The Revolution - Katherine Kersten

The Revolution - Katherine Kersten on something I've been discussing with friends lately: the real reason for the gulf between the US and Europe:

At a deeper level, however, the gulf that separates Europeans from Americans is philosophical. Not surprisingly, Europe and America hold fundamentally different views of what it means for a nation to be a liberal democracy.

In a recent issue of the New Republic, political commentator Paul Berman explores these divergent views. Berman points out that, from the beginning, America's experiment in self-government was radical and unique. In an age of monarchies, our founders saw freedom and equality as universal aspirations -- the birthright of all men. Over the years, American presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan have perpetuated this vision. They have viewed liberal democracy as "a revolutionary project for universal liberation," and America as experimenting with a possible future for the entire world.

Americans find it natural to see Chinese students marching with a model of the Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square. We believe that America's power and example have helped to spread democracy throughout the world, and can continue to do so in the future.

Europeans have a very different idea of liberal democracy. Their national self-concepts are not rooted in democracy, nor do they see their nations as prototypes in a universal democratic experiment. Indeed, as the inhabitants of former imperial powers, they find it hard to understand how a democracy can wield power for liberal aims. For many Europeans, power is imperial or nothing -- the power of brutal empires.

Here's what I think; many on the left (and a few on the near-right, like George HW Bush) still see the world in the terms that were "frozen" in place at the end of World War II; the "good guys" at that point codified their relationship (the Security Council with its five anachronistic permanent members), and that's the way it's been.

But all relationships change; remember, Japan and Italy were both allies in WWII, bitter enemies a generation later. Of the five permanent, vetoing members of the Security Council, France is now pretty much irrelevant except for its vestigial veto, Russia saved from irrelevance by its nuclear arsenal, and China is still singing the "internationale". Stretched between such poles, its ideology morphed from its postwar mission to a pseudo-EU-ish stew of recursive national interests, nothing much useful happens.

In the meantime, the construct that Andrew Sullivan calls the Anglosphere - the informal group of nations that embrace liberal democracy in the sense that Ms. Kerstin describe - are getting things done. The US, UK and Oz - with the nations that admire them, including most of Eastern Europe - have a clear goal and mission. And it shows.

Posted by Mitch at March 26, 2003 07:07 AM