Humiliation or Solidarity?: The Hope for a Common European Foreign Policy

...4) Notes and footnotes should also be typed double-spaced, on a separate sheet...

...The solidification of the European Union into a powerful independent force in world affairs would be viewed by that segment of American opinion not as an expression of resentful antiAmericanism but as an entirely appropriate and altogether welcome reaction to the danger that the direction of American foreign policy poses for the world...

...Such a confederation has been recognized, ever since Hiroshima, as the only long-term solution to the problem created by nuclear weapons...

...If the statesmen of "Kerneuropa" adopt the stance that Habermas and Derrida recommend and DISSENT / Fall 2003 n 23 EUROPEAN FOREIGN POLICY act in concert to assert their independence of Washington, the U.S...

...To believe that Washington can forever hold all these rulers in awe would be folly, yet it is a folly that seems likely to prevail...

...Whether or not Condoleezza Rice actually used those words, they express the attitude of the Bush administration toward nations that failed to join the Iraq War coalition...

...But just insofar as they continue to do this, it will be easy for Washington to set them against one another—to make them behave like schoolchildren vying for the teacher's favor...

...Washington will also do its best to set the members of the European Union against one another, in order to ensure that Kerneuropa's audacity does not become an example for the EU as a whole...

...Richard Rorty pRESIDENT BUSH'S national security adviser has said, according to newspaper reports, that Russia will be forgiven, Germany ignored, and France punished...

...More frightening than the bullying tone adopted by President Bush's advisers is the fact that European heads of government and foreign ministers are now reverting to their bad old habits...

...Such an upsurge DISSENT / Fall 2003 .2,5 EUROPEAN FOREIGN POLICY of idealistic self-redefinition would be responded to around the world, in the United States and China as well as in Brazil and Russia...

...Disagreement with Washington by foreign governments is being treated by the Bush White House not as honest difference of opinion but as the failure of knaves and fools to accept guidance from the wise, farsighted, and benevolent...

...The Bush administration's view that a permanent pax Americana, one whose terms are dictated by Washington alone, is the world's only hope has as a corollary that the United States must never permit its military power to be challenged...

...It was also the day on which, in Habermas's words "the newspapers reported to their astonished readers the Spanish prime minister's invitation to the other European nations willing to support the Iraq war to swear an oath of loyalty to George W Bush, an invitation issued behind the back of the other countries of the European Union...

...Both Europe and America contain many millions of people who see clearly that, despite all that America has done for the cause of human freedom, its assertion of a right to permanent hegemony is a terrible mistake...

...It will have to offer proposals for rewriting the Charter of the United Nations and for putting the UN in charge of a program of global nuclear disarmament...

...It will have to dream dreams that will strike Realpolitikers as absurd...

...Please use inclusive language so that we don't have to make adjustments during editing...

...If any projects for a new international order put forward by the EU are to be of use, they will have to embody the idealism that America has seemingly become unable to sustain...

...The leaders of France, Germany, Benelux, Italy, Portugal, and Spain cannot postpone the choice they have to make: whether to accept the humiliating subservience that Washington hopes to impose on them or to break free by formulating and pursuing foreign policy initiatives to which Washington will react with incredulous outrage...

...Juergen Habermas and Jacques Derrida argue that "Europe must, within the framework of the United Nations, throw its weight in the scale in order to counterbalance the hegemonic unilateralism of the United States...

...If there is ever a time when public opinion must force politicians to be more idealistic than they feel comfortable being, this is it...

...Presumably she thinks that people such as Joschka Fischer and Dominique de Villepin, though neither fools nor knaves, must nevertheless be publicly humiliated, in order to help ensure a stable world order...

...It is, as far as I can see, about the only thing that might...

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...For such stability, on her view, will be possible only if America's hegemony goes unchallenged...

...Remembering what happened the last time that Washington's will was defied, European governments will be loath to instruct their representatives at the UN to question the latest American initiative...

...The EU—just as it stands, even prior to the adoption of a constitution—is already the realization of what the Realpolitikers thought was an idle fantasy...

...But this knowledge may not suffice to make them change the direction of American foreign policy...

...Look at our last few issues to see if your idea fits in...

...Other European philosophers (Umberto Eco, Adolf Muschg, Fernando Savater, and Gianni Vattimo) published statements along the same lines in the leading newspapers of their respective countries, also on May 31...

...Refusal to accept the American magisterium will be viewed by most of the American media as a sign of moral weakness...

...It can only keep things going for another generation or two...

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...The EU will have to put forward a vision of the world's future to which Washington will react with scornful mockery...

...Most of them realized that American hegemony was a makeshift that would have to do until something more enduring became possible—something like a veto-free United Nations functioning as a global parliament, equipped with a permanent peacekeeping military force and able to carry out a program of global disarmament...

...The leaders of the still-fragile regimes that govern Russia and China are too preoccupied with their own hold on power, and with domesEUROPEAN FOREIGN POLICY tic problems, to ask themselves questions about the best course for the world as a whole...

...Their resentment at Washington's arrogance will remain tacit...

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...For if Washington does force Germany to beg not to be ignored and France to plead for relief from punishment, then the next time an American president decides to embark on an excit24 n DISSENT / Fall 2003 ing military adventure there will be no significant countervailing pressure from abroad...

...RICHARD Rolm teaches philosophy in the comparative literature department at Stanford University...

...This means that the European Union is the only likely sponsor of an alternative to Washington's project of a permanent pax Americana...

...Rice herself (the former provost of my university) is a very sophisticated and knowledgeable scholar, and so it is unlikely that she thinks of European leaders in any such simplistic way...

...For all the reasons Habermas and Derrida give, the citizens of Kerneuropa are in the best position to exert such pressure...

...That document pretends that the danger of nuclear confrontation ended when the cold war ended and takes for granted that American and Russian submarines, each of them armed with enough warheads to destroy ten great cities, will lurk beneath the oceans for generations to come...

...The National Security Strategy of the United States" makes no reference to eventual nuclear disarmament, only to nonproliferation, where "nonproliferation" means that only regimes that acknowledge American hegemony have the right to possess nuclear weapons...

...For Bush's advisers suspect that if the EU had held together—if its member governments had been unanimous and vociferous in their repudiation of Bush's adventurism—they would never have been able to persuade the American public to agree to the war in Iraq...

...After so many decades of dependence, it is very hard for Europe's leaders to stop judging their success in foreign affairs by the extent to which they are on cordial terms with the great imperial power...

...Sooner or later we shall recreate the situation that prevailed during the cold war—nuclear powers daring each other to be the first to launch their missiles...

...And please remember that we can't consider articles unless they're accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope...

...I once heard a former Republican secretary of state say, in private, that he would be willing to trade a considerable measure of American national sovereignty for nuclear disarmament...

...If February 15 comes to be seen, as Habermas and Derrida hope it may, as the "birth of a European public sphere," the beginning of a new sense of shared European identity, that would change everyone's sense of what is politically possible...

...THE EDITORS 26 n DISSENT / Fall 2003...

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...That claim is made explicit in a policy statement titled "The National Security Strategy of the United States," which asserts, "Our forces will be strong enough to dissuade potential adversaries from pursuing a military build-up in hopes of surpassing, or equaling, the power of the United States...

...They appreciate that it was idealistic Wilsonian internationalism in the United States that led to the creation of the United Nations...

...They know that the unilateralist arrogance of the Bush administration is a contingent misfortune—neither inevitable nor expressive of something deeply embedded, and irredeemable, in American culture and society...

...3) Type your ms double-spaced, with wide margins...

...Both philosophers have profited from their frequent and extended visits to the United States to gain a deep and thorough understanding of America's political and cultural achievements...

...If America refuses to recognize that that day will come sooner or later, and if Europe does nothing to offer an alternative scheme for world order, then nothing is likely to change...

...BUSH'S APOLOGISTS in the American media are likely to dismiss such initiatives as Habermas's and Derrida's as just further examples of the envious and resentful antiAmericanism that is recurrent among European intellectuals...

...If Europe did that, it might just save the world, something that American policy cannot do...

...The Habermas-Derrida article was called "February 15th, or What Binds Europeans Together"—a reference to the day in 2003 on which mass demonstrations against the Iraq War were held in London, Rome, Madrid, Barcelona, Berlin, and Paris...

...government will do everything possible to turn American public opinion against them...

...They are right to say that Europe has, in the second half of the twentieth century, found a solution to the problem of how to transcend the nation state...

...The bullying tone adopted by the Bush administration may be one that all future American presidential candidates feel compelled to adopt in order to show themselves "strong" and "resolute" in "making war against terrorism" (an expression that will be invoked, as David Bromwich has pointed out in these pages, to excuse anything the American government may choose to do...

...But her insistence on the need for America to retain total control of global affairs is consonant with the remark that the American press is now attributing to her...

...Prior to the Bush administration, American statesmen usually paid lip service, at least, to the idea that the pax Americana was a transition to something better...

...They are competing with one another for Washington's favor...

...For Americans who were horrified by the willingness of their fellow citizens (and of the Democratic Party) to support Bush's Iraq War, the acquiescence of European statesmen in American unilateralism would be a tragedy...

...It is possible that even Democratic presidents will, in the future, reiterate this claim to permanent hegemony...

...Americans who realize this need all the help they can get to persuade their fellow citizens that Bush has been taking their country down the wrong path...

...They can afford to wait for their own day to come—the day on which they tell Washington that they can and will challenge its military power...

...It would break the logjam that we are now trapped in...

...IF THE CITIZENRY and the governments of Europe do not seize the hour, if they do not carry through on the repudiation of American unilateralism manifested on February 15, Europe is unlikely ever again to play a significant role in determining the future of the world...

...If the sense of shared European citizenship becomes entrenched in the first quarter of the twenty-first century in the way in which the sense of shared American citizenship became entrenched in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, the world will be well on the way to a global confederation...

...But, as Habermas and Derrida point out, some of Europe's recent dreams have come true...

...The text below, representing an American reaction to the Habermas-Derrida initiative, was published in German in Sueddeutsche Zeitung on May 31...

...Why," Habermas and Derrida ask, "should not Europe . . . devote itself to the broader goal of defending a cosmopolitan world-order based on international law against competing initiatives...

...Such a charge would be completely baseless...

...THE RULERS of at least a dozen countries will soon have their fingers on nuclear triggers...

...If the citizens and governments of Kerneuropa act as Habermas and Derrida hope they will, Washington will use every trick in the book to get them back in line—to make sure that their countries' votes in the United Nations are determined by decisions made by Rice and her colleagues on the National Security Council...

...At best, America's "national security strategy" can only postpone disaster...

...2) Please don't write to ask whether we're interested in such and such an article—it makes for useless correspondence...

...It called upon the nations of "Kerneuropa" (Donald Rumsfeld's "Old Europe"—France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Benelux, and Portugal) to adopt a common foreign policy...

...They are well aware of America's world-historical role as the first of the great constitutional democracies, and also of what America has done for Europe in the years since World War II...

...They are farsighted enough to know that American economic and military dominance is bound to be transitory, and to suspect that insistence on perpetual military supremacy will, sooner or later, produce a confrontation with China, Russia, or both—a confrontation that may end in nuclear war...

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...For Bush and his advisers talk of such a rebuilt UN is pointlessly idealistic, a refusal to face up to reality, a romantic retreat into a dream world...

...This may be the case even though men like John Kerry, Howard Dean, and Richard Gephardt (the most plausible candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination next year) understand, as President Bush does not, that no empire lasts forever...

...For the last thing Washington wants is a Europe that is sufficiently united and self-confident to question America's hegemony...

...The Habermas-Derrida article was published in English in the September 2003 issue of Constellations...