The Whole World is Watching
Common Dreams / Published on Monday, November 1, 2004 by the Inter Press Service
It is the future unity of the ''West'' that, more than any other basic factor in contemporary global affairs, is most at stake in Tuesday's presidential elections.
As Democratic challenger Senator John Kerry has stressed virtually from the outset of his campaign, trans-Atlantic relations -- which is at the core of the post-World War II, western-dominated international system -- have never been more strained than under U.S. President George W Bush.
No wonder: the coalition of aggressive nationalists, neo-conservatives and Christian Rightists that has driven Bush's foreign policy, particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on New York and the Pentagon, is unquestionably the most contemptuous of Europe since just before Washington's entry into World War II, when U.S. leaders still heeded the founders' admonition to avoid ''entangling alliances'' with European powers.
That contempt has been registered. According to a number of surveys taken in European countries -- including Britain -- over the past six months, Kerry is the overwhelming favorite of both ''Old Europe'', as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld dismissively called Washington's core NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) allies last year, and of the ''new'' one -- the former Warsaw Pact nations of central and eastern Europe, which have sided with Bush on the war on Iraq and received virtually nothing in return.
The rise in hostile feelings towards Washington is based above all on Europeans' feeling that Bush, in his unilateralism, has disregarded their interests and advice -- from his summary rejection of the Kyoto Protocol to curb global warming and the International Criminal Court (ICC) to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.
And while pollsters and political scientists say the unprecedented anger and resentment directed at Washington has been fundamentally anti-Bush, rather than ''anti-American'', his re-election Tuesday to a second term is very likely to move that contempt into the second category, cementing a permanent breach in the western alliance.
''This U.S. election will shape the future of Europe and the transatlantic West'', wrote Oxford University Professor Timothy Garten Ash in a column in the 'Washington Post' a week ago. ''If President Bush is re-elected, many Europeans will try to make the European Union a rival superpower to the United States''.
Such a result would, of course, have the most profound implications, not just for the two parties involved, but for the entire world.
For that very reason alone, it seems unlikely, particularly considering the durability of the western alliance since World War II and the fact that the economic, corporate and strategic interests of both the United States and Europe -- overseen by the elaborate multilateral structure that includes everything from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank to NATO and the United Nations Security Council -- are so similar.
But those interests might not be sufficient to keep the two sides from breaking apart. After all, the U.S. alliance with Europe dates only from the Cold War, when the fear of the Soviet Union welded the two together for what was effectively the first time in history. In many ways, Bush and the forces he has empowered represent a throwback to an earlier period.
Having claimed to represent the very best of ''western civilization'', Americans have, in fact, long been ambivalent about Europe. The first colonists, mostly religious Calvinists, saw themselves, like the ancient Hebrews out of Egypt, the ''chosen people,'' brought forth from a sinful, decadent and idolatrous Europe to found a ''new Israel''.
Over the decades and centuries that followed, ''Americans'' -- overwhelmingly European in origin until just the last few decades -- sought constantly to compare their achievements in the arts, industry and science with those of the great powers across the Atlantic while, at the same time, to contrast their moral and political values grounded in democracy, rugged individualism, civic-mindedness and straightforwardness with the autocracy, rigid hierarchies, corruption and mendacity of the ''Old World''.
This sense of moral and political superiority -- or ''exceptionalism'' -- was confirmed in a 150-year foreign-policy tradition, sometimes called ''isolationism'', which was directed above all at Europe -- as opposed to Latin America, the Caribbean or Asia, all of which have at one time or another constituted part of America's ''manifest destiny'' to spread the blessings of liberty southward and westward.
That the United States has enjoyed a virtually uninterrupted rise from 13 sparsely populated colonies hugging the Atlantic seaboard to its current status as the world's sole superpower also tends to confirm the sense that ''Providence'' (as U.S. Leaders referred to it from the mid-19th century to the early 20th century) has carved out a special role for the country apart from Europe, especially given the Puritan belief that God rewards the righteous.
These hoary old ideas have experienced an unprecedented resurgence under Bush, who has explicitly added the Middle East to those regions that stand to be redeemed by Washington's democratic ''mission''.
The focus on the Mideast is particularly compelling given the centrality of Israel as another morally ''exceptional'' nation in the ideologies of the Christian Right and neo-conservatism.
Indeed, under Bush Israel itself, and especially Washington's unprecedented backing for its Likud government, has become one of the most important sources of contention between Washington and Europe.
Bush, a Texan and fundamentalist Christian brought up in the heart of the U.S. ''Bible belt'', clearly falls into the ”exceptionalist” tradition that sees the United States as the morally redemptive force in the world. In his eyes, tying Washington to alliances and other multilateral mechanisms or instruments in ways that could constrain its power to act in the world is immoral.
It is in this sense that his open contempt for diplomacy and indifference to the views of European allies and international law -- constantly echoed and promoted by neo-conservative polemicists in particular -- harkens back to a much-earlier time in U.S. history, when Europe was both resented and despised and the unique moral mission of the United States was generally unquestioned by citizens and leaders alike.
Kerry, who actually spent much of his upbringing in Europe (and even France!), could not be more different.
Raised in the Atlantic-centered realism of his father, a ranking State Department diplomat who played important roles in the reconstruction and unification of western Europe and its integration into the NATO alliance, Kerry has long shown an instinctive distrust for any kind of political messianism, a distrust sharply honed, of course, by his own disillusionment as a highly decorated soldier in the Vietnam War.
Indeed, it was only in the 1990s, when the Clinton administration launched successive, but relatively modest -- and ally-approved -- interventions in Haiti and the Balkans, that it appears Kerry became persuaded that the exercise of U.S. military power could be a beneficial force under certain circumstances.
Even then, when former President Bill Clinton referred to the United States as ''the indispensable nation'', Kerry complained to a long-time aide, ''Why are we adopting such an arrogant, obnoxious tone''?
The senator's articulation of that belief as president -- that the United States is morally neither ''exceptional'' nor superior to Europe -- rather than any immediate changes in substantive policy, which could be made difficult or impossible by Congress, could at least begin to mend the breach between the United States and Europe that has become so enormous in the four years of the Bush presidency.
But even that might not be sufficient to put the alliance back together.
