The Democrats are going to pound on the "Anti-Americanism" in Europe, and blame it on Bush. The "Financial Times" has a "must read" on the subject.
With friends like these
By Christopher Caldwell
Christopher Caldwell is an FT columnist and a senior editor at The Weekly Standard
When Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State, went to Berlin about a year ago to assess what he calls the "psychological situation" of young Germans, he got a rude surprise. At a roundtable set up by the German Marshall Fund, an American foundation that promotes transatlantic ties, Kissinger met a dozen young leaders - including Bundestag members from the conservative Christian Democratic Union and its Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union - both a traditional source of support for Washington.
Kissinger was told that anti-American sentiments, the balder the better, could draw big applause at political-party rallies. Mostly this happened at Green Party rallies, but Social Democrats, and even some Christian Democrats, now also stood and cheered when the United States was anathematised.
"It was not a hostile meeting," Kissinger recalled in an interview, insisting that his surprise not be taken as anger. "It's a new generation that is trying to find its own identity. It's not burdened by the war, not obsessed with economic recovery. That means that they are not automatically pro-American."
In its diplomacy, as in its military strategy, the United States is discovering that it has a very shaky idea of who its real friends are. In the old days, it was very clear where the instinctive pro- Americans, or "Atlanticists" were to be found. They made up most of the Christian Democratic parties everywhere, and an influential right-wing rump of the Socialist parties in Germany, Scandinavia and Britain. And some of today's pro-Americans are still on the right: Germany's CDU still backs America, as do the British Tories, although not unanimously, and particularly not when Labour is in power. Beyond them, though, today's Atlanticists are an unfamiliar mix of New Labour (in its British and Dutch variants), continental human-rights activists (particularly in France), Eastern European ex-dissidents and post-cold war parties of the right (in Spain and Italy). It would be surprising if America's future foreign policy did not take some account of which Europeans like it, and which don't.
Dennis MacShane, Britain's Labour minister for Europe, tells me that I shouldn't overstate the shift in support. There were, he says, always important exceptions to the rule that America's friends in Europe were on the right. De Gaulle called the United States the biggest threat to world peace as early as 1965, while in Britain, Labour's support has been broader than the American right tends to remember.
"The roots of European social democracy are anti-communist," says MacShane. "European social democracy has far more in common with American values, including the war on terrorism, than with any other ideology." The European left should never feel embarrassed about siding with the US, provided the US is a progressive force, MacShane thinks. In the 1980s, they should have remarked (but mostly they didn't) that Ronald Reagan was, by many measures, tougher on South Africa than Europeans were.
Today, he thinks they should be quicker (but they're pretty slow) to embrace the sympathetic parts of George W. Bush's agenda. "I look at Bush, who has rejoined Unesco, talked about legalising eight or nine million immigrants from Mexico, and massively increased help for HIV/Aids," MacShane says. "This is not what we would call a hardline, right-wing agenda."
But MacShane's "we" doesn't embrace all or even most of his own party, and it sells poorly in continental Europe.
In France, Senator Jean Francois-Poncet was a pillar of Atlanticism during his term as Valery Giscard d'Estaing's foreign minister in the 1970s. He isn't one any more. He says now the Euro-American battle over the Iraq war exposed differences that cannot be ignored, and Europe marches to a different drum. "What you have to face," he told me calmly, "is that the Franco-German position had the overwhelming support of public opinion all over Europe."
Johannes Rau, Germany's president and a social democratic Atlanticist, made the same point at the height of European agitation against the war when he said: "In some ways, Europe has never been more united."
And this anti-American unity is being voiced in the traditional sancta of pro-Americanism. At a conference last summer in Berlin - sponsored by Atlantik-Brucke (Atlantic Bridge) and the American Council on Germany, two groups whose raison d'etre is bilateral comity - the rapporteur Daniel Casse, a former aide to the first President Bush, said morosely: "What I heard was that America had to be 'checked', 'tamed', 'steered', 'counterbalanced' and 'Europeanised'."
Bundesbank president Ernst Welteke sounded wistful as he recalled that "'chewing gum' and 'chocolate' were the first American words I could speak". These were the good old, Good American, days. Now, he said, "a rift is slowly developing, and has been since the end of the cold war". Amity was no longer a glue. All that could be hoped for was that interests would remain common. Winding up his remarks, he reached for the John D. Rockefeller adage that: "Friendships founded on business work better than businesses founded on friendship." One could say the same of China or Russia. Or, nowadays, Libya.
There are still "classic" pro-Americans in Europe, even in France, who think that Europe and the US, because of shared values and civilisation, will always wind up in the same geostrategic boat. Claude Goasguen, who represents Paris's wealthy 16th arrondissement, likes to remind visitors to his office in the National Assembly that he is a Breton who hails from Finistere, France's westernmost point, "turned towards the Atlantic". Goasguen is as nationalist as any French politician, but he thinks it bad for France to "wind up in a 'minority camp' in the West".
Alain Madelin, who stood on the Liberal Democrat ticket for the French presidency two years ago, is with him and with the Americans. On a sunny morning in his office in the seventh arrondissement, he says that he is unhappy that France has, in the past 12 months, become the "Mecca" of European anti-Americanism. "I'm not pro-American for the joy of being pro-American. When the United States was backing Pakistan, I opposed them. But I'm with the Americans strategically. Still, we have to realise that this is the end of the generation that lived the war. They don't have the same feeling for America, deep down."
For Madelin, those who would understand the current international predicament must realise that we live in an age of individual networkers. "The 20th century was the century of unlimited confidence in states," he says. "The 21st is rediscovering confidence in people." Madelin has made contact with like-minded political thinkers in Europe. In Venice recently, he discussed French-American links with the US under secretary of state, John Bolton, a high priest in the neo-conservative temple. Pierre Lellouche, who was the only French assembly member besides Madelin to vocally support the war, has kept up contacts in the United States, and, during the run-up to war, organised meetings for a handful of sympathetic Paris intellectuals every Tuesday night in Paris.
But such networking among individuals is as nothing compared to the anti-American, anti-war forces which control dozens of anti- globalisation and leftist websites and, in several European capitals, could put close to a million people onto the streets. And it is little compared with the rhetoric that President Jacques Chirac and foreign minister Dominique de Villepin can muster - to great applause - when they excoriate America. Many conservative parliamentarians describe a window of potential sympathy for the US that is even wider, saying wistfully that the stance of the French right towards the United States would be different if Alain Juppe - prime minister at the beginning of Chirac's first seven-year term - had been president. (The eventual chances of that, of course, moved from slim to none with Juppe's conviction in late January on corruption charges.)
Others speak of conservatives in the government who are much more pro-American than they let on in public. Interior minister Nicholas Sarkozy, for instance, who is emerging as a future rival to Chirac after spending much of January on high-profile diplomatic visits to Egypt and China, has siblings in the US.
Even if there were many pro-Americans who dared not speak their name, it probably wouldn't matter. After half-a-century of being set by the right, no matter who was in power, French foreign policy has seen its centre of gravity shift leftwards in the last half- decade. In recent French debates, there has been little difference between left and right. According to Senator Francois-Poncet, the two sides differed little in the past year's contretemps with the US, except in one respect. "The left," he said, "played a role in insisting that Chirac must follow his logic all the way to the end."
The old links and ties which sustained the right across the Atlantic have gone, in part because the necessity to stick together in face of the Soviet threat from the East, and the socialist challenge from within, have also gone. Atlanticism no longer finds its deepest roots in Christian democracy.
Europeans often look for an explanation of this estrangement in something George W. Bush "did". But perhaps the explanation rests in Christian Democracy - or in Christianity. The idea of Christianity as a conservative force has been an illusion for a long time. First, it is not a force. The weakening of piety (probably) and church affiliation (certainly) since the second world war have led the German CDU to transform itself from wooing Christians through church groups into wooing consumers through television. And the Italian Democrazia Cristiana could not manage even that transition, shattering into several tendencies after the "Clean Hands" corruption investigations of the early 1990s.
Also, the Christian churches are not particularly conservative. According to Franco Venturini, of the Italian daily, Corriere della Sera, Italy's Eurocommunists found it necessary, by the end of the cold war, to back Nato. But "in the Christian Democrats you had the opposite phenomenon because they were basically Catholic and Catholics are basically pacifist". The result was surprising: "By the time of the Kosovo war," says Venturini, "the former communists behind Massimo D'Alema were more pro-American than the former Christian Democrats."
This increasing pacifism among Christians may explain the large number of rainbow-coloured flags reading "Pace" ("Peace") that one saw throughout Italy during protests over the US/UK Iraq invasion - and still see, a little tattered and grubby now, in many Italian streets. Most Italians believe that the chief constraint on the Berlusconi government's ability to adopt a stance of full-throated Atlanticism has been the anti-war position of the Pope.
The issue now is: can the United States, and particularly the neo- conservatives who believe in the use of force to defend Western values, connect with like-minded people in Europe to create a new international alliance? Here is the first problem: in the United States, the neo-conservatives are on the right. In Europe, their natural home is, or has recently been, on the left.
In France, for example, the intellectuals most often associated with support for the war in Iraq were the filmmaker Romain Goupil, the philosopher Andre Glucksmann, Bernard Kouchner, a founder of Medecins sans Frontieres, and the novelist Pascal Bruckner.
Sitting outside a pub near Les Halles, Bruckner tells me he's all for a "European neo-conservatism". In his mind, this would mean a European army that would take aim at the weak links in the world's totalitarian chain. He thinks it would have an advantage over its American variant, because Europeans - partly by virtue of the French and British colonial administrative traditions - have been more rooted in other cultures than the US has, and may have formed a better sense of how to respect local cultures, recognise the local power-elites and administer transition governments. Early on in the Iraq invasion, Bruckner was struck by how much more successful British troops had been in controlling Basra and the south of Iraq, compared to the Americans who were running the rest of it.
This brand of "neo-conservatism" is not an emulation of America's; it may even reflect a distrust of it. Europe's problem, as Bruckner sees it, is not that it has drifted too far to the left - for the left-right concept is one that he considers "totally discredited". Nor is Europe's problem simply anti-Americanism.
"Anti-Americanism can only be very ambivalent," he says, "where American culture sets the tone. The French are voting for America - in the market place - all the time." Rather, Bruckner says, "our great problem as Europeans is that we want to exit from history. Sometime after 1989, we developed the belief that barbarism could be refuted intellectually." Here, he makes clear, he is speaking primarily of France and Germany, not the UK.
Italy is both the same and different. There, as mentioned, Christianity has drifted into the orbit of the left, taking some formerly conservative Christian Democrats along with it. As in most continental countries, a large majority of Italians opposed the war. But Italy also has, in Silvio Berlusconi, a leader who revolutionised his country's media - and through them, his countrymen's politics - by importing American television.
Parliamentary deputy Enrico Letta is a member of the Margherita Party, a branch of Christian Democracy that, when the collapse in Italian parties came, sided against Berlusconi. As Letta explains it, the big change came in the 1980s, and it was Berlusconi the media wheeler-dealer - as opposed to Berlusconi the politician - who brought it. As he took over one Italian television network after another, Berlusconi Americanised the country. US television changed Italians' priorities, drawing them away from politics and towards consumerism.
"Berlusconi brought a model of television from the US," Letta says. "Not just a business model but a programming philosophy." Just as Tony Blair had to move his party's base from the mill to the university before he could take over his country, Berlusconi had to move his country's culture into the television age before he could reap the political benefits. Berlusconi knows what his countrymen think, because it is he who made them think it. In concrete terms, says Letta, the result is an American-style party system, in which weak parties compete for control of a strong government - the opposite of the old Italian system. Berlusconi's Forza Italia is just such a weak party. The majority of those supporting the government, in this view, are Republicans (in the American sense). "We, in turn," Letta admits of the opposition, "have become more and more similar to American Democrats."
This implosion of Italy's party system may be laying the groundwork for a more durable pro-Americanism than the old Christian Democrats could offer - and, not for the first time, it could be pioneering a new trend in Europe. After all, Italy has been the only one of the EU's six founder nations to offer the US its steady support for the past two years. Personality explains part of it. Something in US president George W. Bush, and the America he represents, is very attractive to Berlusconi. According to the Corriere's Venturini, "Berlusconi thinks: 'They will understand me... That is the country of the self-made man. Here in Italy, people will tell me I used to play piano on cruise ships. In America, they don't care. They even like that. In Italy, they tell me I'm not a real politician. In America, they distrust real politicians.'"
Different metaphors are possible: Giancarlo Loquenzi, a Senate aide, prefers to compare Berlusconi to the New York mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg. Bush - unlike Schroder and Chirac - never criticised Berlusconi's election in 2001, and Berlusconi's camp includes such US admirers as defence minister Antonio Martino, who imbibed a good deal of American philosophy through his participation in the free- market Mont Pelerin Society.
In Britain, Mark Leonard, director of the Blairite Foreign Policy Centre, says there is a new strain of Atlanticism which is "revolutionary rather than status-quo". This new strain attracts a certain number of Conservatives - Leonard names the Times columnist, Michael Gove, and the MP Michael Portillo - who believe in "a neo-conservative idea of democracy".
But he also recognises that the Atlanticist project has a great appeal to part of the left. "This is a left that thinks the American tiger can be ridden to promote human rights," he says, "which is fine, except for two problems. The first is American nationalism - we're not Americans. The second is an impatient belief on the left that to deal with big problems, we are going to have to develop a more multilateral way." While Leonard thinks that certain Europeans are too obsessed with multilateralism - those who would not have attacked Serbia in 1999 without a UN mandate, for instance - he thinks the US is far too inclined to go it alone.
Israel is central to the ideological divide over Atlanticism. Much attention has been given on both sides of the Atlantic to the rising tide of anti-Semitism in many European countries, especially France. Less focus has been given to pro-Israeli movements and initiatives. Claude Goasguen says: "There are about a hundred pro- Israel people in the National Assembly, and it's among them that Atlanticists can be recruited."
Berlusconi's refusal, in the six months of Italy's EU presidency, to meet with Palestinian strongman Yasser Arafat, despite an EU directive to the contrary, can be understood as placing him on the pro-American side of the Atlanticist divide. In general, though, support for Israel is haemorrhaging away in the political classes of Western Europe. In Germany, that support came primarily from political leaders - Helmut Kohl, Johannes Rau - whose generation is dying off, and whose immediate successors are evidently much less inclined to nail their colours to the Israeli mast.
By contrast, former leftists are moving to the Zionist cause as they swing to the centre, and so is one major party of the right - a party which would have been the last one would have thought could take such a position. Gianfranco Fini's post-fascist Alleanza Nazionale party, heir to Mussolini's fascists, was once viscerally hostile to the Jewish state - but Fini made an official visit to Israel last autumn.
As European integration comes to revolve increasingly around foreign-policy questions - from defence, to the Turkish candidacy for membership - hard and unavoidable decisions present themselves. Politicians on both right and left feel that Atlanticism has become a zero-sum game: they cannot take a firm stand in favour of the United States (through bilateral agreements, for instance) without endangering the European project.
It's a state of play, paradoxically, that favours the emergence of traditionally Eurosceptic Britain as a model for smaller European states. Particularly in Italy, politicians note with interest (or jealousy) Britain's ability to balance two roles - an occidental/Atlantic/Nato one and a European one. Italian Senate aide Giancarlo Loquenzi says he hopes his own country can replicate Britain's "not-so-ritual vision" within Europe.
As Italy took a hard line to protect its position on milk quotas during recent EU Common Agricultural Policy negotiations, Margaret Thatcher's name was frequently invoked.
For Giuliano Ferrara, the charismatic former communist who now edits the Berlusconi-friendly daily, Il Foglio, the Blair government represents the triumph of the political ideas of "a certain right" in Europe. "Blair acknowledges that we now live in a shareholder society." says Ferrara. "He has been consistent in foreign affairs with both Clinton and Bush." But others, inside Italy and out, doubt that the country has the means to emulate Britain's diplomatic bigamy. Enrico Letta considers the idea that a traditionally pro-EU Italy can replicate Britain's freedom of action within Europe to be delusional. France's Senator Francois- Poncet thinks Blair's stance is a dangerous one to imitate in the first place: "The British think they are in a better position by being largely subservient to the Americans," he remarks. "I would say that they wildly overstate their influence."
The point, however, is that Britain is more important in Europe because it is now becoming evident that dealing with America and dealing with the EU are not separate issues. As Gianni Bonvicini of Italy's Institute for International Affairs put it, "There is an increasing feeling that the Europe relationship can't be monopolistic. It can't mean giving up other relationships."
And Britain is the only EU-member country, at present, that is managing both relationships satisfactorily. Even French foreign minister Dominique de Villepin seems to recognise the indispensability of British military capabilities to European construction, particularly after those capabilities have been enhanced by 10 months of battlefield exposure to American technology and logistics. "There will be no Europe without a European defence," de Villepin wrote recently, "and there will be no European defence without the United Kingdom." That is why, for the Anglo-Franco-German summit recently announced for February 18, Britain appears to hold all the trumps.
Transatlantic ties are now shifting to different bases, but the bases still exist. Henry Kissinger is correct to say that the new generation of Europeans is not automatically pro-American. But neither need it be automatically anti-American. And others tend to miss the present Europe-wide unease about the European project. In the wake of December's Brussels summit, this unease has reached its highest level since the Maastricht agreement. The gloom arises, in part, from the failure at Brussels to find a constitutional voting formula acceptable to both the large countries (particularly Germany and France) and the medium-sized ones (particularly Poland and Spain.) But it also rests on the inability over the past year to find a common European voice on foreign policy, and specifically on the US.
In January, in a thoughtful Brussels post-mortem, the Le Monde writer, Thomas Ferenczi, speculated that "one of the most visible causes of the exhaustion of the European project is the retreat of those political forces that defended it, come hell or high water, for the past half-century." By this, he meant the Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats, the former transformed into Chirac-followers and free-marketeers, the latter losing significant numbers of voters, in France, to a more charismatic extreme left. These are the two parties, Ferenczi says, with a natural link to the total history of Europe - one through religion, the other through the Enlightenment.
But they are also the parties with a natural link to the foreign policy Europe has pursued through the longest period of peace in its history. For that reason, it may be hard to strike at the roots of the European relationship with America without striking at the roots of the project of European construction. Politicians increasingly see this link. Dennis MacShane, who is so impatient with European attempts to paint George W. Bush as a radical rightist, says: "What I recognise as a hardline agenda is anti- Europeanism from the British right. Like anti-Americanism from the Continental left, it's a politics that leads nowhere." This is a two-way street. If Washington sees the same link as MacShane, it will resist the temptation to damage the EU. And indeed, in the past year, the US has moved steadily away from defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld's evocation of an "Old Europe" and from a White House aide's urging that the Bush administration work towards the "'disaggregation' of Europe."
In most of his speeches since his visit to Warsaw last year, Bush has stuck to the line that one need not choose between the US and Europe. On one hand, the US has shown - for instance, through its threats, believable or not, to deny Iraq contracts to those unwilling to aid the coalition last spring - that it will not sit idly around if European countries seek to poison its bilateral relationships with other European allies. On the other, the US has dropped any larger project of undermining Europe's project of self- government, seeing that it risks creating a pretext for anti- Americanism that politicians across the political spectrum can endorse.
It is with such considerations in mind that Devon Cross, an American philanthropist whose career has included service on the Pentagon's Defence Policy Board, showed up in London in January. Cross hopes to start an NGO that will link American policy-makers and strategists with European journalists and publics - and, she hopes, promote a better understanding of how American foreign- policy thinking works and what the American government is trying to do. While she is a longtime friend of Donald Rumsfeld, and might be called a neo-conservative in the US, Cross says she will make it a priority to bring to London the widest possible variety of foreign- policy voices, from Bush Republicans (she has invited the under secretary of defence, Paul Wolfowitz, to participate) to Clinton Democrats (such as the former CIA director James Woolsey) to the human-rights activists of the Democratic left (who cluster around the Freedom House Foundation and American organised labour). This varied coalition is what Americans naturally think of when they think of the political constituency for their foreign policy. But it is not what Europeans think of.
And that is just the point, according to Cross. Her view - that America is losing the battle for the world's hearts and minds by neglecting "public diplomacy", of the sort that its government, foundations and labour unions carried out throughout the cold war - is held quite widely in the US.
Cross's London operation is the first fruit of such thinking, but it is hard work starting up an organisation that aspires to do the work of such lavishly funded, celebrity-studded cold war organisations as the Congress for Cultural Freedom. The Chelsea house where she had hoped to locate her operation fell through, but at least now the organisation has acquired a name: The Policy Forum. Which is an improvement from the time Cross first had the idea to start such an organisation, at the nadir of trans-Atlantic relations in the days following the launch of Operation Iraqi Freedom. "Back then," said Cross on her first day in London, "I had thought of calling it Operation Just Show Up."
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