With Us or Against Us Page 6
unique mix of moralistic religiosity, minimal provision for public
welfare, and maximal market freedom—the “American way of life”—
coupled with a missionary foreign policy ostensibly directed at exporting
that same cluster of values and practices. Here, the United States is
ill-served by globalization, which highlights for the world’s poorer
countries the costs of exposure to economic competition and reminds
West Europeans, after the long sleep of the Cold War, of the true fault
lines bisecting the hitherto undifferentiated “West.” Indeed, a truth
that is clearer now than even just a few years ago is that in many crucial
respects, Europe and the United States are actually less alike than they
were 50 years ago. This observation flies in the face of claims about
“globalization” and “Americanization” advanced not just by enthusi-
astic proponents of the process, but also by its angry critics. Yet there
is less to the promise of a new American century than meets the eye.
In the first place, we have been there before. It is a cardinal tenet of
the prophets of globalization that the logic of economic efficiency
must sweep all before it (a characteristically nineteenth-century fallacy
they share with Marxists). But that was also how it seemed at the peak
of the last great era of globalization, on the eve of World War I, when
many observers, likewise, foresaw the decline of the nation-state and a
future age of international economic integration.
What happened, of course, was something rather different, and
1913 levels of international trade, communication, and mobility
would not be reached again until the mid-1970s. The contingencies
of domestic politics trumped the “laws” of international economic
behavior, and they may do so again. Capitalism is indeed global in its
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reach, but its local forms have always been richly variable and they still
are. This is because economic practices shape national institutions and
legal norms and are shaped by them in their turn; they are deeply
embedded in very different national and moral cultures.
Partly for this reason, the American model is not obviously more
appealing to people elsewhere and its triumph is far from assured.
Europeans and Americans live quite different sorts of lives. More than
one American in five is poor, whereas the figures for continental
Western Europe hover around one in twelve. In their first year of life,
60 percent more babies die in the United States than in France or
Germany. The disparity between rich and poor is vastly greater in the
United States than anywhere in continental Europe (or than it was in
the United States 20 years ago); but whereas fewer than one American
in three supports significant redistribution of wealth, 63 percent
of Britons favor it and the figures are higher still on the European
continent.
Even before modern European welfare states were established,
most employed Europeans had compulsory health insurance (since
1883 in the German case), and all Western Europeans now take for
granted the interlocking mesh of guarantees, protections, and supports
whose reduction or abolition they have consistently opposed at the
polls. The social and occupational insecurity familiar to tens of mil-
lions of Americans has long been politically intolerable anywhere in
the European Union. If fascism and communism were the European
reactions to the last great wave of laissez-faire globalization, then
“welfare capitalism” is Europe’s insurance against a rerun. On prudential
grounds, if for no other reason, the rest of the West is not about to
take the American path.
But what of the claim that Europeans, like everyone else in the
world, will have little choice? Much is said about the coming ineluctable
triumph of American economic practice at the expense of the lumber-
ing, unproductive, inflexible European variant. Yet handicapped as
they are by all the supposed impedimenta of their statist past, the
economies of Belgium, France, and the Netherlands last year were
actually more productive for each hour worked than that of the United
States, while the Irish, the Austrians, the Danes, and the Germans
were very close behind.21
Between 1991 and 1998, productivity on average actually grew
faster in Europe than in the United States. The United States, nonethe-
less, outpaces Europe in gross terms. This is because more Americans
work; the state takes less from their wages (and provides less in
return); they work longer hours—28 percent more than Germans and
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A New Master Narrative?
29
43 percent more than the French; and they take shorter vacations or
none at all.
Whether Europe (or anywhere else) would look more like America
if the American economic model were adopted there is a moot point.
The modern American economy is not replicable elsewhere. The “war
on terror” is not the only matter in which the United States is criti-
cally dependent upon foreigners. The American economic “miracle”
of the past decade has been fueled by the $1.2 billion per day in
foreign capital inflow that is needed to cover the country’s foreign
trade deficit, currently running at $450 billion per year. It is these
huge inward investment flows that have kept share prices up, inflation
and interest rates down, and domestic consumption booming. If a
European, Asian, or Latin American country ran comparable trade
deficits, it would long since be in the hands of the International
Monetary Fund. The United States is uniquely placed to indulge such
crippling dependence on foreign investors because the dollar has been
the world’s reserve currency since World War II. How long the
American economy can operate thus before it is brought pain-
fully to earth by a loss of overseas confidence is a much-debated
topic; as is the related claim that it was these rivers of foreign
cash, rather than the unprecedented productivity of the new high-tech
sectors, that drove the prosperity of the 1990s.22 What is clear is that
for all its recent allure, the American model is unique and not for
export.
Far from universalizing its appeal, globalization has, if anything,
diminished foreign enthusiasm for the American model: the reduction
in public ownership of goods and services in Europe over the past
20 years has not been accompanied by any reduction in the state’s
social obligations—except in Britain where, tellingly, governments
have had to backtrack in the face of public opposition. And it is
because they inhabit such very different societies that Europeans and
Americans see the world so differently, and value sharply contrasting
international processes and outcomes.
But Europe, especially “old Europe,” is much more in tune than
the United States with the thinking of the rest of the world on every-
thing from environmental threats to international law, and its social
legislati
on and economic practices are more congenial to foreigners
and more readily exportable than the American variants. U.S. domestic
policy and politics are poorly adapted to the complexity of today’s
world. And it is the United States, not Europe that is increasingly
dependent on foreign investment to feed its deficit-laden economy
and sustain its vulnerable currency.
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Thus when American leaders throw fits of pique at European
dissent, and provoke and encourage internal European divisions, these
might reasonably be interpreted as signs of incipient weakness, not
strength. Real power is influence and example, backed up by under-
stated reminders of military force. When a great power has to buy its
allies, bribe its friends, and blackmail its critics, something is amiss.
The energetic American response to 9/11 may thus be misleading.
The bedrock reality is a world from which the United States will either
retreat in frustration or with which it will have to engage on cooperative
terms. Either way, the “American era” is passing.
*
*
*
And yet America is still esteemed and even revered overseas, not
because of globalization but in spite of it. America is not epitomized
by MTV and McDonald’s, or by Enron or WorldCom. America is not
even particularly admired abroad for its awesome military establish-
ment, any more than it is respected for its unparalleled wealth. If
American power and influence are actually very fragile, it is because
they rest upon an idea, a unique and irreplaceable myth: that the
United States really does stand for a better world and is still the best
hope of all who seek it. Radical anti-Americans acknowledge the force
of this myth, even as they disparage it.
What gives America its formidable international influence is not its
unequaled capacity for war but the trust of others in its good inten-
tions. That is why Washington’s opposition to the International
Criminal Court does so much damage. It suggests that the United
States does not trust the rest of the world to treat Americans fairly.
But if America displays a lack of trust in others, the time may come
when they will return the compliment. The greatest threat to America
is that in the face of American neglect and indifference, the American
image will fade and “large proportions of key societies [will] turn
against the United States and the global values of free trade and free
society.”23
This process is already well under way. “Anti-globalizers,” environ-
mentalists, advocates of a European (or French) “alternative model,”
all share a common anti-Americanism that takes its cue from U.S.
behavior and serves as a broad church within which the discontented
of the world can now congregate. Whether this coalition of senti-
ments and interests will ever move beyond rhetorical unison is unclear
and perhaps unlikely. Europeans may see themselves as increasingly at
odds with the United States, but from the point of view of much of
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A New Master Narrative?
31
the rest of humanity, the wealthy West still looks like a single bloc with
fundamentally similar interests.
But it may be that today’s transatlantic schisms and distinctions will
come to matter more, not less, in years to come. Long-standing social
and cultural contrasts are being highlighted and reinforced by irre-
solvable policy disagreements. Already the schism over the U.S. war
on Iraq has revealed something new. In the early years of the Cold
War, anti-American demonstrations in Europe took their cue from
Soviet-financed “peace movements,” but the political and economic
elites were firmly in the American camp. But today’s mass anti-war
protests require no manipulation, and the widespread anger toward
the United States is a new development.
This is not good news for America’s European allies—as Aznar,
Blair, and their collaborators wrote in their controversial open letter of
January 30, 2003, “Today more than ever, the transatlantic bond
is a guarantee of our freedom.” But it augurs ill for America, too. If
the world needs the United States, the converse is no less true.
If anti-Americanism becomes the shared default sentiment of much of
humanity, then America will be compelled increasingly to resort to
force, or the threat of force, to achieve its own ends, having lost the
means to persuade or convince friends and foes alike. The outcome
would be further suspicion and dislike, very possibly triggering a new
American retreat from international responsibility. It is an unappealing
prospect.
Notes
1. Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War over Iraq. Saddam’s
Tyranny and America’s Mission (Washington: Diane Pub. Co., 2003),
pp. 120–121.
2. See The Economist, January 4, 2003.
3. For Czech and Polish attitudes to war with Iraq, see The Economist,
February 1, 2003. For Spanish opposition to Aznar, see El País, February 3,
2003.
4. See the survey of transatlantic attitudes in a poll conducted by the Chicago
Council on Foreign Relations and the German Marshall Fund of the U.S.
at www.worldviews.org. For NATO member-state defense expenditures,
see La Republica, February 11, 2003. The critical views of a Central
European diplomat were expressed in a private communication. Like many
other politicians from former Communist Europe, he was reluctant to air
his criticisms of American policy in public.
5. See Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the
New World Order (Knopf: New York, 2003), and my review in The New
York Review of Books, vol. 50, no. 6, April 10, 2003.
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6. See Craig Kennedy and Marshall M. Bouton, “The real transatlantic
gap,” Foreign Policy, November–December 2002, based on a recent
survey by the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations and the German
Marshall Fund. For American views, see www.gallup.com/poll/
releases/pr030228.asp. In late February 2003, 59% of Americans
opposed a war on Iraq without UN support.
7. Emmanuel Berl, Mort de la pensée bourgeoise (Paris: Bernard Grasset,
1929; reprinted, 1970), pp. 76–77; André Siegfried, Les États-Unis d’au-
jourd’hui (Paris: Colin, 1927), quoted in Michel Winock, Nationalisme,
antisémitisme et fascisme en France (Paris: Seuil, 1982), p. 56. See also
Georges Duhamel, Scènes de la Vie future (Paris: Mercure de France, 1930);
Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu, Le Cancer américain (Paris: Rieder,
1931); and my own “America has gone mad: anti-Americanism in histor-
ical perspective,” in Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), pp. 187–204.
8. For Simone de Beauvoir, see her L’Amérique au jour le jour (Paris:
Morihien, 1948), pp. 99–100. Sartre was commenting on the trial and
execution of the Rosenbergs. For Le
Monde, see the editorial “Mourir
pour le Coca-Cola,” Le Monde, March 29, 1950.
9. For German representations of the price of Americanization, see Rainer
Werner Fassbinder’s Marriage of Maria Braun (1979); or Edgar Reitz’s
Heimat: Eine deutsche Chronik (1984), where the American impact on
“deep Germany” is depicted as far more corrosive of values than the pas-
sage through Nazism. And it was Václav Havel, no less, who reminded
his fellow dissidents back in 1984 that rationalism, scientism, our fascina-
tion with technology and change, were all the “ambiguous exports” of
the West, the perverse fruits of the dream of modernity. See Václav Havel,
“Svedomí a politika,” Svedectví, vol. 18, no. 72 (1984), pp. 621–635
(quote from page 627).
10. Philippe Roger, L’Ennemi américain: Généalogie de l’antiaméricanisme
français (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
11. See Philippe Mathy, Extrême Occident: French Intellectuals and America
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), and L’Amérique dans les
têtes: Un siècle de fascinations et d’aversions, edited by Denis Lacorne,
Jacques Rupnik, and Marie-France Toinet (Paris: Hachette, 1986).
12. Thierry Meyssan, 11 septembre 2001: L’Effroyable Imposture (Chatou:
Carnot, 2002), p. 23. In the same key, see Andreas von Bülow, Die CIA
und der 11. September (Munich, 2003). A representative selection of
British views, none of which descends to the paranoid absurdities of
Meyssan or von Bülow, can be found in “What we think of America,”
Granta, vol. 77 (spring 2002).
13. Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, Pourquoi le monde déteste-t-il
l’Amérique? (Paris: Fayard, 2002), Peter Scowen, Le Livre noir des États-
Unis (Paris: Editions Mango, 2003); Noël Mamère Patrick Farbiaz,
Dangereuse Amérique: Chronique d’une guerre announcée (Paris: Ramsay,
2002).
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A New Master Narrative?
33
14. We are back in May 1944, when Hubert Beuve-Méry, future founder and
editor of Le Monde, could write that “the Americans constitute a real
threat to France. . . . [They] can prevent us accomplishing the necessary
revolution, and their materialism lacks even the tragic grandeur of the