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Living with America.... Living With America:rolleyes
It's four more years. Here's how the world can turn them to opportunity—in partnership with America
By Timothy Garton Ash
Newsweek International
Nov. 22 issue - History throws it at you faster than any Hollywood action movie. On Tuesday, the world thought—and most of it hoped—that the U.S. election would give us four years of President John F. Kerry. (Remember him?) On Wednesday, it woke up with a headache to realize more Americans had turned out for George W. Bush. On Thursday, this primal groan was overtaken by the news of Yasir Arafat's death, a source of grief to his own people and renewed hopes of peace to almost everyone else. On Friday, a re-elected President Bush stepped before the press in Washington with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and started talking like Woodrow Wilson. Peace, he said, would be made around the world by spreading democracy. Democracy in Iraq. Democracy in a new Palestinian state. Democracy everywhere.
Like a middle-aged man who can no longer take all those thrill-filled late nights, the world hoped to sleep it off over the weekend. But history wouldn't wait. This was a global election, in its effects if not its causes. Now the roughly 6.3 billion people who didn't vote for George W. Bush have to make up their minds how to live with him.
So far, the clearest answers have come from the world's two other oldest democracies, Britain and France. Their sharply contrasting responses are symbolized by Blair's visit to Washington last week and Jacques Chirac's trip to Beijing last month.
Blair's answer is to engage fully with the only global hyperpower and try to nudge it toward a wiser course through private advice mixed with public loyalty. In a by-now lichened simile, the British will be like the ancient Greeks to America's imperial Rome. Or, in more contemporary terms, like the aged British butler Alfred to Washington's Batman. As indirect payback for his support in the Iraq war, Blair persuaded Bush to announce a "Roadmap" to peace between Israel and the Palestinians. Now he wants Washington to get back on the road.
As Britain next year takes over the chair of the G8, and then of the European Union, the British prime minister wants the new Bush administration to broaden its agenda from a narrowly defined "war on terror." Its new priorities should include such favorite European themes as reducing the greenhouse-gas emissions that contribute to global warming. Beyond this, he has an even more ambitious vision of leading the whole of the now enlarged European Union in a global partnership with the United States, based on a shared belief in freedom and democracy.
Chirac has a quite different strategy. "It is clear," he said immediately after Bush's re-election, "that Europe, now more than ever, has the need, the necessity, to strengthen its dynamism and unity when faced with this great world power." In plain English, he wants to make the European Union a rival superpower to the United States. He preaches "multipolarity," meaning that Europe should be one alternative magnetic pole to the United States—and China another. To this end, and to secure lucrative contracts for French business, he has traveled to Beijing, singularly failed to criticize China's human-rights record, endorsed mainland China's position on Taiwan and called for the lifting of the EU's embargo on exporting arms to China without clear conditionality about human rights or Taiwan.
Naturally enough, the Chinese are delighted. They love the idea of multipolarity. Back in the 1970s, Henry Kissinger played the China card against the Soviet Union. Now China can play the European card against the United States. And not just the European card. In a little-noticed development, the Chinese foreign minister was recently in Tehran, saying he would oppose American-led efforts to take the issue of Iran's nuclear program to the U.N. Security Council.
What we glimpse here is the prospect of a power play familiar to all students of diplomacy. Against President Bush's forceful assertion of the supremacy of American military power, other states form alliances of convenience to counterbalance it. Following the principle "the enemy of my enemy is my friend," or at least "the rival of my rival is my temporary ally," they make alignments irrespective of whether their chosen allies are dictatorships or democracies. These alignments are sustained by a public opinion that, in most countries of the world, has never been more hostile to the United States.
Chirac and his fellow Euro-Gaullists are happy to advertise the superior values of a peace-loving, law-abiding European "social model," as contrasted with bellicose, cowboylike American "casino capitalism," identified around the world with the names of corporations like Enron and Halliburton. But he also thinks nothing of forging an alliance between his own democracy, the motherland of "liberty, equality and fraternity," and the dictatorship that is China. His global strategy of counterbalancing the American hyperpower is, so to speak, value-free.
Who's right? Which is the better approach for the world's 85 other free countries to follow, as they work out how to live with Bush? Blair's is better, but not enough on its own. It needs a dash of hard-nosed French realpolitik to make it work. The policy we need is three parts Blair and one part Chirac. Call it the Blairac response. Here's why, and here's how.
Chirac's answer for the world is both cynical and unrealistic. It's unrealistic because the European Union will never be united around a rivalry to the United States. There are far too many Europeans who will not go along, starting with the British and the Poles, but continuing with what I call the Euro-Atlanticists in every European country, including France. These European divisions give the Bush administration endless opportunities to cherry-pick between European powers, as they have done over the past four years. The ancient Romans called this divide et impera ("divide and rule"). Meanwhile, even the Chinese, carefully calculating the balance of their own interests, will go only so far in playing a divided Europe against the United States. Talk of a China-Europe "axis" is overdone, since it assumes a single, coherent Europe that does not exist. So Chirac's neo-Gaullist fantasy is just that: a fantasy.
Blair's idealism is more realistic. He recognizes that the United States is currently the world's only hyperpower, and not much can be done against it or without it. But he also understands very well—partly because the British and the Americans speak the same language of liberty, and share more history than most nations—that the United States is a very unusual top dog. Just how unusual we saw at that White House press conference last Friday. Here was the president whom foreigners like to caricature as a cowboy, the "toxic Texan," sounding not merely like Woodrow Wilson but like a contemporary disciple of the German Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant. "The reason why I'm so strong on democracy,' said the philosopher-president, "is democracies don't go to war with each other."
Blair sees this as a perfect starting point for a response, not just from Europe but from other free countries around the world. "Yes," we should say, "we share the democratic and (yes) liberal values and the goal that you enunciate. That's exactly what we want, too. Now here's what we have to do to make it happen. And here's how we can help."
In spelling that out, we can make it quietly clear that, while no one living in a free country should want Iraq to become a failed state that is a training ground for terrorists (like pre-9/11 Afghanistan), invading Iraq was not the best way to start spreading democracy in the wider Middle East. Helping in Iraq is, first of all, a way of staunching a self-inflicted wound. A miracle may still happen, and Iraq may become the first halfway decent democracy in the Arab world, but I wouldn't count on it.
In the wider Middle East, however, there is already Turkey, a secular democra-tic state with a moderate Islamist government that the European Union should encourage in mid-December by agreeing to open membership negotiations. (Chirac now publicly supports it; but his party, and probably he privately, oppose it.) There is, of course, the democratic state of Israel. There is now the hope, under international tutelage, of a democratic Palestine. There are small Arab states, like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, making tentative steps in the right direction. In Iran, there is a strong civil society and a democratic opposition, although the things we have to do to prevent its Islamic regime from acquiring the capacity to make nuclear weapons are unlikely to help them, at least in the short term. It's a long-running scandal that the United States gives such massive aid to Egypt while exercising so little leverage over the way it treats its own citizens. Here, in supporting the liberalization and eventual democratization of the wider Middle East, is a shared agenda for at least four years ahead—if not for 40, which is how long it took to achieve the liberation of Middle Europe in the cold war.
Yet Blair's well-mannered, idealistic-insider approach has its limits, too. For there's another side to the policy of the Bush administration: a fierce, even militaristic American nationalism that reaches sometimes too quickly for the gun (partly because the United States has such big ones) and seems to believe that its war on terror can be won simply by hunting down and shooting terrorists. In the one longer conversation I have had with President Bush, I was struck by a certain "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" quality in the way he talked about foreign affairs. Often he was the courteous Yalie Dr. Jekyll, keen to get on with allies, very much his father's son; but then the impatient Texan Mr. Hyde would suddenly stomp out, just itching to ride off the ranch and kick butt. Listening to other senior figures in the administration, especially Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, I find the old Greek word hubris comes involuntarily to mind: the pride that goes before a fall, the overestimation of your own power that ends with nemesis.
In dealing with this tempestuous Mr. Hyde, the well-mannered British butler, discreetly whispering sage advice in the master's ear, is not enough. Mr. Hyde needs rougher medicine. Power listens to power; and Britain alone does not have sufficient power to gain the hearing it deserves. (In fact, it's something of a violation of the laws of gravity that the leader of one medium-size European state is taken so seriously in Washington.)
The European Union, however, with a combined GDP roughly equal to that of the United States, does potentially have that power. And where it speaks with one voice, over trade or competition policy, then it's listened to in Washington with corresponding attention. Recently the EU effectively blocked the merger of two giant American companies, General Electric and Honeywell.
Here is the soupcon of truth in the Chirac approach. Only if Europe can bring sufficient power to the table, including deployable military force, and learn to speak with one voice on issues of foreign and security policy, can it hope to save the second Bush administration from the dangerous hubris of its Mr. Hyde side. However, it will achieve that only if we make it clear that we want a strong, united Europe as a partner for the United States, in pursuit of the same values and goals, and not as a rival to it. As anyone in business knows, that's what a partner is: someone whose powers you respect, but who is fundamentally on the same side.
This Blairac response is not just a matter for Europe. The other great democracies of the English-speaking world, such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, can and should weigh in with Washington in the same direction. So can the world's largest democracy, India, and the other democracies of Latin America, Africa and Asia. In fact, this year Freedom House counts 117 democracies out of the world's 192 sovereign states. I suspect that's an overstatement. I doubt if Russia can now properly be called a democracy. Others are electoral democracies, but certainly not in any meaningful sense liberal democracies. (Iraq will join the former category in January.) The more realistic figure is Freedom House's count of 88 free countries. Yet those 88 contain nearly half the world's population, and most of its wealth and arms.
Between them, these free countries have the power both to welcome and assist the Wilsonian part of Bush's agenda, and to deter the militaristic, nationalistic part; to embrace Dr. Jekyll and restrain Mr. Hyde. What's more, they will find, in the nearly half of America's politically engaged citizens who did not vote for Bush, in the Blue States that shared the world's postelection primal groan, a formidable ally inside the United States. As Karl Marx did not say: Blue States of the world, unite!
President Bush begins his second term in a world of great dangers—terrorists with the ability to carry weapons of mass destruction in a carry-on suitcase, tyrannies, appalling poverty, drugs, AIDS, the undoubted fact of rapid global warming. It's also a world of great opportunities. More people in the world are more free than ever before. And the possibilities of spreading freedom are large. The old West of the cold war will never be re-created. But a new, wider post-West, a community of democracies, including many that never belonged to the historic West, can take its place. We have the chance to move forward from what we used to call "the free world," meaning essentially the anti-communist West, toward a free world. Never in the history of grammar has a shift from the definite to the indefinite article been more important.
Garton Ash is professor of European Studies at Oxford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His new book is "Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West." To discuss these ideas, visit freeworldweb.net.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc.
URL: msnbc.msn.com/id/6479274/site/newsweek/
"Molon labe".
Leonidas, King of Sparta,
Thermopylae, 480 B.C.
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