Talking Turkey at the TurkeyBlog

Sunday, December 12, 2004

Whither Europe? Nowhereville, unless they read their Tao...

Note: The TurkeyBlog has been fighting with one of those colds that don't leave you coughing and sneezing but do leave you tired and all stuffed up - his favorite, offering all the fun and none of the sympathy of a regular cold - hence the light posting.

Europe doesn't seem to know it, but it's digging itself into a hole right now. This is not, of course, news. What's more interesting is the "why" of the whole thing: Europe is declining in status because of its conscious striving to ascend in status and a fatal miscalculation in its strategy for doing so.

The fatal miscalculation, of course, is deciding to challenge the United States. Not that the U.S. will smack them down. Or do much of anything about them, really. Sure, we've had our own silly moments with "Freedom fries" and the like. But for the most part, Europe is something we read about and get in high dudgeon about, not something we actually bother with. The problem with challenging us, or - the French here is better - trying to rivaliser with us is the comparisons it invites.

At the center of Europe's mess is the Franco-German axis. From the early 1800s through the 1940s, this bunch entangled Europe in war a half-dozen times and roped the whole civilized world into the mess a few of those times. Then they invented the EU to counterbalance the two. This did much to keep war from breaking out between those two people. It did little to tame the egos of the French and the Germans, particularly the French.

I've lived in France, and one of the striking things I've noticed is the way that political programs become articles of faith. I had a long "discussion" with a French woman one evening in which she conceded that yes, people were getting increasingly limited and ineffectual treatments, yes, the government could not even afford these and yes, the whole thing could collapse any year now. So, I asked, what next? The answer was that you couldn't change the Securité sociale, it was a critical part of the fabric of French society symbolizing the way in which all the people are together as one, etc. In a country where the state tried literally to take the place of God on a few occasions the notion that policies bound up in national identity could be altered is not merely wrongheaded, it's alien.

One of the beliefs of Europe, once upon a time, is that it had a mission civilisatrice, that it could bring the Third World out of darkness and into the wonderful modernity that it knew. Today, it's ambivalent. They'll send troops to former colonies, of course. And they can't bring themselves to discuss how bad it sounded to teach generations of Algerians about their Gaulish ancestors. But they generally favor collective civilization, that is that the world would be brought out of darkness by coming into their orbit with tales of the advantages that come in being European. But what is European?

"European," today, doesn't stand for as much as it once did. For one thing, they've shirked Europe's two greatest creations, capitalism and the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment, incidentally, is not the same thing as the French Revolution and all that other mishmash, it was an intellectual movement that called on people to, in Diderot's words, "remove the eyes of habit" to see what was actually there. Here, especially, Europe has done itself in, strapping on goggles with visions of European superiority, socialism's inevitability and collective peace painted on the lenses. Their biggest mistake, however, is getting bass-ackwards how these three would interact if they came to the fore.

Many Europeans think just a little bit too much about the United States. Sure, we've bailed their asses out in a couple world wars, the Cold War, etc. And sure, we're in serious competition with them to be the most powerful entity in the world. But it's a one sided competition. When you pick up Le Monde, the Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung (spelling), Corriere della Sera and most other Western European newspapers, the U.S. is somewhere on the front page, often above the fold. When you pick up an American newspaper, news from Europe is on page A12 - they are, they'll be cheered to know, still the first folks we look at in International News.

Coming back to the bass-ackwardness of Europe's push for European superiority, socialist progress and collective security... Europe's focus on the U.S. isn't merely embarrassing, it's dangerous and foolish. What makes it foolish is that they confuse ends and means. What makes it dangerous is where this leads them. Which brings us to the Tao in this mess.

In the Tao we are given dozens of little aphorisms like this: There is work being done but there is no one working. And we are advised up front that the Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way. Warnings about striving - warnings we too need to heed - abound. The point is this: To become the sage of the Tao - or the leader of the world, for that matter - you must shift your focus from ego to the work at hand. You must not do things so that you will have done them, but merely so they will have been done. Finally you must realize that the Way cannot be found, but only followed, that if you do what must be done you will be on the path but if you strive to find The Way, you'll miss it.

Europe, alas, has not read the Tao. Ministers wake up every morning and ask themselves, how can we challenge the US? How can we establish European superiority? What formulae will enable us to finally achieve the dominance we should know? So...

How did the U.S. stumble into the American century? Kicking and screaming. We avoided World War I. We avoided World War II. We argued about whether we really wanted to get messed up in post-war Europe. We argued about whether we really had to act to counteract Cuba in the Caribbean and Central America. Different American leaders may have wanted to act, but what won public support for most of the actions that established American supremacy in the 20th century was not that it would enhance our prestige or bring us glory, but, to the contrary, that it had to be done now or else something else would have to be done later. We did our work, work that we had to do because no one else had the combination of power and will necessary to do it.

The other stumble the U.S. avoided on the way to the American century was thinking that it had found the one best way. From the New Deal to the New Frontier to the War on Poverty, we tried. But as these things failed to bring paradise, we pruned the most embarrassing bits. And in the world sphere, we focused less on our own power than on limiting that of the Soviet Union. Grenada, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Afghanistan - places we acted with good or bad results. But they did not become American satellites or outposts. Most tellingly, at the height of our powers, we did not turn Iraq into an American oilfield, but packed our bags and left once Kuwait was liberated. We did our work but did not presume to remake the world in our image.

Europe's problem today is that it doesn't understand how to surpass the U.S. anymore than Sun Microsystems knew how to surpass Microsoft. It works like this: Do it better. Look at the European vision of collective security... isn't it great? Everyone comes together and asserts the sovereignty of everyone else. Their charters all say that if you're in the group, your security is assured by the collective will of the European Union. It looks like one hell of a deal. You do your part and your safety is assured...

The U.S. has a vision of collective security. It goes like this: Yeah, right. The U.S. sends troops because it serves its purposes. Joins alliances primarily to keep down enemies. Sends foreign aid a little more generously, but if you want the big bucks your interests had better align with ours. A slightly more expanded of our vision of collective security is this: We fight for and alongside those with whom our interests are intertwined.

So... why isn't everyone signing up for the Europe plan? Here's the funny bit: The Europeans live in a post-moral age. They're sophisticated. They're world-wise. And the average small country trusts them with their security about as much as they'd trust their wives with a Frenchman. The U.S. is big, lumbering and thoroughly backward. Under the influence of Christian morality and other hocus pocus, we believe in things like souls, free will leading to self-determination and God knows what else. Small countries know too. They know that if their safety is intertwined with our world vision they're in good shape. And strangely enough, because of the expansive definition of our interests that arises from our moral conceptions, that fits the bill in a lot of places. End result? In a lot of cases, the best ticket to security is having an understanding with or provoking the sentiment of the U.S. Ask the Bosnians. The Kosovars. The Poles. The Latvians, Letts and Estonians. And, heh heh, the French of the 1930s.

The Europeans, like Sun, have tried suing for supremacy. They've got the U.N., the ICJ and a million other international bureaucracies on their side. But they're getting nowhere. They've tried arguing they're superior. To little avail. In fact, in their efforts to establish superiority, they're actually going downhill. Because they keep trying to challenge the U.S.

In the runup to the Iraq war, Old Europe made several heavy-handed attempts to get Eastern Europe on the same page. Getting messed up in Iraq, they said, is dangerous, unnecessary, foolhardy. Trust the U.N., trust international institutions. We'll get it worked out diplomatically. Trust us. The Poles, the Latvians, the Letts, the Estonians, the Czechs... they'd heard that before. When the issue was their domination by the Soviets. In the post-Cold War age, Europe hasn't done much better. From Bosnia and Kosovo to Iraq and now the Ukraine, Europe has thought too much of Europe, and of its "rival," the U.S. It has thought too little of the Bosnians, the Kosovars, the Kurds and Shiites and the people of the Ukraine. It has thought too much of ego, of itself, and too little of the work at hand.

We've heard a lot of talk about Europe taking the lead. About their industrial planning, their use of international institutions, their vision of collective security. The only thing in their favor, though, is the occasional American politician's blather about a second American century, suggesting we might fall to the same hubris. Fortunately the people at the top seem too busy managing events to get swept up in such nonsense. They're doing their work. And so long as we keep it that way, European dreams of greatness are better termed delusions of grandeur.

Bottom line: It is not important who crushes despots, who liberates the oppressed, who succors the sick, who keeps shipping lanes open, and so forth. What is important is that despots be crushed, the oppressed be liberated, the sick be succored and free flow of goods, services and people be assured. If you do these things, you need not strive for greatness. You're already there. If you strive for greatness without doing these things, however, you will never get there because you're on the wrong path. Which is why so long as America keeps doing what it thinks needs to be done, and Europe keeps trying to revitalize Europe, we're in for another American century by default, as unfortunate as that is for us. If, however, Europe gives up its quest for greatness and shifts its focus to bringing to the world the best of the Enlightenment she unleashed (whose products include her "rival," America) we might get something even better: The Western Century.

I know. It'll never happen. Nice thought, though.

posted by gbarto at 11:43 AM

Sunday, December 12, 2004

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