Ian Boyne, Contributor
AMERICA'S CHRISTIAN Fundamentalist President George Bush is cast in the role of a gambler, as he pursues his mission to Europe to shore up his declining political stocks back home and tries to patch up his relationship with his European allies.
To try to link his occupation of Iraq with the fight against Nazism and for freedom in Europe 60 years ago is a hard sell. An already cynical, distrustful and anti-Bush Europe is certainly not predisposed to accept the same lame excuses for the war in Iraq which the American people themselves have now rejected, according to the latest polls. There is no comparison between the D-Day landing 60 years ago today and the illegal, unjustifiable attack on Iraq last year.
The Vatican's Foreign Minister Archbishop Giovanni Lajolo told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica last month that the prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq dealt "a more serious blow to the United States than September 11, except that the blow was not inflicted by terrorists but by Americans against themselves."
Opposition to the war in Iraq has been strong in Europe, and the Vatican has been a most outspoken opponent of the war. Today President Bush will pose with some of his staunchest opponents of the Iraq war French President Jacques Chirac, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the indomitable German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder. Reuters quoted the well-known pollster John Zogby on Wednesday as saying that "this president is on the ropes. The trip is a risky gambit because I don't think he's going to come home with much" in foreign policy accomplishments. There will be good photo opportunities with European leaders and opportunities to trot out the usual lame excuses and rationalisations for the intervention in Iraq, but there will be very few takers of the propaganda line.
UNFAVOURABLE VIEW
Recent polls done by the authoritative Pew Research Center show that almost two-thirds of the public in France and Germany hold an 'unfavourable' opinion of the United States. "America's standing in the world has plummeted under Bush's watch and the Atlantic Alliance has been stretched to the breaking point," says the Harvard and Oxford-educated Director of Europe Studies at the influential Council on Foreign Relations in the United States, Charles Kupchan. "Europe today is home to a rising tide of angry anti-American sentiment."
It is not that Europe is unconcerned about terrorism or about the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. Europe is home to 15 million Arabs, 10 million of whom live in France and Germany (compared with only 700,000 Jews). In the just published summer edition of the scholarly Washington Quarterly, there is a sobering essay 'Europe and Islam: Crescent Waxing, Cultures Clashing'. Europeans believe that unilateralist actions such as the U.S. pre-emptive strike against Iraq sets back, rather than advances, the struggle against global terrorism. They point to the empirical fact of the inflaming of Arab anger against the United States as a result of the war in Iraq, which has taken multiple thousands of innocent Iraqi lives and which has unleashed atrocities such as those uncovered in the prisoner abuse scandal.
Europeans believe that the United Nations, as the symbol of international law, should have been respected and no war should have been declared without its authority. The Europeans supported the Americans in their intervention in Afghanistan where there was clear evidence of state-supported global terrorism. Not one shred of evidence has been presented to show links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Indeed, Hussein, as an Arab who eschewed Islamic Sharia law and who was more secularist rather than Fundamentalist, was at odds with bin Laden and his brand of Islam. President Bush himself said after the illegal attack against Iraq that there was no link between Saddam Hussein and the events of September 11. And we know that the main psychological and political weapon used to justify the war against Saddam Hussein was that he posed an imminent threat because of his possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction. A little Sarin gas found recently does not amount to a threat to Western civilisation!
That the world is a better place without the tyrant Saddam Hussein is not debatable. But whether any state has the right to intervene in another sovereign state because it - rather than the United Nations, representing the international community - decides that it is a threat to its people is an entirely different matter.
The Europeans are deeply concerned about matters such as the respect for international law, multilateralism and consensus building.
SEEKING ABSOLUTION
In an important speech given in late November 2003 at Princeton University, the German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said, "In the 21st century, security through co-operation and integration, security through participation and progress, will be just as important as security through deterrence and containment."
The Bush administration relies heavily on military force and bully tactics, ignoring soft power, negotiation and consensus building with its allies. Now Commander in Chief Bush has to be ingratiating himself with European leaders on their soil, hoping to gain absolution for his transgressions.
Appropriately, he stopped first at the Vatican, which has a long established confessional theology. I am sure the man known as the Holy Father would have had some appropriate words of counsel for the errant Protestant.
The radical clash of visions between the hawkish Bush administration and the more sober Europeans was seen in this statement made by Fischer in his Princeton address: "We need more than strong democracies based on a stable foundation of values. We also need strong multilateral institutions first and foremost a reformed UN which are able to enforce and uphold this order in keeping international law. Such a world must be based on effective multilateralism which is able to impose peace and security."
The deep divisions between Europe and America revolve not only around the Iraq war. The Iraq war was merely the culmination, the turning point in what had already been serious cracks in the Atlantic alliance. The Bush administration's turning its back on such multilateral treaties as the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the Biological Weapons Conven-tion, the International Criminal Court and The Kyoto Protocol on the environment signalled to Europe a hardening unilateralism. That Europe could have been so seriously disregarded on an important issue as how to deal with Iraq demonstrated to Europe that the Bush administration was on a heady course, buoyed by its hyper-power.
PHILOSOPHICAL CLASH
Anyone seeking to understand the deep roots of the tensions between Europe and America has to read Robert Kagan. His June-July, 2002 essay 'Power and Weakness' in the journal Policy Review set off a debate in the scholarly press over U.S.-Europe relations which has not stopped. In that highly engaging essay, the young scholar explained the philosophical clash of visions between Europe and America today.
Europe has experienced the horrors of nationalism and unchecked power. It has a history of wars. Almost 60 million people died in World War II alone (or, as Aggrey Brown, my most intellectually stimulating teacher at university, used to correct us, 'the North Atlantic war').
Europe is proud of its recent history of peace. This is a legacy it wants to bequeath to the world. This is its mission. Europe wants to be seen as creating Immanuel Kant's Perpetual Peace, in Kagan's view, rather than having to inhabit George Bush's Hobbesian world of brutish war.
Kagan says in 'Power and Weakness' that Europe is interested in "inhabiting a world where strength doesn't matter, where international law and international institutions predominate, where unilateral action by powerful nations is forbidden, where all nations regardless of their strength have equal rights and are equally protected by commonly agreed-upon international rules of behaviour. Europeans have a deep interest in devaluing and eventually eradicating the brutal laws of the anarchic Hobbesian world where power is the ultimate determinant of national security and success." This view, he further explores in his book Of Paradise and Power.
MILITARY WEAKNESS
Kagan posits that Europe's military weakness facilitates its devotion to multilateralism.
He illustrates his point: "The psychology of weakness is easy to understand. A man armed with only a knife may decide a bear prowling the forest is a tolerable danger inasmuch as the alternative hunting the bear armed only with a knife is actually riskier than lying low and hoping the bear never attacks. The same man armed with a rifle, however, will likely make a different calculation of what constitutes tolerable risk."
The fear in Europe is that the all-powerful America, arrogant and intoxicated with its status as the only standing Superpower, might pose as great a danger to the world if not greater than the loose terrorist networks. Europe, because of its military weakness and ideological aversion to the unnecessary use of force, is intensely interested in a world governed by international law and rules-based behaviour.
Besides, the ending of the Cold War has made Europe more secure and less dependent on U.S. military umbrella. The high-level report of the Independent Task Force sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and co-chaired by former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Renewing the Atlantic Partnership) notes that the "end of the Cold war set Europe and the United States on separate paths when it came to defence spending, social priorities, the efficacy of military force or even the optimal configuration of the post-Cold War World."
POTENTIAL THREAT
The Soviet Union no longer threatens Europe, so the U.S. nationalists would say, "they cannot afford to be cocky and ungrateful". But the Europeans know, too, that with no Soviet Union to constrain the actions of the United States, the US now represents a potential threat to Europe as the unipolar power.
"The United States and Europe are not just lapsed partners; they have become open rivals," says Charles Kupchan, one of the leading scholars in foreign policy today, writing at salon.com. That is why Europe wants to see a strong United Nations and a multilaterally governed international order. This consumes Europe even more than the terrorist threat.
Admits the neoconservative Kagan in his book Of Paradise and Power: "Although fiercely protective of its own autonomy, the United States has been less concerned about the inviolability of the sovereignty of others. It has reserved for itself the right to intervene anywhere and everywhere."
This is what Europe rightly fears and resents. And it is what the civilised world, which has emerged from the long dark night where the most powerful ruled by dictat, must oppose relentlessly. It is why Bush's European crusade for goodwill will fail.
Ian Boyne is a veteran
journalist. You can send your comments to ianboyne1@yahoo.com
