5美國製造的世界

 THE WORLD AMERICA MADE

If Americans are unhappy about this state of affairs, they should recall that today’s Europe—both the integrated Europe and the weak Europe—is very much the product of American foreign policy stretching back over the better part of nine decades. The United States abandoned Europe after World War I, standing aside as the Continent slipped into a war even more horrible than the first. Even as World War II was ending, the initial American impulse was to walk away again. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original wartime vision had been to make Europe strategically irrelevant.54 In the late 1930s and even during the war, the common conviction of Americans was that “the European system was basically rotten, that war was endemic on that continent, and the Europeans had only themselves to blame for their plight.”55 Europe appeared to be nothing more than the overheated incubator of world wars that cost America dearly.

During World War II, Americans like Roosevelt, looking backward rather than forward, believed no greater service could be performed than to take Europe out of the global strategic picture once and for all. Roosevelt actually preferred doing business with Stalin’s Russia. “After Germany is disarmed,” FDR pointedly asked, “what is the reason for France having a big military establishment?” Charles de Gaulle found such questions “disquieting for Europe and for France,” as well he might have. Americans of Roosevelt’s era held an old American view of Europe as corrupt and decadent, now mingled with a certain contempt for European weakness and dependence. If the European powers were being stripped of their global reach by military and economic weakness following the destruction of World War II, many Americans were only too happy to hurry the process along. As FDR had put it, “When we’ve won the war, I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France’s imperialistic ambitions, or that will aid or abet the British Empire in its imperial ambitions.”56

When the Cold War dawned, Americans such as Dean Acheson hoped to create in Europe a powerful partner against the Soviet Union, and most Americans who came of age during the Cold War have always thought of Europe almost exclusively in Achesonian terms—as the essential bulwark of freedom in the struggle against Soviet tyranny. But a suspicious hostility toward Europe always played around the edges of American foreign policy, even during the Cold War. When President Dwight Eisenhower undermined and humiliated Britain and France at Suez in 1956, it was only the most blatant of many American efforts to cut Europe down to size and reduce its already weakened global influence.

Nevertheless, for the most part the emerging threat of the Soviet Union compelled Americans to recalculate their relationship with European security, and therefore with the Europeans. And ultimately the more important American contribution to Europe’s current world-apart status stemmed not from anti-European but from essentially pro-European impulses. A commitment to Europe, not hostility to it, led the United States in the immediate postwar years to keep troops on the Continent and to create NATO. The presence of American forces as a security guarantee in Europe was, as it was intended to be, the critical ingredient for beginning the process of European integration so that a cohesive “West” would be strong enough materially and spiritually to withstand the daunting challenge of what promised to be a difficult Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Europe’s evolution into its present state occurred under the mantle of the U.S. security guarantee and could not have occurred without it. Not only did the United States for almost half a century supply a shield against such external threats as the Soviet Union and internal threats posed by ethnic conflict in places like the Balkans. More important, the United States was the key to the solution of the “German problem” and perhaps still is. Germany’s Fischer, in his Humboldt University speech, noted two “historic decisions” that made the new Europe possible: “the USA’s decision to stay in Europe” and “France’s and Germany’s commitment to the principle of integration, beginning with economic links.” But, of course, the latter could never have occurred without the former. France’s willingness to risk the reintegration of Germany into Europe—and France was, to say the least, highly dubious—depended on the promise of continued American involvement in Europe as a guarantee against any resurgence of German militarism. Nor were postwar Germans unaware that their own future in Europe depended on the calming presence of the American military.

The current situation abounds in ironies. Europe’s rejection of power politics and its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil. Europe’s new Kantian order could flourish only under the umbrella of American power exercised according to the rules of the old Hobbesian order. American power made it possible for Europeans to believe that power was no longer important. And now, in the final irony, the fact that U.S. military power has solved the European problem, especially the “German problem,” allows Europeans today, and Germans in particular, to believe that American military power, and the “strategic culture” that has created and sustained it, is outmoded and dangerous.

Most Europeans do not see or do not wish to see the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually as well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of “moral consciousness,” it has become dependent on America’s willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.

Some Europeans do understand the conundrum. Britons, not surprisingly, understand it best. Robert Cooper writes of the need to address the hard truth that although “within the postmodern world [i.e., the Europe of today], there are no security threats in the traditional sense,” nevertheless, throughout the rest of the world—what Cooper calls the “modern and pre-modern zones”—threats abound. If the postmodern world does not protect itself, it can be destroyed. But how does Europe protect itself without discarding the very ideals and principles that under-gird its pacific system?

“The challenge to the postmodern world,” Cooper argues, “is to get used to the idea of double standards.” Among themselves, Europeans may “operate on the basis of laws and open cooperative security.” But when dealing with the world outside Europe, “we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era—force, preemptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary.” This is Cooper’s principle for safeguarding society: “Among ourselves, we keep the law, but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.” Cooper directs his argument at Europe, and he couples it with a call for Europeans to cease neglecting their defenses, “both physical and psychological.”57

Cooper has also served as a close adviser to Tony Blair, and it is clear that Blair, perhaps a good deal more than his Labour Party followers, has endorsed the idea of an international double standard for power. He has tried to lead Britain into the rule-based Kantian world of the European Union. But as his solidarity with President Bush on the question of Iraq has shown, Blair has also tried to lead Europe back out into the Hobbesian world, where military power remains a key feature of international relations.

But Blair’s attempt to bring Europe along with him has been largely unsuccessful. Schroeder has taken his nation “the German way,” and France, even under the more conservative Gaullism of Jacques Chirac, has been a most resistant partner of the United States, more intent on constraining American power than in supplementing it with French power.

One suspects that what Cooper has really described, therefore, is not Europe’s future but America’s present. For it is the United States that has had the difficult task of navigating between these two worlds, trying to abide by, defend, and further the laws of advanced civilized society while simultaneously employing military force against those who refuse to abide by such rules. The United States is already operating according to Cooper’s double standard, for the very reasons he suggests. American leaders, too, believe that global security and a liberal order—as well as Europe’s “postmodern” paradise—cannot long survive unless the United States does use its power in the dangerous Hobbesian world that still flourishes outside Europe.

What this means is that although the United States has played the critical role in bringing Europe into this Kantian paradise, and still plays a key role in making that paradise possible, it cannot enter the paradise itself. It mans the walls but cannot walk through the gate. The United States, with all its vast power, remains stuck in history, left to deal with the Saddams and the ayatollahs, the Kim Jong Ils and the Jiang Zemins, leaving most of the benefits to others.