"I'M AFRAID OF THE RUSSIANS, CAN'T SLEEP AT NIGHT"

Does the Western World Still Exist? (Immanuel Wallerstein, Commentary No. 112, May 1, 2003)

While the United States agonizes politically about its future world policy (and despite Bush's current high ratings in the polls, which are quite transitory, the United States is indeed agonizing over this question), Europe will continue painfully to construct itself - as Europe, not as a part of the "the West" or of the "Atlantic world." How can I say this when, at the moment, the United States seems far more politically unified than Europe, which seems to be in a state of acute and overt internal conflict?

There are really two reasons. One is economic, and one is cultural. The economics are rather simple to expound. On the one hand, Europe shares with the United States its interests in maintaining the present core-periphery split in the world-economy, with all the advantages that structure provides for the North. On the other hand, Europe is clearly an economic rival of the United States, and this rivalry will become more intense in the coming decades. So Europe has to balance its gains from a common front of the North in such arenas as the World Trade Organization, and its losses from a continuing economic advantage to the United States over it because of the role of the dollar, sustained as it is by U.S. military and political pressures on Europe.

If Europe fails to break the privileged role of the dollar, it is doomed to second-place status. Europeans are smart enough to realize this. Will they then sacrifice their class interests as integral members of the "North," if they have a major fight with the United States? Not necessarily, because they believe that U.S. strategy as the North is less efficacious than the one they wish to pursue, and that the U.S. position on North-South questions is compromised by their simultaneous struggle against Europe. Europe thinks that a different North-South policy is not only in their own best interests but in that of the United States as well (even if the U.S. doesn't realize this). It seems likely therefore that Europe will not call off its economic struggle with the United States, which revolves around both international financial arrangements and investments in new leading products. And in order to pursue their economic interests, Europe will now construct an independent military force, against which both Blair and Powell have recently once again voiced their vigorous opposition, an opposition tinged with considerable concern that they will not be able to stop it.

Mr. Wallerstein is a spectacularly inept analyst of the Western scene, one of those folks whose worldview freezes at some point in the early 1900s when Europe still mattered, though its decline had begun, and continentals who'd not paid attention to the North's performance in the Civil War could still kid themselves that America was not the world's pre-eminent power. His most influential recent essay appeared in Foreign Policy, The Eagle Has Crash Lande, in the Summer of 2002:

The United States' success as a hegemonic power in the postwar period created the conditions of the nation's hegemonic demise. This process is captured in four symbols: the war in Vietnam, the revolutions of 1968, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the terrorist attacks of September 2001. Each symbol built upon the prior one, culminating in the situation in which the United States currently finds itself-a lone superpower that lacks true power, a world leader nobody follows and few respect, and a nation drifting dangerously amidst a global chaos it cannot control.

Yes, well, let's ask heads of government (one is reluctant to call them leaders) from Paris to Baghdad to Pyongyang to Ramallah to Berlin to Damascus whether the U.S. has any power anymore, shall we?

Meanwhile, this latest essay is equally divergent from reality. He ignores Europe's demographic problems, immigration problems, stagnating economies, pensions crises, etc.--which is the only way anyone can pretend that it has a rosy economic future--and, in what can only be characterized as a visit to fantasy-land, imagines that Europe will construct a military force that the U.S. and Britain would have to fear. One might point out, if nothing else, that British opposition suggests a significant fissure in the mighty Europe of which Mr. Wallerstein dreams. More than that though, the fissure divides Germany/France/Russia on the one hand and Britain/America/Australia/Spain on the other. Past performance may not be a guarantee of future returns, but it would be helpful to his argument if the nations of the latter coalition hadn't made a two century habit of drubbing the nations of the former. Posted by Orrin Judd at May 5, 2003 9:45 AM