In 2003, as the Iraq War was driving a wedge between Europeans and Americans, the American historian and commentator Robert Kagan published a book that sparked mass controversy.
In “Of Paradise and Power,” Kegan elaborates his conservative view of global politics through the developments of the time. It came after he had been in the camp that had argued the end of the Cold War would not abolish power politics nor deprive it of its central role in shaping the international order.
A catchphrase meant to sum up the gist of the book was that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus” in terms of strategic culture. While America retains a preference for power, Europe favors diplomacy and law.
The fact is that Americans cannot deny Europe’s status as the “motherland,” though conservatives often treat her like an unhinged, overindulgent mother whose kindness borders on naivete, and who, when confronted with the cruelty of the real world, always ends up calling on the United States to come to her rescue.
This is precisely what happened in the two world wars, both of which had begun as European wars. At the time, America did not limit itself to providing military assistance; it also offered, through the Marshall Plan, economic and financial assistance to support reconstruction efforts after the continent had been devastated by its wars.
Driven by a frontier culture that occupies a lot of space in the American political consciousness, the grievances against Europe often went further. In this view, Europe lives as though there were permanent peace in the world, spending on its welfare but not its defense despite the serious trouble on those borders, as demonstrated by the Russian-Ukrainian war, and as the waves of mass migration and refugee flows continue to demonstrate. Instead of fortifying its states and armies, Europe pours its energy into a transnational European Union. Amid bickering over Iraq, the hawkish US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld went so far as to call Western Europe the “old Europe,” leaving Central and Eastern Europe in the “new Europe.”
Rumsfeld was probably not one to be embarrassed by the dark chapters of the United States’ history of brutality, such as the reservations to which Native Americans were confined (or, more accurately, detained), nor the forced transfer of the Japanese in America- most of them US citizens- from the West Coast to “relocation centers” that have been described as concentration camps.
For their part, Europeans do not hide their culture’s bias for another worldview. Through their continental union, they contained the threats that some had feared following Germany’s reunification. For their part, the neighbor and “the other” are not necessarily enemies, even neighbors that have consistently been on the opposite side of wars and conflicts historically.
Accordingly, seeking common ground becomes a broad and noble concern. We are taught by historians of the stature of the French scholar Fernand Braudel, to give one of many examples, that the Mediterranean region, despite its wars, was never a battlefield shared by isolated civilizations; rather, it was home to a web of interconnected societies that developed through inter dependence. The relationship among those civilizations was one of “superposition,” with each civilization constituting a layer stacked upon another, all coexisting within the same space and time.
And if America’s debt to Europe cannot be denied, another debt—Europe’s debt to America—should not be denied either. American political and social intellectual life maintained its provincialism until European intellectuals and artists, most notably German Jews, fleeing from the Nazis, emigrated to the United States.
It is difficult to write the history of American culture without going over its Parisian moment in the early 20th century- a moment that inaugurated “cultural migration” to a capital that had served as a laboratory for artistic freedom and intellectual experimentation, as well as offering a space for individuality that had been stifled by the conservatism of America at the time.
Without Paris, it is impossible to understand the lives and experiences of figures like Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, who founded a salon frequented by some of the leading figures of European literary and artistic modernism, among them Picasso, Matisse, and Ezra Pound- the “City of Light” thereby was an obligatory pitstop for any American creative making his way to that modernity.
That, of course, is not how Conservative America thinks. War (and everything that comes with it) is the invariable criterion by which it passes judgment. The frontier mindset born of the American domestic experience was not moderated by its good fortune of being “bordered to the north and south by weak neighbors, and to the east and west by fish,” to borrow from the French writer Andre Maurois.
On top of that, conservative America is not impressed with the intellectual and artistic gifts it has received from Europe, nor is it drawn to the idea of bartering its hard power for European soft power. One could even say that McCarthyism was, in part, a rejection of more of those European gifts and an attempt to contain their influence. The cosmopolitanism of California and New York (and the fact that the latter hosts the United Nations and international NGOs) does not spark joy in conservative America. In a previous era, conservatism even managed to prevent the US from joining the League of Nations despite the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, being its lead architect.
While the loudest voice in Europe continues to stress that the future cannot be derived from the past because, in this event, it would not be a future, the loudest voice in America gives the future to cutting-edge technologies and anchors the mind in a past that must not pass.
