February 7, 2003
A GUEST POST FROM PJ:
Frail Europe, Brawny America: A Mismatch With Consequences: a review of Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, by Robert Kagan (James Rubin, NY Observer)Mr. Kagan quotes a French official who points out that the "problem is failed states, not rogue states" like Iraq, Iran and North Korea. It's worth remembering that it was a failed state--Afghanistan--that provided a base for the most devastating attack on American soil in 200 years.
Here I (pj) think is the French attitude in a nutshell. In the French view, the key choice in politics is between anarchy, which results in a Hobbesian war of all against all, or in universal submission to a single centralized authority which, of course, cannot conflict with itself. All problems are the result of anarchy, and submission to a centralized authority is always the solution. Iraq, Iran, and North Korea cannot be problems, because they have already submitted to authority. If terrorism is a problem, it must have arisen from anarchy. Similarly, European problems must have arisen due to the lack of submission to a single authority, so an EU superstate is the solution. Internationally, conflict needs to be ended by bringing about submission to the UN and ICC.
What this leaves out is, of course, the third possible social principle: freedom, in which power is distributed widely among the people, and in order to get things done, people cooperate. For the French, this possibility is unthinkable: people, they suppose, would not cooperate, society would degenerate into Hobbesian warfare, and the strong would prey upon the weak. Capitalists would become warlords. (Of course, the French themselves never cooperate, so it is natural that they project their own tendencies upon the world.)
The conflict between us and France is not, as Kagan says, a matter of military imbalance. It is ideological and cultural. They love governmentalauthority, seeing it as the solution to social conflict, and they know from their experience that cooperation is impossible. We love freedom, we love a cooperative society in which people renounce violence, and willingly sacrifice their own interests to bring about cooperation -- in short, love one another -- and we know from our experience that cooperation is not only possible, but creates the best possible society. As a result, our responses to terrorism are diametrically opposed: the French seek to end terrorism by strengthening strongmen like Saddam and Arafat; we seek to end terrorism by establishing free, cooperative societies.
This ideological conflict is dividing the West. I think Kagan and Rubin are blind to how deep this divide may become.
Posted by Orrin Judd at February 7, 2003 3:57 PMA very good observation. France has the longest history of being a centralized nation-state, probably longer than any other modern country. In the Middle Ages England had a strong noble class to counter the king (Magna Carta), and Germany as a nation-state didn't even exist until the 1890s, being a collection of small loosely affiliated kingdoms before then (Saxony, Bavaria, etc)
Posted by: at February 7, 2003 4:32 PMThat's not pj complimenting himself, is it?
Posted by: oj at February 7, 2003 5:12 PMNo, it's not . . . though when I read it, I wondered if others would think so!
I am currently writing a book on economics and I may include a chapter on the economics of culture, in which I might discuss the non-cooperative French culture and its relationship to their centrally-directed economy, vs. our cooperative culture and largely free economy. France centralized in the 16th and 17th centuries, whereas Germany and Japan did it in the late 19th and early 20th century, the U.S. never. Sociological evidence is that cooperativeness follows length of time under freedom, people become steadily less cooperative as they live under centralized governments. The French are much less cooperative than Americans, Germans, or Japanese. Even within the U.S., blacks, who were long oppressed, do not cooperate easily, while whites are cooperative.
France is not, however, the modern country with the longest history of centralization. Russia has a longer history, and the Islamic world has been centralized nearly continuously, whereas France was free in the Middle Ages.
It was my post (accidentially anonymous sorry.)
Getting back to PJ's analysis, the point I wanted to make is that historically France is the quintisenntial centralized nation-state, going back to Henri IV (c. 1590) if not earlier (Louis I in the Dark Ages is apocryphal but not entirely unhistorical.)
PJ had spotted an intersting historical angle on the French anti-war stance that I hadn't realized until he mentioned it.
P.S. A good summary of the cooperativeness-centralized gov't connection is in Fukuyama's (1995) Trust
.