But Kagan also has a strong element of the realist in his ideological makeup. He knows that America’s progress in converting the world to freedom and peace will be slow and unsteady because all too many nations not only resist America’s impulse to expand the realm freedom but also try to pull the world back into a regressive condition of tyranny and war. As history’s pivotal nation (the collapse of Communism and the end of the Cold War serving as the pivot), America must be ready to confront realistically and deal effectively with those nations that resist its leadership and threaten its progressive ideal.
One would think that the nations whom America protected from the regressive pull of Communist tyranny, the nations of Europe, would be among those most supportive of America’s pivotal role in the ineluctable march of freedom and peace. But such has not been the case, and in his book Of Paradise and Power, published in 2003, prior to the outbreak of the Iraq War, Kagan attempts to account for the political rift that has opened up between America and its transatlantic allies and friends.
As I discussed last time, the cause of the rift, according to Kagan, is the disparity in military power between Europe and America. Because of this disparity, Europe and America have come to view the world from very different perspectives. Europe has constructed a paradise of Kantian peace and prosperity and deals with the nations outside its paradise by means of diplomacy and the soft-power seductions of economic and cultural exchange. America, on the other hand, though it looks longingly at the paradise Europe has created and the “separate peace” within which it lives, must steadfastly and heroically deal with the world outside the gates of the European paradise, a world governed by a Hobbesian fight for dominance and power. In such a world European soft-power seductions do not work. Only the hard-power methods of military might prove successful, and it is to those methods that America is dedicated.
Europe had itself once been dedicated to the methods of military force, but during the Cold War Europe allowed the United States to take on the task of militarily facing down the behemoth behind the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union. Having thus ceded to the United States the role of freedom’s protector, Europe was able to invest its wealth much more in the instruments of peace than in those of war. And now, an economically strong but militarily weak entity on the stage of international relations, it extols those foreign policy tools militarily weak nations always extol: diplomacy, alliances, economic exchange.
And thus it seems that the military disparity between Europe and America—and the consequent disparity in their views of international policy—is a result of mere historical happenstance. But Kagan knows that such is not the case. If Europe, compared to the United States, is militarily weak, it is because Europe chooses to be militarily weak. Military strength is an option that is open to Europe but one that Europe has very deliberately and very consciously rejected. Europe’s repudiation of power, that is, is not just a practical repudiation but an ideological one. As Kagan puts it, the underlying cause of the current rift between Europe and America “lies somewhere in the realm of ideology, in European attitudes not just toward defense spending but toward power itself” (53)
In order to explain Europe’s ideological rejection of military power as a tool of foreign policy, Kagan first looks at that which so often decisively influences behavior, either in a person or in a nation: the past.
1. They Haven’t Forgotten
Kagan makes it clear that Europe’s renunciation of power is not a consequence of social or economic incapacities.
With a highly educated and productive population of almost 400 million people and a $9 trillion economy, Europe today has the wealth and technological capability to make itself more of a world power in military terms if Europeans wanted to become that kind of world power. (53-4)
It is obvious that Europe has at its disposal the means to achieve something approaching military parity with the United States. If Europe continues to lag behind America in military strength it is not because it lacks sufficient means to achieve power but rather because it lacks sufficient will to achieve power. Very consciously and deliberately Europe has rejected a “strategic culture” based on power and in its place has put one that emphasizes diplomacy, the rule of law, economic and cultural ties, multilateral decision-making, and multinational action. And we can easily locate the source of Europe’s rejection of power: its memory. The “modern strategic culture” that Europe has chosen, a culture of law opposed to the culture of power embodied in America, “represents a conscious rejection of the European past” (55).
The specific past that Europe has rejected is the one memorialized in the first half of Europe’s twentieth century. Europeans have not forgotten the history of those years, refuse to forget it (my way of putting it, not Kagan’s). That history memorializes the mass production of violent death, consciously and deliberately initiated and carried through not once but twice by the great civilized nations of Europe. Europeans also do not forget, refuse to forget the motive that propelled the great civilized nations of Europe into the production of such inhuman carnage—a nationalistic desire for power. Each great nation of Europe saw itself in a competition for power with every other great nation of Europe. Unshakably confident in the rightness of their policies of power, the great nations of Europe engaged in a constantly shifting struggle in which each sought not only to protect what power it had but also to augment it, if not within the bounds of Europe itself then certainly outside Europe in those areas of the world into which the great civilizing principles of Europe had not yet penetrated—Asia, the Middle East, Africa.
Having refused to forget the history that their great, civilized nations made, Europeans have now chosen to transcend it. The history of the modern world was made by the great industrial nations of Europe using the weapons manufactured by their modern technologies to advance their own separate nationalistic agendas. Europe has now made the deliberate choice to leave that modern history behind and to advance into a postmodern world. In this brave new European world nations still exist, of course, but they now relate to one another not by means of physical force but by means of the force of reason. The persuasive force of rational argument and rules and not the coercive force of mass weaponry now guides and even compels the behavior of nations.
Thus, although European nations still have the economic means to construct and deploy armies and navies and air forces comparable to those of the United States, they have consciously and deliberately chosen not to do so. The Europeans, “who invented power politics,” Kagan says, have “turned themselves into born-again idealists by an act of will” (56), an act of will based on a refusal to forget the history that they have made.
“American realists might scoff at this idealism,” Kagan says (57). But he himself, idealist that he is, does not.
Within the confines of Europe, the age-old laws of international relations have been repealed. Europeans have pursued their new order, freed from the laws and even the mentality of power politics. Europeans have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian world of perpetual peace. (57)
2. Someone’s Gotta Do It
This Kantian world of perpetual peace that the Europeans have created, however, confronts them with a potentially insoluble dilemma.
According to Kagan, “Kant had argued that the only solution to the immoral horrors of the Hobbesian world was the creation of a world government” (57). In order for nations to escape the perpetual war of all against all that characterizes the world of Hobbesian anarchy, they must agree to a covenant. They will hand over a portion of their freedom, and especially their freedom to use force, to a supranational government, a sovereign entity whose allegiance is to no single nation but to the rule of law. Only this sovereign government has the right to promulgate laws, and only this sovereign government has the force to compel obedience to the laws it creates. Thus it can establish and maintain order among nations that, lacking the restraints imposed by such an authority, would persist in their destructive struggle for power and domination.
But, according to Kagan, Kant
also feared that the “state of universal peace” made possible by world government would be an even greater threat to human freedom than the Hobbesian international order, inasmuch as such a government, with its monopoly of power, would become “the most horrible despotism.” (57-58)
Having monopolized the power to create laws and enforce obedience, the sovereign government could very well turn despotic and destroy the freedom and peace it was established to protect. Kant could not resolve this fundamental dilemma, so Kagan tells us. But in our contemporary world, at least in regard to itself and Europe, the United States has resolved it.
The nations of Europe, as we’ve seen, have established their supranational Union by deliberately substituting the tools of reason for the tools of power, and they continue to perpetuate their Kantian realm of peace not by means of military deterrence but by means of persuasion and the rule of law.
European nations, of course, continue to maintain substantial military forces, but they no longer feel compelled to build them up to their highest possible capacities. The era when the great nation-states of Europe militarily competed and warred against one another is past, and Europeans have well learned the lesson that their wealth, both individually and as a collective, is more productively employed in civilian than in military research and development.
But their renunciation of power puts them in a difficult position when they turn their attention to the world outside their Union. For the supranational government that they have created is not by any means a world government. It holds only in one small portion of the world, Europe itself. Outside Europe the world’s other nations, not only terrorist nations such as Iran but autocratic nations such as China and Russia, still engage in the power politics that wrought such havoc in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. These nations, that is, still function in the Hobbesian realm of domination, anarchy and potential war.
Because of their deliberate choice to renounce military power, European nations, either separately or together in a Union, cannot now effectively confront such terrorist nations as Iran and certainly will not in the future be able effectively to confront such autocratic giants as China and Russia. And given the internal nature of their governments, we cannot rest assured that either the Radical Islamic state of Iran or the two autocratic giants, China and Russia, will forever respect the separate realm of peace and prosperity that the Europeans have made for themselves. (Note: Kagan does not speak of the threat of autocracies in Of Paradise and Power. I’m alluding here to his latest writings on international affairs which I will examine in future posts.)
We thus come to understand and appreciate the vital role that the United States has taken on as the Kantian “sovereign,” the beneficent hegemon that guarantees Europe’s safety and peace. Of course, the nations of Europe have not given over to the American colossus any power to make their laws or enforce them. They continue in their Union to promulgate and enforce their own laws. But by providing Europe security from outside its Union, the United States has rendered it unnecessary for Europe’s nations, either separately or as a Union, to provide it for themselves. Europe thus has the freedom to create a separate realm of supranational peace and prosperity—and also the luxury of renouncing effective military power—precisely because it has ceded to the United States the role of the world’s Sheriff.
As we’ll see, according to Kagan, Europeans remain deeply ambivalent about ceding to America this constabulary role, but ceded it they have. The Europeans are not naïve. Someone has to be able to deal with the terrorists and the autocrats should the occasion arise, and if that someone is not Europe itself, which has deliberately renounced effective military power as a tool of international relations, only one other plausible choice remains on the planet.
Indeed, America is the only plausible choice for the role of the world’s Sheriff not only because America, like Europe, is founded on the rule of law, but also because America, unlike Europe, has never renounced effective military power. Europe can thus feel comfortable ceding to America its current role as the world’s Sheriff because it knows that the United States will not morph into a despot. Keeping watch on the boundary, heroically and steadfastly doing its job, America will never turn its military force on the peaceful European states within, but will always use it to protect Europe’s realm of Kantian reason from the autocratic and terrorist states without, those states that refuse to subscribe to reason and that fervently, even zealously, compete with one another for dominance and power.
But Europe, for reasons that are not completely clear, balks at America’s behavior and cannot bring itself to concede that the role America has taken on in world affairs is a necessary, even a heroic one. Europe contends that it has created a realm of rationality and rules, but its conduct in the world and, especially, its attitude towards America betray motives that are distinctly irrational. And Kagan has identified these irrational motives. For one such motive, idealist that he is, Kagan feels a certain affinity. Like America, Europe is on an ideological mission in the world, intent on spreading to all nations its newfound ideal of peace.
In its new role as missionary of Kantian peace, it has come into ideological conflict with America because America sees clearly what Europe now refuses to see: before we can establish peace we must establish freedom, and freedom, in a world of Hobbesian anarchy, can only be established by the instruments of power. Next week I’ll discuss Kagan’s view of the ideological competition in which Europe and America are engaged. I will then examine more closely the two ideas that Kagan has been using to structure and ground his argument: Hobbes' idea of perpetual war and Kant's idea of perpetual peace.
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