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Politics : War -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (13465)	4/9/2002 11:38:13 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

This e-mail sent by a European correspondent to an American weblogger is a little at odds with what you say. And he has a thought provoking take on the future of US/EU relations. >>I live in Paris and write about culture and foreign affairs for Brazil’s main newspaper, Folha de S. Paulo . . .. My own perception of what’s happening in Europe nowadays is not much different from yours, but for the fact that it is somewhat grimmer. Believe me: I now think that since 9/11, like the proverbial old generals, we have been fighting the last culture war. It is high time to admit we are in a new one. The problem is not cultural relativism, moral equivalence, nostalgic leftism, third-worldism, knee-jerk anti-Americanism, residual anti-semitism and so on. Not anymore. For the last half year or so I have been reading voraciously The Guardian, The Independent, Le Monde, Libération, El País, La Reppublica etc. European Schadenfreude in September amazed me as much as it did most Americans who took notice of it. It seemed pretty stupid, didn’t it? Well, now it is beginning to make sense. What happened last week, though it did not get a fraction of the attention it deserved, will be considered a central event and will be discussed by historians for many years to come. Some of the highest ranking eurocrats went to Israel, not in search of a truce or a peace agreement, not to talk to the country’s elected government, but expressly to take sides in a war, and to try and save their protegé, Yasser Arafat. And they were immediately sent home. Now, this is not the way “normal” diplomatic transactions take place: it amounts to a mutual diplomatic declaration of war, with high stakes involved on both sides. But all this was downplayed. Think about what the European press would usually be making of the whole affair. (It is funny, on the other hand, as a kind of sideshow, to see all those journalists and commentators who two weeks ago were absolutely against America’s Iraqi policy telling Bush and Blair they’d better stop Israel’s military campaign for the sake... of a successful war against Saddam!) As I see it, Bush’s Thursday intervention was indeed a diplomatic counter-offensive the objective of which was to prevent further similar European steps. In other words, we are not talking any longer of different opinions on how to achieve the same goals, nor are we talking about disagreement inside the Western Civilization. We are talking about great-power politics. Nato or Shmato aside, it seems quite realistic to say that we are seeing the first open shots in the new clash of civilizations, and the opposing sides in it are the US and Europe. The European Union is clearly taking a Gaullist turn. Equally clearly, the goals of each side in the Middle East (I mean the US and Europe) are divergent. And in a collision route. I would not be absolutely sure by now that Europe is at all commited to the existence of a Jewish state in the region, not if it harms its interests (its growing and developing anti-American alliance with the Arab world) and advances America’s. Britain, obviously, up to the moment, is split in the middle. Whatever has been said during the American-European Kulturkampf has to be revisited in light of recent events. I think we have been interpreting the European intelligentsia’s standpoints as sorry little differences of opinion within a shared worldview. Now, maybe that’s what is really simplistic. When, for instance, I see the BBC, Le Monde and so on behaving exactly like Pravda, I cannot avoid the strong impression that we are facing a new, coherent and, for all purposes, official ideology, an ideology that came to fill the vacuum left since the end of the Soviet Union. It may be far-fetched to say it, but a kind of Second Cold War does not sound to me absurd at all.<< Scroll down a few posts instapundit.blogspot.com