The United States Contested

American Unilateralism and European Discontent

Sergio Fabbrini

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• eBook ISBN: 9781134166916
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Diplomacy & Treaties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Why and how is America contested by Europe? This new book answers this question and contributes to a better understanding of contemporary transatlantic tensions.

Adopting different theoretical perspectives, the leading contributors to this volume assess the European discontent with America and relate this to the unilateral turn of US foreign policy in the twenty-first century. American unilateralism is interpreted by all the authors as the expression of a new conservative nationalism which has been growing in the country since the 1970s and became culturally hegemonic after 9/11. They explore the following key areas:

• the rise of American conservative nationalism
• US foreign policy
• transatlantic relations
• anti-Americanism
• the Iraq War
• the future of American political and cultural hegemony.

This book will be vital reading for students of international relations, foreign policy analysis, American and European politics.

1
US unilateralism and American conservative nationalism

Sergio Fabbrini

Introduction

The military invasion of Iraq by the United States (US) in the spring of 2003 triggered a widespread movement of protest in Europe and elsewhere. Active protesters conquered public squares and dominated public debate, especially in Europe where, soon after, the movement against the war assumed an unequivocally anti-American tone. If the vast majority of European public opinion rallied around America immediately after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 2001 on New York’s Twin Towers and Washington’s Pentagon, in a few short years the cry ‘Nous sommes tous Américains’ has been transformed into ‘Nous sommes contre les Américains’. With the US decision to invade Iraq, anti-American sentiment reappeared on the surface of public debate in many, mainly Western European countries (Fabbrini 2004a). This chapter will argue that such a contestation is due primarily to the unilateralist foreign policy that characterized the first presidential term of George W. Bush (2001–2004) and which has subsequently been confirmed by his re-election to a second term. Anti-Americanism is also an underlying sentiment in European culture, particularly among political active elites such as those involved in the peace movement. However, with the international crisis of the US unilateral invasion of Iraq, this time the European mistrust towards America has significantly increased in magnitude.

My argument is that the unilateralist turn-around in American foreign policy is due to the internal growth, followed by the electoral success, of an ideological and political coalition characterized as neoconservative. This coalition is the outcome of distinct cultural traditions which have successfully merged into an overriding vision – a vision based on the assertion of a new American nationalism. Thus, with the term ‘neoconservative’, I intend a family of different currents and streams of conservative nationalism, not only the self-identified group of (‘Scoop’ Jackson) Democrats which moved on the Republican side because of their militant view of the global role of America. This nationalism has deep roots in the democratic history of the country and has emerged whenever the country has had to face either domestic or external transformations, or both. This time the transformations were induced by the

crisis of welfare liberalism that began in the 1960s and the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, and were dramatically deepened by the 9/11 2001 terrorist attack. Each time America has had to face radical transformations, a part of it has run back to its cultural roots, to its founding identity. To confront periods of turmoil, America (or a part of it) has tended to deploy its conservative nationalism, conservative because it based its political project of the future on the cultural values of the past. However, given the exceptionalism of American cultural identity (for its faith in liberty and democracy), this backward-looking perspective has been perceived as a celebration of universal rather than particularistic values. In America it is possible to be nationalist and universalist at the same time, because America is perceived by its citizens as the universal nation. It is against this conservative nationalism, which conflates the national interest of America with the interests of the world, that the European anti-American mood analysed here has developed.

The unilateral turn of American foreign policy since 2000 can be seen as the outcome of a complex process of cultural and political redefinition of the American national identity (McCartney 2004). Certainly, the unilateral turn has been imposed by the contingent factor of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but it is also certain that it was initiated much before that (especially in 1994, with the Republican conquest of the Congress’ majority). As Mauro Del Dero explains in Chapter 2, the unilateralism of the late 1990s is the outcome of a long-drawn critique of the influential currents of America foreign policy in the post-World War II era (such as realism, inter-independence and the liberal left’s idealism), whose common trait was the idea (unacceptable to neoconservative critics) of the moral equivalence between America and the rest of the world. It is this idea of an American exceptionalism that neoconservative have resurrected and counterposed to the trauma of the civil rights movements and the defeat of the Vietnam War. This conservative nationalism is a reaction to the liberal nationalism which, in the post-World War II era, oriented the country domestically towards multiculturalism and internationally towards multilateralism, in keeping with the pluralist tradition and the Madisonian logic of American democracy (Dahl 1956; 1976). A liberal nationalism because it was based on the political (or better constitutional) identity of the country (Walzer 1996; Shklar 1991), rather than on its cultural or religious or ethnic background.

This chapter will be organized in the following way. First, I will define the terms of European anti-Americanism. Second, I will attempt to describe American foreign policy from the end of the Cold War to the 2000s, in order to show how the unilateralist strategy fully asserted itself only with George W. Bush’s victory in the November 2000 elections. In fact, for a good part of the 1990s, with the Democrats in charge of the presidency with Bill Clinton and a Republican Congress from the mid-term elections of 1994, America was torn by a battle between a neoconservative and a neo-liberal view, rather than unified around a unilateral perspective. This is why in the 1990s, although there was criticism of US foreign policy, that criticism did not develop into anti-Americanism as it did in the following decade. Third, I will try to uncover the domestic social and ideological changes that led to the victory of conservative nationalism in the elections of 2000 and 2002, and more fully in 2004. With those elections, at least at the institutional level, the battle between the two Americas has been institutionally settled in favour of the conservative one. Finally, I will ponder whether such internal changes and their external consequences are destined to push liberal American nationalism into an irreversible decline. This point is especially important for Europe because the integrated Europe of today (the European Union or EU) is one of the fruits of liberal America. Indeed, the influence that the latter exercised on international institutions and on the democratic processes within European countries following World War II created the conditions for the integrationist experiment.

The cultural and political hegemony of conservative America will continue to generate contestation by Europeans for two reasons. First, because if it is true that unilateralism is the result of deep changes within American society, then it is possible to claim that the conservative nationalism which supports it is not destined to disappear easily from the international scene. Second, and simultaneously, because if it is true that the process of European integration has reached a point of no-return, whether or not the constitutional treaty on the future of Europe will be finally approved by the EU member states, it is also possible to claim that the European project of supra-nationalism is not destined to disappear from the international scene easily either. Thus, America and Europe are likely to continue to be allies and partners in many aspects of the international system, but they are also destined to clash because one partner looks at the world from a nationalist point of view (charged, moreover, with missionary components) while the second views it from a post-nationalist perspective (which expresses itself primarily in juridical terms). The question which remains to be answered is: how will this tension evolve?

Anti-Americanism in a European perspective

Throughout history, all great powers have tended to be criticized by those who have resented their power. In the case of the US, this sentiment is particularly troubling since it targets a country which was largely admired for its capacity to confront and finally to defeat its post-war rival superpower, the Soviet Union. Additionally, anti-American sentiment has emerged against a country recently wounded by the most horrific terrorist attack of the modern era (Crockatt 2003). Furthermore, this anti-American mood became manifest at the turn of the century, in a context of the apparently undisputed success of liberal democracy and of the market economy, whose structural features and ideological values were traditionally represented by the US. A strong anti-American mood had been traditionally widespread in less developed countries of the world, such as those of Latin America, where American power was frequently exercised to control domestic political processes and to impose external economic interests. Widespread anti-Americanism is much more striking when it is seen to be emerging in the developed countries of Western Europe where American power was crucial in re-establishing democracy in several countries after the war, namely Italy and Germany. Moreover, the prolonged American military presence on the European continent has been a condition for its pacification and integration.

However, in politics as in economics, even substantial amounts of capital run the risk of dissipating, which is precisely what has happened to the US under the presidency of George W. Bush. The determination with which he pursued a unilateralist strategy in Iraq in his first term produced a widespread reaction in Europe, not to mention in Latin America and the Muslim world, because such a strategy applied in Iraq appeared unjustified. To the eyes of Europeans (Garton Ash 2004), in fact, a good part of the justifications given for the preventive military intervention proved unreliable: weapons of mass destruction were never found in Iraq; links between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were never proven; American troops were not welcomed as liberators by the Iraqi people. As if that were not enough, the American concern with taking immediate control of the oil wells while neglecting to make arrangements for the complex problems of the country’s civil reorganization further served to highlight European criticism of the unilateralist strategy. If one then considers how the military intervention soon turned into an occupation devoid of juridical rules, to the point of legitimating (through an official directive from the Department of Defence supported by the positive opinion of the Department of Justice) the torture of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib (carried out as well by English troops in another camp), then it is understandable why the re-election of George W. Bush as President in November 2004 has produced a widespread feeling of consternation throughout Europe and in a good part of the rest of the world, as Robert Kroes argues in Chapter 5.

According to a BBC News opinion poll on 19–20 January 2005, a wide majority of the European citizens interviewed believed that Bush’s re-election constituted a negative factor ‘for peace and security in the world’. More precisely, his re-election is viewed negatively by 77 per cent of Germans, 75 per cent of French, 64 per cent of English and 54 per cent of Italians (but only 27 per cent of Poles). When non-European countries are considered, an equally dramatic majority – 79 per cent of Argentines, 78 per cent of Brazilians, 68 per cent of Indonesians – view Bush’s re-election negatively. Among the 21 countries considered (representative of the various geographic areas of the world), an average of 58 per cent of those interviewed believe that Bush’s re-election is destined to make the world more dangerous. Nevertheless, in his inauguration speech of 26 January 2005 to launch his second presidential term, George W. Bush did not mitigate his unilateralist strategy. In fact, he rendered more explicit the reasoning that supports it: the US must intervene wherever there is tyranny in the world, not only where there are already ascertainable links between specific tyrannical regimes and terrorist cells such as those that organized the September 11 attacks. He said, in fact, that ‘it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world ’ (italics added). In other words, the reasons originally advanced to justify the intervention in Iraq (and later revealed as unreliable) have now been definitively abandoned. The battle against terrorism has been replaced by a battle against tyranny. Of course, it is plausible to claim that only the diffusion of democracy can create the conditions for peace and global stability. However, how or by which means democracy has to be promoted is an open question. Moreover, where democracy must be diffused is also an open question. Indeed, George W. Bush’s conception of tyranny led him to consider (justly) the Iranian regime as tyrannical, but not that of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia or Egypt – countries whose tyrannies are dismissed because they are allies of the US. Notwithstanding all this, George W. Bush suffered no doubts in reconfirming the missionary role of his country. As he said in his second inaugural address, ‘America, in this young century, proclaims liberty throughout all the world and to all inhabitants thereof’.

With this state of affairs, it is clear why BBC News announced with concern that ‘negative feelings about Bush are high and are being extended to the American people who re-elected him’. Obviously, anti-Americanism was not born with the war in Iraq; rather, it constitutes a deep current within European politics, however regionally differentiated (more emphasized in France than in Great Britain, more on the continent than on the islands). In other words, the contestation of America has a history in Europe (Fabbrini 2002), at least as long as European criticism of modernity (economic, political, cultural). In some sense, anti-Americanism is one of the founding discourses of European modernity in so far as the latter has tried to define its modernity as distinct from (if not opposed to) American modernity (Rubin and Rubin 2004). However, equally long-lasting, is the slippery and ambiguous use of anti-Americanism to de-legitimize all criticisms of the latter, both those of principle (related to its nature) and those of fact (related to its policies). The same thing has happened within America with the charge of un-Americanism levelled at critiques of what America is and what America does. The boundary between these critiques, of course, does not always appear clear in the arguments advanced by critics (Ross and Ross 2004). In fact, the terms in which they are expressed are often confused, for they originate from contradictory considerations, as has become clear during the war in Iraq. However, there is sufficient evidence, as Pierangelo Isernia shows in Chapter 7, to argue that, in the case of the Iraq war, the contestation of America concerned primarily what it did (in terms of foreign policy choices), rather than what it is.

Yet, it remains to be explained why the Europeans in particular reacted so strongly to US unilateralism. As the chapters of this book suggest, this is due to the fact that US unilateralism was perceived as the expression of a new American nationalism. New, however, relative to the post-World War II period, not to the long democratic history of the country. Thus, although it is true that anti-Americanism represents an underlying current in European politics, European criticism of America has nevertheless been fed by an unconstrained manifestation of American power as such. For the first time in the post-World War II period, Europeans have had to come to terms with an American nationalism which is not ashamed to assert American sovereignty over other national, international and supra-national institutions. As suggested above, it is a nationalism peculiar to itself and different from other nationalisms, in that it postulates a connection between the interest of America and that of the world. The defence of America coincides with the promotion of freedom in the world. It is a conservative nationalism because it bases the primacy of America on the cultural, religious and ethnic traits of its experience (Lieven 2004). This is a novel development since, from the end of the Second World War, the US has actively worked to build a system of international institutions which, through multilateral management, have effectively regulated its own nationalist ambitions or impulses (Ikenberry 2001), intermingling them with other national expectations.

Never before in history has a victorious power undertaken so strongly, as the US has, to constitutionalize its own hegemony (in the Western sphere), setting in motion relations of reciprocal recognition between the interest of the leading hegemon (namely, the US) and those of the hegemonized (countries of Western Europe, but also Japan). This has given life to an American hegemony defined by commentators as benign or reluctant. Still, this hegemony has never been translated into a nationalistic predominance, as happened between the Soviet Union and its satellites in Eastern Europe. Western Europeans, who had to pay appalling costs (in terms of human life and material destruction) for expansionistic and militaristic nationalism, ended up seeing in the US an example of aggregating separated units into a common project (et pluribus...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Figures
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: Why is America Contested?
• 1: US Unilateralism and American Conservative Nationalism
• Part I: The Rise and Success of American Conservative Nationalism
• 2: The Historical and Ideological Roots of the Neoconservative Persuasion
• 3: The Neoconservatives As a Continuation and an Aberration In American Foreign Policy
• 4: What’s the Big Idea? Models of Global Order In the Post-Cold War Era
• Part II: The European Discontent: A New Anti-Americanism?
• 5: Anti-Americanism In Europe What’s New?An Appraisal and Personal Account
• 6: Anti-Americanism and the European Peace Movement The Iraq War
• 7: Anti-Americanism and European Public Opinion During the Iraq War
• Part III: Which Future for American Conservative Nationalism?
• 8: America After the 2004 Elections Bold Policies and Political Quicksand
• 9: The Economic Constraints On American Unilateral Foreign Policy
• 10: The Cultural Resistance to American Political Values A Global Perspective
• Conclusion: America Contested or Rejected?
• 11: Contested But Indispensable the Missing Point of European Discontent