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The Decline of Shared Values in the West

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The Decline of Shared Values in the West Last Stop Baghdad: Origins of the Transatlantic Trainwreck JOSHUA W. BUSBY Joshua W. Busby is a research fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution, and a PhD candidate in the department of government at Georgetown University. This article appeared in Global Dialogue, Summer/Autumn 2003. n an influential article, the journalist Robert Kagan concluded: “on major strategic and international questions today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus: They agree on little and understand one another I less and less.”1 What follows is assessment of this view and an exploration of the fissures that tear at the fabric of US–European solidarity, with specific reference to the security arena and recent events in Iraq. This essay unfolds in three steps. I begin with two thought experiments, one in which Al Gore had become president of the United States and another in which Europe was attacked on 11 September 2001. In the second section, I examine the material and cultural divides between the United States and Europe. In the final section, I discuss the domestic structural features of our political processes that affect transatlantic relations and ways in which decision-makers on both sides of the Atlantic can help us get back on track. Two Counterfactual Scenarios Perhaps a couple of simple thought experiments can reveal the extent to which present US–European difficulties are a product of contingent developments, as opposed to deep-rooted or structural factors. While it is impossible to re-run the tape of history, we can imagine a world in which a few more votes in Florida or a bomb blast in Paris or Berlin resulted in a radically different setting for transatlantic relations. Where would the world be if the United States had responded differently to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s invocation of Article 5 after 11 September? What would have happened if Edmund Stoiber had unseated Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Germany’s 2002 general election? Instead of the transatlantic divide, we might be talking about the strength of Nato and the partnership between the United States and Europe in light of the shared security threat. Had a few hundred voters in Florida figured out the butterfly ballot and voted for the Democratic Party’s candidate, Al Gore, instead of Republican outsider Pat Buchanan in the 2000 US presidential elections, how different would the world be? The Economist ran a semi-serious column in which a President Gore and Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke responded with an aplomb equal to that of George W. Bush and Colin Powell in the immediate aftermath of 11 September.2 After skilfully assembling a multinational coalition, a Gore administration in the mock scenario led the effort to destroy the Taliban. What would have been different under President Gore? Not much, the article concluded. However, given the Bush administration’s posture vis-à-vis allies and its extension of the war against terrorism to Iraq, we must conclude that Al Gore would have acted differently on a host of other issues and on Iraq specifically. It is inconceivable that a Democratic administration would have repudiated numerous international agreements and multilateral obligations such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, the International Criminal Court, and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty. And Iraq, as Tom Friedman has written, was always a war of choice rather than necessity.3 Even if a Gore administration opted to pursue by military means the long-simmering dispute with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction, it is highly likely that its diplomatic approach would have unfolded rather differently. To be fair, as is discussed below, the same views that are dominant in the Bush administration would have had an influential voice in Congress through Republican lawmakers. However, American unilateralists would have not exercised such control over the executive branch. Should President Bush lose the 2004 election, will editorials and columns look back on this period of turbulence in the same way as we now look back on de Gaulle’s exit from Nato in 1966 or the earlier hiccup in transatlantic relations during the Suez crisis—i.e., as a transitory disruption of fundamentally good ties? There are reasons to be less sanguine. September 11 itself may have set in motion both institutional changes in the American bureaucracy—the Department of Homeland Security—as well as transformations in the American psyche that will lead the United States and Europe further apart in terms of priority issues and threat perception. This suggests a second thought experiment: if Berlin, Brussels or Paris had been bombed on 11 September instead of just Washington and New York, in what state might we find transatlantic relations today? Some would argue that the United States and Europe were already so far apart in terms of military capabilities, global responsibilities and threats that a single instance of terrorism would only have accentuated but not fundamentally altered the growing disconnection between them. Others might argue that our underlying values are now so different as a result of divergent historical trajectories that an attack on any of these European sites would have elicited very different European responses at the national level and in the European Union writ large from that actually taken by the United States following 11 September. A final argument is rather more circumspect about both of these claims. In my view, simultaneous attacks in Europe and the United States would have led to more congruence in policy approaches. Before 11 September, neither Americans nor Europeans were that concerned about terrorism. After 11 September, many in Europe, after initial empathy, had a very different reaction from Americans to the attacks, not so much because of different values but because Europeans had not lived through what Americans had just experienced. Before 11 September, Americans were not that concerned about foreign policy or terrorism. In 1998, the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations conducted a poll of Americans in which 21 per cent answered “don’t know” when asked to name the most important foreign-policy problem. Only 12 per cent cited terrorism, and only 7.3 per cent named any foreign-policy problem as the most important issue facing the United States. In the 2002 Chicago Council poll, 36 per cent of Americans named terrorism as the top problem facing the country, the highest response for any issue. Elite opinion demonstrated an even more pronounced shift. Only 10 per cent of elites in 1998 identified terrorism as the most important foreign-policy problem. By 2002, this had risen to 50 per cent. As in the United States, terrorism was not a central concern in Europe before 11 September. It did not feature in the major fears of EU member states. Two fears—loss of jobs to countries with lower production costs, and difficulties for farmers—ranked as the biggest in the European Union in 2000 (60 per cent identified these as two important fears).4 September 11 changed that somewhat. A 2002 Eurobarometer poll found that 64 per cent of Europeans said terrorism was “extremely important”. The US figure was 91 per cent.5 This suggests rather low concern about terrorism before 11 September on both sides of the Atlantic, and a persistent difference in threat perception after the attacks. What would have happened if Europe had been bombed on 11 September? A bloodied Europe may well have experienced the kind of fear and uncertainty that allowed President Bush to extend the war on terrorism to wider threats like Iraq. Would the French have had the same qualms about using military force in Iraq had the Eiffel Tower tipped into the Seine after being struck by a jetliner? Would the Germans’ empathy with America have lasted longer if the Reichstag’s dome had collapsed in upon itself? Would there not have been more unanimity of opinion in Europe if Nato headquarters in Brussels had been the scene of a fiery conflagration? Fortunately, these horrific visions have not come to pass. While these what-if questions are very hard to answer, they may shed light on the significance of the past that actually happened. One counter-argument is that Europe has long had terrorist attacks on its soil, yet these did not lead it to carry out militarised assaults on other countries. Notable examples include the Red Army Faction attacks in Germany, the Munich Olympics assault on Israeli athletes in 1972, the 1984 IRA bombing of the Conservative Party conference in Britain, and numerous terrorist incidents in France. Cornell political scientist Peter Katzenstein argues, in the case of Germany, that the shadow of the past led the state away from militaristic responses to terrorism in favour of investment in profiling technology.6 Shapiro and Suzan maintain that the French see terrorism as something to “manage and minimise” rather than eliminate in a “war on terrorism”.7 France has evolved a judicial/investigative approach through trial and error that has enabled it to prevent some major terrorist incidents. The authors suggest that the French statist tradition permits a more intrusive infringement of civil liberties than would be allowed in the United States. The German and French cases indicate that the European experience with terrorism has created distinct institutional habits, such that the European reaction to new terrorist incidents would probably be very different from that of the United States. Nonetheless, in the 1970s, Germany despatched commandos to Somalia to storm a Lufthansa plane that had been hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. And France, following a wave of small-scale terrorist attacks on its soil in 1986 and 1995, passed legislation allowing the government to detain people suspected of involvement in terrorist activities.
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