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Bernard-Henri L?vy entitled "Bernard-Henri Levy hates the Iraq war, but loves America." The interviewer is WSJ Op-Ed chief TUNKU VARADARAJAN.
The article makes the obligatory references to the long love/hate relationship between France and the US. Tunku's stylistic quirks are a bit annoying. For example, the little patty-cake session:
"There are five other prominent French Amerophiles, by my reckoning, giving us a grand total of seven. Guessing identities would make an amusing parlor game. (Answers on a postcard, with a bottle of Calvados for the first all-correct missive. Hint: There are no women.)"
Okay, maybe I'm spoiled by The Economist and the Financial Times, but the WSJ is impish without the charm.
After running through M. Levy's eccentricities of manner, Tunku explains his new book, which sounds like an interesting expedition through the neuro-ruts of the somewhat typically autistic French intellectual:
His latest project has been to follow in the footsteps of Alexis de Tocqueville and travel through the United States in the manner of the author of "Democracy in America." The world being what it is, the result was never likely to be an update of Tocqueville. Instead, we have what might fairly be described as "Bernard-Henri L?vy in America."
The author has called it "American Vertigo"--not a bad name, as it speaks to America's vertigo, as well as to his own--and the literary poobahs in Paris have their culottes in a twist over his decision to bypass France and publish it in America first, in English. Much harrumphing has happened in Paris, much talk of betrayal; but Mr. L?vy--who in a conversation with New York magazine this week laid out his love for America in terms that were almost pornographic--regards the book as his gift to this country: "It had to be published here first," he says, with an upward tilt of a nose so aquiline one might hang a hat on it. "Unquestionably."
Contrarian to his toenails, the French sage expounds on his philosophy of America:
"In France, with the nation based on roots, on the idea of soil, on a common memory . . . the very existence of America is a mystery and a scandal." This is a particular source of pain, Mr. L?vy says, for "the right." Contrary to what is thought generally, he insists, anti-Americanism "migrated to the left, to the Communist Party, but its origins are on the extreme right." America gives the French right "nightmares," as the country is based on "a social contract. America proves that people can gather at a given moment and decide to form a nation, even if they come from different places." The "ghost that has haunted Europe for two centuries"--and which gives fuel, to this day, to anti-Americanism there--"is America's coming together as an act of will, of creed. It shows that there is an alternative to organic nations."
Tunku comes close to sticking a pin in M. Levy's gaseous balloon:
These are important insights, and surely gratifying to an American. But is this the whole picture, I ask. Isn't today's French gauche--and the European left as embodied by Gerhard Schr?der and Spain's Zapatero, to name but two leading offenders--more than just a passive inheritor of a right-wing anti-Americanism? Why this insistence--and Mr. L?vy does, sometimes, protest too much--on anti-Americanism as a sort of rightist Original Sin? Here, Mr. L?vy is evasive: "It is true of the left," he concedes, nodding his head in accord, but then checks himself: "It is partly true. . . . But you must see that in France you have the Gaullist tradition, which is strongly anti-American."
After calling Chirac a cynical "pragmatist," M. Levy laments the fall of ideologies which in turn were based on the "dream" of revolution:
When did the dream of revolution die? "With Cambodia," Mr. L?vy answers. This was an event "much more important than the fall of the Berlin Wall. When the Hegel of modern times will write this history, he will say that the real crucial event was Cambodia." Why? "Because till Cambodia all the revolutionaries in the world believed that revolution had failed because it didn't go far enough, because it wasn't radical enough." And then Cambodia happened--"the first revolution in history to be really radical. . . . And what did we discover, all of us? Instead of paradise, revolution gives absolute hell."
So the new Hegel would say that Stalin killing more or less fifty million Soviet citizens or Mao killing perhaps seventy million were not the "tipping point," to employ the latest mindless "Hegelian" analogy, but it was killing half the population in an Asian backwater? Tunku has even more fun in store for us:
So would Mr. L?vy say, improving on Francis Fukuyama, that Cambodia, and not the fall of the Berlin Wall, was "the end of history"? "No, not history. The end of revolution. The end of the desirability of revolution." Mr. L?vy has this disagreement, and others, with Mr. Fukuyama. "I do not believe that with the death of communism we entered into an age in which there will be no more radical contradiction, dialectical war, and so on. I don't believe that."
Whew! So who will the "radical contradiction, dialectical war" be between? M. Levy doesn't say, but he does say who it won't be between.
If Mr. Levy's debate with Mr. Fukuyama is benign, his differences with another American sage, Samuel Huntington, are positively acrimonious. ("I met him once, and he . . . maybe he drank too much wine, but at the end of the lunch he was so strange. I told about my thoughts on America as a nation based on a creed, and that this was not very different from the foundation of Israel. There is an American creed, and there is an Israeli creed--and this idea, of America having to share its concept of creed with Israel, did put him in a very strange anger. He was furious at this idea. 'You cannot compare,' he told me, 'the creed of Israel, which is an ethnic creed, with the creed of America.'")
So the Constitution is a religion? And the clash won't be between civilizations? How about between creeds? M. Levy dodges and weaves and jukes the minuette that the seizieme arrondissement requires when cornered, first discharging a colossal broadside against Huntington:
Mr. L?vy describes Mr. Huntington's last book, "Who Are We?" as "racist," and rejects the notion that there is in the world, or has been, a clash of civilizations: "We are engaged in a war against terrorism, but the war is a political one, not a religious one, not a civilizational one. It is, I stress, a political war." I press him on this point: How does he make the distinction?--these concepts, surely, are all intertwined. "Of course," he replies, unimpressed. "But I make the distinction because I believe that you have some Muslims who do not hate the West. Being an enemy of the West is not a necessary condition of being Muslim, of adoring the God of Islam." I persist: Isn't his preference for the description of this war as "political" itself a political decision? "It is suicide to say that this is a civilizational war, because if it is such, it is an endless war, bloc against bloc. If you say 'political' you make a bet on the outcome."
So it is a "political" war. Although Tunku left aside the unexplained problem of a "dialectical war" being possible, but a "civilizational" war impossible because it would be "endless," la ronde continues:
Does he have something in common, therefore, with American neoconservatives, who also believe that we are engaged in a political war, who believe, after all, that Islamic societies are capable of practicing democracy? "I have a lot in common with them--our history is in common, as are our reflexes. What is not are our conclusions, the way of transforming our ethics into politics." Mr. L?vy is an acknowledged critic of the war in Iraq, but here, not for the first time in our conversation, he is unpersuasive.
Because the Iraq was not justified, or rather was morally justified, but politically a disaster. Because we should have done that old British trick, waiting for something to turn up and, well, as Tunku says, this old-timer just keeps on ticking:
Was the Iraq war justified? "No," he says, almost gruffly, and then elaborates: "I think it was morally justified and politically a disaster." Mr. L?vy's complaint is that the Bush administration did not exhaust all "political" options before going to war. "Politics . . . more politics . . ." he said, wagging a finger. But with Messrs. Chirac and Schr?der such adamant opponents, what more, I ask, should have been done? Mr. L?vy's response was as follows, and chivalry prevents me from making a public judgment of it: "America supported Saddam for years and years. You could have waited a few months more for him to die, of natural or nonnatural causes . . . or for an opposition movement to grow up . . ." Besides, he added, referring to the Iraqis, "you cannot liberate un peuple somnambule"--a people sleepwalking.
So liberty, equality and fraternity for all the hyper-caffeinated, but if you are a zombie, forget about your claim to human rights!
Mr. L?vy regards his own criticism of America not as anti-Americanism, but as tough love. He is an assiduous believer in America's "manifest destiny," and expects this country, clearly, to uphold the highest standards--as he sees them. Some of these standards he would prescribe to France, in particular the American approach to citizenship. He contrasts the "model of Dearborn"--the Detroit suburb, home to significant numbers of contented Arab-Americans--with the "model of St. Denis," the Parisian banlieu where discontented Arab immigrants (never referred to as Arab-Frenchman) ran riot late last year. "What is good about America is that in order to be a citizen, you are not asked to resign from your former identity. You cannot tell Varadarajan or L?vy, 'You have to erase from your mind the ancestors you had.' In France, we erase."
America, Mr. L?vy concludes, "is a factory of citizens, which has some defects, some problems, but the country works, not too badly. Better, I think, than mine."
So a citizenship factory is based on a contract where you don't have to shed your former identity, but the US is a nation founded on a creed. Plus, we have a lower unemployment rate! And no thirty-five hour workweek! Is that why we work better?
Oh well, never mind.........
I'll take yes to "all of the above" for an answer!
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