Europe and Power

Robert Kagan ‘s acclaimed little book, Paradise and Power , offers the following insightful analysis into the contemporary European vision of the world and the European hostility to and suspicion of US power. After WW2, Kagan writes, “European strategy culture” set out on a program of “conscious rejection of the European past, a rejection of the evils of European Machtpolitik.” As Joschka Fischer, Germany’s Foreign Minister, puts it, “The core of the concept of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European balance-of-power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states that had emerged following the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.” After 1945, Europe entered a post-nationalist and post-modern and post-power world.

Kagan notes that the Germany’s reintegration into Europe, the culmination of three-quarters of a century of conflict and diplmacy, gave inspiration to the new European strategic vision: “it is the integration and taming of Germany that is the great accomplishment of Europe ?Eviewed historically, perhaps the greatest feat of international politics ever achieved.” Again, “European life during the more than five decades since the end of World War II has been shaped not by the brutal laws of power politics but by the unfolding of a geopolitical fantasy, a miracle of world-historical importance: The German lion has lain down with the French lamb.” This was accomplished through peaceful means, so the European story goes: “diplomacy, negotiations, patience, the forging of economic ties, political engagement, the use of inducements rather than sanctions, compromise rather than confrontation, the taking of small steps and tempering ambitions for success.” Heady with this achievement, Europeans took it as their mission to lead the world into a global post-modern version of Kant’s vision of perpetual peace. If Germany and France could be cajoled into peace, why not Palestinian and Jew, Iraqi and Iranian, North Korean and South Korean: “The mission of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe’s new mission civilisatrice.”

Enter America, with its unilateralism and militarism. It is not difficult to see how Europeans see American power: “America’s power and its willingness to exercise that power – unilaterally if necessary ?Econstitute a threat to Europe’s new sense of mission. Perhaps it is the greatest threat.” American power represents “an assault on Europe’s new ideals, a denial of their universal validity, much as the monarchies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe were an assault on American republican ideals.”