FRANCIS FUKUYAMA PART II
Europeans, by contrast, tend to believe that democratic legitimacy flows from the will of an international community much larger than any individual nation-state. This international community is not embodied concretely in a single, global democratic constitutional order. Yet it hands down legitimacy to existing international institutions, which are seen as partially embodying it. Thus, peacekeeping forces in the former Yugoslavia are not merely ad hoc inter-governmental arrangements, but rather moral expressions of the will and norms of the larger international community.
One might be tempted to say that the stiff-necked defence of national sovereignty of the type practiced by Sen. Jesse Helms is a characteristic only of a certain part of the American Right, and that the Left is as internationalist as are the Europeans. This would be largely correct in the security-foreign policy arena, but dead wrong with regard to the economic side of liberal internationalism. That is, the Left does not grant the WTO or any other trade-related body any special status with regard to legitimacy. They are very suspicious of the WTO when it overturns an environment or labour law in the name of free trade, and are just as jealous of democratic sovereignty on these issues as Sen. Helms.
Between these two views of the sources of legitimacy, I would say that the Europeans are theoretically right, but wrong in practice. They assert that they and not the Americans are the true believers in liberal universal values. It is in fact impossible to assert as a theoretical matter that proper liberal democratic procedure by itself inevitably results in outcomes that are necessarily legitimate and just. A constitutional order that is procedurally democratic can still decide to do terrible things to other countries that violate human rights and norms of decency on which its own democratic order is based. Indeed, it can violate the higher principles upon which its legitimacy is based, as Lincoln argued was the case with slavery. The legitimacy of its actions are not in the end based on democratic procedural correctness, but on the prior rights and norms which come from a moral realm higher than that of the legal order.
The problem with the European position is that while such a higher realm of liberal democratic values might theoretically exist, it is very imperfectly embodied in any given international institution. The very idea that this legitimacy is handed downwards from a willowy, disembodied international level rather than handed upwards from concrete, legitimate democratic publics on a nation-state level virtually invites abuse on the part of elites who are then free to interpret the will of the international community to suit their own preferences.
The second important practical problem with the European position is that of enforcement. The one power that is unique to sovereign nation-states and to them alone, even in today’s globalised world, is the power to enforce laws. Even if existing international laws and organisations did accurately reflect the will of the international community (whatever that means), enforcement remains by and large the province of nation states. A great deal of both international and national law coming out of Europe consists of what amount to social policy wish lists that are completely unenforceable. Europeans justify these kinds of laws saying they are expressions of social objectives; Americans reply, correctly in my view, that such unenforceable aspirations undermine the rule of law itself.
The only way that this circle of theory and practice could be squared would be if there were genuine democratic government at a level higher than that of the nation-state. Such global democratic government could then be said to truly embody the will of the international community, while containing procedural safeguards to make sure that that will was not willfully misinterpreted or abused by various elites or interest groups. It would also presumably have enforcement powers that do not today exist, apart from the specific ad hoc arrangements made for peacekeeping and multilateral coalitions.
Some Europeans may believe that the steady accumulation of smaller international institutions like the ICC or the various agencies of the United Nations will some day result in something resembling democratic world government. In my view, the chance of this happening is as close to zero as you ever get in political life. What will be practically possible to construct in terms of international institutions will not be legitimate or democratic, and what will be legitimate and democratic will not be possible to construct. For better or worse, such international institutions as we possess will have to be partial solutions existing in the vacuum of international legitimacy above the level of the nation-state. Or to put it differently, whatever legitimacy they possess will have to be based on the underlying legitimacy of nation-states and the contractual relationships they negotiate.
Why do these differences exist?
Robert Kagan in the article mentioned earlier provides a realpolitik explanation for US-European differences with regard to international law. The Europeans like international law and norms because they are much weaker than the United States, and the latter likes unilateralism because it is significantly more powerful than any other country or group of countries (like the EU) not just in terms of military power, but economically, technologically, and culturally as well.
This argument makes a great deal of sense as far as it goes. Small, weak countries that are acted upon rather than influencing others naturally prefer to live in a world of norms, laws, and institutions, in which more powerful nations are constrained. Conversely, a ‘sole superpower’ like the United States would naturally like to see its freedom of action be as unencumbered as possible.
But while the argument from the standpoint of power politics is correct as far as it goes, it is not a sufficient explanation of why the US and Europe, not to mention other countries around the world, differ. As noted above, the pattern of US unilateralism and European multilateralism applies primarily to security/foreign policy issues and secondarily to environmental concerns; in the economic sphere, the US is enmeshed in multilateral institutions despite (or perhaps because of) its dominance of the global economy.
Moreover, to point to differences in power is merely to beg the question of why these differentials exist. The EU collectively encompasses a population of 375 million people and has a GDP of $9.7 trillion, compared to a US population of 280 million and a GDP of $10.1 trillion. Europe could certainly spend money on defence at a level that would put it on a par with the United States, but it chooses not to. Europe spends barely $130 billion collectively on defence—a sum that has been steadily falling—compared to US defence spending of $300 billion, which is due to rise sharply. The post-September 11 increment in US defence spending requested by President Bush is larger than the entire defence budget of Britain. Despite Europe’s turn in a more conservative direction in 2002, not one rightist or centre-right candidate is campaigning on a platform of significantly raising defence spending. Europe’s ability to deploy the power that it possesses is of course greatly weakened by the collective action problems posed by the current system of EU decision-making. But the failure to create more useable military power is clearly a political and normative issue.
Moreover, not every small, weak country is equally outraged by American unilateralism. In a curious role reversal from Cold War days, the Russians were actually much more relaxed about the American withdrawal from the ABM Treaty than were many Europeans, since it makes possible deep cuts in offensive strategic nuclear forces. Australia and New Zealand of course want the US to abide by international trade rules since they are directly affected by American agricultural subsidies, but have generally expressed less moral outrage over the American failure to subordinate its security policy to international norms than most members of the European Union.
This brings us to other reasons why Europeans see the international order so differently from Americans. One critically important factor has to be the experience of European integration over the past generation. The loss of sovereignty is not an abstract, theoretical matter to Europeans; they have been steadily giving up powers to Brussels, from local control over health and safety standards to social policy to their currency itself. Having lived through this masochistic experience repeatedly, one imagines that they are like former smokers who want to put everyone else through the same withdrawal pains that they have endured.
The final important difference between the United States and Europe with regard to international order has nothing to do with European beliefs and practices, but with America’s unique national experience, and the sense of exceptionalism that has arisen from it. The sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset has spent much of his distinguished career explaining how the United States is an outlier among developed democracies, with policies and institutions that differ significantly from those of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Japan.(5) Whether in regard to welfare, crime, regulation, education, or foreign policy, there are constant differences separating America from everyone else: it is consistently more anti-statist, individualistic, laissez-faire, and egalitarian than other democracies.
This sense of exceptionalism extends to its own democratic institutions and their legitimacy. Unlike most of the old societies of Europe, the United States was founded on the basis of a political idea. There was no American people or nation prior to the founding of the country: national identity is civic rather than religious, cultural, racial, or ethnic. There has been only one American regime which, as the world’s oldest continuously existing democracy, is not viewed as a transient political compromise. This means that the country’s political institutions have always been imbued with an almost religious reverence that Europeans, with more ancient sources of identity, find peculiar. The proliferation of American flags across the country in the wake of September 11 is only the most recent manifestation of Americans’ deeply felt patriotism.
Moreover, for Americans, their Declaration of Independence and Constitution are not just the basis of a legal-political order on the North American continent; they are the embodiment of universal values and have a significance for mankind that goes well beyond the borders of the United States. The American dollar bill has the inscription novus ordo seclorum—‘new order of the ages’—written under the all-seeing eye of the great pyramid. When President Reagan repeatedly quoted Governor Winthrop in speaking of the US as a ‘shining city on a hill’, his words had great resonance for many Americans. This leads at times to a typically American tendency to confuse its own national interests with the broader interests of mankind as a whole.
The situation of Europe—as well as developed Asian societies like Japan, for that matter—is very different. Europeans were peoples with shared histories long before they were democracies. They have other sources of identity besides politics. They have seen a variety of regimes come and go, and some of those regimes have, in living memory, been responsible for very shameful acts. The kind of patriotism that is commonplace in America is highly suspect in many parts of Europe: Germans for many years after World War II taught their children not to display the German flag or cheer too loudly at football matches. While the French and, in a different way, the British continue to feel a sense of broader national mission in the world, it is safe to say that few other European countries regard their own political institutions as universal models for the rest of the world to follow. Indeed, many Europeans regard their national institutions as having a much lower degree of legitimacy than international ones, with the European Union occupying a place in between.
The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. Europeans regard the violent history of the first half of the 20th century as the direct outcome of the unbridled exercise of national sovereignty. The house that they have been building for themselves since the 1950s called the European Union was deliberately intended to embed those sovereignties in multiple layers of rules, norms, and regulations to prevent those sovereignties from ever spinning out of control again. While the EU could become a mechanism for aggregating and projecting power beyond Europe’s borders, most Europeans see the EU’s purpose as one rather of transcending power politics. They do, in other words, see their project as one of finding comfortable accommodations for the last man at the end of history
Australia’s national experience places it somewhere in between the United States and Europe. As a loyal colony of Britain, it was not born in a revolution against state authority as was the United States, and therefore does not share America’s anti-statism and suspicion of higher authority to nearly the same degree. Though it was also a land of new settlement, its national identity was less overtly tied to a set of new democratic political institutions than was that of the United States. Its size and historical origins moreover have never allowed Australia to develop a sense that its own institutions were exceptional.
On the other hand, national sovereignty is more important to Australia than to most European countries. Australia has never had the experience of the unlimited exercise of its own sovereignty leading it to disaster, as in Central Europe. Rather, it saw its sovereignty threatened by Japan and needed to be rescued from that threat by American power. The neighbourhood it lives in is highly diverse, politically and culturally. Traditional power politics remain a fact of life in East Asia; there is no overarching framework of institutions and norms comparable to the EU which is capable of regulating relations between states in the region. As a small power, it depends on larger powers being constrained by rules and institutions, particularly in the economic realm, but it also depends ultimately on American power for its security. It is not surprising, therefore, that Australian criticisms of the United States since September 11 have been more muted than those coming from Europe.
Are we at the end of history?
This brings us back full circle to the initial question with which we started, which is also one of the important sources of US-European disagreement. The Europeans are certainly right that they are living at the end of history; the question is, where is the rest of the world? Of course, much of the world is indeed mired in history, having neither economic growth nor stable democracy nor peace. But the end of the Cold War marked an important turn in international relations, since for the first time the vast majority of the world’s great powers were stable, prosperous liberal democracies. While there could be skirmishes between countries in history, like Iraq, and those beyond it, like the United States, the prospect of great wars between great powers had suddenly diminished.
There are certainly no new non-democratic great powers to challenge the United States; China may one day qualify, but it isn’t there yet. But a terrorist organisation armed with weapons of mass destruction is a different matter: although the organisation itself may be a minor historical player, the technological capability it can potentially deploy is such that it must be taken seriously as a world-class threat. Indeed, such an organisation poses graver challenges in certain ways than nuclear-armed superpowers, since the latter are for the most part deterrable and not into the business of committing national suicide.
The question about the threat is then whether the world has fundamentally changed since September 11, insofar as hostile terrorist organisations armed with weapons of mass destruction will become an ongoing reality. Many Americans clearly think so, and believe that once a leader like Saddam Hussein possesses nuclear weapons he will pass them on to terrorists as a poor man’s delivery system. They, like President Bush, believe that this is a threat not just to the United States, but to Western civilisation as a whole. The acuteness of this threat is what then drives the new doctrine of preemption and the greater willingness of the United States to use force unilaterally around the world.
Many Europeans, by contrast, believe that the attacks of September 11 were a one-off kind of event where Osama bin Laden got lucky and scored big. But the likelihood that al-Qaeda will achieve similar successes in the future is small, given the heightened state of alert and the defensive and preventive measures put into place since September 11. They believe that the likelihood that Saddam Hussein will pass nuclear weapons to terrorists is small, and that he remains deterrable. An invasion of Iraq is therefore not necessary; containment will work as it has since the Gulf War. And finally, they tend to believe that Muslim terrorists do not represent a general threat to the West, but are focused on the United States as a result of US policy in the Middle East and Gulf.
Democracy's future
Assuming we get past these near-term threats, there is a larger principle at issue in the current US-European rift that will continue to play an important role in world politics for the foreseeable future. That principle has to do with the nature of democracy itself. In an increasingly globalised world, where is the proper locus of democratic legitimacy? Does it now and forever more exist only at the nation-state level, or is it possible to imagine the development of genuinely democratic international institutions? Will the existing welter of international rules, norms, and organisations some day evolve into something more than a series of ad hoc arrangements, in the direction of genuine global governance? And if so, who will design those institutions?
My own view, as stated earlier, is that it is extremely hard to envision democracy ever emerging at an international level, and many reasons for thinking that attempts to create such international institutions will actually have the perverse effect of undermining the real democracy that exists at a nation-state level. A partial exception to this is the European Union, which continues to move ahead as a political project with the introduction of the Euro and the planned expansion under the Nice Treaty. But in a way, the experience of the EU proves my point: there is a significant ‘democratic deficit’ at the European level, which exacerbates existing democratic deficits at the member state level. This is the source of much of the backlash against further European integration, which is seen as weakening local powers in favour of unmovable bureaucrats in Brussels. The problem will become even more severe after the next round of European expansion, which will bring in states from Eastern Europe with very different expectations and experiences.
Nor is it possible to argue in principle that if a nation is threatened with terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction it does not have a right to defend itself unilaterally. It is legitimate to argue over whether such a threat exists. But if it does, it would be irresponsible for any government to depend on international law for self-defence.
But if the United States refuses, rightly, to concede the principle that there is a broader democratic international community providing legitimacy to international institutions, it needs to consider carefully the consequences and perceptions of its behaviour as the world’s most powerful democratic nation-state. Its own self-interest dictates the need for reciprocity across the broad range of cooperative agreements and institutions within which it finds itself enmeshed. The opportunities for unilateral action that exist presently in the military realm are not nearly as broad in the realm of trade and finance. There are a large number of global public goods, like standards, free trade, financial flows, and legal transparency, as well as public bads like environmental damage, crime, and drug trafficking, that create difficult collective action problems. Some of these problems can be solved only if the world’s most powerful country takes the lead in either providing those public goods, or in organising institutions to provide them—something the US was eager to do in earlier periods.
The enormous margin of power exercised by the United States, particularly in the security realm, brings with it special responsibilities to use that power prudently. Robert Kagan speaks of the need to show what the American founders labelled a ‘decent respect for the opinions of mankind’. But for him that seems to consist of nothing more than not gratuitously rejecting offers of support for American aims and objectives. It is not clear that those aims and objectives should themselves in any way be shaped by the opinions of non-Americans.
In my view, an appropriately moderate American foreign policy that did show a real degree of ‘decent respect’ would involve at least the following elements.
First, if the United States is going to shift to a preemptive policy towards international terrorism, there ought to be a thinking-through and enunciation of a broader strategy that among other things indicates the limits of this new doctrine. What kinds of threats, and what standards of evidence, will justify the use of this kind of power? Presumably, the US is not thinking of unilaterally attacking at least two of the three legs of the axis of evil; if this is the case, why not at least spell this out? The United States is in the process of scaring itself to death with regard to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. A more realistic appraisal of future threats will raise the bar to preemption, while keeping it in the arsenal.
Second, the US needs to take some responsibility for global public bads like carbon emissions. The Kyoto Protocol is a very flawed document for any number of reasons, and the link between carbon emissions and observed warming has not been conclusively proven. On the other hand, it has not been disproven, either, and it would seem only prudent to hedge against the possibility that it is true. Apart from global warming, there are any number of good reasons why the United States ought to tax energy use much more heavily than it does: to pay for the negative externality of having to go to war every decade or so to keep open access to Middle Eastern oil; to promote development of alternative energy sources; and to create some policy space in dealing with Saudi Arabia, which does not seem to be a particular friend of the United States after September 11. Americans may not ever be convinced that they should make serious economic sacrifices for the sake of international agreements, but they may be brought around to an equivalent position if they see sufficient self-interest in doing so.
Finally, there should be a walking back of the steel and agricultural subsidy decisions taken earlier this year. No one in Washington ever pretended that there was a reason for making them in the first place other than pure political expediency, and there can be no US leadership on any important issue related to the global economy in their wake. Now that Trade Promotion Authority exists, the United States needs to use it as a mandate to act forcefully.
The US-European rift that has emerged in 2002 is not just a transitory problem reflecting the style of the current US administration or the world situation in the wake of September 11. It is a reflection of differing views of the locus of democratic legitimacy within a broader Western civilisation whose actual institutions have become remarkably similar. The underlying principled issue is essentially unsolvable because there is ultimately no practical way of addressing the ‘democratic deficit’ at the global level. But the problem can be mitigated by a degree of American moderation within a system of sovereign nation-states.
Notes
(1) “Time to Stop Being America’s Lapdog,” Observer (Feb. 17, 2002).
(2) Thierry Meyssan, L'Effroyable Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud).
(3) Robert Kagan, "Power and Weakness," Policy Review no. 116 (June-July 2002).
(4) John Van Oudenaren, "E Pluribus Confusion," National Interest no. 65 (Fall 2001): 23-36.
(5) Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). This theme appears also in his books Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, 2nd. Ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); The First New Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963); and Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York & London: Routledge, 1990).
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About the Author:
Francis Fukuyama is the Bernard Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He has a B.A. in classics from Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard. Dr Fukuyama currently sits on the President's Council on Bioethics. He has written widely on democratisation and international political economy, and culture and social capital in modern economic life. His books include the award winning The End of History and the Last Man, published in over twenty foreign editions, and most recently Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution. |
