[lbo-talk] Europe versus America (Was NYT hires a new hack)

[C. G. Estabrook]

"...Europe surrendered to the United States. This rendition is the most 
taboo of all to mention. A rough approximation to it can be found in 
what remains in many ways the best account of the relationship between 
the two, Robert Kagan’s Paradise and Power, the benevolent contempt of 
whose imagery of Mars and Venus – the Old World, relieved of military 
duties by the New, cultivating the arts and pleasures of a borrowed 
peace – predictably riled Europeans.11 But even Kagan grants them too 
much, as if they really lived according to the precepts of Kant, while 
Americans were obliged to act on the truths of Hobbes. If a 
philosophical reference were wanted, more appropriate would have been La 
Boétie, whose Discours de la servitude volontaire could furnish a motto 
for the Union. But these are arcana. The one contemporary text to have 
captured the full flavour of the transatlantic relationship is, perhaps 
inevitably, a satire, Régis Debray’s plea for a United States of the 
West that would absorb Europe completely into the American imperium.12

"Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less 
united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in 
the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before 
the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states 
were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were 
self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters 
of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not 
just of a figure like De Gaulle, but of Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and 
Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if 
their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national 
assumptions, and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of 
a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another 
fashion. Down into the 1970s, something of this spirit lived on even in 
Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn 
of the 1980s, and the arrival in power in the 1990s of a postwar 
generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state 
as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything 
except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.

"By this time, on the other hand, the Community had doubled in size, 
acquired an international currency, and boasted a GDP exceeding that of 
the United States itself. Statistically, the conditions for an 
independent Europe existed as never before. But politically, they had 
been reversed. With the decay of federalism and the deflation of 
inter-governmentalism, the Union had weakened national, without creating 
a supranational, sovereignty, leaving rulers adrift in an ill-defined 
limbo between the two. With the eclipse of significant distinctions 
between left and right, other motives of an earlier independence have 
also waned. In the syrup of la pensée unique, little separates the 
market-friendly wisdom of one side of the Atlantic from the other, 
though as befits the derivative, the recipe is still blander in Europe 
than America, where political differences are less extinct. In such 
conditions, an enthusiast can find no higher praise for the Union than 
to compare it to ‘one of the most successful companies in global 
history’. Which firm confers this honour on Brussels? Why, the one in 
your wallet. The EU ‘is already closer to Visa than it is to a state’, 
declares New Labour’s Mark Leonard, exalting Europe to the rank of a 
credit card..."

--Perry Anderson, "Depicting Europe," LRB 20 September 2007

Full article at <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n18/ande01_.html>.

Doug Henwood wrote:
> On Jan 2, 2008, at 9:13 AM, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> 
>> The EU's failure to derail War Plan Iraq is not evidence of Europe's
>> inability to "do what it wants".  It's an example of Washington's
>> refusal to listen to counsel.  These are two different things.
> 
> It could be that, despite all their occasional huffing and puffing,  
> that the European elite is happy to stand aside and have the U.S. act  
> as the world's tough guy. They get the global hierarchy enforced, yet  
> get the opportunity to seem all high-minded. Canada too.
> 
> Doug
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