Europe's love-hate relationship with the United States
Bruckner, Pascal
Pascal Bruckner is one of the leading figures of the Generation of 1968 in France—which is to say, he is someone who, in his student days, agitated for the revolution. And he is someone who, as he...
...The brusque style of Washington has managed to antagonize its best friends by means of anachronistic ukases and its treatment of allies as unruly children...
...In this present essay, he criticizes his fellow Europeans—and he criticizes the United States...
...If Europe wishes to have the slightest influence over the rest of the world, it is obliged to establish for itself a new pan-European democratic structure—an entity that would be unprecedented in its ambitions and political form, and that derives authority from the voluntary surrender of local and national sovereignty to a higher body...
...that is, we have learned our lesson...
...An admirable prospect, to be sure, because this kind of government limits the loss of human life and manages without violence...
...European democracy has become what remains after all other dreams have been abandoned: it secures a domain of great diversity, where it is good to live, to accomplish things, to prosper if possible, surrounded by masterpieces of culture...
...A hedonistic and individualistic society is naturally reluctant to accept sacrifices, regardless of the martial rhetoric with which it clothes its ambitions...
...But history continues to be made without us...
...something unprecedented is happening there without its inhabitants' even being aware of it...
...We must really construct better models of social justice, economic efficiency, and ethnic coexistence...
...We Europeans are obviously greedy, cowardly, and decadent...
...This long process of questioning remains to be accomplished for Islam, which is convinced that it is the last, and therefore the only authentic, revealed religion...
...They both have much to learn from one another about audacity and wisdom: how to temper American hubris with 16 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 European moderation and European moderation with American dynamism...
...It is easier to breathe under the indulgent aegis of Washington than it would be, say, under that of Moscow or Beijing...
...An earlier version of this essay appeared in the South Central Review, Volume 20, no...
...unable to take control of a new world order, America has forgotten that "the worst enemy of success is success itself," as David Landes put it...
...It judges itself pitilessly, and is constantly engaged in self-examination...
...Christianity and Islam are both imperialist religions...
...Neither the status of victim nor that of executioner is hereditary...
...I N FACT, it is less American leadership than American discretion that is troubling...
...F EUROPE ever wants to be a "power," it will have to establish a defense force wor thy of the name, or rather create among its citizens a state of mind that accepts the establishment of an army strong enough to intervene rapidly anywhere...
...The Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization increased the debt, and America was guilty even of the help it gave us...
...Likewise, America lost the Vietnam War, but it won the peace...
...But no protectorate at all would be even better, and partnership is better than subjugation, even benign subjugation...
...Europe's worst enemy is Europe itself—its penitential vision of its past, its gnawing guilt, its disillusionment with itself...
...We temper our indignation with cynicism and treat the aggressor and his victim as equals, as though, in light of our own disenchantments, nothing made any difference...
...The "neo-imperialist" lobby, which is very influential in the White House and which proposes to "democratize" the Middle East by force, may believe that America is invulnerable, but it fails to see that America lacks the resources to be an empire, even a "benevolent" one...
...When fighting a monster, be careful not to become a monster yourself," said Nietzsche...
...Translated from the French by George Holoch...
...These traits have made him one of the liveliest and most incisive intellectuals in France...
...Unless it is ready to suffer another defeat, the United States must abandon its splendid smugness...
...If you do the same to other beliefs, you will be accused of racism...
...The colonial adventure perished from its own basic contradiction...
...We delight in casting all our sins onto this ideal scapegoat, because everything that goes wrong in the world can be laid at Washington's door...
...But the suspicion that hovers over our most striking achievements always carries the risk of descending into self-hatred and facile defeatism...
...Conversely, America, home of the most enterprising capitalism, is the last great political nation of the West...
...In the United States it concerns the genocide of the Indians, the slave trade, and segregation...
...Consider the history...
...Similarly, when the French media—as they should—focus on the torture committed by our army in Algeria, but then become discreet about identical horrors committed by the National Liberation Front, they help to create an appalling and slanted image of France...
...In this kind of enterprise, the danger always exists of adopting the logic of the enemy the better to defeat him, of expanding police power and militarization, and suspending or weakening the marvelous constitutional edifice forged by America's Founding Fathers...
...Quite the contrary...
...Europe always dreams of converting its adversaries into partners...
...Bruckner wrote one of the most important criticisms of left-wing self-delusion in The Tears of the White Man, which I urge the readers of Dissent to examine...
...Feudal tyranny led to democracy, oppression by the church led to freedom of conscience, rivalry among nations led to the dream of an international community, overseas conquests led to anticolonialism, and revolutionary ideologies led to antitotalitarian movements...
...For too many countries, particularly in the Arab world, selfcriticism is confused with the search for a convenient scapegoat: it's never their fault, always someone else's...
...Reason demands that we convert European-American rivalry into emulation between two blocs that are both close and different from each other...
...Western Europe knows that without American help in the last century, it would have been wiped off the map or colonized by Soviet troops...
...This is the real challenge to any intervention in Iraq, even though everyone favors the elimination of the butcher of Baghdad...
...In the imagination of many intellectuals and political leaders, America plays the role the Jews once did in National Socialist demonology...
...First we bark and then we give in...
...They embody two divergent conceptions of the Enlightenment, two outcomes of emancipation inaugurated in the eighteenth century...
...We persist in our refusal to grow up and assume our responsibilities...
...The culture of mobilization and fear has always been the favorite tool of dictatorship...
...In the past, Americans have paid dearly for their pious cult of the messianic nation, their unshakeable conviction of righteousness, their ingenuous belief that what is good for Uncle Sam is good for the rest of the planet...
...On September 11, one faction of radical Islam, itself eager for world domination, declared war not only on the West, on "Jewish and Christian pollution," but also on the rest of the world and particularly on its own moderate coreligionists, whom they accused of being lukewarm and corrupt...
...Repentance is not a policy, and the continent of Europe cannot model its relationship to the past on that of Germany...
...But by the same token, it created the ideas that enable us to analyze and to destroy those monsters...
...It has the unique capacity to elevate its particular concerns and anxieties into priorities for the entire world...
...The Catholic church accomplished its aggiornamento with Vatican II...
...Smith was convinced of the (then) revolutionary idea that material abundance is the most effective means for domesticating human passions and civilizing the world...
...The duty to remember implies nothing about the purity or guilt of descendants...
...The typical European man or woman is a sensitive creature always prepared to feel pity for the sufferings of the world and to assume responsibility for them, always asking what the North can do for the South rather than what the South can do for itself...
...Europe holds its own cards...
...Europe's real spiritual father is not Immanuel Kant or Jean Monnet but Adam Smith...
...If all we brought to Algeria was oppression and war, how can we explain the fact that for the last thirty years so many Algerians have dreamed of emigrating to France, fleeing their country, which may be independent, but which has sunk into civil war and chaos...
...Contrition cannot be restricted to a few and innocence attributed to everyone who claims to be persecuted...
...America can no more do without us than we can without America...
...Democracy must be armed, heavily armed, to resist tyranny, to preserve its vocation of essential freedoms and to guarantee justice...
...The third-worldism that set the wretched of the earth in opposition to the sated North is moribund as a political movement, yet it survives in our minds as a subtle poison, in the way we spontaneously denounce ourselves for the world's disorders...
...This is, then, an admirable writer who is also an admirable man...
...I have especially admired his La Melancolie democratique and La Tentation de l'innocence—the latter of which shows that, among the French writers today, no one has a better understanding of the United States...
...PASCAL BRUCKNER'S books in English include The Temptation of Innocence, The Tears of the White Man, Evil Angels, and The Divine Child...
...Europe is today's largest contemporary political and cultural laboratory...
...In the Middle East and elsewhere, Europe no longer wants to get its hands dirty, only to hold them out in a passionate appeal to all men and women of goodwill...
...This is first of all a conflict within Islam...
...In France, a country with an anticlerical tradition, you can scorn, ridicule, and trample on Christianity with impunity...
...The omnipotence on which it prides itself is a burden too great for its shoulders alone...
...For we can blame America for everything except our own apathy...
...This is an excellent thing, a salutary realization of past offenses, provided that other cultures and other beliefs also recognize their errors...
...Its refusal to ratify major treaties, its absurd and futile guerrilla warfare against the International Criminal Court, its contempt and arrogance toward the UN, and its shameful treatment of the prisoners in Guantanamo are disgraceful...
...America, the offspring of the Old World that has surpassed its progenitor, would witness the birth of a new Europe that would then put the United States in its place...
...Half its fleet of helicopters was grounded because of poor maintenance and a lack of spare parts...
...The Vietnam War pushed these tendencies to extremes...
...Few societies have shown themselves so capable of declaring guilt, analyzing defects, and reforming...
...They are willing prisoners of the very logic that they challenge...
...The West cannot be wholly defined by imperial will...
...We saw this in Bosnia in 1995, in Kosovo in 1999, and comic-opera style, when the European Union asked Washington to mediate the microscopic Spanish-Moroccan conflict over Parsley Island off the coast of Tangiers in the summer of 2002...
...it is a minefield from which we struggled to escape after 1945 and again in 1989...
...As a new front opens in Iraq, the Bush administration seems to have misread its own citizenry and to have forgotten the lessons of Vietnam...
...Intransigence pays—most of the time—but it can also turn into a quagmire, a national catastrophe...
...Still, it is up to us to retaliate without flinching, with force, but also by intellectual arguments that eschew insult while aiming to isolate fanatics (even if they come disguised as friends of tolerance), and to encourage secular forces and to empower women, the emblematic victims of Sharia...
...An army whose official doctrine is "no casualties" is illsuited to long, costly military expeditions...
...America is capable of identifying an enemy, exaggerating the threat it poses, and attacking it...
...We are far from doing so...
...It pushes scruples to the point of paralysis...
...But our possibilities are enormous if we enact a genuine intellectual revolution...
...F UROPE'S GREAT virtue lies in an aware , ness of its dark side, its pathologies, the fragility of the barriers protecting it from its own dishonor...
...The birth of a new McCarthyism, thanks to the conservative right, would be Osama bin Laden's greatest victory over the country of Abraham Lincoln...
...When the colonized demanded freedom, they simply turned against their masters the rules those masters taught them...
...Democracies can make only limited use of it before they destroy themselves...
...A Fatal Weariness The United States, particularly the left wing of the Democratic Party, also lives with a guilty conscience...
...The Ambiguities of Masochism Europe gave birth to monsters...
...We Europeans spontaneously agree -PAUL BERMAN with our enemies in the way we judge ourselves, and we take shelter from the furies of the age by focusing on everyday economic and social problems...
...Ever since the conquistadors, Europe has combined the greatest progress with the greatest cruelty...
...In every situation, we demonstrate the clairvoyance of the dupe who swears that he will not be taken in again...
...No doubt...
...It is often forgotten that contemporary Europe did not come into existence as the United States did, with an enthusiastic vision of a new birth of history...
...Despite mutual suspicion, we are condemned to strengthen our ties and to increase transatlantic cooperation...
...Consider the wave of repentance sweeping through the continent nowadays—like an epidemic, especially in the major religions...
...America mobilizes and acts...
...The American government sets itself above the law...
...This calm life would be perfect in a time of great serenity, in a world that had finally achieved Kant's "perpetual peace...
...How can we command respect if we do not respect ourselves, if we constantly depict ourselves, in literature and the media, in the darkest colors...
...One has the sense that this sporadic policeman is not up to the mission it has adopted...
...We Europeans can challenge the dominance of the English language and the finance capitalism of Wall Street (with its extraordinary compassion for the rich), we can easily denounce the ambiguities of the melting pot and the ravages of communitarianism, and we can reject a world made in the image of American society...
...At least we know all this well enough to attempt to improve ourselves...
...The bitter truth is that Europe lags behind our transatlantic cousin in almost every area...
...We would rather complain than act, cursing Uncle Sam while throwing ourselves into his arms at the slightest trouble...
...And John Paul II completed this unprecedented process by addressing solemn apologies to the Jewish community, the Indians of Latin America, the Eastern Orthodox church, and Protestants, by recognizing the papacy's failure to accept major scientific discoveries since the fifteenth century, by condemning the Crusades, and by renouncing forced conversions...
...This magnificent result, full of lessons for other nations, is not enough...
...Obsessive attention to past abominations has blinded us to the horrors of the present...
...This lucidity prevents Europe from calling for crusades of Good against Evil, proposing instead to struggle for the preferable against the dreadful, as Raymond Aron put it so well...
...Seldom has the gap been so small between the most salutary political action and the most unreasonable military campaign...
...Either it will build a counterforce endowed with credible political and military tools or it will be vassalized, willingly...
...These actions recall oddly those now defunct Marxist regimes that challenged bourgeois legality in the name of a higher proletarian truth...
...If incrimination of the system is an integral part of the system itself...
...But Christianity, worn down by four centuries of opposition from within Europe, has given ground and accepted the principle of secularism...
...Without the world wars and their procession of horrors, there would never have arisen today's longing for peace, which is now confused with the longing for rest...
...The truth is that Europeans do not like themselves or at least not enough to overcome their disgust and to exhibit toward their own culture the quasi-religious fervor that is so striking in the Americans...
...Not only is criticism of Islam not "reactionary," it is the only authen 12 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 tically Voltairean attitude to adopt at a time when millions of Muslims wish to practice their religion in peace, without the interference of doctrinal extremists...
...European democracy resembles a rest cure that its once turbulent peoples have taken after losing their taste for battle...
...The time for being anti-American has passed...
...The United States sometimes gives the impression that it wishes to evade the constraints and duties of ordinary humanity...
...The only authorized racism seems to be the anti-Christian variety...
...There is skepticism and the art of living on one side, and optimism and religiosity on the other...
...For now, since geopolitics is the contemporary form of fortune telling, this is nothing but wishful thinking...
...Even today, we still have the vague sense that in the case of serious trouble, our security depends more or less on our Yankee big brother...
...DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 13 History's Minefield We no longer love history...
...1-2 (2003...
...Consequently, our diplomacy is often confined to oppositional stances for lack of positive alternatives...
...Europe suffers from two complexes about its American "protector": the debtor's complex and the Peter Pan complex...
...Woe to the brutes who think they are civilized and lock themselves in an infernal circle of certainty...
...It is the only nation able to "determine the exceptional situation" (Carl Schmitt), to rise above its particular interests in order to defend its underlying values, first of all freedom...
...It moves us away from ourselves in order to come closer to the Other...
...It will help to dissipate the mistrust many nations feel for this sacrificial monotheism...
...Sensitive souls on both right and left would have urged us to flagellate ourselves: we've been attacked, so we're guilty...
...If we are honest, we will of course recognize divisions of opinion on both sides of the Atlantic...
...if, for example, the entire history of colonialism was shadowed by a powerful current of anti-colonialism, from Las Casas through Montaigne to Sartre, this is because, along with our greedy drive for expansion, we preserved spaces for dialogue and recognition of the relativity of beliefs...
...All things considered, an American protectorate is preferable to others...
...Colonialism subjected some continents to the laws of anDISSENT / Spring 2003 n I I other continent and at the same time fostered the idea of nationhood and the right of selfdetermination...
...Our task at this historical moment is to reconcile Europe with history and to reconcile the United States with the world, to teach Europe that battles are not won by incantation and compromise, and to teach the United States that it is not alone in the world, charged with a divine mission that relieves Americans of seeking the approval of others, from listening to and arguing with them...
...Europe snickers and stands by—a fearful colossus suffering from its great size, losing strength as it expands territory, Europe has become the Pontius Pilate of nations...
...In this respect, September 11, with its spectacular drama, was perhaps a terrible opportunity...
...Following the example of Europe, no people, no regime can now evade the duty of thinking against itself...
...we have to be pro-European instead, to increase our own strength...
...Here is the paradox: the more we curse the United States, the more we depend on it...
...They are mere rhetorical flourishes designed to conceal an actual renunciation...
...Intoxicated by its technological, cultural, and economic success...
...The West did not invent genocide, but it invented the concept of "crimes against humanity...
...After 1945, Europe distanced itself from its own barbarism by giving these words a more precise definition—at the risk of turning the accusation of barbarism against itself...
...Never has Voltaire's famous call been more pertinent: Ecrasons l'infame...
...We still imitate their mistakes after they have devised remedies...
...The commitments of the past are over and done...
...The day on which its authorities ask forgiveness for crimes committed in the name of the Quran against infidels, unbelievers, and women will be a day of progress for all humanity...
...Some prestigious analysts such as Joseph Nye and Charles Kupchan have argued repeatedly that their country too easily confuses superpower status with omnipotence, and warn that unchallenged predominance cannot last for more than ten years...
...It took the total disaster of the twentieth century to bring Europe to virtue...
...One side is obsessed with turning wolves into lambs, the other reduces the complexity of human affairs to the logic of military force...
...Make no mistake: the same argument would have been made if the terrorists had destroyed the Eiffel Tower or Notre Dame...
...We may have become wise, but the wisdom is that of a sated brute, weary with slaughter, resigned to modest projects...
...Still, a civilization guilty of the worst atrocities and capable of the most sublime achievements should not feel only remorse...
...And he has accomplished one other thing...
...But some expressions of generosity are forms of insult...
...Since the Renaissance, we have developed the habit of conceiving truth as plural and not singular...
...In October 2001, France had to lease Russian planes to contribute to the intervention in Afghanistan...
...the stupidity and bitterness it manifests or the willing servitude that it presupposes toward a superiority it denounces—in order not to change it...
...It forced us to think about democracy in terms of a struggle, as a concern for all humanity, and not just as a spontaneous growth arising from the market and the operation of international institutions...
...Commerce and Righteousness It is an irony of history that Europe, the bastion of socialism and Marxism, now defines itself only in commercial terms, and that the anti-globalization movements see the world only through economics...
...And he commands the distinctively French art of the essay...
...The "USAers" may experience moments of great solidarity or bursts of patriotism, but they are not made to rule the world like Romans because the "message" of America is self-fulfillment and love of life...
...Measures such as affirmative action were taken to attenuate the consequences of these terrible tragedies...
...Pascal Bruckner FOR THE LAST half century, Europe has been haunted by the demons of repentance...
...He has had a lot of success in France with his novels...
...If we confine ourselves solely to the prose of the world—to growth, wages, pensions, the thirty-five-hour work week—we will be unable to reconcile power and right and to rediscover a historic ambition worthy of our prosperity...
...Yet we do nothing to free ourselves from American domination...
...It sent soldiers, missionaries, and merchants to subdue distant lands...
...Europeans think they have solved all problems by stopping mutual slaughter and establishing "no more war" as an inviolable dogma...
...We live off the dividends of our self-accusation...
...DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 17...
...We lag far behind the Americans, out of breath...
...We have a choice: either we do what we must to achieve independence or we stop ranting and raving...
...Europe's true crime is not only what it did in the past, but what it fails to do today: its inaction in Yugoslavia, its scandalous delay in Rwanda, its frightening silence in the face of the massacres in Chechnya...
...However, while Americans sometimes succumb to self-abuse, they also maintain the ability to reconcile a critical approach with self-affirmation...
...A liberal population drawn to abundance and individual development cannot transform itself for long into a mass military force and witness the death of many of its children without denying its basic freedoms...
...When those men and women reject our friendship, well, we leave it up to others to do what is necessary...
...Nevertheless, we criticize him for subjugating our continent...
...In the 1990s, Bruckner was one of the intellectuals who succeeded in forcing France to intervene more forcefully in the Balkans—which eased the way for the United States to follow suit...
...It is hard to tell what is most hateful in present-day anti-Americanism...
...Anti-imperialist" recriminations are specious insofar as they require the preservation of their target...
...Our attackers are really poor people protesting against our insolent wealth and our western lifestyle...
...Ruminating over its past crimes—slavery imperialism, fascism, communism—it has seen its history as nothing but a long litany of murder and rapine culminating in two world wars...
...This is the sticking point, because it would involve budgetary choices and therefore sacrifices...
...We are supposedly forever in debt to the poor, the oppressed, the immigrants, and our only obligation is to expiate endlessly...
...We are like a child who rebels against his parents so that he will never leave them...
...By the evening of September 11, a majority of our citizens, despite their obvious sympathy for the victims, were telling themselves that the Americans had it coming...
...It is remarkable, for example, how we evade contemporary tensions, even on our own territory, and delegate responsibility to the Americans, only to criticize them mercilessly thereafter...
...After all, if we're nice to them they'll be nice to us...
...The first leads to failure to act, the second to adventurism...
...Rome, in keeping with its founding vocation, finally seems to have abandoned its temporal ambitions for purely spiritual aims...
...Renewing Transatlantic Bonds Whatever may happen, Europe and America are linked to one another...
...Whatever it does, whether it abstains or intervenes, America is always wrong...
...The disputatious halves of the West have to be brought together because, with the notable exceptions of India and Japan, they remain the only guarantors of universal democracy...
...If all European history boiled down to the sinister and stupid blundering of crusaders and bloodthirsty adventurers searching for gold, why do so many of Europe's formerly subject peoples seek to join us and to adopt our values...
...DISSENT / Spring 2003 n 1 5 However, neglecting political solutions in favor of saber-rattling is no solution either...
...Europe has to recover its civilizing capacities and its pride, not in blood and battle, but primarily in spiritual conquests...
...It is not a matter of choosing between the New and the Old World, because only a dialectic between the two is exciting, the source of fruitful prospects...
...In the latter case, an aging and declining Old World will reduce itself to being a luxurious vacation resort, coveted by predators, and always prepared to abdicate its freedom for a little more calm and a little more comfort...
...As soon as the last GI left Saigon, thousands, and then millions, of Vietnamese took to the sea to escape from their liberators...
...Some Europeans place their hope in a theory of reverse genesis...
...Europe has an extraordinary and paradoxical nature...
...But it also invented anthropology a way of seeing ourselves as others see us and of seeing others as they truly are...
...We are pathetic in our aspirations, and miserable in our pleasures...
...Like a jailer who throws you into a prison cell while slipping you the key, Europe simultaneously gave the world despotism and freedom...
...And just as every military intervention is not necessarily warmongering, so every reservation and call for caution is not a replay of Munich...
...Europe has taken shape through selfdenying doubt...
...Our criticisms of American policies are often justified, but they would carry more weight if our continent, already under 14 n DISSENT / Spring 2003 mined by its internal divisions, did not demonstrate tragic fecklessness...
...When a crisis erupts, we do our utmost to delay...
...They express a pride in themselves and their country that is too often lacking on the other side of the Atlantic...
...But then we have to offer in its place something more than mockery and reproof...
...Today, we are desperately lucid...
...It arose out of weariness with slaughter...
...Both are convinced that they possess the truth and have been prepared to save humanity despite itself, with the sword, the stake, and the Inquisition...
...It needs a strong Europe at its side—a Europe able to support it, but also able to criticize it, give it firm and friendly warnings against its symmetrical temptations of withdrawal and hegemony...
...September 11 reminded us that history remains tragic, that madness and barbarism, privatized in a criminal multinational organization, can flourish on the same soil as the democratic ideal and move parallel to it, using the most sophisticated technologies...
...And he is someone who, as he grew up, never lost the grand traits of the student uprising of '68: the instinct for the new and the fresh, the spirit of impudent truth-telling, the spirit of internationalism, the instinctive knowledge that politics and culture and sexuality cannot be divorced...
Vol. 50 • April 2003 • No. 2
