by
Communism. But in the long run, it is hard
to see that Islamism offers much of a realistic
alternative as a governing ideology for real
world societies. Not only does it have limited
appeal to non-Muslims; it does not meet the
aspirations of the vast majority of Muslims
themselves. In the countries that have had
recent experience of living under an actual
Muslim theocracy—Iran and Afghanistan—there
is every evidence that it has become extremely
unpopular. Thus, while fanatical Islamists
armed with weapons of mass destruction pose
a severe threat in the short-run, the longer-term
challenge in the battle of ideas is not going
to come from this quarter. September 11 represents
a serious detour, but in the end modernisation
and globalisation will remain the central
structuring principles of world politics.
I want, however, to explore another important
issue that is related to the question of
the end of history that has been raised by
events since September 11, namely, whether
the ‘West’, which was in my earlier account
the ultimate goal of the historical process,
is really a coherent concept, and whether
the United States and its foreign policy
might themselves become the central issues
in international politics.
Reactions to September 11
In the immediate aftermath of September 11,
the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard published
a long piece in Le Monde in which he argued
that ‘Ultimately, it is they [i. e., the
terrorists] who’ve done the deed, but it
is we who have wanted it. . . . Terrorism
is immoral, and it responds to a globalisation
that is itself immoral.’ His image is one
of France, and Europe more generally, as
a island of civilisation caught in a struggle
between two morally equivalent fundamentalisms,
that of the United States and of the radical
Islamists.
Baudrillard does not, of course, speak for
all Frenchmen, and his piece was quickly
denounced in Le Monde by Alain Minc who said
that it reflected ‘the French intelligensia’s
traditional inability to recognise that a
hierarchy of values exists’. But Baudrillard’s
view, while phrased in an offensive way unique
to French intellectuals, represents more
of an undercurrent in Europe than many Americans
realise or are inclined to admit. The idea
that the United States was only getting what
it deserved in the Word Trade Center/Pentagon
attacks was a far from uncommon view, not
just in Europe but in many other parts of
the world.
There was, of course, a large, spontaneous
outpouring of support for the United States
and for Americans around the world after
September 11, with European governments lining
up immediately to help the US prosecute its
‘war on terrorism’. But with the demonstration
of total American military dominance that
came with the successful rousting of al-Qaeda
and the Taliban from Afghanistan, new expressions
of anti-Americanism began to pour forth.
After President Bush’s denunciation of the
‘axis of evil’ in his late January State
of the Union address, it was not just European
intellectuals but European politicians and
publics more generally that began to criticise
the United States on a wide variety of fronts.
According to Will Hutton, the Labourite journalist,
Britain’s US ally is ‘not the same good America
. . . that reconstructed Europe and led an
international liberal economic and social
order’(1) Rather, it had been taken over
by a group of crazed conservatives and was
now the chief source of global instability.
In France, a book became a bestseller arguing
that September 11 was not the work of Muslim
extremists but of a cabal of conservatives
within the US government. (2) According to
one poll, some 30 percent of French people
regard the United States as France’s chief
enemy. While many Americans regard September
11 as a broad attack on Western civilisation,
Europeans are much more likely to regard
it as a response to specifically American
policies, representing a risk from which
they are largely immune.
What is going on here? The end of history
was supposed to be about the victory of Western,
not simply American, values and institutions.
The Cold War was fought by alliances based
on shared values of freedom and democracy.
And yet an enormous gulf has opened up in
American and European perceptions about the
world, and the sense of shared values is
increasingly frayed. Does the concept of
the ‘West’ still make sense in the first
decade of the 21st century? Is the fracture
line over globalisation actually a division
not between the West and the Rest, but between
the United States and the Rest?
And where will Australia fit in such a divided
world? It is historically tied more closely
to Europe than to America, but as a land
of new settlement it shares many characteristics
with the United States. It is situated, moreover,
in a part of the world in which American
power and influence matter greatly in the
maintenance of peace and an open international
trading order.
In my view, the idea of the West remains
a coherent one, and that there remain critical
shared values, institutions, and interests
that will continue to bind the world’s developed
democracies, and Europe and the United States,
in particular. But there are some deeper
differences emerging between Western democracies
that will be highly neuralgic in America’s
dealings with the world in the coming years
that need critical attention by policymakers
and by, yes, statesmen.
The nature of the rift between America and
its allies
In the remainder of this lecture I will refer
repeatedly to differences between Europe
and the United States. But it should be kept
in mind that ‘Europe’ in this context is
more of a placeholder for global attitudes
critical of American foreign policy. Europeans,
of course, are themselves divided in their
views of the US; the views I characterise
as typical of them are often broadly representative
of left-of-centre opinion in a variety of
countries around the world, including Australia
and New Zealand. Asian countries from Japan
to Malaysia have voiced similar misgivings
about American unilateralism in the wake
of September 11. Some views, however, related
to the need to devolve sovereignty to supranational
organisations, are peculiar to the historical
experience of members of the European Union.
The ostensible issues raised in the US-European
disputes since the ‘axis of evil’ speech
for the most part revolve around alleged
American unilateralism and international
law. There is by now a familiar list of European
complaints about American policy, including
but not limited to the Bush Administration’s
withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on global
warming, its failure to ratify the Rio Pact
on biodiversity, its withdrawal from the
ABM treaty and pursuit of missile defence,
its opposition to the ban on land mines,
its treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo
Bay, its opposition to new provisions of
the biological warfare convention, and most
recently its opposition to the International
Criminal Court.
The most serious act of US unilateralism
in European eyes concerns the Bush Administration’s
announced intention to bring about regime
change in Iraq, if necessary through a go-it-alone
invasion. The axis of evil speech did indeed
mark a very important change in American
foreign policy from deterrence to a policy
of active preemption of terrorism. This doctrine
was further amplified in Bush’s West Point
speech in June, in which he declared ‘the
war on terror will not be won on the defensive.
We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt
his plans, and confront the worst threats
before they emerge. In the world we have
entered, the only path to safety is the path
of action.’
The European view is that Europe is seeking
to create a genuine rule-based international
order suitable to the circumstances of the
post-Cold War world. That world, free of
sharp ideological conflicts and large-scale
military competition, is one that gives substantially
more room for consensus, dialogue, and negotiation
as ways of settling disputes. They are horrified
by the Bush Administration’s announcement
of a virtually open-ended doctrine of preemption
against terrorists or states that sponsor
terrorists, in which the United States and
the United States alone decides when and
where to use force. In Europe, the nation-state
to an increasing extent has been dissociated
from military power, despite the fact that
the modern state built on centralised power
was born on that continent.
Robert Kagan, in a brilliant recent article
in Policy Review, (3) put the current difference
between the United States and Europe as follows.
The Europeans are the ones who actually believe
they are living at the end of history, that
is, in a largely peaceful world that to an
increasing degree can be governed by law,
norms, and international agreements. In this
world, power politics and classical realpolitik
have become obsolete. Americans, by contrast,
think they are still living in history, and
need to use traditional power-political means
to deal with threats from Iraq, al-Qaeda,
and other malign forces. According to Kagan,
the Europeans are half right: they have indeed
created an end-of-history world for themselves
within the European Union, where sovereignty
has given way to supranational organisation.
What they don’t understand, however, is that
the peace and safety of their European bubble
is guaranteed ultimately by American military
power. Absent that, they themselves would
be dragged backwards into history.
Is the rift genuine?
This, at least, is the popularly accepted
account of American unilateralism and European
emphasis on international law and institutions.
We need to ask, however, whether it is in
fact accurate, and whether the US has consistently
been more unilateralist than Europe. The
truth of the matter here is far more complicated,
with the differences between the US and Europe
being much more nuanced.
Liberal internationalism, after all, has
a long and honoured place in American foreign
policy. The United States was, after all,
the country that promoted the League of Nations,
the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions,
the GATT/WTO, and a host of other international
organisations. There are a huge number of
international governance organisations in
the world today in which the US participates
as an active, if not the most active member,
from standards-setting, nuclear power safety,
and scientific cooperation, to aviation safety,
bank settlements, drug regulation, accounting
standards/corporate governance, and telecommunications.
It is useful here to make a distinction between
those forms of liberal internationalism that
are primarily economic, and those that have
a more political or security dimension. Particularly
in recent years, the United States has focused
on international institutions that have promoted
international trade and investment. It has
put substantial effort into creating a rule-based
international trade and investment regime
with stronger and more autonomous decision-making
authority. The motives for this are obvious:
Americans benefit strongly from and indeed
dominate the global economy, which is why
globalisation bears a ‘made in the USA’ label.
In the realm of economics, the Europeans
don’t have all that great a record with regard
to respect for multilateral rules when compared
to the United States. They have been on their
high horse this year because of American
actions with regard to steel and agricultural
subsidies, and they are right to complain
about American hypocrisy with regard to free
trade. But this I regard as kind of normal
hypocrisy: all countries act in contradiction
of declared free trade principles, and the
Europeans have been notorious for among other
things agricultural subsidies maintained
at higher levels and over longer periods
of time than American ones. America is guilty
only of the most recent outbreak of hypocrisy.
And in any event, the American administration
can argue that its backsliding on trade was
a tactical retreat undertaken for the sake
of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), which
was in fact granted by the US Congress in
early August. With TPA the Bush Administration
has announced an ambitious trade liberalisation
agenda including the ending of agricultural
subsidies, though at this point the agenda
remains an unfulfilled promise.
There are a number of areas where the Europeans
have acted unilaterally in economic matters,
and in ways that at times contravene the
existing legal order. The EU resisted unfavourable
decisions against them on bananas for nine
years, and beef hormones for even longer.
They have announced a precautionary principle
with regard to genetically modified foods,
which is very difficult to reconcile with
the WTO’s sanitary and phytosanitary rules.
Indeed, the Europeans have been violating
their own rules with regard to GM foods,
with certain member states setting standards
different from those of the community itself.
The European Competition Commission under
Mario Monti successfully blocked the merger
of GE and Honeywell when the deal had been
approved by American and Canadian regulators,
in ways that promoted suspicions that the
EU was simply acting to protect specific
European interests. Finally, the EU has succeeded
in exporting its data privacy rules to the
United States through its safe harbour arrangements.
For all their talk of wanting to establish
a rule-based international order, the Europeans
haven’t done that well within the EU itself.
As John van Oudenaren has argued, the Europeans
have developed a decision-making system of
Byzantine complexity, with overlapping and
inconsistent rules and weak enforcement powers.
(4) The European Commission often doesn’t
have the power even to monitor compliance
of member states with its own directives,
much less the ability to make them conform.
This fits with an attitude towards law in
certain parts of Europe that sees declarative
intent often of greater importance than actual
implementation, and which Americans tend
to see instead as undermining the very rule
of law.
It should be noted that Australia and New
Zealand are actually in a much better position
to criticise American hypocrisy on trade
issues than are the Europeans, since neither
one has anything like a Common Agricultural
Policy or the clout to enforce safety or
privacy rules unilaterally on other countries.
Both countries, being highly dependent on
agricultural exports, have been strong supporters
of free trade in recent years and are particularly
vulnerable to American agricultural subsidies.
New Zealand in particular since the mid-1980s
has moved to one of the lowest levels of
agricultural protection of any country in
the world.
The second type of liberal internationalism
has to do with politics and security. With
the exception of the two environmental agreements
(Rio and Kyoto), all of the US-European disputes
in recent months have concerned security-related
issues (the International Criminal Court
may not seem like a security matter, but
the reason that the United States does not
want to participate in it is out of fear
that its soldiers and officials may be held
criminally liable by the Court in the conduct
of their duties). It is in this realm that
the tables are turned and European charges
of American unilateralism are made.
It is possible to overstate the importance
of these disputes. A great deal of European
irritation with the United States arises
from stylistic matters, and from the Bush
Administration’s strange failure to consult,
explain, justify, and cajole in the manner
of previous administrations. The administration
could have let ratification of Kyoto languish
in Congress as the Clinton administration
did, rather than casually announcing withdrawal
from the pact at a luncheon for NATO ambassadors.
Europeans did not like the religious language
of the ‘axis of evil’, nor the fact that
this major policy shift was announced as
it were on the fly without prior notification
or explanation. The United States has had
a consistent record of using strong-arm tactics
to shape international agreements to its
liking, and then to walk away from them at
the last moment. This pattern goes all the
way back to Woodrow Wilson and the League
of Nations, and was continued in negotiations
over the Rio Pact, Kyoto, and the International
Criminal Court (ICC). Even if you are skeptical
about the value of international institutions,
it is not difficult to see why non-Americans
might get a little irritated at this kind
of behavior.
The foregoing suggests that much of the European-American
rift concerns style rather than substance.
The Clinton administration talked a multilateralist
game, while the Bush administration has at
times asserted what amounts to a kind of
principled unilateralism; in fact, policy
between the two administrations doesn’t differ
in substance all that much. Clinton may have
signed the Kyoto and ICC treaties, but he
knew he wouldn’t spend much political capital
in a hopeless effort to get them through
Congress. On the other hand, the US effort
in Afghanistan made use of a reasonably broad
coalition of forces.
But while it is tempting to say the problem
is simply stylistic, I think that it is fundamentally
wrong. There is in fact a deeper issue of
principle between the United States and Europe
that will ensure that transatlantic relations
will remain neuralgic through the years to
come. The disagreement is not over the principles
of liberal democracy, which both sides share,
but over where the ultimate source of liberal
democratic legitimacy lies.
To put it rather schematically and over-simply,
Americans tend not to see any source of democratic
legitimacy higher than the constitutional
democratic nation-state. To the extent that
any international organisation has legitimacy,
it is because duly constituted democratic
majorities have handed that legitimacy up
to them in a negotiated, contractual process.
Such legitimacy can be withdrawn at any time
by the contracting parties; international
law and organisation have no existence independent
of this type of voluntary agreement between
sovereign nation-states.
Europeans, by contrast, tend to believe that
democratic legitimacy flows from the will
of an international community much larger
than any individual nation-state. This international
community is not embodied concretely in a
single, global democratic constitutional
order. Yet it hands down legitimacy to existing
international institutions, which are seen
as partially embodying it. Thus, peacekeeping
forces in the former Yugoslavia are not merely
ad hoc inter-governmental arrangements, but
rather moral expressions of the will and
norms of the larger international community.
One might be tempted to say that the stiff-necked
defence of national sovereignty of the type
practiced by Sen. Jesse Helms is a characteristic
only of a certain part of the American Right,
and that the Left is as internationalist
as are the Europeans. This would be largely
correct in the security-foreign policy arena,
but dead wrong with regard to the economic
side of liberal internationalism. That is,
the Left does not grant the WTO or any other
trade-related body any special status with
regard to legitimacy. They are very suspicious
of the WTO when it overturns an environment
or labour law in the name of free trade,
and are just as jealous of democratic sovereignty
on these issues as Sen. Helms.
Between these two views of the sources of
legitimacy, I would say that the Europeans
are theoretically right, but wrong in practice.
They assert that they and not the Americans
are the true believers in liberal universal
values. It is in fact impossible to assert
as a theoretical matter that proper liberal
democratic procedure by itself inevitably
results in outcomes that are necessarily
legitimate and just. A constitutional order
that is procedurally democratic can still
decide to do terrible things to other countries
that violate human rights and norms of decency
on which its own democratic order is based.
Indeed, it can violate the higher principles
upon which its legitimacy is based, as Lincoln
argued was the case with slavery. The legitimacy
of its actions are not in the end based on
democratic procedural correctness, but on
the prior rights and norms which come from
a moral realm higher than that of the legal
order.
The problem with the European position is
that while such a higher realm of liberal
democratic values might theoretically exist,
it is very imperfectly embodied in any given
international institution. The very idea
that this legitimacy is handed downwards
from a willowy, disembodied international
level rather than handed upwards from concrete,
legitimate democratic publics on a nation-state
level virtually invites abuse on the part
of elites who are then free to interpret
the will of the international community to
suit their own preferences.
The second important practical problem with
the European position is that of enforcement.
The one power that is unique to sovereign
nation-states and to them alone, even in
today’s globalised world, is the power to
enforce laws. Even if existing international
laws and organisations did accurately reflect
the will of the international community
(whatever that means), enforcement remains
by and large the province of nation states.
A great deal of both international and national
law coming out of Europe consists of what
amount to social policy wish lists that are
completely unenforceable. Europeans justify
these kinds of laws saying they are expressions
of social objectives; Americans reply, correctly
in my view, that such unenforceable aspirations
undermine the rule of law itself.
The only way that this circle of theory and
practice could be squared would be if there
were genuine democratic government at a level
higher than that of the nation-state. Such
global democratic government could then be
said to truly embody the will of the international
community, while containing procedural safeguards
to make sure that that will was not willfully
misinterpreted or abused by various elites
or interest groups. It would also presumably
have enforcement powers that do not today
exist, apart from the specific ad hoc arrangements
made for peacekeeping and multilateral coalitions.
Some Europeans may believe that the steady
accumulation of smaller international institutions
like the ICC or the various agencies of the
United Nations will some day result in something
resembling democratic world government. In
my view, the chance of this happening is
as close to zero as you ever get in political
life. What will be practically possible to
construct in terms of international institutions
will not be legitimate or democratic, and
what will be legitimate and democratic will
not be possible to construct. For better
or worse, such international institutions
as we possess will have to be partial solutions
existing in the vacuum of international legitimacy
above the level of the nation-state. Or to
put it differently, whatever legitimacy they
possess will have to be based on the underlying
legitimacy of nation-states and the contractual
relationships they negotiate.
Why do these differences exist?
Robert Kagan in the article mentioned earlier
provides a realpolitik explanation for US-European
differences with regard to international
law. The Europeans like international law
and norms because they are much weaker than
the United States, and the latter likes unilateralism
because it is significantly more powerful
than any other country or group of countries
(like the EU) not just in terms of military
power, but economically, technologically,
and culturally as well.
This argument makes a great deal of sense
as far as it goes. Small, weak countries
that are acted upon rather than influencing
others naturally prefer to live in a world
of norms, laws, and institutions, in which
more powerful nations are constrained. Conversely,
a ‘sole superpower’ like the United States
would naturally like to see its freedom of
action be as unencumbered as possible.
But while the argument from the standpoint
of power politics is correct as far as it
goes, it is not a sufficient explanation
of why the US and Europe, not to mention
other countries around the world, differ.
As noted above, the pattern of US unilateralism
and European multilateralism applies primarily
to security/foreign policy issues and secondarily
to environmental concerns; in the economic
sphere, the US is enmeshed in multilateral
institutions despite (or perhaps because
of) its dominance of the global economy.
Moreover, to point to differences in power
is merely to beg the question of why these
differentials exist. The EU collectively
encompasses a population of 375 million people
and has a GDP of $9.7 trillion, compared
to a US population of 280 million and a GDP
of $10.1 trillion. Europe could certainly
spend money on defence at a level that would
put it on a par with the United States, but
it chooses not to. Europe spends barely $130
billion collectively on defence—a sum that
has been steadily falling—compared to US
defence spending of $300 billion, which is
due to rise sharply. The post-September 11
increment in US defence spending requested
by President Bush is larger than the entire
defence budget of Britain. Despite Europe’s
turn in a more conservative direction in
2002, not one rightist or centre-right candidate
is campaigning on a platform of significantly
raising defence spending. Europe’s ability
to deploy the power that it possesses is
of course greatly weakened by the collective
action problems posed by the current system
of EU decision-making. But the failure to
create more useable military power is clearly
a political and normative issue.
Moreover, not every small, weak country is
equally outraged by American unilateralism.
In a curious role reversal from Cold War
days, the Russians were actually much more
relaxed about the American withdrawal from
the ABM Treaty than were many Europeans,
since it makes possible deep cuts in offensive
strategic nuclear forces. Australia and New
Zealand of course want the US to abide by
international trade rules since they are
directly affected by American agricultural
subsidies, but have generally expressed less
moral outrage over the American failure to
subordinate its security policy to international
norms than most members of the European Union.
This brings us to other reasons why Europeans
see the international order so differently
from Americans. One critically important
factor has to be the experience of European
integration over the past generation. The
loss of sovereignty is not an abstract, theoretical
matter to Europeans; they have been steadily
giving up powers to Brussels, from local
control over health and safety standards
to social policy to their currency itself.
Having lived through this masochistic experience
repeatedly, one imagines that they are like
former smokers who want to put everyone else
through the same withdrawal pains that they
have endured.
The final important difference between the
United States and Europe with regard to international
order has nothing to do with European beliefs
and practices, but with America’s unique
national experience, and the sense of exceptionalism
that has arisen from it. The sociologist
Seymour Martin Lipset has spent much of his
distinguished career explaining how the United
States is an outlier among developed democracies,
with policies and institutions that differ
significantly from those of Europe, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, or Japan.(5) Whether
in regard to welfare, crime, regulation,
education, or foreign policy, there are constant
differences separating America from everyone
else: it is consistently more anti-statist,
individualistic, laissez-faire, and egalitarian
than other democracies.
This sense of exceptionalism extends to its
own democratic institutions and their legitimacy.
Unlike most of the old societies of Europe,
the United States was founded on the basis
of a political idea. There was no American
people or nation prior to the founding of
the country: national identity is civic rather
than religious, cultural, racial, or ethnic.
There has been only one American regime which,
as the world’s oldest continuously existing
democracy, is not viewed as a transient political
compromise. This means that the country’s
political institutions have always been imbued
with an almost religious reverence that Europeans,
with more ancient sources of identity, find
peculiar. The proliferation of American flags
across the country in the wake of September
11 is only the most recent manifestation
of Americans’ deeply felt patriotism.
Moreover, for Americans, their Declaration
of Independence and Constitution are not
just the basis of a legal-political order
on the North American continent; they are
the embodiment of universal values and have
a significance for mankind that goes well
beyond the borders of the United States.
The American dollar bill has the inscription
novus ordo seclorum—‘new order of the ages’—written
under the all-seeing eye of the great pyramid.
When President Reagan repeatedly quoted Governor
Winthrop in speaking of the US as a ‘shining
city on a hill’, his words had great resonance
for many Americans. This leads at times to
a typically American tendency to confuse
its own national interests with the broader
interests of mankind as a whole.
The situation of Europe—as well as developed
Asian societies like Japan, for that matter—is
very different. Europeans were peoples with
shared histories long before they were democracies.
They have other sources of identity besides
politics. They have seen a variety of regimes
come and go, and some of those regimes have,
in living memory, been responsible for very
shameful acts. The kind of patriotism that
is commonplace in America is highly suspect
in many parts of Europe: Germans for many
years after World War II taught their children
not to display the German flag or cheer too
loudly at football matches. While the French
and, in a different way, the British continue
to feel a sense of broader national mission
in the world, it is safe to say that few
other European countries regard their own
political institutions as universal models
for the rest of the world to follow. Indeed,
many Europeans regard their national institutions
as having a much lower degree of legitimacy
than international ones, with the European
Union occupying a place in between.
The reasons for this are not hard to fathom.
Europeans regard the violent history of the
first half of the 20th century as the direct
outcome of the unbridled exercise of national
sovereignty. The house that they have been
building for themselves since the 1950s called
the European Union was deliberately intended
to embed those sovereignties in multiple
layers of rules, norms, and regulations to
prevent those sovereignties from ever spinning
out of control again. While the EU could
become a mechanism for aggregating and projecting
power beyond Europe’s borders, most Europeans
see the EU’s purpose as one rather of transcending
power politics. They do, in other words,
see their project as one of finding comfortable
accommodations for the last man at the end
of history
Australia’s national experience places it
somewhere in between the United States and
Europe. As a loyal colony of Britain, it
was not born in a revolution against state
authority as was the United States, and therefore
does not share America’s anti-statism and
suspicion of higher authority to nearly the
same degree. Though it was also a land of
new settlement, its national identity was
less overtly tied to a set of new democratic
political institutions than was that of the
United States. Its size and historical origins
moreover have never allowed Australia to
develop a sense that its own institutions
were exceptional.
On the other hand, national sovereignty is
more important to Australia than to most
European countries. Australia has never had
the experience of the unlimited exercise
of its own sovereignty leading it to disaster,
as in Central Europe. Rather, it saw its
sovereignty threatened by Japan and needed
to be rescued from that threat by American
power. The neighbourhood it lives in is highly
diverse, politically and culturally. Traditional
power politics remain a fact of life in East
Asia; there is no overarching framework of
institutions and norms comparable to the
EU which is capable of regulating relations
between states in the region. As a small
power, it depends on larger powers being
constrained by rules and institutions, particularly
in the economic realm, but it also depends
ultimately on American power for its security.
It is not surprising, therefore, that Australian
criticisms of the United States since September
11 have been more muted than those coming
from Europe.
Are we at the end of history?
This brings us back full circle to the initial
question with which we started, which is
also one of the important sources of US-European
disagreement. The Europeans are certainly
right that they are living at the end of
history; the question is, where is the rest
of the world? Of course, much of the world
is indeed mired in history, having neither
economic growth nor stable democracy nor
peace. But the end of the Cold War marked
an important turn in international relations,
since for the first time the vast majority
of the world’s great powers were stable,
prosperous liberal democracies. While there
could be skirmishes between countries in
history, like Iraq, and those beyond it,
like the United States, the prospect of great
wars between great powers had suddenly diminished.
There are certainly no new non-democratic
great powers to challenge the United States;
China may one day qualify, but it isn’t there
yet. But a terrorist organisation armed with
weapons of mass destruction is a different
matter: although the organisation itself
may be a minor historical player, the technological
capability it can potentially deploy is such
that it must be taken seriously as a world-class
threat. Indeed, such an organisation poses
graver challenges in certain ways than nuclear-armed
superpowers, since the latter are for the
most part deterrable and not into the business
of committing national suicide.
The question about the threat is then whether
the world has fundamentally changed since
September 11, insofar as hostile terrorist
organisations armed with weapons of mass
destruction will become an ongoing reality.
Many Americans clearly think so, and believe
that once a leader like Saddam Hussein possesses
nuclear weapons he will pass them on to terrorists
as a poor man’s delivery system. They, like
President Bush, believe that this is a threat
not just to the United States, but to Western
civilisation as a whole. The acuteness of
this threat is what then drives the new doctrine
of preemption and the greater willingness
of the United States to use force unilaterally
around the world.
Many Europeans, by contrast, believe that
the attacks of September 11 were a one-off
kind of event where Osama bin Laden got lucky
and scored big. But the likelihood that al-Qaeda
will achieve similar successes in the future
is small, given the heightened state of alert
and the defensive and preventive measures
put into place since September 11. They believe
that the likelihood that Saddam Hussein will
pass nuclear weapons to terrorists is small,
and that he remains deterrable. An invasion
of Iraq is therefore not necessary; containment
will work as it has since the Gulf War. And
finally, they tend to believe that Muslim
terrorists do not represent a general threat
to the West, but are focused on the United
States as a result of US policy in the Middle
East and Gulf.
Democracy's future
Assuming we get past these near-term threats,
there is a larger principle at issue in the
current US-European rift that will continue
to play an important role in world politics
for the foreseeable future. That principle
has to do with the nature of democracy itself.
In an increasingly globalised world, where
is the proper locus of democratic legitimacy?
Does it now and forever more exist only at
the nation-state level, or is it possible
to imagine the development of genuinely democratic
international institutions? Will the existing
welter of international rules, norms, and
organisations some day evolve into something
more than a series of ad hoc arrangements,
in the direction of genuine global governance?
And if so, who will design those institutions?
My own view, as stated earlier, is that it
is extremely hard to envision democracy ever
emerging at an international level, and many
reasons for thinking that attempts to create
such international institutions will actually
have the perverse effect of undermining the
real democracy that exists at a nation-state
level. A partial exception to this is the
European Union, which continues to move ahead
as a political project with the introduction
of the Euro and the planned expansion under
the Nice Treaty. But in a way, the experience
of the EU proves my point: there is a significant
‘democratic deficit’ at the European level,
which exacerbates existing democratic deficits
at the member state level. This is the source
of much of the backlash against further European
integration, which is seen as weakening local
powers in favour of unmovable bureaucrats
in Brussels. The problem will become even
more severe after the next round of European
expansion, which will bring in states from
Eastern Europe with very different expectations
and experiences.
Nor is it possible to argue in principle
that if a nation is threatened with terrorists
armed with weapons of mass destruction it
does not have a right to defend itself unilaterally.
It is legitimate to argue over whether such
a threat exists. But if it does, it would
be irresponsible for any government to depend
on international law for self-defence.
But if the United States refuses, rightly,
to concede the principle that there is a
broader democratic international community
providing legitimacy to international institutions,
it needs to consider carefully the consequences
and perceptions of its behaviour as the world’s
most powerful democratic nation-state. Its
own self-interest dictates the need for reciprocity
across the broad range of cooperative agreements
and institutions within which it finds itself
enmeshed. The opportunities for unilateral
action that exist presently in the military
realm are not nearly as broad in the realm
of trade and finance. There are a large number
of global public goods, like standards, free
trade, financial flows, and legal transparency,
as well as public bads like environmental
damage, crime, and drug trafficking, that
create difficult collective action problems.
Some of these problems can be solved only
if the world’s most powerful country takes
the lead in either providing those public
goods, or in organising institutions to provide
them—something the US was eager to do in
earlier periods.
The enormous margin of power exercised by
the United States, particularly in the security
realm, brings with it special responsibilities
to use that power prudently. Robert Kagan
speaks of the need to show what the American
founders labelled a ‘decent respect for the
opinions of mankind’. But for him that seems
to consist of nothing more than not gratuitously
rejecting offers of support for American
aims and objectives. It is not clear that
those aims and objectives should themselves
in any way be shaped by the opinions of non-Americans.
In my view, an appropriately moderate American
foreign policy that did show a real degree
of ‘decent respect’ would involve at least
the following elements.
First, if the United States is going to shift
to a preemptive policy towards international
terrorism, there ought to be a thinking-through
and enunciation of a broader strategy that
among other things indicates the limits of
this new doctrine. What kinds of threats,
and what standards of evidence, will justify
the use of this kind of power? Presumably,
the US is not thinking of unilaterally attacking
at least two of the three legs of the axis
of evil; if this is the case, why not at
least spell this out? The United States is
in the process of scaring itself to death
with regard to terrorism and weapons of mass
destruction. A more realistic appraisal of
future threats will raise the bar to preemption,
while keeping it in the arsenal.
Second, the US needs to take some responsibility
for global public bads like carbon emissions.
The Kyoto Protocol is a very flawed document
for any number of reasons, and the link between
carbon emissions and observed warming has
not been conclusively proven. On the other
hand, it has not been disproven, either,
and it would seem only prudent to hedge against
the possibility that it is true. Apart from
global warming, there are any number of good
reasons why the United States ought to tax
energy use much more heavily than it does:
to pay for the negative externality of having
to go to war every decade or so to keep open
access to Middle Eastern oil; to promote
development of alternative energy sources;
and to create some policy space in dealing
with Saudi Arabia, which does not seem to
be a particular friend of the United States
after September 11. Americans may not ever
be convinced that they should make serious
economic sacrifices for the sake of international
agreements, but they may be brought around
to an equivalent position if they see sufficient
self-interest in doing so.
Finally, there should be a walking back of
the steel and agricultural subsidy decisions
taken earlier this year. No one in Washington
ever pretended that there was a reason for
making them in the first place other than
pure political expediency, and there can
be no US leadership on any important issue
related to the global economy in their wake.
Now that Trade Promotion Authority exists,
the United States needs to use it as a mandate
to act forcefully.
The US-European rift that has emerged in
2002 is not just a transitory problem reflecting
the style of the current US administration
or the world situation in the wake of September
11. It is a reflection of differing views
of the locus of democratic legitimacy within
a broader Western civilisation whose actual
institutions have become remarkably similar.
The underlying principled issue is essentially
unsolvable because there is ultimately no
practical way of addressing the ‘democratic
deficit’ at the global level. But the problem
can be mitigated by a degree of American
moderation within a system of sovereign nation-states.
Notes
(1) “Time to Stop Being America’s Lapdog,”
Observer (Feb. 17, 2002).
(2) Thierry Meyssan, L'Effroyable Imposture
(The Horrifying Fraud).
(3) Robert Kagan, "Power and Weakness,"
Policy Review no. 116 (June-July 2002).
(4) John Van Oudenaren, "E Pluribus
Confusion," National Interest no. 65
(Fall 2001): 23-36.
(5) Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism:
A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton,
1995). This theme appears also in his books
Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics,
2nd. Ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1981); The First New Nation (New York:
Basic Books, 1963); and Continental Divide:
The Values and Institutions of the United
States and Canada (New York & London:
Routledge, 1990).
To Top About the Author: Francis Fukuyama
is the Bernard Schwartz Professor of International
Political Economy at the Paul Nitze School
of Advanced International Studies at Johns
Hopkins University. He has a B. A. in classics
from Cornell University and a Ph. D. in Political
Science from Harvard. Dr Fukuyama currently
sits on the President's Council on Bioethics.
He has written widely on democratisation
and international political economy, and
culture and social capital in modern economic
life. His books include the award winning
The End of History and the Last Man, published
in over twenty foreign editions, and most
recently Our Posthuman Future: Consequences
of the Biotechnology Revolution
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