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  • Which Power? Whose Weakness?:On Robert Kagan's Critique of European Ideology
  • Etienne Balibar (bio)

Robert Kagan’s essay on “Power and Weakness”, first published in the June–July 2002 issue of Policy Review and now expanded into an entire book, has made its author “the toast of the foreign-policy set” in the words of The New York Times.[1] It has been abundantly cited, admired, discussed, criticized and refuted by journalists and experts on both sides of the Atlantic. Its trace can be read every day in the debate over the different stances of the United States of America, or its current administration, and Europe, “old” and “new”, on the issue of war in the Middle East and perhaps above all on the role of the United Nations and International Law in the current crisis. In my opinion this essay also deserves a careful theoretical discussion since its formulations, however brutal they may sound to our ears, rely upon a carefully chosen combination of history, politics, and philosophy. The viewpoint expressed by Kagan is certainly not “the American viewpoint” on the future of transatlantic relations, since there is no such thing as a unified “American” viewpoint even if there are certain powerful systemic constraints. But it is extremely revealing of what many theoreticians of the current direction of American international politics do think and it identifies a problem that will remain on the agenda for some time. I do not accept its premises, but I think that we can learn from it. For these reasons, I want to discuss some aspects of the essay that seem to me especially important, “from a European point of view”.[2]

“It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world,” writes Kagan, who is targeting the kind of “European opinion” on whose emergence and development American liberals place their hopes. Europeans believe they are “moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation.” But while Europe would have entered “a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s ‘perpetual peace’,” the United States “remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.” [3]

One may wonder, then, what is the origin of the European rejection of the use of force as a means to solve international conflicts? According to Kagan, it is not because Europeans possess a special character or nature: in past centuries when they dominated the world they never tired of using force to increase or maintain their power, but they have become weaker and simply no longer have the capacity for power politics. Europe and America have “exchanged” their political cultures, as it were: it is now Europe that has adopted the Wilsonian discourse, dreaming of “civilizing the world” by putting an end to wars and doing away with Machtpolitik, the terrible effects of which Europeans have experienced on their own soil. A nice project indeed ... but subject to one proviso: what makes European pacifism and moral consciousness materially possible is American military power itself! “The irony is that this trans-Atlantic disagreement is the fruit of successful trans-Atlantic policies. As Joschka Fischer and other Europeans admit, the United States made the new Europe possible by leading the democracies to victory in World War II and the Cold War, and by providing the solution to the age-old ‘German problem.’ Even today, Europe’s rejection of power politics ultimately depends on America’s willingness to use force around the world against those who still do believe in power politics. Europe’s Kantian order depends on the Unitied States using power according to the old Hobbesian rules. Most Europeans do not realize that they can project themselves into “post-history” or “post-modern history” only because the U.S. did not follow this path. But as a result “this has put Europeans and Americans on a collision course.” [4] Formally...

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