Americans Do Not Love Liberty

RÆSON

Storpolitik i en lille verden

FØRSTE KVARTAL 2003: 10.MARTS

"Americans do not love liberty. That is why you have to look all over Washington for a place where you can smoke at lunch!"

by Henrik Østergaard Breitenbauch, RÆSON in Washington

Sovereignty Changing

HB: Currently, the transatlantic relationship is going through its worst phase ever – on the level of high politics. But some of the answers to why it is so might be found at a lower, more basic level, that of political culture, the different conceptions of politics that can be found on the two sides of the Atlantic. Kagan’s analysis, if not wholly new or original, contains some good points about where and how these differences in conceptions developed.

CC: I agree. On the current situation, yesterday I had lunch with a high-ranking German official who explained why Germany, France and Belgium were blocking the NATO supply of Patriot missiles to Turkey. He said that they wanted to avoid “anything that would suggest a logic of war”. So there are very different perceptions: we think it is a war. They don’t. If you don’t think it is a war, then all of the European positions make perfect ethical sense. We, the Americans, are looking for a French pay-off in terms of Iraqi oil in the same way the French are looking for a Halliburton-styleAmerican pay-off. But really I think both sides are acting ethically according to their understanding of the situation.

HB: Among the recent European opinion polls, an English one put the USA first ahead of both North Korea and Iraq on a list of countries deemed most a threat to world peace? In Europe, many people conceive of this as a classic security dilemma: that hawkish tough-talk will only make a situation worse by raising the stakes?

CC: The American side of that problem is to say: “Look, Saddam Hussein is cooperating with International Authorities only due to the threat of force from the United States, and by diminishing that threat of force or making it less credible, you make war more likely. Right now, the UN regime has worked to the extent is has because Saddam really believes that it will be war if he does not let it work. The moment the Western alliance cracks to the point where he thinks war is unlikely, then he will begin to cheat on the UN sanctions.

A lot of your questions seem to point to a possible reordering of the world. The people who understandthe stakes of this best, I think, are those inthe misnamed anti-globalization movement who DO want a set of rules that will apply to all countries. The United States is beginning to think that too: there is an attempt to create a world order that would obey some kind of constitutional principles. This is very confusing, to me certainly, but I wrote a column in the Financial Times last week comparing Davos and Porto Alegre. They’re both talking about the same things now…

HB: …about global governance, not a personalized government?

CC: Yes, they’re talking about regulation. One distinction that was made for me - when I did a couple of articles on Hubert Védrine a few years ago, by the people around him – was between régulation and réglementation. This is a distinction we do not have in English, andI think that our lack of one might be the source of a great deal of blindness. The French ability to distinguish between the two is the reason why they won’t have a Newt Gingrich, why they won’t have a real liberal party. They won’t think, as the Americans do, that the only way to get efficiency is to destroy government. But the United States has in the last 17 months discovered the benefits of regulation.

HB: But on which level is this shift to be found – one thing is the toast speeches in Davos, but on which concrete levels do you think this change has been expressed?

CC: Oh, I think it is expressed in the war on Iraq. If you wanted to be blunt, you could say that the American casus belli is that the US doesn’t want anyone in the Arab world to have a nuclear weapon. That’s not the United States’s “business” in any traditional understanding of sovereignty. I myself have seen my attitudes toward sovereignty change radically in the last two years. For instance, I really opposed the Kosovo war and the trial of Pinochet in Europe. The trial of Pinochet I would still oppose but for practical morethan philosophical reasons. Practical reasons because the Pinochet precedentmakes it less likely that you can arrange a Saddam exile situation. But philosophically, I had misgivings aboutit onsovereignty grounds. And so, The United States is making a move now that takes it away from the traditional ideals of sovereignty that it has always espoused: it is acting in the name of a global community. There’s a paradox here, an irony: at the very moment of this Transatlantic rift, The United States is actually accepting some of the founding principles of the European Union. And you could even sayit is the United States’ acceptance of those principles that iscausing that rift: There is apost-national community of values, which hasvariable geometries.

Bush: The World Needs an Executive

HB: But the paradox is even bigger because this would appear to come after the first part of the Bush Administration where it was accused of “unabashed unilateralism” for not wanting to cooperate with the world community in terms of the Kyoto treaty, Missile defense etc. That would, at least on the surface, seem to contradict your reading of this shift?

CC: I think that a lot of this has changed suddenly after September 11th. You can draw parallels to domestic policies. But I am not sure if that contradicts the reading. There are some very strange unpredictabilities to sovereignty in the world now. There are all these inchoate, incomplete institutions that are in their infancy, and I think that Davos and Porto Alegre are examples – the United Nations is another one. The United States is beginning to be one of these institutions itself. There are these competing sovereignties that are each part of a global constitutional order. The United Nations is a legislative without an executive. The United States seems to want to act as an executive without a legislature. Or rather, it seems to be seeking an appropriate legislature. The American perspective is that the UN is not a suitable legislature, it is not accountable under any constitutional understanding - it’slike a “rotten-borough” system.

I mean, there is no reason that Surinam should have the same vote as China. But also, you could say that there is no reason that China should have the same vote as France – if you really think that the world should work on democratic principles. Even in our Montesquieuan, Lockean democracies not anyone can vote. In America, if you are convicted of a violent crime, if you’re a felon, you cannot vote. There are certain people who are not competent to vote. I don’t see that North Korea should have a vote in any future world constitutional order, and I think that the Europeans believe that too. So there is something that strikes the Americans as disingenuous about the European … you cannot be absolutist about the UN, it may the beginning of good world legislature, but it is only the beginning.

HB: If we put aside the obvious – classical national interest – objections the French would have to any reorganization or change within the UN, for fear of losing their permanent seat in the Security Council, and look at value communities, what you are saying is basically that there is a lack of comprehension in Europe for the extent to which the American administration is acting within or on what is a set common, shared values across the Atlantic. That this is fundamentally about liberal democracy. In a way, and I hope to provoke you a little bit, it thus not far from the Clinton administration’s vision?

CC: There has been a break with the Clinton administration: not only the unilateralism you mentioned, but also the belief in small sovereignties. The Bush administration would not have fought the Kosovo war. The Bush administration’s initial position on the Middle East was that the Israelis and the Palestinians know more about itthan we do, and we won’t meddle with that. That was a departure from the Clinton style of conflict resolution, which was a more European style.

Since September 11 Bush has been groping his way towards his own post-national understanding of the world order. But that does not mean that it is the same asClinton’s – I do not see a lot of continuity between them. There is a certain Democratic style of American assertiveness – the Madeleine Albright circle is an example of that. These people tend to support Bush on the war. But the Bush perspective is still very different from the Clinton perspective, which was much more modest. The Bush view is that there must be some sort of executive power for this world order. I may be thinking more conceptually about this than the people in the Bush administration, but I’m surethey think that the world order will break down if it lacksan executive.

Islamic Extremism: Once Broken...

HB: This concept of the executive is also a point wherethe Europeans and the Americans seem to miss each other. Especially in the small countries and specifically Scandinavia there is great hesitation as a gut reaction against the idea of use of force - not the least due to our historical experience of loss whenever one of the big countries have moved around a little bit. It is a gut reaction, which says that it is difficult to defend any kind of attempt to substantially move away from whatever the present status quo is. There seems to exist a more comprehensive conception of the moral possibility of leadership in the States?

CC: It is interesting that you’re so focused on the question of morality in politics. I’m probably not a representative neo-conservative in this sense, even though I agree with their position on Iraq: there are others who are very moral on foreign politics. I think that they think that a large a part of the case for invading Iraq is to stop it from being a totalitarian state and dictatorship.

HB: So this is classical idealism?

CC: Yes it is: I’m closer to the so-called “realist school” than they are. The big reason for invading Iraq that I would go with is to keep radical muslims from getting the atomic bomb. That’s why I would like to invade Iraq. I think there is a better chance of doing that if you intimidate Saudi-Arabia, which is a force because of its money, it is a small country, with very little military resources but its money gives it great reach, and to have a couple of hundred thousand troops in the area exercises I think a chilling effect on radical Islam in all the surrounding countries.

This might be my own, overly optimistic view, but I think that if you can break the tradition of this Islamic extremism, then it will not crop up again. It will be like Nazi Germany after itsdefeat: very little of the ideology survived. Even people who hadheld it beforesort of ceased to see the logic of it. It was hard evenfor an ex-nazi to explain his way into this thinking – that is why all of those conversations with Albert Speer are so interesting. So I am applying this kind of logic to this part of the world: if you can break this cycle of recruital and upping the ante, of exaggerating and demonization – things like that, then I hope this ideology can be stopped.

HB: But is it possible to reduce religion to ideology in this context?

CC: That is a tough question. Before September 11 I would have said no, that it was not an ideology, they believe what they believe. But since then I have been impressed with how ideologized a religion Islam can be in certain cases. Maybe post-September 11 I err on the side of looking at it as too ideological.

HB: Then you have neo-conservatives pleading for a war on Iraq on the grounds of going against totalitarianism abroad – and then you have an implicit argument here, which says, to put it very bluntly, that the sociological characteristics of Islam as an ideology in the Middle East is an example of how it is not modern, secularised enough, not well suited for open deliberation and politics? And thus you have the neo-conservatives defending a classical enlightenment agenda?

CC: That’s right. I don’t want to make extravagant claims for my understanding of Islam. I read Oriana Fallaci’s book (Vreden og Skammen, red) and I’m uncomfortable with the sort of broad-brush descriptions in it. I don’t know whether she isright or wrong. But I do feel comfortable saying we should face that there is akind of totalitarian threat from radical Islam, or from a broad strand of political Islam – the whole Sharia-imposing Islam.

But your formulation is right: this is a funny alliance of people who are interested in this war: Donald Rumsfeld is not fighting the same war as Paul Wolfowitz. Rumsfeld is fighting the security war; Wolfowitz is fighting the idealistic war. But is doesn’t mean that oneof them is wrong. An interesting thing was said by one of the Germans at the lunch yesterday. He said: this war is either going be a great success or a great failure. But whatever happens, I hope that the side that was proved wrong will have the courage to learn from itsmistakes. He was a real agnostic, as at the end of the day I am.

"We Have More Socialism Than It Looks"

HB: After the Clinton administration, seen from Europe, the whole transatlantic relationship seemed to change all of a sudden. The Europeans seem to have trouble even understanding American conservatism? Is it possible to describe the conceptual difference as two partially overlapping circles, where each represents the concept of politics in Europe and the United States respectively?

CC: On these questions I am not much of a defender of the American conservative point of view. On your idea of the overlapping circles, that is a good description. I mean: you don’t have the same kind of market-liberals that we do whereas we don’t have the same kind of socialism that you do. I do think we have more socialism than it looks. Becausesocialism has been a suspect ideology in this country, it has had to be pursued underground. So a lot of it is done by heavy-handed regulation; bythe bullying of companies into compliance with hiring and health-care codes, by tax incentives… It doesn’t look like we have a government health plan – aside from Medicare and Medicaid – but the tax code is structured to punish companies that don’t offer medical plans to their employees. This leaves some people uninsured, but it also means that the government is exerting itself, behind the scenes, through the tax code and through regulation, to provide health care for 80-90% of the population.

HB: Some reporters placed the figure at around 40 million without health coverage?

CC: Yes around 40 million itis said don’t have it. But even if those numbers are accurate,it is tough to say who those people are. A lot of them are just starting out in their careers. They’re young, and thus in low risk categories. A lot of them are immigrants, which raises a lot of interesting constitutional problems. If your socialism comes out of regulation rather than out of legislation, then a person who is not constitutionally legal can be a sort of a non-citizen. Our system is – I don’t quite know how to put this – we take advantage of immigrants by keeping them outside of the realm of constitutional protection. So the socialism that operates through law does not reach them, it is kind of designed not to: it makes them more economically efficient. There’s some truth to the leftish sounding ideas about a two-tier system.

HB: That leads me to what seems to be a transatlantic value-gap – in terms of for example the different tolerance levels for income inequality?

CC: On the American-European value gap, I do not believe that we are more rugged and individualistic than the Europeans, even if that is what we like to tell ourselves. Like the Germans who like to think that they like to work hard. It is just a deep part of the national mythology. Americans do not love liberty. That is why you have to look all overWashington for a place where you can smoke at lunch! In most of this country, a guy who owns a bar does not have the right to allow you to smoke. If you have children you are not allowed to ride in your own car without a car-seat. In fact: if you have a baby, you are not allowed to take your own child out of hospital unless you can show that you have a car-seat installed in your car. This is not a liberty loving country!

You get these bidding wars for sentencing for tiny crimes in the heat of election campaigns. One candidate will say “Y’know the penalty for smoking marihuana ‘round ‘ere is only six months, and three weeks ago some kid got high on marihuana and he raped and killed a girl. I wanna raisethe penalty for marihuana to 5 years.” And the other candidate goes: “I wanna raiseit to ten years!”. So you get these absurd drug laws – this is not a freedom loving country. We do not have all this inequality because we love freedom so much.