The End of the West?

Crisis and Change in the Atlantic Order

Jeffrey J. Anderson, G. John Ikenberry, Thomas Risse, Jeffrey J. Anderson, G. John Ikenberry, Thomas Risse

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780801446399
• eBook ISBN: 9781501701917
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The past several years have seen strong disagreements between the U.S. government and many of its European allies. News accounts of these challenges focus on isolated incidents and points of contention. The End of the West? addresses some basic questions: Are we witnessing a deepening transatlantic rift, with wide-ranging consequences for the future of world order? Or are today's foreign-policy disagreements the equivalent of dinner-table squabbles? What harm, if any, have events since 9/11 done to the enduring relationships between the U.S. government and its European counterparts?

The contributors to this volume, whose backgrounds range from political science and history to economics, law, and sociology, examine the "deep structure" of an order that was first imposed by the Allies in 1945 and has been a central feature of world politics ever since. Creatively and insightfully blending theory and evidence, the chapters in The End of the West? examine core structural features of the transatlantic order to determine whether current disagreements are minor and transient or catastrophic and permanent.

1 EXPLAINING CRISIS AND CHANGE IN ATLANTIC RELATIONS

An Introduction

G. John Ikenberry

The first years of the twenty-first century will long be remembered as a time of political upheaval in Atlantic relations. The United States embarked on a controversial war in Iraq opposed by most Europeans and many of their governments. For the first time in the postwar era, a German chancellor opposed Washington in full public view on a fundamental issue of security and even made opposition to Bush policy a part of his reelection campaign. At the United Nations, France publicly lobbied Security Council members to oppose a resolution that would authorize the United States’ use of force in Iraq. European hostility to the United States—its polity, power, and policy—reached historic levels. Long-standing social and cultural differences between America and Europe in areas such as energy consumption, global warming, the death penalty, transnational justice, and religion were inflamed. In the eyes of many Americans, Europe and the Western alliance were no longer central to the pursuit of U.S. global security. In the eyes of many Europeans, the United States had become a superpower that now must be resisted and contained. Some observers even speculated about the “end of the West.”1

The political storms that swirled so violently across the Atlantic over the Iraq War have since calmed, and new leaders have taken office in Western countries seeking to move beyond the conflicts of the recent past. Yet as the conflicts between the United States and Europe over the Iraq War and Bush-era foreign policy recede into the past, questions remain about the longer-term significance and impact of this upheaval on Atlantic relations. The policy agenda of the Western alliance has moved beyond Iraq, but it is less clear that the crisis of the old Atlantic partnership is really over. The conflicts have receded but the questions have not, at least not the scholarly questions about the logic and character of the Atlantic political order and its future. With the greater distance and perspective that time provides, it is now possible to look more deeply into the structures and foundations of the Western order and into the ways in which the recent conflict exposes the operating logic and trajectory of that order.

The two most important questions in the contemporary debate about conflict and crisis across the Atlantic are how serious is the U.S.-European discord as it was recently experienced and what are its sources? The cover of the February 15–21, 2003, issue of the Economist posed the first question—“How deep is the gulf?” In part this question is about how to describe the nature of the recent Atlantic political conflict. Journalists and public intellectuals have evoked a wide variety of terms to capture what is happening—divorce, estrangement, rift, dividing fates. These terms tend to beg a deeper question about the character of the crisis. Is it a political conflict that has been particularly intense but will come and go—as it has in the past—or are we witnessing a more fundamental break and transformation of U.S.-European relations? That is, is the Atlantic world—or more concretely the Western alliance—breaking apart in some meaningful sense or simply evolving, adjusting, and accommodating itself to new realities?

The second question focuses on the sources of the crisis. Is this recent crisis really about the Bush administration and the war in Iraq or is it driven by deeper fissures that will continue to open up and erode Atlantic relations after the Bush administration and the Iraq War no longer occupy center stage? That is, how “structural” should our analysis be of the troubles that have recently beset U.S.-European relations? To be sure, there are many historic shifts in the international political system that bear on Atlantic relations: the end of the cold war, the rise of U.S. unipolarity, the fits and starts of European unification, the emergence of new security threats, the growing geopolitical importance of Asia, and the globalizing impact of modernity. Does one or several of these transformations auger ill for Atlantic cooperation and community? Would a crisis in U.S.-European relations have erupted if George W. Bush had not been elected or if he had not launched the Iraq War? If there are deep and growing sources of conflict in Atlantic relations, how are they manifested? Some world historical developments may serve to pull America and Europe apart. This is the famous claim of Robert Kagan, who argues that growing power disparities between the United States and Europe breed divergent strategic cultures and interests, which in turn lead to conflicts over rules and institutions, the use of force, and the basic organizing principles of international order.2 But other world historical developments may be pushing America and Europe back together. The relentless forces of trade and investment and the proliferation of Western transnational civil society are also strengthening the interests and social ties across the Atlantic. Structural shifts can cut both ways.

This volume has three purposes. First, the volume is aimed at improving our theoretical understanding of the logic of conflict and crisis within Western and international order. What do we actually mean by conflict, crisis, breakdown, and transformation in the Atlantic order? What precisely are the theoretical claims that are in play in our judgments about continuity and change in U.S.-European relations? What is new in this current moment of Atlantic crisis and what is not? Political conflict—by itself—does not say much about the functioning of a political order. Political conflict can trigger the rupture, breakdown, and transformation of a political system. It can, however, also be a normal part of the operation of a stable and mature political system. After all, political conflict is ubiquitous within Western democratic societies—and indeed it is essential to the operation of such democracies. So the question is: how do we make sense of political conflict across the Atlantic? Are the recent tensions and disputes between the United States and Europe a reflection of deep problems, contradictions, and dysfunctions of the Atlantic political system or part of the healthy functioning of a stable political order?

When political conflict turns into a genuine crisis within the political order, additional questions arise. What is a crisis and what are the various logics of change that follow from crisis? In this volume, crisis is defined as an extraordinary moment when the existence and viability of the political order are called into question. That is, it is a historical juncture at which conflict within the political order has risen to the point that the interests, institutions, and shared identities that define and undergird the political system are put in jeopardy. The settled rules, expectations, and institutions that constitute the political order are rendered unsettled. Conflict has pushed the very existence of the political order to the brink.

Defined in this way, crisis can lead in several different directions. Crisis can lead to resolutions that reestablish the old rules and institutions of a political system, it can lead to a transformation of that political system, or it can lead to a fundamental breakdown and disappearance of the old political system. Developing a theoretical sense of how conflict and crisis operate within the Atlantic political order and what the current conflict and crisis mean for the future of the Atlantic system is a central inquiry of this volume.

A second purpose is that we seek to identify the new interdisciplinary research agenda on Atlantic relations. The public debate is lively and full of insights. But what do scholars have to offer? The answer is historical perspective, theoretical clarity, and empirical rigor. This response does not mean that scholars agree on the character and sources of Atlantic conflict, but they can help illuminate the categories and forces that are at work in generating conflict and cooperation. The authors of these chapters draw on established research traditions and knowledge in political science, history, economics, sociology, and law that sharpen and deepen the debate about the character and sources of Atlantic discord. In doing so, they tend to take the long view of U.S.-European relations, putting the recent troubles in postwar historical context.

Finally, the authors in this volume use the Atlantic crisis as a contemporary laboratory to examine the relevance of various theories of politics and international relations. Crises expose fault lines, deep structures, and historical trajectories, so we want to use the current situation to reassess old theories and scholarly debates. Power, interests, culture, historical legacies, and personalities are all at play in the current disputes between the United States and Europe. How can we use this current moment to draw more general conclusions about the usefulness of time-honored realist, liberal, and social constructivist theories about core features of the advanced industrial world?

In recent decades, the transatlantic order has not been a place where basic debates about international relations theory have been conducted. Those have occurred elsewhere. Debates about U.S.-European relations have tended to be less theoretical and focused on empirical issues of policy and diplomacy. This lack of theoretical vibrancy in the study of Atlantic relations is not entirely surprising, inasmuch as the Atlantic relationship has been so steady and predictable for many decades. The upheavals in world politics have occurred outside the West. Great social theories and debates tend to emerge in response to historic disruptions and grand upheavals—social revolutions, wars, civil violence—rather than in response to the calm and dull equanimity of a stable political order. The recent disruption in the relatively placid Atlantic landscape offers an opportunity to probe theories of power politics, alliance relations, democratic community, capitalist society, and Western order.

Indeed, in response to the new Western discord, a growing body of scholarship has started to appear. Some writers have drawn detailed empirical portraits of the policy disputes that have risen between the United States and Europe in recent years—quarrels over trade, the International Criminal Court, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate as well over the Iraq War.3 Others offer scholarly studies of the political, economic, cultural, and ideological dimensions of the crisis in Atlantic relations as it appeared in 2003 with the Iraq War. David M. Andrews and his colleagues, for example, have recently explored the various ways in which changes in the post–cold war international environment have tended to undercut support for Atlanticism in both the United States and Europe.4 Still others have explored the deeper question of the fate of the Atlantic political order. While some scholars argue that the special characteristics of the transatlantic order—built on a foundation of shared democracy and security cooperation—prevent conflict from spiraling out of control, others have questioned the permanence of this security community. Michael Cox writes that “[a] few years ago, it was normal to refer to something called the West; liberal theorists could also talk (and did) about a ‘security community.’ Today, it is doubtful whether we can talk of either with the same degree of confidence.”5

It is here that this book enters the debate. The title of the book—End of the West?—is meant to be a provocation. By “the West,” we mean the transatlantic order or security community, embodied as it is in the Atlantic alliance. The book’s title signals our collective purpose: to probe the shifting foundational structures of the Atlantic political order. In fact, none of the authors in this volume argues that the West—defined in our terms—is going to disappear. Charles Kupchan makes the most thoroughgoing argument that the old postwar Atlantic world is passing away. But no one argues that war or even old-style balance-of-power politics or security competition is on the horizon. Yet the authors take seriously the notion of a crisis that calls into question the old assumptions and bargains of Atlantic political order. In this sense, the “end of the West” really means an end of the old grand strategic partnership between the United States and Europe. The result will not be a complete breakdown in Atlantic political community but rather its transformation into a new type of Western political order.

In the concluding chapter, Thomas Risse draws out these collective arguments. Most of the authors do in fact see a crisis in the Atlantic order, defined as a moment when the existence and viability of that order are called into question. Yet they also tend to see not an “end of alliance” but an evolution away from or transformation in the rules, institutions, and bargains of the old postwar partnership. As Risse observes, the disagreements in this volume are mostly over the sources and causes of the crisis. In one sense, these disagreements are not surprising inasmuch as the authors come to the problem from widely divergent theoretical and disciplinary backgrounds. But the authors also offer unexpected and counterintuitive findings about the impact of economic interdependence, conceptions of sovereignty, and sociopolitical values on Atlantic conflict and crisis.

The old transatlantic order has exhibited a remarkable robustness over the postwar decades. The crisis of today reflects changes in the interests, institutions, and identities of the United States and Europe as they operate within the Atlantic political space. The old order, as Thomas Risse argues in the conclusion, has outlived itself and needs to be adjusted to the challenges of the twenty-first century. This statement is not surprising. The global system has itself been transformed in the six decades since the end of World War II. The West has been plunged into crisis before—indeed, it has consumed itself in war and depression—but regained its footing and developed new forms of political and economic community. If history and theory are a guide, it will do so again.

Points of Departure

We begin by making clear our common points of departure, which are fourfold. First, the authors in this volume agree that the United States and Europe have created and operate within a relatively distinct and coherent postwar regional political order that goes by various labels, such as the North Atlantic community, the Atlantic political order, or the Western system. This Atlantic order obviously predates the end of World War II, but it was really only after 1945 that it took on its current shape. It has security, economic, political, and ideational dimensions. It has institutions and norms that reflect a functioning—if loosely organized—political order.

Second, we argue that this community is also a distinctive political order—although we may not fully agree on the specific features that make it distinctive. Karl Deutsch’s famous depiction of the North Atlantic region as a “pluralistic security community” is probably the most frequently evoked way to identify what is distinctive about this order.6 It is a regional interstate system in which war or the threat of force to settle disputes within the region is unthinkable. It is a stable “zone of peace.” Moreover, this security community character of the Atlantic order is reinforced by shared values, economic and societal integration, and political institutions that regulate and diffuse political conflict. In this and other ways, the postwar Atlantic political order operates in a manner that set it apart from other regions of the world and political orders of past eras.

Third, over the last several years—and most dramatically in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003—this political order has encountered extraordinary turbulence and disruption. This conflict may or may not be unprecedented. Indeed, in their chapters William Hitchcock and Henry Nau argue that today’s conflict is not altogether different from previous disputes that roiled Atlantic relations. And the current crisis may or may not...

Table of contents

• CONTRIBUTORS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• 1 Explaining Crisis and Change in Transatlantic Relations
• 2 Inevitable Decline versus Predestined Stability
• 3 The Ghost of Crises Past
• 4 Iraq and Previous Transatlantic Crises
• 5 The Atlantic Order in Transition
• 6 Trade Is No Superglue
• 7 The Ties That Bind?
• 8 Crisis, What Crisis?
• 9 The Sovereign Foundations of Transatlantic Crisis in the Post-9/11 Era
• 10 Passions within Reason
• 11 American Exceptionalism or Western Civilization?
• 12 The End of the West?