Of Paradise And Power Review

Of paradise and power, America and Europe in the new world order

Robert Kagan, published in 2003 by Alfred A.Knopf ed.

It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world.(p.3)

Europe is turning away from power, or put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation.(p.3)

Americans generally see the world divided between good and evil, between friends and enemies...hey want problems solved, threats eliminated.(p.4)

(Europeans) They are more tolerant of failure, more patient when solutions don't come quickly.

They are quicker to appeal to international law, international conventions, and international opinion to adjudicate disputes.(p.5)

What Europeans now consider their more peaceful strategic culture is, historically speaking, quite new. (p.8)

At its birth America was the great hope of Enlightenment Europeans, who despaired of their own continent and viewed America as the one place "where reason and humanity" might "develop more rapidly than anywhere else"(p.9)

Two centuries later, Americans and Europeans have traded places- and perspectives.(p.10)

The power gap

It is true that Europe has been declining as a global military power for a long time. (p.12)

In the economic and political realms, the European Union produced miracles. (P.21)

In fact, the 1990s witnessed not the rise of a European superpower but the further decline of Europe into relative military weakness compared to the United States(p.22)

Because we wanted it, you silly sod! If you want peace, someone has to start stopping feeding the army and give subsidies to education...

Psychologies of power and weakness

"when you have a hammer, all problems start to look like nails" British criticism (p.27)

One of the biggest transatlantic disagreements since the end of the Cold War has been over which "new" threats merit the most attention. American administrations have placed the greatest emphasis on the so-called rogue states and what Pdt George W. Bush a year ago called the "axis of evil". Most Europeans have taken a calmer view of the risks posed by these regimes.(p.29)

Europeans often argue that Americans have an unreasonable demand for perfect security, the product of living for centuries shielded behind two oceans.(p.30)

When Europeans took to the streets by the millions after September 11, most Americans believed that it was out of a sense of shared danger and common interest.

When Europeans wept and waved American flags after September 11, it was out of genuine human sympathy. It was an expression of sorrow and affection for Americans.(p.36)

They do not share the same broad view of how the world should be governed, about the role of international institutions and international law, about the proper balance between the use of force and the use of diplomacy in international affairs.(p.37)

Instead, Europeans hope to constrain American power without wielding power themselves. In what may be the ultimate feat of subtlety and indirection, they want to control the behemoth by appealing to its conscience.(p.41)

I hope he doesn't seriously believes that...otherwise I just understand the other stupid stuff in that book...

Hyperpuissance

Why hasn't the Europe fulfilled the promise of the European Union in foreign and defense policy, or met the promptings of some its most important leaders to build up even enough military power to tilt the balance, just a little, away from American dominance?(p.53)

Because we do not play that game anymore...

The postmodern paradise

With a highly educated and productive population of almost 400 million people and a 9 trillion economy, Europe today has the wealth and technological capability to make itself more of a world power in military terms if Europeans wanted to become that kind of power.(p.53-54)

They have rejected the power politics that brought them such misery over the past century and more. This is a perspective on power that Americans do not and cannot share, inasmuch as the formative historical experiences on their side of the Atlantic have not been the same.(p.55)

As German foreign minister Joshka Fischer put it in a speech outlining his vision of the European future, "the core of the concept of Europe after 1945 was and still is a rejection of the European balance of power principle and the hegemonic ambitions of individual states that had emerged following the Peace of Westfalia in 1648"

Fisher's principal contention- that Europe has moved beyond the old system of power politics and discovered a new system for preserving peace in international relations- is widely shared across Europe. (p.56-57)

Europeans have stepped out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian world of perpetual peace. (p.57)

This is what many Europeans think they have to offer the world: not power, but the transcendence