Modern America's Roman Predicament

The Financial Times has an interesting commentary on U.S. hegemony written by Princeton Prof Harold James, the article is available by subscription on-line, I have my home paper to quote from:

Before September 11 2001, it was widely assumed that globalisation bred peace and stability. But over the past five years, there has been increased nervousness about this concept in many parts of the world. It is not worry about the state of the world economy, which has proved amazingly robust, but about the framework for world governance. In particular, there is widespread mistrust of the world's only superpower and increased doubt about the sort of politics that America tries to impose on the rest of the world.

As the Bush presidency gets bogged down in the quagmire of Iraq, there is still a widespread assumption that there might be a quick and easy fix. Critics of the administration think that the world's view of America would be transformed if only the US president sounded kinder. Many officials in Washington believe that if the world understood all they really wanted was peace, prosperity and democracy, the criticism would subside. Such optimistic beliefs are mistaken but are characteristic of an ever-recurring dilemma of an interconnected world. Consider some historical parallels: in 1776, the year of the US Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith and Edward Gibbon published the first volumes of two works that both used history to illuminate Britain's own problems with the globalisation of that age: The Wealth of Nations and The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Prof James goes on to cite Robert Kagan's famous juxtaposition of the Mars views of Americans versus the Venus views of Europeans. Americans have universal rules and Europeans see American power behind the rules and can scarcely, with some exceptions, deal with American Manichaean viewpoints.

The question at the heart of the projection of American power/European multicultural multilateralism lies in the cultural and political differences between the two, but James claims they are both based on "challenge and response" of the West confronting a rapidly developing Islamic/radical/underdeveloped world. James asks:

Should we fight off [American] or buy off [EU] the barbarians at the gates? Conquer and/or provide prosperity? The first is arrogantly belligerent and the second arrogantly patronizing. Both recommend more power and more modernization.

Before we lapse into a "Clash of Civilizations" mindset, James finally poses a question about values and traditions:

Instead of thinking that technical development will automatically produce prosperity and thus solve, as if by magic, the problem of values, policymakers in the industrialized world need to think and talk explicitly about values and traditions.

What does the Islamic tradition have in common with western traditions that respects human dignity and how can modern America show that it respects these values too?

James ends by claiming that resolving Guantanamo Bay detentions "would be an obvious first step to showing how the US can accept as well as invent universal values."

I disagree. The detainees were and are non-POWs in the Geneva Convention sense, as they were in civilian garb when captured. This would amount to putting potential terrorists now possibly radicalized by Gitmo back into circulation. Already, several released detainees have been recidivists on the terror scene.

James has a nugget of fool's gold with a little 24-carat gilding. James assumes that an international system of values and traditions can avoid the "Clash of Civilizations" Again, Robert Kagan provides a bit of cold water to the face:

George F. Kennan assumed only his na?ve fellow Americans succumbed to such "Wilsonian" legalistic and moralistic fancies, not those war-tested, historically minded European Machiavels. But, really, why shouldn’t Europeans be idealistic about international affairs, at least as they are conducted in Europe’s “postmodern system”? Within the confines of Europe, the age-old laws of international relations have been repealed. Europeans have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian world of perpetual peace. 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 laid down with the French lamb. The conflict that ravaged Europe ever since the violent birth of Germany in the nineteenth century has been put to rest.

The cartoon controversy, sparked by a 220,000 unassimilated minority in 6 million Denmark, demonstrates that the Kantian perpetual peace has subversives within. Denmark has the lowest unemployment rate in the EU, but over 80% of the Muslim "refugees" are unemployed and living in subsidized housing and stipends from the state. Ditto for Sweden, according to Christopher Caldwell in The New York Times magazine a week ago.

There is a Trojan Horse of values and traditions anti-thetical to Enlightenment Europe's Kantian la-la land. Burnt cars in France, Ghettostans in the UK, Guest Workers in Germany and Scandanavian refugee/squatters. And the votes in France and Holland last year against continuing the EU fantasy mission civilitrice are perhaps a result of the murders of the Dutchmen Pym Fortyn and Theo Van Gogh as symbols of Islamic intolerance of criticism or abiding by the cultural norms of host countries.

In the end, the US applications of power may be more appropriate for the Hobbesian realities prevailing in much of the geopolitical planet. Harold James may have confused the Categorical Imperative with the EU's patronizing view that it won the Cold War all by itself.

Let's see Europe assimilate the former East Bloc's migratory labor before it claims moral superiority over other inclusionary cultures, like the USA.