February 2, 2003
IF WE'VE LOST FRIEDMAN, WE'VE LOST AMERICA:
Ah, Those Principled Europeans (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, February 2, 2003, NY Times)Being weak after being powerful is a terrible thing. It can make you stupid. It can make you reject U.S. policies simply to differentiate yourself from the
world's only superpower. Or, in the case of Mr. Chirac, it can even prompt you to invite Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe - a terrible tyrant - to visit Paris just to spite Tony Blair. Ah, those principled French."Power corrupts, but so does weakness," said Josef Joffe, editor of Germany's Die Zeit newspaper. "And absolute weakness corrupts absolutely. We are now living through the most critical watershed of the postwar period, with enormous moral and strategic issues at stake, and the only answer many Europeans offer is to constrain and contain American power. So by default they end up on the side of Saddam, in an intellectually corrupt position."
The more one sees of this, the more one is convinced that the historian Robert Kagan, in his very smart new book "Of Paradise and Power," is right: "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus." There is now a structural gap between America and Europe, which derives from the yawning power gap, and this produces all sorts of resentments, insecurities and diverging attitudes as to what constitutes the legitimate exercise of force. [...]
[T]here are serious arguments against the war in Iraq, but they have weight only if they are made out of conviction, not out of expedience or petulance - and if they are made by people with real beliefs, not identity crises.
In Munich and Paris they may dismiss Mr. Friedman's latest ("He's one of them, don't you know"), but when the foreign policy voice of the Times--the Pravda of the liberal establishment--dismisses your nations and notions outright, you've gotten yourselves seriously out of step with your most important ally. Posted by Orrin Judd at February 2, 2003 6:29 AM
1. "Being a once-widely respected NYT columnist can be a terrible thing...."
2. "In Munich and Paris..."? Was that intentional?
Shhhhhhh!!! Don't reveal my secrets.
Posted by: oj at February 2, 2003 7:58 AMI wonder if the Foreign Ministry is still on the Bendlerstrasse? But I'm certain Schroeder won't be receiving US emmisaries at Berchtesgaden.
Posted by: Tom Roberts at February 2, 2003 8:17 AMI guarantee Chirac serves Vichy souisse (sp?) at state dinners.
Posted by: oj at February 2, 2003 9:29 AMThe Europeans can still take comfort in Howell Raines. He thinks as they do and slants his news in their favor.
Posted by: Melissa at February 2, 2003 9:46 AMI respect Kagan, but I disagree with Kagan and Friedman that the cause of our troubles is a disparity in power. Its roots are ideological, and based in European loyalty to the supremacy of centralized governments and American loyalty to the supremacy of the people. Europe only has disagreements as to "what constitutes the legitimate use of force" because their leftists dislike our
use of force to promote our world-vision, which they hate.
The leftists in our country have the same problem. They hate George Bush and Republicans so they twist themselves into pretzels to justify siding with Saddam Hussein. It would be humorous if it didn't undermine the war effort and endanger the lives of our soldiers. It's not about pacifism for the leftists, it's about hate.
Posted by: NKR at February 2, 2003 11:40 AMpj:
I think you may be confusing an effect with the cause. They're inferior because of their statism and are lashing out because of that inferiority. It seems unlikely that they just feel affinity for other non-European statists.
NKR:
Ah, for the twenties when the Left decamped to Paris...
oj - I agree that France is not supporting Saddam primarily because they see him as their ideological brother; rather because "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." But his totalitarianism doesn't bother them, which it would if they loved freedom.
Their centralizing ideology has brought about their statist governments, which has made them inferior, which as you say feeds their hatred. But this centralizing ideology also gives them a hatred of advocates of freedom, and the US is a nation of advocates for freedom. It is the ideology which is the root cause of the hatred, along both paths.
pj:
I'll go most of that way with you--I'd think they are less inclined to the sort of visceral and healthy distrust of the State that is our inheritance.
It seems that all (or, perhaps more correcly, most) nations, like individuals, possess inherent inconsistencies.
And while some of these inconsistencies are cause for laughter on the one hand---or grave concern on the other---perhaps the measure of the relative "health" of any organism is the ability to "reconcile," or survive well, in spite of such inconsistencies.
As such, it is most interesting to see what is happening in Europe, generally, and France and Germany, in particular.
Francis Fukuyama's Trust
(1995) has a good discussion of how centralized government affected the culture in France. Here's a passage:
There is . . . a very pronounced French cultural distaste for informal, face-to-face relationships of the type required in new informal associations and a strong preference for authority that is centralized, hierarchical, and legally defined. Frenchmen of equal status, in other words, find it difficult to solve problems between themselves without reference to a higher, more centralized form of authority. [Stanley Hoffmann, Decline or Renewal? France Since the 1930s
(1974), pp 69-70, 121.] In Crozier’s words,
"Face-to-face dependence relationships are, indeed, perceived as difficult to bear in the French cultural setting. Yet the prevailing view of authority is still that of universalism and absolutism . . . [T]he French bureaucratic system of organization is the perfect solution to the basic dilemma of Frenchmen about authority." [Michel Crozier, The Bureaucratic Phenomenon
(1964), p 222.]
The dislike of direct, face-to-face relationships is apparent in many aspects of French economic life. . . .
The historical origins of the French propensity for centralization and the corresponding weakness of associational life can be found in the victory of the French monarchy over its aristocratic rivals in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and its systematic suppression and subordination of alternative centers of power. . . . Local administration was abolished in favor of a system of intendants appointed from Paris and supervised by a Royal Council with ever-expanding duties. According to Tocqueville, the result of this political centralization was that “there was in France no township, borough, village, or hamlet, however small, no hospital, factory, convent, or college which had a right o manage its own affairs as it thought fit or to administer its possessions without interference.” [Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old Regime and the French Revolution
(1955), p 51.]
pj:
How is it that de Tocqueville figured everything out a century and a half ago?