US-Europe divide on world order puts us in danger - The Centre for Independent Studies
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US-Europe divide on world order puts us in danger

‘What kind of world order do we want?” asked Joschka Fischer, Germany’s Foreign Minister, on the eve of the US invasion of Iraq in March last year.

That this question remains on the minds of many Europeans today is a telling sign of the differences that separate the two sides of the Atlantic – because most Americans have not pondered the question of world order since the Iraq war started.

Opinion polls show two peoples living on separate strategic and ideological planets. While more than 80 per cent of Americans believe that war can sometimes achieve justice, less than half of Europeans agree. Americans and Europeans disagree about the role of international law and international institutions, and about the nebulous but critical question of what confers legitimacy on international action.

What if their differences over world order infect the rest of what we have known as the liberal West? Will the West still be the West?

A few years ago, such questions were unthinkable. After the Cold War, the political theorist Francis Fukuyama assumed that at the end of history the world’s liberal democracies would live in relative harmony. Because they share liberal principles, these democracies would “have no grounds on which to contest each other’s legitimacy”.

That reasonable assumption has now been thrown into doubt, for it is the question of legitimacy that divides Americans and Europeans today – the legitimacy of their respective visions of world order. For the first time since World War II, a majority of Europeans has come to doubt the legitimacy of US power and global leadership.

Because losing legitimacy with fellow democracies would be debilitating – perhaps even paralysing – over time, Americans cannot ignore their predicament. The biggest failure of the Bush Administration may be that it was too slow to recognise this truth. The US can neither appear to be acting, nor in fact act, as if only its self-interest mattered. The US, in short, must pursue legitimacy in the manner truest to its nature: by promoting the principles of liberal democracy not only as a means to greater security but as an end in itself.

US conduct in Iraq today is especially important in this regard. The US will be judged – as it should be – by the care and commitment it takes to secure a democratic peace in Iraq. It will be judged by whether it indeed advances the cause of liberalism, there and elsewhere, or whether it merely defends its own interests.

The US should try to fulfil its part of a new transatlantic bargain by granting Europeans some influence over the exercise of its power – provided that, in turn, Europeans wield that influence wisely. NATO, an alliance of and for liberal democracies, could be the forum for such a bargain. The US has ceded influence to European states in NATO: they vote on an equal footing with the superpower in all of the alliance’s deliberations. For decades, NATO has been the one organisation capable of reconciling US hegemony with European autonomy and influence.

The challenge for the US will be to cede some power to Europe without putting US security, and the security of Europe and the liberal democratic world, at risk. US security and that of the liberal democratic world depend today, as they have for the past half-century, on US power.

Yet the US has seen the world through its eyes rather than by adopting Europe’s postmodern world view. Were Americans now to adapt their vision, neither the US nor postmodern Europe would remain secure for long.

Herein lies the tragedy. To address today’s global dangers, Americans will need the legitimacy that Europe can provide, but Europeans may fail to grant it. In their effort to constrain the US, they may lose sight of the mounting dangers in the world, which are far greater than those posed by the US. Out of nervousness about unipolarity, they may underestimate the dangers of a multipolar system in which non-liberal and non-democratic powers would come to outweigh Europe.

Out of passion for international legal order, they might forget the other liberal principles that have made postmodern Europe what it is today. Europeans might succeed in debilitating the US this way. But since they have no intention of supplementing its power with their own, they would only succeed in weakening the overall power the liberal democratic world can wield in its defence – and in defence of liberalism itself.

Robert Kagan is a senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. This is an edited version of the Centre for Independent Studies’ John Bonython Lecture delivered last night.

Extracts from the John Bonython Lecture were also published in The Australian, the Australian Financial Review, the Courier Mail and the Herald Sun.