Читать книгу The New Old World - Perry Anderson - Страница 22

That may be so, enthusiasts might reply, but why should it detract from the larger good that the EU represents in the world, a political community that stands alone in its respect for human rights, international law, aid to the poor of the earth, and protection of the environment? Could the Union not be described as the realization of the Enlightenment vision of the virtues of le doux commerce, that ‘cure for the most destructive prejudices’ as Montesquieu described it, pacifying relations between states in a spirit of mutual benefit and the rule of law?

In the current repertoire of tributes to Europe, it is this claim—the unique role and prestige of the EU on the world’s stage—that now has pride of place. What it rests on, ubiquitously, is a contrast with the United States. America figures as the increasingly ominous, violent, swaggering Other of a humane continent of peace and progress—a society that is a law to itself, where Europe strives for a legal order binding on all. The values of the two, Habermas and many a fellow-thinker explain, have diverged: widespread gun culture, extreme economic inequality, fundamentalist religion and capital punishment, not to speak of national bravado, divide the US from the EU and foster a more regressive conception of international relations. Reversing Goethe’s dictum, we have it better here.

The crystallization of these images came with the invasion of Iraq. The mass demonstrations against the war of 15 February 2003, Habermas thought, might go down in history as ‘a signal for the birth of a European public’.¹² Even such an unlikely figure as Dominique Strauss-Kahn, recently installed head of the IMF, announced that they marked the birth of a European nation. But if this was a Declaration of Independence, was the term ‘nation’ appropriate for what was being born? While divergence with America over the Middle East could serve as a negative definition of the emergent Europe, there was a positive side that pointed in another conceptual direction. Enlargement was the great new accomplishment of the Union. How should it be theorized? In late 1991, a few months after the collapse of the Soviet Union and a few days after the summit at Maastricht, J.G.A. Pocock published a prophetic essay. A trenchant critic of the EU, which he has always seen as involving a surrender of sovereignty and identity—and with them conditions also of democracy—to the market, though one never yet completed, Pocock observed that Europe now faced the problem of determining its frontiers, as ‘once again an empire in the sense of a civilized and stabilized zone which must decide whether to extend or refuse its political power over violent and unstable cultures along its borders’.¹³

At the time, this was not a formulation welcome in official discourses on Europe. A decade later, the term it loosed with irony has become a common coin of complacency. As the countdown to Iraq proceeded, the British diplomat Robert Cooper, special adviser on security to Blair, and later to Prodi as head of the Commission, explained the merits of empire to readers of Prospect. ‘A system in which the strong protect the weak, in which the efficient and well-governed export stability and liberty, in which the world is open for investment and growth—all of these seem eminently desirable’. Of course, ‘in a world of human rights and bourgeois values, a new imperialism will . . . have to be very different from the old’. It would be a ‘voluntary imperialism’, of the sort admirably displayed by the EU in the Balkans. Enlargement ahead, he concluded, the Union was en route to the ‘noble dream’ of a ‘cooperative empire’.¹⁴

Enlargement in the bag, the Polish theorist Jan Zielonka, now at Oxford, exults in his book Europe as Empire that its ‘design was truly imperialist’—‘power politics at its best, even though the term “power” was never mentioned in the official enlargement discourse’, for this was a ‘benign empire in action’.¹⁵

In more tough-minded style, the German strategist Herfried Münkler, holder of the chair of political theory at the Humboldt University in Berlin, has expounded the world-historical logic of empires—which stabilize adjacent power vacuums or turbulent border zones, holding barbarians or terrorists at bay—in an ambitious comparative work, Imperien, whose ideas were first presented as an aide-mémoire to a conference of the ambassadors called by the Aussenamt. While naturally loyal to the West, Münkler disavows normative considerations. Human rights messianism is a moral luxury even the American empire can ill afford. Europe, for its part, should take the measure of its emergent role as a sub-imperial system, and match its required tasks to its capabilities without excessive professions of uplifting intent.

The prefix, of course, poses the question that is the crux of the new identity Europe has awarded itself. How independent of the United States is it? The answer is cruel, as even a cursory glance at the record shows. In many ways, perhaps at no time since 1950 has it been less so. The history of enlargement, the Union’s major achievement—extending the frontiers of freedom, or ascending to the rank of empire, or both at once, as the claim may be—is an index. Expansion to the East was piloted by Washington: in every case, the former Soviet satellites were incorporated into NATO, under US command, before they were admitted to the EU. Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had joined NATO already in 1999, five years before entry into the Union; Bulgaria and Romania in 2004, three years before entry; even Slovakia, Slovenia and the Baltics, a gratuitous month—just to rub in the symbolic point?—before entry (planning for the Baltics started in 1998). Croatia, Macedonia and Albania are next in line for the same sequence.

The expansion of NATO to former Soviet borders, casting aside undertakings given to Gorbachev at the end of the Cold War, was the work of the Clinton administration. Twelve days after the first levy of Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic had joined the Alliance, the Balkan War was launched—the first full-scale military offensive in NATO’s history. The successful blitz was an American operation, with token auxiliaries from Europe, and virtually no dissent in public opinion. These were harmonious days in Euro-American relations. There was no race between the EU and NATO in the East: Brussels deferred to the priority of Washington, which encouraged and prompted the advance of Brussels. So natural has this asymmetrical symbiosis now become that the United States can openly specify what further states should join the Union. When Bush told European leaders in Ankara, at a gathering of NATO, that Turkey must be admitted into the EU, Chirac was heard to grumble that the US would not like being instructed by Europeans to welcome Mexico into the federation; but when the European Council met to decide whether to open accession negotiations with Turkey, Condoleezza Rice could telephone the assembled leaders from Washington to ensure the right outcome, without hearing any inappropriate complaints from them about sovereignty. At this level, friction between Europe and America remains minimal.

Why then has there been that sense of a general crisis in transatlantic relations, which has given rise to such an extensive literature? In the EU, media and public opinion are at one in holding the conduct of the Republican administration outside NATO to be essentially responsible. Scanting the Kyoto Protocol and the International Criminal Court, sidelining the UN, trampling on the Geneva Convention, and stampeding into the Middle East, the Bush regime has on this view exposed a darker side of the United States, one which has understandably been met with near-universal abhorrence in Europe, even if etiquette has restrained expressions of it at diplomatic level. Above all, revulsion at the war in Iraq has, more than any other single episode since 1945, led to the rift recorded in the painful title of Habermas’s latest work, The Divided West.

In this vision, there is a sharp contrast between the Clinton and Bush presidencies, and it is the break in the continuity of American foreign policy—the jettisoning of consensual leadership for an arrogant unilateralism—that has alienated Europeans. There is no question of the intensity of this perception. But in the orchestrations of America’s Weltpolitik, style is easily mistaken for substance. The brusque manners of the Bush administration, its impatience with the euphemisms of the ‘international community’, and blunt rejection of Kyoto and the ICC, offended European sensibilities from the start. Clinton’s emollient gestures were more tactful, if in practice their upshot—neither Kyoto nor the ICC ever risked passage into law while he was in office—was often much the same. More fundamentally, as political operations, a straight line led from the war in the Balkans to the war in Mesopotamia. In both, a casus belli—imminent genocide, imminent nuclear weapons—was trumped up; the Security Council ignored; international law set aside; and an assault unleashed.

United over Yugoslavia, Europe split over Iraq, where the strategic risks were higher. But the extent of European opposition to the march on Baghdad was always something of an illusion. On the streets, in Italy, Spain, Germany, Britain, huge numbers of people demonstrated against the invasion. Opinion polls showed majorities against it everywhere. But once it had occurred, there was little protest against the occupation, let alone support for the resistance to it. Most European governments—Britain, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands, Denmark, Portugal in the West; all in the East—backed the invasion, and sent troops to bulk up the US forces holding the country down. Out of the fifteen member-states of the EU in 2003, just three—France, Germany and Belgium—came out against the prospect of war before the event. None condemned the attack when it was launched. But the declared opposition of Paris and Berlin to the plans of Washington and London gave popular sentiment across Europe a point of concentration, confirming and amplifying its sense of distance from power and opinion in America. The notion of an incipient Declaration of Independence by the Old World was born here.

Realities were rather different. Chirac and Schröder had a domestic interest in countering the invasion. Each judged their electorates well, and gained substantially—Schröder securing reelection—from their stance. On the other hand, American will was not to be trifled with. So each compensated in deeds for what they proclaimed in words, opposing the war in public, while colluding with it sub rosa. Behind closed doors in Washington, France’s ambassador Jean-David Levitte—currently diplomatic adviser to Sarkozy—gave the White House a green light for the war, provided it was on the basis of the first generic UN Resolution 1441, as Cheney urged, without returning to the Security Council for the second explicit authorization to attack which Blair wanted, that would force France to veto it. In ciphers from Baghdad, German intelligence agents provided the Pentagon with targets and coordinates for the first US missiles to hit the city, in the downpour of Shock and Awe. Once the ground war began, France provided airspace for USAF missions to Iraq (passage Chirac had denied Reagan’s bombing of Libya), and Germany the key transport hub for the campaign. Both countries voted for the UN resolution ratifying the US occupation of Iraq, and lost no time recognizing the client regime patched together by Washington.

As for the EU, its choice of a new president of the Commission in 2004 could not have been more symbolic: the Portuguese ruler who hosted Bush, Blair and Aznar at the Azores summit on 16 March 2003 that issued the ultimatum for the assault on Iraq. Barroso is in good company. France now has a foreign minister, Bernard Kouchner, who had no time for even the modest duplicities of his country about America’s war, welcoming it as another example of the droit d’ingérence he had always championed. Sweden, where once a prime minister could take a sharper distance from the war in Vietnam than De Gaulle himself, has a new minister for foreign affairs to match his colleague in Paris: Carl Bildt, a founder member of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, along with Richard Perle, William Kristol, Newt Gingrich and others. In the UK, the local counterpart has proudly restated his support for the war, though here, no doubt, the corpses were stepped over in pursuit of preferment rather than principle. Spaniards and Italians may have withdrawn their troops from Iraq, but no European government has any policy towards a society destroyed by America that is distinct from the outlook in Washington.

For the rest, Europe remains engaged to the hilt in the war in Afghanistan, where a contemporary version of the expeditionary force dispatched to crush the Boxer Rebellion has killed more civilians this year than the guerrillas it seeks to root out. The Pentagon did not require the services of NATO for its lightning overthrow of the Taliban, though British and French jets put in a nominal appearance. Occupation of the country, which has a larger population and more forbidding terrain than Iraq, was another matter, and a NATO force of five thousand was assembled to hold the fort around Kabul, while US forces finished off Mullah Omar and Bin Laden. Five years later, Omar and Osama remain at large; the West’s puppet ruler Karzai cannot move without a squad of mercenaries from DynCorp International to protect him; production of opium has increased ten-fold; the Afghan resistance has become steadily more effective; and NATO-led forces—now comprising contingents from thirty-seven nations, from Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey and Poland down to such minnows as Iceland—have swollen to 35,000, alongside 25,000 US troops. Indiscriminate bombing, random shooting, and ‘human rights abuses’, in the polite phrase, have become commonplaces of the counter-insurgency.

In the wider Middle East, the scene is the same. Europe is joined at the hip with the US, wherever the legacies of imperial control or settler zeal are at stake. Britain and France, original suppliers of heavy water and uranium for the large Israeli nuclear arsenal, which they pretend does not exist, demand along with America that Iran abandon programmes it is allowed even by the Non-Proliferation Treaty, under menace of sanctions and war. In Lebanon, the EU and the US prop up a cabinet that would not last a day if a census were called, while German, French and Italian troops provide border guards for Israel within the country. As for Palestine, the EU showed no more hesitation than the US in plunging the population into misery, cutting off all aid when voters elected the wrong government, on the pretext that it must first recognize the Israeli state, as if Israel had ever recognized a Palestinian state, and renounce terrorism—read: any armed resistance to a military occupation that has lasted forty years without Europe lifting a finger against it. Funds now flow again, to protect a remnant valet in the West Bank.

Questionable some of this record may be, lovers of Europe might reply. But these are external issues, that can scarcely be said to affect the example Europe sets the world of respect for human rights and the rule of law within its own borders. The performance of the EU or its member-states may not be irreproachable in the Middle East, but isn’t the moral leadership represented by its standards at home what really counts, internationally? So good a conscience comes too easily, for the War on Terror knows no frontiers. The crimes committed in its name have stalked freely across the continent, in the full cognizance of its rulers. Originally, the sub-contracting of torture—‘rendition’, or the handing over of a victim to the attentions of the secret police in client states—was, like so much else, an invention of the Clinton administration, which introduced the practice in the mid-nineties. Asked about it a decade later, the CIA official in charge of the programme, Michael Scheuer, simply said: ‘I check my moral qualms at the door’.¹⁶ As one would expect, it was Britain that collaborated with the first renditions, in the company of Croatia and Albania.

Under the Bush administration, the programme expanded. Three weeks after 9/11, NATO declared that Article V of its charter, mandating collective defence in the event of an attack on one of its members, was activated. By then American plans for the descent on Afghanistan were well advanced, but they did not include European participation in Operation Enduring Freedom—the US high command had found the need for consultations in a joint campaign cumbersome in the Balkan War, and did not want to repeat the experience. Instead, at a meeting in Brussels on 4 October 2001, the allies were called upon for other services. The specification of these remains secret, but—as the second report to the Council of Europe by the courageous Swiss investigator Dick Marty, released in June 2007, has shown—high on the list agreed on this occasion must have been a stepped-up programme of renditions. Once Afghanistan was taken, the Bagram air base outside Kabul became both interrogation centre for the CIA and loading-bay for prisoners to Guantánamo. The traffic was soon two-way, and its pivot was Europe. In one direction, captives were transported from Afghan or Pakistani dungeons to Europe, either to be held there in secret CIA jails, or shipped onwards to Cuba. In the other direction, captives were flown from secret locations in Europe for requisite treatment in Afghanistan.

Though NATO initiated this system, the abductions it involved were not confined to members of the North Atlantic Council. Europe was eager to help America, whether or not fine print obliged it to do so. North, South, East and West: no part of the continent failed to join in. New Labour’s contribution occasions no surprise: with up to 650,000 civilians dead from the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq, it would have been unreasonable for the Straws, Becketts, Milibands to lose any sleep over the torture of the living. More striking is the role of the neutrals. Under Ahern, Ireland furnished Shannon to the CIA for so many westbound flights that locals dubbed it Guantánamo Express. Social-Democratic Sweden, under its portly boss Göran Persson, now a corporate lobbyist, handed over two Egyptians seeking asylum to the CIA, who took them straight to torturers in Cairo. Under Berlusconi, Italy helped a large CIA team to kidnap another Egyptian in Milan, who was flown from the US airbase in Aviano, via Ramstein in Germany, for the same treatment in Cairo. Under Prodi, a government of Catholics and ex-Communists has sought to frustrate the judicial investigation of the kidnapping, while presiding over the expansion of Aviano. Switzerland proffered the overflight that took the victim to Ramstein, and protected the head of the CIA gang that seized him from arrest by the Italian judicial authorities. He now basks in Florida.

Further east, Poland did not transmit captives to their fate in the Middle East. It incarcerated them for treatment on the spot, in torture-chambers constructed for ‘high value detainees’ by the CIA at the Stare Kiejkuty intelligence base, Europe’s own Bagram—facilities unknown in the time of Jaruzselski’s martial law. In Romania, a military base north of Constanza performed the same services, under the superintendence of the country’s current president, the staunchly pro-Western Traian Băsescu. Over in Bosnia, six Algerians were illegally seized at American behest, and flown from Tuzla—beatings in the aircraft en route—to the US base at Incirlik in Turkey, and thence to Guantánamo, where they still crouch in their cages. Down in Macedonia, scene of Blair’s moving encounters with refugees from Kosovo, there was a combination of the two procedures. A German of Lebanese descent was kidnapped at the border; held, interrogated and beaten by the CIA in the country; then drugged and shipped to Kabul for more extended treatment. When it eventually became clear, after he went on hunger-strike, that his identity had been mistaken, he was flown blindfolded to a NATO-upgraded air-base in Albania, and deposited back in Germany.

There the Red-Green government had been well aware of what happened to him, one of its agents interrogating him in his oubliette in Kabul—Otto Schily, the Green minister of interior, was in the Afghan capital at the time—and accompanying his flight back to Albania. But it was no more concerned with his fate than with that of another of its residents, a Turk born in Germany, seized by the CIA in Pakistan and dispatched to the gulag in Guantánamo, where he too was interrogated by German agents. Both operations were under the control of today’s Social-Democratic foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, then in charge of the secret services, who not only covered for the torturing of the victim in Cuba, but even declined an American offer to release him. In a letter to the captive’s mother, Joschka Fischer, Green foreign minister at the time, explained that the government could do nothing for him. In ‘such a good land’, as a leading admirer has recently described it,¹⁷ Fischer and Steinmeier remain the most popular of politicians. The new interior minister, Wolfgang Schäuble, is more robust, publicly calling for assassination rather than rendition in dealing with deadly enemies of the state, in the Israeli manner.

Such is the record set out in Marty’s two detailed reports to the Council of Europe (nothing to do with the EU), each an exemplary document of meticulous detective work and moral passion. If this Swiss prosecutor from Ticino were representative of the continent, rather than a voice crying in the wilderness, there would be reason to be proud of it. He ends his second report by expressing the hope that his work will bring home ‘the legal and moral quagmire into which we have collectively sunk as a result of the US-led “war on terror”. Almost six years in, we seem no closer to pulling ourselves out of this quagmire’.¹⁸ Indeed. Not a single European government has conceded any guilt, while all continue imperturbably holding forth on human rights. We are in the world of Ibsen—Consul Bernick, Judge Brack and their like—updated for postmoderns: pillars of society, pimping for torture.

What has been delivered in these practices are not just the hooded or chained bodies, but the deliverers themselves: Europe surrendered to the United States. This rendition is the most taboo of all to mention. A rough approximation to it can be found in what remains in many ways the best account of the relationship between the two, Robert Kagan’s Paradise and Power, whose benignly contemptuous imagery of Mars and Venus—the Old World, relieved of military duties by the New, cultivating the arts and pleasures of a borrowed peace—has predictably riled Europeans. But even Kagan grants them too much, as if they really lived according to the precepts of Kant, while Americans were obliged to act on the truths of Hobbes. If a philosophical reference were wanted, more appropriate would have been La Boétie, whose Discours de la servitude volontaire could furnish a motto for the Union. But these are arcana. The one contemporary text to have captured the full flavour of the transatlantic relationship is, perhaps inevitably, a satire, Régis Debray’s plea for a United States of the West that would absorb Europe completely into the American imperium.¹⁹

Did it have to come to this? The paradox is that when Europe was less united, it was in many ways more independent. The leaders who ruled in the early stages of integration had all been formed in a world before the global hegemony of the United States, when the major European states were themselves imperial powers, whose foreign policies were self-determined. These were people who had lived through the disasters of the Second World War, but were not crushed by them. This was true not just of De Gaulle, but of figures like Adenauer and Mollet, of Eden and Heath, all of whom were quite prepared to ignore or defy America if their ambitions demanded it. Monnet, who did not accept their national assumptions and never clashed with the US, still shared their sense of a future in which Europeans could settle their own affairs, in another fashion. Down into the seventies, something of this spirit lived on even in Giscard and Schmidt, as Carter discovered. But with the neo-liberal turn of the eighties, and the arrival in power in the nineties of a post-war generation, it faded. The new economic doctrines cast doubt on the state as a political agent, and the new leaders had never known anything except the Pax Americana. The traditional springs of autonomy were gone.

By this time, on the other hand, the Community had doubled in size, acquired an international currency, and boasted a GDP exceeding that of the United States itself. Statistically, the conditions for an independent Europe existed as never before. But politically, they had been reversed. With the decay of federalism and the deflation of inter-governmentalism, the Union had weakened national, without creating a supranational, sovereignty, leaving rulers adrift in an ill-defined limbo between the two. With the eclipse of significant distinctions between Left and Right, other motives of an earlier independence have also waned. In the syrup of la pensée unique, little separates the market-friendly wisdom of one side of the Atlantic from the other, though as befits the derivative, the recipe is blander still in Europe than America, where political differences are less extinct. In such conditions, an enthusiast can find no higher praise for the Union than to compare it to ‘one of the most successful companies in global history’. Which firm confers this honour on Brussels? Why, the one in your wallet. ‘The EU is already closer to Visa than it is to a state’,²⁰ declares New Labour’s infant prodigy. Europe exalted to the rank of a credit-card.

Transcendence of the nation-state, Marx believed, would be a task not for capital but for labour. A century later, as the Cold War set in, Kojève held that whichever camp accomplished it would emerge the victor from the conflict. The foundation of the European Community settled the issue for him. The West would win, and its triumph would bring history, understood as the realization of human freedom, to an end. Kojève’s prediction was accurate. His extrapolation, and its irony, remain in the balance. They have certainly not been disproved: he would have smiled at the image of a chit of plastic. The emergence of the Union can be regarded as the last great world-historical achievement of the bourgeoisie, proof that its creative powers were not exhausted by the fratricide of two world wars; and what has happened to it as a strange declension from what was hoped from it. Yet the long-run outcome of integration remains unforeseeable to all parties. Even without shocks, many a zig-zag has marked its path. With them, who knows what further mutations might occur.

1. Postwar, London 2005, p. 799.

2. Mark Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, London 2005, pp. 7, 85.

3. Why Europe Will Run the Twenty-First Century, p. 4.

4. Jeremy Rifkin, The European Dream: How Europe’s Vision of the Future is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream, Cambridge 2004, p. 382.

5. The European Dream, p. 385.

6. Jürgen Habermas, The Divided West, Cambridge 2006, p. 43.

7. ‘Ulrich Beck, Understanding the Real Europe’, Dissent, Summer 2003.

8. ‘Le problème européen’, Le Débat, No. 129, March–April 2004, p. 66.

9. Eneko Landabaru, ‘The Need for Enlargement and the Differences from Previous Accessions’, in George Vassiliou (ed.), The Accession Story: The EU from Fifteen to Twenty-Five Countries, Oxford 2007, p. 15.

10. See Le Monde, 20 May 2005.

11. Andrew Moravcsik, ‘In Defence of the “Democratic Deficit”: Reassessing Legitimacy in the European Union’, Journal of Common Market Studies, Vol. 40, No. 4, November 2002, p. 618; Financial Times, 14 June 2005; ‘Conservative Idealism and International Institutions’, Chicago Journal of International Law, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn 2000, p. 310.

12. The Divided West, p. 40.

13. ‘Deconstructing Europe’, p. 287.

14. ‘The Next Empire’, Prospect, October 2001.

15. Europe as Empire: The Nature of the Enlarged European Union, Oxford 2006, pp. 54–7.

16. See Dick Marty’s first report to the Council of Europe of 7 June 2006, Alleged Secret Detentions and Unlawful Inter-state Transfers Involving Council of Europe Member States, Strasbourg, footnote to paragraph 30.

17. Timothy Garton Ash, ‘The Stasi on our Minds’, New York Review of Books, 31 May 2007.

18. Dick Marty, Secret Detentions and Illegal Transfers of Detainees Involving Council of Europe Member States: Second Report, 8 June 2007, paragraph 367.

19. L’Édit de Caracalla ou plaidoyer pour les États-Unis d’Occident, Paris 2002; extracted in Régis Debray, ‘Letter from America’, New Left Review II/19, January–February 2003.

20. Leonard, Why Europe Will Run the 21st Century, p. 23.