The New Road to Serfdom (13 page)

The United States, alas, is going in the opposite direction. It’s not a specific policy that worries me, so much as the assumptions that underpin
all
the programs of the present administration. If Washington had decided, in isolation, to reassume control of social security, it would be an error, but a reversible one. If, in response to the financial crisis, there had been a one-time injection of federal spending, I’d still have disagreed, but it would have been a defensible proposition.

The trouble is that these things are not unrelated initiatives. They amount to a sustained and deliberate shift in power: from the states to Washington, from the citizen to the government, from the elected representative to the federal czar. It’s no wonder the current administration
is so keen on a European superstate: It is constructing its own version at home.

Europeanization is incompatible with the vision of the founders and the spirit of the republic. Americans are embracing all the things their ancestors were so keen to get away from: high taxes, unelected lawmakers, pettifogging rules.

That, of course, is your business as Americans. But it’s our business, too. Being the strongest nation on the planet carries certain responsibilities. The world has, until now, been fortunate in its superpower. The promise of the U.S. Constitution didn’t simply serve to make Americans free. It also drove your fathers to carry liberty to other continents. A fundamental alteration of the character of the republic is not simply an internal matter: If America Europeanizes its domestic arrangements, it will sooner or later Europeanize its foreign policy, too. At which point, your problems become our problems.

“
A
mericans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus.” Such phrases catch on because they capture a mood, crystallizing what had been until then an inchoate feeling, putting into words thoughts that people hadn’t verbalized.

The quotation comes from the opening lines of Robert Kagan’s 2003 book,
Of Paradise and Power.
Kagan’s treatise
was, of course, much more subtle and layered than that slogan suggests. But, in the year that saw the invasion of Iraq, those words transcended the thesis that had generated them, and took on a life of their own.

Throughout the 1990s, the realization had been gradually dawning on Europeans that they no longer needed U.S. military protection. There was no more need even to pretend to defer to the nation whose nuclear guarantee had kept the Red Army from marching to the North Sea. It was possible for Europeans—especially if they banded together—to assert an altogether different foreign policy from that of the
hyper-puissance.

Different in what ways? Javier Solana, a former socialist minister from Spain who became the first man to aspire to run the EU’s foreign policy, defined its peculiar characteristics as follows:

You get the picture. Europeans are smart, sophisticated, sensitive. They understand the past. They rely on force of argument, not force of arms. They keep the rules.

Americans, by implication, are the reverse of all these things. They favor
Machtpolitik
over
Moralpolitik.
They throw their weight around. They blunder in, with little sensitivity toward local conditions. They stick to the rules only when it suits them. They are, if not wholly uninterested in democracy and human rights, certainly willing to trample over them in pursuit of immediate gain.

Americans, of course, were at the same time evolving their own converse stereotype. Europeans in general, and Frenchmen in particular, were ingrates, who had accepted American protection for forty years, and were now driven by a pathological need to bite the hand that freed them. As the Euro-enthusiast British writer Tim Garton Ash put it:

The invasion of Iraq confirmed the prejudices of both sides. As Europeans saw it, a clique of neo-cons had told lies about Saddam’s weapons program in order to drag the world into a ruinous war, whose true purpose was to establish an American garrison in an oil-rich region and win contracts for Dick Cheney’s buddies.

Americans, meanwhile, were shaken by the explosion of anti-U.S. sentiment in countries that they had until then regarded as allies. Even those who had voted against George W. Bush were taken aback to see their head of state portrayed as a worse dictator than Saddam Hussein. Even those who had opposed the invasion didn’t much care to see it being described as a Jewish plot (“rootless cosmopolitan,” “Zionist,” now “neo-con”: the code word changes from generation to generation).

Kagan’s sound bite attracted a great deal of attention in Europe. It was understood as the dismissive snort of a braggart, a typical example of neo-con swaggering. Needless to say, few of the critics had read the accompanying book. If they had, they would have found that Kagan still believes that there is such a thing as the West, is
convinced that Europe and America can and should collaborate to mutual advantage, and lauds the process of European integration as a “miracle” and a “reason for enormous celebration.” Indeed, the book’s main flaw, as John Fonte of the Hudson Institute points out, is that it takes the EU at its own estimate, failing to understand the extent of its anti-democratic propensities.

Nonetheless, very few Europeans dissented from the essential proposition that there was a fundamental cultural divergence between the United States and the EU, partly reflecting the simple reality of military imbalance, but also rooted in a difference of
Weltanschauung:
of how to look at the world. Both sides, in their own way, agreed. Americans really
did
feel they were from Mars, Europeans that they were from Venus.

People naturally describe the divergence with different adjectives, depending on their point of view. America is prepared to back her ideals with actions, whereas Europe blusters. America stands up to bullies, whereas Europe appeases them. America keeps Europe safe while Europe sneers. Or, to turn it around, America defies international law while Europe tries to lead by example. America reacts to criticism with daisy-cutter bombs, Europe with persuasion. America seeks to pulverize those who disagree, Europe to win them over. Take your pick: It amounts to the same analysis.

The most eloquent European answer to the Kagan thesis came in a book published in 2005 with the startling
title
Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century.
Its author, a British think-tanker called Mark Leonard, is on the extreme end of the Euro-integrationist spectrum in Britain, but fairly representative of the political class of the EU as a whole.

His proposition is that world leadership will shift to the EU because of Europe’s different understanding of power and interest. Instead of attacking its adversaries, the EU seeks to draw them into a nexus of common interest. Its weapons are not bombs and missiles, but trade accords and human rights codes. The worst threat that it holds over recalcitrant neighbors is not that it will invade them, but that it will ignore them. It was precisely in the hope of attracting the sympathetic attention of Brussels, argues Leonard, that Serbia gave up its war criminals for international trial, that Poland liberalized its abortion law, that Turkey strengthened the rights of its Kurdish minority.

One by one, nations are being drawn into what he calls “the Eurosphere.” Balkan and even Caucasian states aspire to eventual membership. And more distant nations—the EU’s Mediterranean neighbors in the Maghreb and the Levant, the former colonies of Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the republics that once made up the USSR—are increasingly dependent on EU trade, aid, investment, and political patronage.

Where Washington simply writes checks to such allies as Colombia, Brussels aims for a complete transformation
of society: It encourages democratic and liberal reforms so that the governments of its allies will
want
to support the EU. And because the EU is not a superpower, but a network of states, its rise will not attract envy or encourage the formation of hostile coalitions.

It’s a tremendously appealing thesis: taut, logical, and consistent. The trouble is that it isn’t true. Once again, we are in the world of the Cartesian malicious demon: an EU that exists between the covers of books, but that bears no relation to the actual one.

The EU, Leonard contends, is a force for “democracy, human rights and the protection of minorities.” Really? Where exactly? In Iran, where it is cozying up to murderous ayatollahs who, among other things, recently ordered the execution of a teenage girl? In Cuba, where it has withdrawn its support from anti-Castro dissidents? In China, where it has not only declared its willingness in principle to sell weapons to an aggressive tyranny, but is actively collaborating with the Communists on the creation of a satellite system, designed to challenge the “technological imperialism” of America’s GPS? In Palestine, where it’s funneling subsidies to Hamas, despite its own ban on funding terrorist organizations? Or perhaps within its own borders, where it has adopted a new constitutional settlement in defiance of the will of its citizens, clearly expressed in referendums?

Leonard writes enthusiastically about the Lisbon Agenda and the EU’s competitiveness. But, again, this competitiveness is confined to a virtual world of Commission statements and summit communiqués. In the real world, businesses are struggling with the forty-eight-hour week, the Temporary Workers Directive, the Social Chapter, and the rest of the Euro-corporatist agenda. He goes on to predict that, in addition to its economic might, the EU will evolve a powerful military capacity because joint defense procurement projects will lead to economies of scale. He does not mention the supreme example of such joint procurement, the Eurofighter, perhaps the most useless, over-budget, redundant piece of military hardware ever.

Countries within the EU, he writes, are better off than those outside, such as Norway. Yet Norway has a GDP per capita that is more than twice that in the EU. With high growth and negligible unemployment, Norwegians appear to be managing very nicely without Brussels. Do they lack influence in the world? Hardly. Their diplomats have led the way in brokering peace in the Middle East, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and Southeast Asia.

The Euro-enthusiast thesis requires that you push all such inconvenient facts out of your mind. You are invited to take the EU at its word, rather than looking at its deeds. It is enough, for example, to be told that the Constitution commits the EU to democracy and the rule of law. Never mind that the Constitution of,
say, East Germany, made similar noises. We are asked, in short, to engage in a massive collective suspension of disbelief. Is unemployment in the EU high? Never mind: We’ve just published a resolution condemning it. Is corruption rife? We’ve just set up a study group to tackle it. As in the old Eastern bloc, the gap between the official version and real life keeps getting wider.

This point cannot be stressed too strongly. All nations, like all individuals, sometimes engage in hypocrisy. And, in a sense, it’s a good thing they do: Hypocrisy, after all, is a recognition that you could be doing better, a realization that your actions don’t meet your aspirations.

What we see in the EU, however, is something on an altogether different scale: a creed of official self-deceit in which leaders trot out slogans that they don’t expect anyone to believe.

__________

Consider the difference in approach to greenhouse gas emissions. I don’t want to get into the whole global warming debate, which could fill a book larger than this one. My point isn’t about the rights and wrongs of carbon emissions. It’s about the connection between rhetoric and reality.

Of all the actions of the Bush administration, the one that attracted the most opprobrium in Europe, more even than the Iraq War, was withdrawing from
the Kyoto Protocol. And, sure enough, the United States has since produced about 22 percent more carbon than the treaty had envisaged. But many European countries have worse records. Austria, Denmark, and Spain are among the states that have exceeded their quotas by substantially more than the United States. Yet, for some reason, they have escaped criticism. European sensibility requires that people pretend to go along with these supra-national projects, even if they then do nothing about it.