In Defense of Decadent Europe
Alexis Carré, “In Defense of Decadent Europe,” The Vital Center 1, no. 1 (Fall 2023): 33–44.
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If the United States wants to remain the champion of liberal democracy as the most humane form of political freedom, then it, as a global power, has a role to play in empowering the nations of the European Union. The first step, if not the last, is to let them know that it can listen to them.
Many observers saw reason for hope in the West’s display of unity following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. French president Emmanuel Macron, who had pronounced NATO “braindead” back in 2019, declared recently at the GLOBSEC conference in Bratislava that Vladimir Putin had jolted the alliance awake. While this hope should not be overstated, there is no reason to completely brush aside the political significance of the Western reaction to Russia’s aggression. But no awakening of any sort is going to bear long-term fruits if it does not allow us to rethink the foundations of the alliance and the reasons it failed to prevent the war in the first place.
In the last twenty years, Europe and the United States have grown apart in important ways. Already brewing in the 1990s, the first obvious manifestation of that increasing gap was the divide over the Iraq War, both between Europe and the United States, and within Europe. The refusal of France and Germany to come on board, and the willingness of the UK and Eastern European countries to do so, led to the impression that both sides had lost any common conception of the end of political activity and the means to achieve it. It also showed that Europe could no longer agree on what it meant to be part of the Western alliance. But this trend goes far beyond politics and can be observed in journalism, economics, and academia. Americans, whether progressive or conservative, often give the impression nowadays that they no longer have anything to learn from Europeans, who themselves tend to adopt the habits of intellectual provincialism—that is, of blindly embracing or rejecting everything American.
A sad symbol of that trend lies in the fact that, although critical theory was born on our shores (mainly in France and Germany), it only gained the political traction it now has in Europe after it was given the allure of an American import. Even to its European proponents, such a paradox should give pause. And far from being solely the concern of the “Old Continent,” this alienation should deeply worry our American allies, as its political implications weaken the very foundation and purpose of the Western alliance. Not accounting for Ukraine’s stern resistance, Putin was yet confident that the very nature of our relations, while offering Europeans protection, had made us incapable of answering in kind to a frontal aggression at our border if the United States, distracted by increasing tensions in the Pacific and at home, was unwilling to expose itself in that theater. In Africa, the Middle East, and elsewhere others are drawing similar conclusions. The long-ranging consequences of that situation are only starting to unfold and will soon be beyond repair if we do not undertake an urgent effort to understand and overcome this paralysis.
Mars and Venus
It would be tempting to see this as another instance of the rise and decline of global powers, merely asking Europeans to acknowledge their relative decline, swallow their pride and adapt, so as to make the best of their present situation. And many did. On the contrary, we contend that this shift in Euro-Atlantic relations teaches us something about the nature of our regime and the problems it has increasingly faced in the last two decades.
It is true that a big part of that story starts with Europe’s political weakness. How can a continent that cannot act on its own claim the right to think on its own? Americans have long been frustrated with Europe’s perceived, and often real, lack of commitment to international security. To varying degrees, Europeans are understandably said to have abused the benefits of American protection since the Cold War and have sought to enjoy, at no cost to themselves, the dividends of a peace they refuse to enforce.
Back in 2002, Robert Kagan summarized this view in the clearest way possible. Acknowledging that Europe and the United States diverged so much on the nature of the international order and the means to shape it (first and foremost on the legitimacy of the use of force), he argued that attempts to bridge that gap were futile and demanded a more unilateral and robust American foreign policy.
Kagan’s tone was not simply accusatory and was not entirely unfair. In a foreign policy context in which memories of the Balkan crisis were still fresh, as well as the widespread perception that Europe had failed to rise to the task, he admitted that it was entirely natural for weaker powers to view the world in a different way than did stronger ones. Therefore, he merely asked American leadership to reckon with that fact. Shortly after World War II (think of Suez or Indochina), it became increasingly clear that the smaller nations of Europe could no longer hope to match continental states like Russia or the United States, and compete successfully with them, as they had in the last centuries, for global significance. For Kagan, it was the consciousness of their own weakness that prompted Europeans to be averse to violence and to favor compromise or rule-based solutions to armed conflicts. This consciousness was reinforced by their certainty that a pacified Europe showed the way to the “paradise” of a post-political world that did away with the need for force. It was therefore pointless to ask people from “Venus” to take risks and wage wars.
Long before Kagan, French political philosopher Raymond Aron admitted in the early 1960s that the material and military out-scaling of the traditional nation-state in the face of superpowers would be the “obsessing question of our time,” but drew from that fact the opposite conclusion of Kagan.
Liberal Democracy and Its Dependence on the Nation
A fierce defender of liberal democracy, Aron understood that public discussion, and liberal institutions in general, are not by themselves conducive to self-government, sovereignty, and rational decision making unless they are supported by a sentiment of shared fate and political friendship. Indeed, in order to formulate collective decisions, we need to publicly discuss what should be done, and we will likely disagree at first and in the long run on a number of topics. But the presupposition that such disagreements should lead us to try to convince people with whom we disagree is credible only if we do not want to be separated from them. And the very need to convince them derives from the fact that collective decisions that are compelling for everyone are constantly required to preserve and foster the desired unity. The diversity of interests and ideas that leads to the formation of what used to be called factions can only produce its intended and beneficial effects if it counters the force that leads to the formation of, and the need for, majorities. In other words, the efficiency of the political innovations that had led to the emergence of liberal democracy depended on political realities it could not produce.
In Europe, and although widely shared, the responsibility to preserve such realities, and make people aware of their worth, had usually been upheld by conservatives, not as an alternative basis to liberalism, but as an essential element of it. That such a burden should fall on them was not entirely due to chance. The fact that social, economic, and ideological divisions could produce in us the desire to convince others to adopt a certain course of action—rather than civil strife or retreat from the public space—depended on the quality of the relations that bind us beyond those divisions, on cultural realities and mediations that cannot be decreed by law but can at best be preserved by it. Whether through ineffectual policies, rhetorical posturing, or outright abandonment of that responsibility, European conservatives have overall failed in their mission. And it is even unclear whether those who pretend to take up that task today fully understand what is at stake in the defense of the nation.
“There is no reason to brush aside the political significance of the Western reaction to Russia’s aggression. But no awakening is going to bear long-term fruits if it does not allow us to rethink the foundations of the alliance and the reasons it failed to prevent the war in the first place.”
For Aron, nations were not essentially communities of mere existence, tribal tokens of self-complacent belonging (“us against them,” or “my country right or wrong”), but communities of projects oriented toward action. Rather than merely seeking to perpetuate themselves, they were aimed at the pursuit of certain goods one cannot enjoy outside of political life. Nations were good and worthy of our attachment because they were the reality that allowed the practical questions through which we seek directions in our lives to become actual deliberations leading to action. It was the membership in such a collectivity, the spectacle of its own functioning, that made such a life, and our personal participation in it, appealing.
But, regardless of the quality of our sense of shared fate, how can collective decisions be convincing to the very people who make them if the communities they form no longer have the power to make them effective? The issue of the weakening of the nation obsessed Aron because it bound the crisis of liberal democracy as a regime to the crisis of nations and the West as historical entities.
The Crisis of the Nation and the Temptation of Globalization
Placed in a situation where they lack the means to fully pursue their goals on their own and must depend on the protection of the United States to do so, Europeans faced the question of whether the political form that had given shape and meaning to their practical deliberation (the nation-state) still had a purpose. Political leaders, adopting the vocabulary of political science, now congratulate themselves (or pretend to do so) on the capacity of European nations to project power and influence, holding it as evidence against those who say they are in decline. In the same way that a diversity of objects combines the effects of gravitational forces into a single outcome—that is, a system to which these objects contribute according to their mass—they understand political agency as that capacity nations still surely possess to weigh to some extent on outward forces and trends in order to maximize their share of their cumulated effects. But in so doing they fail to consider those situations that do not arise out of a system and its constantly adjusting interactions, situations where a motive is set forth and pursued, indeed not in ignorance of, but independently of external factors, situations where one commands and others may follow or resist—namely, political situations. As a great European once remarked, there is a qualitative difference between declaring what one wants and is going to do and being allowed to plead one’s case when the decision is, in fact, out of one’s hands.
Of course, nations still compete in, say, international trade, and some do it better or worse than others, but all are compelled to adopt the understanding of politics on which the international division of labor is predicated. One may say they still exercise their sovereignty in drawing their own conclusions from these predicates—for example, by deciding what policies are most susceptible to increase their competitiveness—but accepting those predicates makes them at the same time and to some extent blind to obvious political facts. While the tools we have at our disposal are surprisingly apt at predicting the consequences of a given trade agreement on our growth rate, we seem to have become strangely indifferent to the nature and the intentions of the regime of the countries it might make us depend on in the future. Recent events should provide the demonstration, however, that a world of diminishing economic uncertainty cannot be conflated with a world of diminishing political threats, and, conversely, that the facts we are best at predicting are not necessarily the most relevant to guide our action. The farmer finds little solace in the astronomers’ perfect predictions of solar eclipses if what he needs to know is tomorrow’s weather, or who is stealing his cattle. In that context, the contention that inaction in the face of hostility should be preferred, because it least upsets the predictable economic processes we are engaged in, turns social science into political superstition. What is unthinkable according to the parameters of the global economy because it cannot be deduced from its predicates (The Great Illusion) is not impossible so long as our enemies want it, however foolish it might appear to us. The expectation that dissenters will be punished by the economic consequences of their own action is equally naïve. Political motion does not always stop on its own, if sustained by sufficient motives. It sometimes needs to be defeated.
Another concrete consequence that derives from this flawed understanding of agency is in fact especially visible at the military level (although it applies to many others), where the organization of many European and NATO armies is now premised on US logistical and technical support. Such armies surely weigh in proportion to their strategic location, equipment, and manpower—Greece is more important than Belgium, or Turkey than Portugal. They all have a place in the system. But ultimately, most of them would be incapable of carrying out a major operation on their own even if they needed to. Many do not see this as a cause for concern, because they believe in the pacifying power of commerce and the international division of labor; in other words, they believe in the disappearance of major wars that it is supposed to lead to—“Why care about sovereignty in the age of global governance?” Others are not concerned, because they see American and European interests as essentially aligned and therefore view dependence as a trivial matter (“no discussion is needed”). But regardless of whether this is true, what is more worrying is that the very imbalance at the heart of the Western alliance has affected, beyond our foreign policy, the inner working of our political regime.
“What seems to have made us more peaceful and tolerant has also numbed us to genuine political concern.”
Out-scaled in all the metrics by which we measure power, nation-states are surely still the main forum of our public conversation, where we care to make a point, but such a conversation no longer seems to set goals whose realization depends on us. This seemingly systemic weakness of the nation, nowhere more visible than in Europe, goes far beyond mere issues of foreign policy. In fact, by widening the gap between the level at which decisions are made and the level at which meaningful civic engagement is possible, we have unraveled the relationship of public discourse, political representation, and sovereignty that had been the trademark of liberal democracy since its inception.
One may even argue that much of today’s populist malaise can be traced back to a rising awareness of that unraveling, paradoxically often shared by large segments of the very governing elites it decries. It has created the pervasive suspicion that national politics is no longer a public deliberation on what to do as a politically independent community, but a somewhat rhetorical and top-down exercise on the part of a largely passive governing class, tasked with convincing people to accept necessities imposed from the outside (international competition, climate change, European integration, compliance with human rights, etc.). In their own way, Brexit and the promotion of a rule-based international order, or its particular instantiation in the EU, are born out of the same creeping awareness of the nation-state’s vanishing sovereignty. Both are attempts by European nations to overcome the anxiety caused by this process: one by bringing back decision making at the level of meaningful public conversation, the other by upscaling institutions at the level of impactful action. The first attempt can probably be blamed for brushing off the concrete weakness of European nations (that is, for its imprudence and its recklessness); however, the second one, by applying liberal institutions to an undifferentiated humanity instead of the communities of shared fate on which the practical meaning of these institutions was premised, effected a radical regime change, under the guise of enlargement.
But, as events have shown, none of the political alternatives has convincingly addressed the decisive issue: the interaction of political freedom and power relations within the West. For that, more is needed than a reflection on our regime and the political form to which it gives agency. We need an explicit appreciation of the concrete relations that bind democratic nations together.
The Unintended Effects of American Unilateralism on Europe
A perspective on the nature of political life is often implicit in our conception of how things should be discussed or negotiated within the Western alliance. If we consider power to be its own end, if we consider politics to be the struggle for or preservation of power, then of course it is a matter of indifference for the members of the alliance to deliberate on what ends power may serve: on their respective goals, their perception of the international situation, and the course of action they dictate. The course of the whole is determined by its biggest player, or by the aggregate of all national interests of which that player is the main factor.
Yet, because their capacity to act on their own is increasingly limited, European nations know that they need friends, that is, countries that might share their motives and are willing to carry out common endeavors with them. This is why much anti-American sentiment has been fueled by the idea that Americans have not been listening to them or treating them as equals. It is somewhat tempting for Americans to brush aside these complaints as ridiculously out of touch with political reality and go their own way without scruples. Why would they treat as equals countries that obviously aren’t? But precisely because of the diminishing power of their arms, the European nations have increasingly seen their sovereignty take the form of effective counsel or deliberation—success in convincing other nations to act, or not to act, in a certain way. By its unwillingness to navigate the possibility of dialogue on an equal footing, the United States has paradoxically aggravated the political paralysis it blames on Europe’s self-inflicted passivity. How could European nations take their own sovereignty seriously while being constantly reminded of their own incapacity to weigh in, in a meaningful way, at the supranational level at which political action is now frequently situated?
More than that, the Americans’ show of force has not achieved its goals. If anything, the two decades since Kagan wrote his seminal article have taught us that if weaker countries need friends, material superiority does not protect stronger ones from humiliating defeats, even at the hands of remarkably smaller adversaries. Powerful countries too may benefit from the deliberation of others, especially when it leads to the kind of unwelcome advice one can take only from an independent but friendly ally. For such advice cannot be expected from nations whose relation is born out of pure considerations of power. By frowning upon expressions of healthy independence as a threat to the cohesion of the alliance, the United States, far from promoting its national interest, has recruited allies who are more willing to please and bargain than to be useful.
A quick look at Europe’s situation since 2003, when a National Security Advisor allegedly declared her country’s intention to “punish France, ignore Germany, and forgive Russia,” makes one wonder what those three verbs have achieved except harming a well-intentioned ally while failing to obtain the honest cooperation of Germany or the gratitude of Russia. And it is doubtful that the failure to act on the red line in Syria, the catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan, or the signature of the AUKUS agreement, were any more successful at securing American interests and leadership. All confirmed indeed that the United States could act unilaterally without fear of real repercussions on the part of their allies. It also confirmed that European nations had reasons to fear such repercussions for merely voicing opposition to American policies they could not effectively oppose in most cases. But we contend that, by discouraging countries that are already undergoing a crisis of confidence, this imbalance has been detrimental to the United States itself, as should be clear from a quick look at the Europe it has shaped.
Europe’s Lost Decades and the German “Miracle”
To a large extent, the political void created during this period has been filled by a new European order that progressively saw the rise of Germany, more specifically of a narrow and short-sighted understanding of its economic interests, and the political and material decline of France. While the two countries were relatively on par in the late 1990s, many perceived this change as a positive development. Germany was showing the way and was presented as a model both in terms of budgetary policy and economic development. One was responsibly integrating itself in the global economy by becoming one of its best competitors, and the other was rightly sanctioned for clinging to its dreams of imperial grandeur or for its more benign nostalgia for post-war welfare policies.
Cheap energy, coming from Russia; cheap labor, coming from eastern European countries; and the Euro along with the common market allowed Germany, still “the sick man” of Europe in 1999 according to The Economist, to become the continent’s industrial powerhouse. Socialist Chancellor Gerhard Shröder, who went on to work for Gazprom, introduced the ambitious reforms of the labor market that were credited with saving the German economy, and whose benefits would then be skillfully administered by Angela Merkel for the next 16 years—making her the most powerful and longstanding political leader in Europe.
For many analysts, all its neighbors could have taken part in Germany’s success story provided they had followed suit with German reforms. But this all-too-common narrative is deeply misleading. In fact, Germany’s takeoff greatly benefited from the depletion of its competitors’ industrial sectors. In 2013, in the middle of the European debt crisis, economist Michael Pettis showed how European institutions and the German reforms of the early 2000’s had created the conditions of an economic imbalance that was causing in other countries the very difficulties their governments were mistakenly asked to solve by following the German model:
To insist that the Spanish crisis is the consequence of venality, stupidity, greed, moral obtuseness and/or political short-sightedness, which has become the preferred explanation of moralizers across Europe begs the question as to why these unflattering qualities only manifested themselves after Spain joined the euro. Were the Spanish people notably more virtuous in the 20th century than in the 21st? It also begs the question as to why vice suddenly trumped virtue in every one of the countries that entered the euro with a history of relatively higher inflation, while those eastern European countries with a history of relatively higher inflation that did not join the euro managed to remain virtuous.
For Pettis, the positive account of the German “miracle” did not stand the test of reality. The common narrative, by conflating household savings and national savings, held that Germans were entitled to dictate reforms because they had been virtuous and thrifty, and that the failing economies of the Southern European block had to listen because they had not, despite having been given the choice to do so. The political conclusion of that narrative was that the reforms they would not implement out of their own will would have to be forced on them, for their own good, through EU institutions. What happened in reality was a completely different macroeconomic mechanism. Pettis says that by keeping wages down, the German labor market reforms had lowered household incomes, as a share of the German GDP. In so doing, it made households’ savings (German “virtue”), by definition a fraction of those incomes, increasingly irrelevant to understand the diverging trajectories of European economies. Indeed, as the share of household incomes dropped so did consumption, which, combined with strict budgetary policies meant that public spending was not making up for the decrease in private consumption (as it had in the 1930s, under somewhat similar deflationary policies, through rearmament). In simple terms, institutional and legal constraints, a political choice, not a change in culture or in the conduct of economic agents, now meant that Germany was producing more than it could consume (as incomes dropped as a share of GDP) and saving more than it could invest (as consumption dropped, the national savings rate mechanically increased faster than companies could absorb through investments).
What it means concretely is that money was transferred, not through spontaneous market mechanisms but out of political will, from households to corporations (the extent of German growth and German low unemployment should have meant rising wages, which it did not because of the reforms); from lenders to borrowers (this surge in capital surplus meant low interest rates, households were getting less from their savings than they should have); and from corporations that provided services and goods to German people, to the ones that did not (basically export-oriented companies). Call it a giant hidden subsidy to these companies. This resulted in what economists call a current account surplus. But since German surpluses were not caused by German households’ thriftiness or the superiority of German engineering—all things that, if true, already existed when Germany was running large current account deficits—but by a political mechanism meant to shrink the share of consumption, imports did not rise, or not as fast, in order to correct that imbalance. That influx of capital that Germany did not absorb, as a result of its own policies, through private consumption, public spending, or investment thus had to be exported abroad: “Of course, the rest of the world had to [...] run the current account deficits that corresponded to Germany’s surpluses. This was always likely to be those eurozone countries that joined the monetary union with a history of higher inflation and currency depreciation than Germany” (Pettis, “Excess German Savings, Not Thrift, Caused the European Crisis”).
As a consequence of German goods surpluses, industries elsewhere in Europe were faltering, and, because of German capital surpluses, these countries were financing the fall through debt towards German lenders. It meant financing their growth through an overflow of capital towards non-export-oriented corporations, namely, corporations servicing private consumption in those countries (services and real estate), leading to an artificial surge in the share of those sectors and the value of those assets, rising unemployment, or both (both equating to a decrease of their national savings rate). And since the amount of capital to be absorbed was so disproportionate (due to the amplitude of the German surpluses and the size of its economy relative to those smaller countries), it was bound to fuel massive inflationary effects and mislocated investments. German economic policies, not southern laziness, was the cause of those difficulties. And far from being a solution to the said difficulties, Germany’s successes were predicated on them.
In other words, the German economic policy could only have had the success it had in Germany because it found an outlet to absorb the ensuing surplus of capital and goods it produced. And it could only do so because it had the very detrimental effects on its partners’ economies, which commentators were blaming on their political irresponsibility when, in fact, political responsibility was precisely what was being taken from them as they were asked to comply with the rules of a game that was harming them.
In that regard, the Euro and EU regulations were not really enforcing pure and perfect competition in Europe, but on the contrary, shielding Germany from the consequences of running such a current account surplus for such an extended period of time. Its currency was protected from appreciation by being shared with its borrowers and their rising debt, while EU regulations were preventing the said borrowers from using the traditional tools at their disposal to correct such imbalances (Pettis mentions “interest rates, trade interventions and currency depreciation”).
German surpluses did not need to mean rising German wages or public spending, because they could be absorbed by the rising debts of its European partners. The market mechanisms that, without the common currency, would have restored the balance of its exchanges with the rest of the world were in this context externalized to the rest of Europe. The price of German houses did not rise, but the price of Spanish and French ones did. The negative consequences of its current account surplus, instead of affecting the German economy, were so to speak outsourced and translated in the diverging trajectories of other European economies, especially the most exposed ones.
Far from increasing competition, the common market and the common currency were slowly creating the conditions, if not of a monopoly, at least of an economic hegemony of Germany over its partners. While the rest of Europe was deindustrializing, Germany was able to use its economic superiority to become a key trading partner with China and reap the benefits of the latter’s integration into global markets. This scissor effect also meant that the same things that were benefiting Germany (e.g., mass immigration or trade agreements) were aggravating the difficulties facing its partners, making them even more incapable of competing with it.
The most charitable interpretation is that Germany played by the rules of the game it was given and secured the best position it could reach within the limits of that system. And, true, some of it was due to courageous, energic, and ambitious reforms other countries might have been well advised to undertake in one form or another. But all of it was premised on an evaluation of the situation of Europe that proved in the last two years to have been profoundly and irresponsibly flawed. The problem was not that Germany was leading Europe, but that it was doing so thanks to the authority of successes measured by the metrics of a system that could only claim to replace political reality but in the minds of economists.
“Expressing frustration at a homeland that no longer seems to have use for their virtues and talents, a lot of young Europeans have expressed their discouragement in a silent but steady emigration. Are Europeans condemned to collective apathy and powerless isolation?”
Its growth, if we isolate Europe from the rest of the world, could admittedly be construed as a success, if a selfish one. But it was based on a system on whose predicates outside of Europe it had little control over and that made Germany, and the rest of continent with it, more dependent on a certain state of international affairs: one where Europe saw the world as a mere, or at a least delayed extension of itself, and whose inner working spontaneously aligned with our altruism and interests through rule-based and mutually beneficial cooperation. But this extension was largely imaginary, and by letting it provide us with the rules of our action, we now realize hostile countries have the capacity to use our dependence on that system through their power to disrupt it. The grave difficulties that the German economy is now facing should demonstrate how fragile it was in the first place, and the fact that it is allowing other European economies to breathe once again shows that it was indeed creating difficulties for Europe as a whole. But this should not be cause for joy. Neither Germany nor Europe as a whole benefited from pretending that the country had become the model it never was. But Europe has nothing to gain from a collapse of Germany that would come as much at the expense of its partners as its hegemony did.
But so long as that hegemony stands, the result is the absence of a robust industrial and technological defense base for the continent; low defense budgets, made even lower by the necessity to comply with EU budgetary rules; and a disproportionate concentration of industries in a single country rendered politically weak by its debilitating dependence on Russia and China and by the pressing need to keep its economy growing as it had in the previous two decades.
And the hope that the war in Ukraine would force the governing elites in Berlin to reassess their priorities should be met with great caution given what has effectively happened since February 2022. If anything, the task might be made harder for a political class challenged by the rise of AfD to convince a society that now thinks it has so much to lose from abandoning the status quo of the need for change. Yet, while Germany has become too powerful for its own good, no country, especially after Brexit, seems to be in a position to take up the task of proposing an alternative leadership.
In that regard, there is no doubt that the political decline of France is also due to internal causes that have little to do with Germany or the United States. But, precisely because of that, its recovery, if unlikely, remains achievable provided that the governing class takes responsibility for it. Such a conversation has yet to take place. But in whatever way we consider this likely to occur, and regardless of whether France will play a role in the renewal of Europe, no change will happen without questioning the current state of Transatlantic relations. Beyond its own faults, France continuously failed to build a coalition for change in Europe, because most countries in whose interest it would have been to join such a coalition repeatedly got credible hints that doing so would damage their relationship with the United States, which they deemed more urgent and vital.
To take but one example, Poland, which is set to become a major military actor on the continent, is unlikely to participate consistently in European armament programs every time it believes it could deteriorate its military partnership with the United States. And what is true of Poland and its military is true of most Eastern European countries in many other respects. While all these countries—even the most heterodox ones, such as Hungary—acknowledge the economic benefits they draw from their membership in the Union, two things have prevented them from participating in the reshaping of Europe with a view to restoring its political agency. One is the all-too-often real infringement on their sovereignty that has been carried out through the Union’s regulatory bodies in Brussels and Strasbourg; the other is their perception that the approval of Washington is more important to their security than anything else. Though counterintuitive—“why empower allies to disagree with us?”—American support for reform may be the only course of action that can make Europe the ally it needs it to be. First, because the United States has nothing to fear from Europe in terms of foreign policy. Second, because the diplomatic tranquility and the few economic gains it has secured against an apathetic Europe are not worth what it has lost and may lose in the future because of European nations made politically unstable and more vulnerable to the pressure of powers deeply hostile to the United States.
However uncomfortable such a process might prove to be for the Americans (as more issues will arise where disagreements may once again prove consequential for both parties), they have very little to gain from maintaining the status quo. And whether they realize it or not, a new leadership in Europe is unlikely to emerge without their consent and their help.
The Political and Diplomatic Meaning of Friendship
The end of the Cold War had obscured what was clear then: that the United States cannot be neutral and indifferent towards the fate of Europe and view it as one competitor among others over whom it should wish to gain every possible advantage. But taking seriously the idea of a liberal and democratic West means reckoning with the possibility that friends of the United States may sometimes be right in opposing its action despite the undeniable fact that they lack the material means to prevent it. For what is to be considered when one has to act is not only capacity and will, but whether it is wise to pursue a given goal in a certain way. Wise decisions are not the product of blind metrics but of conscious deliberation. In other words, they depend more on our political regime and the quality of the public conversation it shapes than on material factors and sheer force.
Indeed, only in Europe has the relative weakening of nation-states led to the dream of a post-national order. In the words of Pierre Manent, a student of Aron, in a recent interview, “Our idea of expansion, our idea of a thing greater than we were, took hold again of our mind and heart. But it was no longer our empire, it was the European Union, and we felt that we could expand through Europe.” Such an expansion without force required Europeans to leave behind the straitjacket of their old nations—because they could not agree on much in terms of substantial political obligations—for the sake of ever-increasing individual rights within an increasingly pacified and open world. Living under the same rules, enforced from afar, Europeans had slipped out of their traditional form of political friendship without ever entering a new, larger one that would give them the desire to lend life to the institutions that now organized so many aspects of their lives. What has come of it?
The idea that nations are imaginary communities of no intrinsic value was probably intended to broaden our mind, but it has instead narrowed the scope of actions we can collectively conceive. What it has gained for democracy as an idea—and we certainly think much of ourselves in that respect—it has lost for democracy as a collective project. By seeing the source of our political friendship as fictional, it has weakened the desire that prevents us from becoming strangers to one another. We like to congratulate ourselves on the positive side of it. Seeing what binds us together as a figment of our imagination means we will not fight as much over it. But what seems to have made us more peaceful and tolerant has also numbed us to genuine political concern.
Strangers may coexist with each other, but they have very little to deliberate about; they do not really need or seek to formulate a common good, but merely want to be entitled to their own conception of it. Yet, without such a desire to live together, political disagreements do not disappear. Rather, entrenched interest groups made indifferent to the fate of one another only find frustration in their mutual dependence. The inevitable realization of that dependence, finding no support in the willing desire for collective decisions, results in pointless quarrels and institutional paralysis. It then becomes tempting for members of the same political community to long for a catastrophic separation or a more discrete but equally depressing internal withdrawal from public life. Expressing frustration at a homeland that no longer seems to have use for their virtues and talents, a lot of young Europeans have expressed their discouragement in a silent but steady emigration. Are Europeans condemned to collective apathy and powerless isolation?
For the same reason that material superiority is no guarantee of success, our political regime can survive the material weakness of the nation only if it retains its long but all too easily forgotten memory of, and devotion to, self-government. The division of the West into politically sovereign units need not be a weakness or a source of exclusion. On the contrary, a political culture that mobilizes the desire not to be separated, the desire to be one people, allows citizens to discuss more things they disagree on, more things they need to be convinced of by one another, and it broadens the political horizon of what we see ourselves capable of achieving collectively.
Indeed, depoliticization would be without consequence if the world itself could provide us with the rule of an action we no longer trust to find in our own judgement. But it should be clear by now that our failure to confront the question of what should motivate our action has not made room for a globalization that spontaneously aligns with our interests, peacefulness, and altruism. The discomfort of justifying our choices to one another should not blind us to the fact that an unstable international order will ask a lot more from us than what constitutes the narrow scope of our current political life of polarization, dull governance, and civic enmity. And our present situation means that Western nations will not be able to deliver on these promises without each other. If Americans expect as much from us in the future, they must be able to accept the consequences of political independence. We cannot afford to be estranged or feel threatened by our disagreements.
Of course, it is tempting for the United States to evade such complications, as it still has the sense that it possesses the means to act on its own. But if the nations of the “Old Continent” have nothing to discuss and offer but the sentiment of their newfound weakness, it is unlikely that they will deal with the challenges ahead with the proper resolve. As politically apathetic countries we may become comfortable partners, and consenting preys to benign competition, but, for the same reasons, we will become unreliable allies. If it cares more about having us stand at its side than signing arms deals and gaining market shares, the United States should welcome European political and strategic autonomy as a happy development rather than a threat. And if it wants to remain the champion of liberal democracy as the most humane form of political freedom, then the United States, as a global power, has a role to play in empowering those nations. The first step, if not the last, is to let them know that it can listen to them.
I would like to thank the James Madison Program at Princeton University. Our weekly discussions on current issues with European and American colleagues greatly contributed to the present article.
