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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Those worried by the unraveling of the Atlantic alliance have been especially shocked by the clashing coverage of the Iraq war in the U.S. and European media. American and European television viewers have seen two different wars, making rational transatlantic discussion of the subject almost impossible. Unlike Americans, moreover, Europeans are acutely aware of the discrepancy in news coverage. They attribute it to what they see as America's post-9/11 autism, a screening out of information that clashes with a set of fixed ideas.
From 9/11 Americans should have learned the importance, for U.S. national security, of accurate, deep and up-to-date knowledge of political instability around the world. Political violence, in any possible country, is never farther than a plane ride away from major U.S. urban centers. But instead of creating a national appetite for knowledge about the world, 9/11 had the opposite effect. It seems to have traumatized Americans, making them even less interested than before in non-American goings-on and points of view. Our capacity to see ourselves through the eyes of others was never great. But after 9/11, Americans seem to have withdrawn even further into themselves.
One symptom of America's growing disconnect from the world, and especially from its former Cold War allies, is the administration's reliance on language that is unintelligible to Europeans. An example is the claim, often advanced by President Bush, that we are currently engaged in a world war between "democracy and terrorism." This is a confusing way to speak because the same terrorist network that attacked the U.S. has also attacked Saudi Arabia, a tribal monarchy that bears no resemblance to a democracy.
But the unintelligibility of Bush's formulation runs much deeper. Roughly speaking, "democracy" is a system that allows those who are directly affected by decisions to exert some influence on the decision makers, ideally by periodically reelecting them or ousting them from office. This simple definition makes clear why Europeans and others greet Bush's endless claims to be "spreading democracy" with such disbelief. Throughout the world, people who were never consulted, even casually, are profoundly affected every day by decisions made in Washington. America's blankness about the downstream effects on other countries of its actions is without question one of the principal sources of anti-Americanism in Europe and elsewhere.
Formulated differently, anti-Americanism is to some extent the expression of thwarted democratic aspirations. This also explains, incidentally, why many Europeans hostile to the U.S. seem to place such unrealistically high hopes on the United Nations and other multilateral bodies. It is obviously impossible to run the world through an organization as dysfunctional as the U.N. But even sophisticated non-Americans who understand the real limits of multilateralism and international law continue to look hopefully to the U.N. They do so, against the odds, because the U.N. represents one of the few possibilities left on the horizon to pressure the U.S. into taking into account non-American interests and points of view.
Arguably, terrorism itself is, in part, a sick, perverted and distorted echo of the desire of powerless groups to get the attention of the sole remaining superpower. That is yet another reason why Bush's stylized "war between democracy and terrorism" seems so misleading to most non-Americans. Bush likes the democracy vs. terrorism contrast, of course, because it brings "moral clarity," that is to say, it paints one side as purely good and the other side as purely evil. The rest of the world cannot decide if this way of speaking is crude propaganda or crude propaganda mixed with self-delusion.
What are the practical effects of the new wave of anti-Americanism? There are some reasons to doubt its importance. For one thing, European publics are just as alienated from Brussels as from Washington, and for much the same reason, namely a "democratic deficit" or lack of consultation. The European Union bureaucracy is not especially transparent or accountable. As a result, there is no political center to which Europeans hostile to America can rally. And there is no positive political agenda to which Europe-wide anti-Americanism can contribute.
