6這裡還是「西方」嗎？

 IS IT STILL “THE WEST”?

If this evolving international arrangement continues to produce a greater American tendency toward unilateralism in international affairs, this should not surprise any objective observer. In return for manning the walls of Europe’s postmodern order, the United States naturally seeks a certain freedom of action to deal with the strategic dangers that it alone has the means and sometimes the will to address. This is the great problem for relations between the United States and Europe, of course. For just at the moment when Europeans, freed of Cold War fears and constraints, have begun settling into their postmodern paradise and proselytizing for their doctrines of international law and international institutions, Americans have begun turning in the other direction, away from the common solidarity with Europe that had been the central theme of the Cold War and back toward a more traditional American policy of independence, toward that uniquely American form of universalistic nationalism.

The end of the Cold War had an even more profound effect on the transatlantic relationship than is commonly understood, for the common Soviet enemy and the consequent need to act in concert for the common defense were not all that disappeared after 1989. So, too, did a grand strategy pursued on both sides of the Atlantic to preserve and strengthen the cohesion and unity of what was called “the West.” It was not just that the United States and Europe had had to work together to meet the Soviet challenge. More than that, the continued unity and success of the liberal Western order was for many years the very definition of victory in the Cold War.

Partly for this reason, American strategy during the Cold War often consisted of providing more to friends and allies than was expected from them in return. To a remarkable degree, American governments measured the success of their foreign policy not by how well the United States was doing by any narrow reckoning of the national interest, but rather by how well America’s allies were faring against the many internal and external challenges they faced. Thus it was American economic strategy to raise up from the ruins of World War II powerful economic competitors in Europe and Asia, even to the point where, by the last decades of the Cold War, the United States seemed to many to be in a state of relative decline compared to its increasingly prosperous allies. It was American military strategy to risk nuclear attack upon its otherwise unthreatened homeland in order to deter both nuclear and conventional attacks on European and Asian allies. When one considers the absence of similarly reliable guarantees among the various European powers in the past, between, say, Great Britain and France in the 1920s and 1930s, the willingness of the United States, standing in relative safety behind two oceans, to link its very survival to that of other nations was rather extraordinary.

America’s strategic and economic “generosity,” if one can call it that, was, of course, closely related to American interests. As Acheson put it, “For the United States to take steps to strengthen countries threatened with Soviet aggression or Communist subversion . . . was to protect the security of the United States—it was to protect freedom itself.”58 But this identification of the interests of others with its own interests was a striking quality of American foreign and defense policy after World War II. After Munich, after Pearl Harbor, and after the onset of the Cold War, Americans increasingly embraced the conviction that their own well-being depended fundamentally on the well-being of others, that American prosperity could not occur in the absence of global prosperity, that American national security was impossible without a broad measure of international security. This was a doctrine of self-interest, but it was the most enlightened kind of self-interest—to the point where it was at times almost indistinguishable from idealism.

Almost, but never entirely. Idealism was never the sole source of American generosity or its propensity to seek to work in concert with its allies. American Cold War multilateralism was more instrumental than idealistic in its motives. After all, “going it alone” after 1945 meant going it alone against the Soviet Union. Going it alone meant shearing apart the West. Nor was it really conceivable, with Soviet troops massed in the heart of Europe, for any American foreign policy to succeed if it was not “multilateral” in its inclusion of Western European interests. On the other hand, genuine idealistic multilateralism had been interred for most Americans along with Wilson and the League of Nations Covenant. Dean Acheson, among the leading architects of the postwar international order, considered the UN Charter “impracticable” and the United Nations itself an example of a misguided Wilsonian “faith in the perfectibility of man and the advent of universal peace and law.”59 He and most others present at the creation of the postwar order were idealists, but they were practical idealists. They believed it was essential to present a common Western front to the Communist bloc, and if that meant swallowing what Acheson disparaged as the “holy writ” of the UN Charter, they were prepared to play along. For Acheson, support for the UN was nothing more than “an aid to diplomacy.”60 This is important, because many aspects of American behavior during the Cold War that both Europeans and many Americans in retrospect find so admirable, and whose passing they so lament, represented concessions made in the cause of Western unity.

That unity was not always easy to maintain. American hostility to de Gaulle’s determined independence, American suspicion about British imperialism, arguments over Germany’s Ostpolitik, strategic debates over arms agreements and arms buildups, especially during the Reagan years, all threatened to open cracks in the alliance. But the cracks were always healed, because everyone agreed that while disagreements were inevitable, fissures were dangerous. If “the West” was divided, it would fall. The danger was not only strategic; it was ideological, even psychological. “The West” had to mean something, otherwise what were we defending? And, of course, during the Cold War, “the West” did mean something. It was the liberal, democratic choice of a large segment of humanity, standing in opposition to the alternative choice that existed on the other side of the Berlin Wall.

This powerful strategic, ideological, and psychological need to demonstrate that there was indeed a cohesive, unified West went down with the Berlin Wall and the statues of Lenin in Moscow. The loss was partly masked during the 1990s. Many saw the struggles in Bosnia and Kosovo as a new test of the West. The enlargement of NATO to include former Warsaw Pact nations was an ingathering of peoples who had been forcibly excluded from the West and wanted to be part of it again. They saw NATO as not only or even primarily a security organization but simply as the one and only institution that embodied the transatlantic West. Certainly, the United Nations was not “the West.”

But the very success of the transatlantic project, the solution of the European security dilemma, the solution of the German problem, the completion of a Europe “whole and free,” the settlement of the Balkan conflicts, the creation of a fairly stable zone of peace and democracy on the European continent—all these great and once unimaginable accomplishments had the inevitable effect of diminishing the significance of “the West.” It was not that the West had ceased to exist. Nor was it that the West had ceased to face enemies, for surely militant Muslim fundamentalism is an implacable enemy of the West. But the central point of Francis Fukuyama’s famous essay, “The End of History,” was irrefutable: The centuries-long struggle among opposing conceptions of how mankind might govern itself had been definitively settled in favor of the Western liberal ideal. Muslim fundamentalism might have its following in the parts of the world where Muslims predominate. Nor can we doubt any longer its capacity to inflict horrific damage on the West. But as Fukuyama and others have pointed out, Muslim fundamentalism does not present a serious challenge to the universal principles of Western liberalism. The existence of Muslim fundamentalism may force Americans and Europeans to defend themselves against devastating attack, and even to cooperate in providing a common defense. But it does not force “the West” to prove itself unified and coherent, as Soviet communism once had.

With less need to preserve and demonstrate the existence of a cohesive “West,” it was inevitable that the generosity that had characterized American foreign policy for fifty years would diminish after the Cold War ended. This may be something to lament, but it is not something to be surprised at. The existence of the Soviet Union and the international communist threat had disciplined Americans and made them see that their enlightened self-interest lay in a relatively generous foreign policy, especially toward Europe. After the end of the Cold War, that discipline was no longer present. The end of the Cold War subtly shifted the old equation between idealism and interest. Indeed, those who decry the decline of American generosity in the post–Cold War era must at least reckon with the logic of that decline. Since Americans objectively had less interest in a foreign policy characterized by generosity, for the United States to have maintained the same degree of generosity in its foreign policy as it had during the Cold War, the same commitment to international institutions, the same concern for and deference to allies, the American people would have had to become even more idealistic.

In fact, Americans are no more or less idealistic than they were fifty years ago. It is objective reality that has changed, not the American character. It was the changed international circumstances after the Cold War that opened the way to political forces in Congress, chiefly though not exclusively Republican, which aimed to rewrite old multilateral agreements and defeat new ones, to extricate the United States from treaty obligations now considered onerous or excessively intrusive into American sovereignty. What was new was not the existence of such forces and attitudes, for they had always been present in American politics. They had dominated American politics throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a period ushered in by a Republican president promising a “return to normalcy” after the ambitious idealism of the Wilson years. But during the Cold War, and especially during the years dominated by Republican presidents from Nixon to Reagan, the grand anti-communist strategy had overwhelmed such narrow nationalist sentiments and trumped concerns for sovereignty.

Nor was America’s post–Cold War turn toward a more nationalist approach to foreign policy simply the product of a rising Republican Right. Realist international relations theorists and policymakers, the dominant intellectual force in the American foreign policy establishment, also pushed the United States back in the direction of a more narrow nationalism. They decried what Michael Mandelbaum famously called the “international social work” allegedly undertaken by the Clinton administration in Bosnia and Haiti. They insisted that the United States return to a more intent focus on the “national interest,” now more narrowly defined than it had been during the Cold War. American realists from Brent Scowcroft to Colin Powell to James Baker to Lawrence Eagleburger did not believe the United States should take on the burden of solving the Balkan crisis or other “humanitarian” crises around the world. The Cold War was over, they argued, and it was therefore possible for American foreign policy to “return to normal.”

Post–Cold War “normalcy,” however, meant fewer concessions to international public opinion, less deference to allies, more freedom to act as the United States saw fit. These realists gave intellectual legitimacy to the forces in Congress who coupled talk of the “national interest” with calls for reductions in overseas involvements of all kind. If the “national interest” was to be narrowly conceived, many Republicans asked, why, exactly, was it still in the “national interest” for the United States to pay its comparatively exorbitant UN dues? A case that had been easier to make when the preservation of Western unity against communism was the goal of American foreign policy was now harder to make in the absence of such a far-reaching and enlightened definition of the American “national interest.”

Even the Clinton administration, more idealistic and, perhaps ironically, more wedded to the Cold War foreign policy of generosity than the realists and Republicans, nevertheless could not escape the new post–Cold War reality. It was Clinton, after all, who ran for president in 1992 on a platform declaring that the American economy mattered and foreign policy did not. Clinton stepped in to try to repair “the West” only after trying desperately not to take on that responsibility. When the administration of George W. Bush came to office in January 2001, bringing with it the realist-nationalism of 1990s Republicanism, “the West” as a functioning concept in American foreign policy had become dormant. When the terrorists struck the United States eight months later, the Cold War equation was completely inverted. Now, with the threat brought directly to American soil, overleaping that of America’s allies, the paramount issue was America’s unique suffering and vulnerability, not “the West.”

The declining significance of “the West” as an organizing principle of foreign policy was not just an American phenomenon, however. Post–Cold War Europe agreed that the issue was no longer “the West.” For Europeans, the issue became “Europe.” Proving that there was a united Europe took precedence over proving that there was a united West. A European “nationalism” mirrored the American nationalism, and although this was not Europe’s intent, the present gap between the United States and Europe today may be traced in part to Europe’s decision to establish itself as a single entity apart from the United States.

This effort impressed on American minds that the transatlantic goal was no longer a unified West; the Europeans themselves no longer thought in such terms. Instead, Europeans spoke of “Europe” as another pole in a new multipolar world—a counterbalance to America. Europe would establish its own separate foreign policy and defense “identity” outside of NATO. The institutions Europeans revered were the European Union and the United Nations. But for Americans, as for Central and Eastern Europeans, the UN was not “the West,” and the European Union was not “the West.” Only NATO was “the West,” and now Europeans were building an alternative to NATO. Everything the Europeans were doing made sense from a European perspective; and the project of European integration was objectively of benefit to the United States, at least insofar as it strengthened the peace. Nor was it the intention of most Europeans to raise a challenge to the United States, much less to the idea of “the West.” But how surprising was it that Americans no longer placed as high a priority on the unity of the West and the cohesion of the alliance as they once had? Europeans had undertaken an all-consuming project in which the United States by definition could have no part. The United States, meanwhile, has projects of its own.