THE HIGH PRICE OF CLEAN HANDS:

What Is a European? (A. S. BYATT, October 13, 2002, NY Times Magazine)

Robert Kagan, in a recent article in the American journal Policy Review, on the power divide between the United States and Europe, describes the new European belief in a world governed by a web of international rules and laws as a belief in having ''stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian world of perpetual peace.'' Larry Siedentop also invokes Kant's idea of a just community and suggests it derives from the Christian respect for the individual as an absolute value. Kagan says with force and truth that out there, there is still a Hobbesian world that will be dealt with by American cowboy justice or not at all. He says the European world of moral rule is an ideal formed in weakness. It is nevertheless worthwhile, and is a partial fulfillment of Churchill's hope that millions of people would want to do good rather than evil. [...]

I myself felt a pull at the ''warm emotions'' when the Turkish Parliament voted to abolish the death penalty and give linguistic and civil rights to
Kurds, in order to conform to the moral requirements of the E.U., which Turkey hopes to join. I felt proud to belong to a community that was collectively against executions. [...]

Europeans were alarmed by George Bush's ''either you are with us or . . . '' speech, because it carried an echo of the absolutist rhetorics that made such a mess of our continent. [...]

During the gulf war, I happened to be in a German monastery with a group of English and German writers and scholars. We divided, not by nationality, but by age. The young were passionately antiwar, as they have been brought up to be. Those who remembered 1945 and its aftermath saw the analogy between Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and Hitler, and spoke unhappily of the imperative to avoid appeasement. Just after 9/11, I was in Frankfurt. I found myself defending the coming strike against the Taliban to an angry and idealistic Austrian TV cameraman who had just spent eight weeks with Afghan refugees and believed nothing justified the loss of innocent lives. I do not know a European -- and that includes the British I talk to -- who is in favor of a strike on Iraq. They do not accept the rhetoric of the ''axis of evil,'' or the connection of such a strike to the
fight against world terrorism. The old know what war does to people and cities. The young believe that aggression is simply bad. The 85 percent is dwindling, at least at this time.

Though a huge fan of Ms Byatt's novel Possession, this formulation is profoundly silly and demonstrates why we can't afford to listen to Europe. She acknowledges that the world is Hobbesian but lauds Europeans for pretending that it isn't. For example, she's proud to have done away with the death penalty in Europe (though most Europeans favor it), presumably because it shows Europe acting as if there were no evil people in the world. Yet the European crime rate is skyrocketing. In other words, innocents are suffering so that European intellectual elites can preen about their superior moral sensitivity.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 13, 2002 9:19 PM