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that America's eight-year delusion that China can be manipulated
through increased trade has faded, it is time for
the United States to consider another great conflict on the horizon.
The European Union recently announced plans to forge further ahead
with an EU military force that will certainly draw resources away
from NATO, the alliance that has kept relative peace on the continent
for a half-century. Europe has also criticized U.S. plans for a
ballistic missile defense, a position it now holds in common with
Russia, China, and other nations of dubious intent toward America.
As Europe continues its process of economic, political, and social
consolidation, it perceives that its interests are rapidly diverging
from those of the United States.
Britain, itself a member of the European Union, is caught in the
middle and increasingly uncomfortable. The European Court of Justice
— the top court of the European Union (EU) — recently
ruled that the EU government "can lawfully suppress political criticism
of its institutions and of leading figures, sweeping aside English
Common Law and fifty years of European precedents on civil liberties,"
as London Daily Telegraph EU correspondent Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
aptly stated it in the paper's March 7 edition. This decision was
actually the culmination of a long series of disagreements that
have pointed out major historical differences between European and
British ways. The court's ruling, that the commission had the authority
to quash dissent in order to "protect the rights of others," laid
bare fundamental philosophical differences between the two political
cultures; it will be difficult to reconcile them. In fact, melding
the two will probably be impossible; one side or the other will
have to give in.
The philosophical disagreement behind this case has worldwide implications.
As we contemplate what kind of political structures will arise and
thrive after the demise of Communism and the rise of a truly global
economy and fully interconnected world, the European Union and the
English-speaking nations provide two strongly contrasting models,
each displaying highly distinctive strengths and weaknesses.
The European Union has always been, of course, a highly planned
phenomenon. Starting with the relatively loose association of the
Common Market nations, European leaders methodically ratcheted up
the process for decades, steadily adding new countries and additional
ties between them, forging the union only as rapidly as seemed feasible
to the experts in Brussels. There is now talk in Brussels of having
a group of "core nations" integrate even further, leading the way
for additional investments of sovereignty in the Brussels government.
Building the union has always been a top-down process, with the
European governments far more enthusiastic for it than most of the
people (especially the British).
Young people in France, for example, have rioted in the streets
in recent years to protest their grim economic prospects as EU regulations
and then the European single currency tightened Brussels's stranglehold
on France's economy, but French president Jacques Chirac remains
one of the strongest advocates of further integration. As political
theorist Kenneth Weinstein notes in the current issue of American
Outlook, European political thinking is based on the idea of
an objective popular will that is better and more altruistic than
that of the individual citizen. This suggests, as Weinstein notes,
that only the state can be trusted to rise above "the selfish preoccupations
that afflict the rest of society."
The European Union's governance style reflects these ideas splendidly.
It is designed to get things done and is therefore expert-oriented,
bureaucratic, unyielding, and centralized. It cannot allow much
room for disagreement, because to dissent against the government
is to undermine what it embodies: the objective public will. And
in any conflict between the individuals and government, the public's
interest — so much wiser and more decent than our own private
lusts — must prevail. This is why the European Court ruled
that the European Commission had the right to fire a British economist
for writing a book called The Rotten Heart of Europe. In
representing the objective public will, the government and its allied
bureaucracy have a clear responsibility to regulate the dissemination
of ideas, because opinions can bubble up from individuals' selfish
personal interests and create social disturbances. And because the
state represents the objective will of the people, ideas must be
judged by their likely political outcome, and the EU government
must punish those who "damage the institution's image and reputation."
Economic interests provide another powerful source of danger to
the public will. Thus the European Union works at reining in corporate
power and guards against economic inequality, in order to reduce
social tensions and restrain the concentrations of wealth that can
threaten the state's power and allow people to exploit one another.
To the Continental mind, the concept of rights refers to
freedom from exploitation by other people, and freedom means moral
autonomy, the opportunity to define one's own conceptions of right
and wrong — providing only that these do not result in damage
to others, especially the state. Although there is much talk in
the European Union of "subsidiarity" — the idea that the central
government should allow some discretion to local authorities —
for all practical purposes the Brussels bureaucracy is in charge
of things.
These concepts and the measures designed to implement them foster
a strong, relatively stable social order, but one in which social
mobility and economic opportunities are somewhat limited in comparison
with the other major bloc of developed countries — the English-speaking
nations, or Anglosphere. Unlike the members of the European Union,
the Anglosphere nations are widely dispersed across the globe, and
there is no formal political union among them. Nonetheless, the
similarities between the English-speaking countries, attributable
to their common cultural background, are greater than those among
the European Union nations, despite the best efforts of the Brussels
bureaucracy to generate uniformity. Europe still lacks the common
linguistic and cultural traditions that make up a true nation.
The Anglosphere has never been the result of any plan. Like the
European Union, British hegemony was initially imposed by force
rather than established by consent; as the British Empire grew and
solidified, its growth was spurred by commercial and political interests,
not any government-ordained plan of action. Administration of the
empire was relatively loose in most cases, and perhaps as a result
of this, it slowly spun out of London's grasp, piece by piece. The
national relationships have been purely by consent for the past
half-century, and decidedly unplanned and informal. These associations
have been close and effective, but based on common interests and
cultural similarities rather than imposed by institutions.
Having grown out of the individualistic habits of an island nation,
the governance style of the Anglosphere countries reflects a more
organic, unruly, trial-and-error approach to political organization.
It involves relatively decentralized governments based on the consent
of the governed; competing points of view contending in a marketplace
of ideas largely free of government censorship; tolerance of corporate
power and economic inequality; a good deal of economic freedom;
respect (at times grudging) for religious liberty; and a perpetual
struggle among interest groups to affect national policies. Of course,
the Anglosphere nations embody this approach imperfectly and to
varying degrees, but they certainly have tended more toward a limited-government
philosophy than have other nations. In the Anglo-Celtic tradition,
the concept of rights refers to freedom from government interference,
and freedom means independence. This political philosophy leads
to a rough, dirty, energetic, productive society with a relatively
ragged social order, high social mobility, and a strong need for
a wide moral consensus that is seldom achieved. It also makes it
much easier to assimilate immigrants from different cultures, because
there is no felt need to create an objective public will.
The weaker sense of public purpose in the English-speaking nations,
however, invites the perpetual tug-of-war among interest groups
so familiar in American politics. This battle of factions is supposed
to impede concentrations of power, but it continuously undermines
these nations' ability to defend individual rights against government
interference, because those who can achieve political power will
naturally try to use it. Moreover, as interest groups succeed in
influencing government actions, they grow larger than their contributions
to the social good would otherwise allow. And as the world economy
becomes increasingly interconnected and corporations become correspondingly
bigger and transnational, it becomes more difficult for the average
individual to feel any great benefits from power being concentrated
in private organizations rather than being explicitly vested in
government, especially as huge corporations become necessarily distant
from consumers and communities. The English-speaking nations will
struggle with this as surely as any other country will, and it is
not clear just how we will be able to resolve the matter. Perhaps
we will do what we always do — simply let things run their
course — and perhaps that will turn out to be the best thing.
It is possible that the English and European models will evolve
toward each other, with the EU incorporating increasing respect
for subsidiarity and individual rights and the Anglosphere allowing
an ever-greater role for government. That scenario seems unlikely,
however, given the fundamental philosophical differences behind
the two approaches. In fact, it is quite plausible to think that
the two systems will diverge further in coming years, and the United
Nations and the World Trade Organization (WTO) will probably shepherd
these competing visions further into global affairs, with the UN
representing the European idea of harmony through support of the
public will and the WTO representing the Anglosphere's concern for
maximizing local sovereignty and individual liberty.
Perhaps, then, as UPI columnist James Bennett argues in American
Outlook, "we have gone beyond the old civilizational alignments
and are actually defining a successor civilization. It may take
another century or so for the new civilization's cultural identity
to jell, but the roots of it are there… [A] civilizational
alliance has to have a general, all-encompassing culture that people
are free to join. The English-speaking nations have that, and I
strongly believe that the English-speaking world of today is best
thought of as a new civilization." Rather than becoming a political
phenomenon on the order of the European Union, this Anglosphere
civilization would probably be as informal and inclusive as the
culture from which it grew. And that, too, might turn out to be
for the best.
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