#2
Moscow News
August 7-13, 2002
The West: the Specter of a Schism
By Alexander Yanov

The only thing proponents and opponents of Putin's pro-Western course agree in is their definition of the West, namely, the Euro-Atlantic community, in which both components are so closely cemented with each other that any conflicts within it can well be described with the proverb "The falling out of lovers is the renewing of love."

The events of the past few weeks, however, do not seem to bear this out. It so happens that there is no longer a common worldview that consolidated the United States and Europe into a single political whole during the Cold War.

Europe, judging by the decisive phase of discussion on a future European constitution, is on the way to emerging from a group of nation-states into a federation. Therefore, national interests within it will be subordinated to community interests. This is happening at a time when the United States is rapidly moving in the opposite direction, emerging from a federation into a nation-state. Therefore, it refuses to subordinate its national interests to world community interests. It was in fact in the name of its national interests that the United States set itself against the whole world by rejecting the Kyoto Protocol and demanding special privileges at the International Criminal Court, also introducing protective steel tariffs and planning to overthrow the regime in Iraq with intercontinental ballistic missiles (mercifully, with non-nuclear warheads). It has come to a point when rumor in Washington has it that Colin Powell, the only "European" in the Bush cabinet, its going to resign.

A rationale for a possible schism has been provided by Robert Kagan, in his article, Power and Weakness, in Policy Review, a publication of the far-right Hoover Institute. It has for the first time on record laid bare the irreconcilable contradictions between the United States and Europe in their worldview. The article has provoked a bitter controversy in Europe, comparable to the dispute around Fukuyama's The End of History, in 1989, and Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, in 1993.

Kagan posits that the Euro-Atlantic community is fundamentally divided since Europe and the United States exist essentially in two different worlds. The Europeans operate on the assumption that the world of the 21st century is nothing like the world described by Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century, where the foe was lurking around every corner, and military power was the only protection against it to be had. The modern world, they believe, can, and should, be governed by international laws and rules. Use of force is only the last resort. So the Europeans are ready to subject their sovereignty to a supranational community.

The United States, however, Kagan goes on, as a traditional nation-state lives precisely in Hobbes' anarchical world, where unpredictable threats keep coming up from every quarter, where international laws and rules are just as unreliable as in the 17th century, and where, therefore, national security cannot be ensured other than through military might.

What position does Kagan uphold then? In a nutshell, it is that mankind is doomed to live in two worlds at once - one, intra-state and the other, international. The former is governed by law and the latter, by force. And it will always be so. For if mankind even in the 21st century lives according to the ruthless Hobbes rules, formulated four centuries ago, it will live the same way even in the 25th century.

One participant in the European discussion, Jeffrey Gedmin, director of the Berlin-based Aspen Institute, responded as follows: "As a matter of fact, we thought that a little more discussion and mutual understanding would close the crack separating us from the Americans. But suddenly we are told: Forget it, contradiction comes from history and culture (not from misunderstanding). This takes my breath away... To be honest, I am afraid of a schism." In short, where a crack had been assumed, a chasm was suddenly discovered.

I do not know whether the jinni can be pushed back into the bottle. I am afraid that the specter of a schism will continue to haunt the Euro-Atlantic community.

Kagan and many others in Europe see a way out in the EU beginning to spend more money on military needs and placing the situation in the Balkans and perhaps in the Middle East under control. Then the United States will stop seeing Europeans as whiners and wimps. Yet will this bridge the gap that Kagan himself has exposed? Military spending has never been known to resolve philosophical/political problems.

Now, what about Russia? Today it is not enough for it to declare itself pro-Western. It also has to have a clear idea which of the two Wests it intends to be aligned with.

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