Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus: an answer to Robert Kagan.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Ucnik, Lubica
• Date: 01 January 2003

Grotius in 1625: 'Man neither was, nor is, by nature, a wild unsociable creature'. (1) Hobbes in 1651: 'And the life of man [is] solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short'. (2) In this article I revisit some of the arguments from the beginnings of modern political theory in order to examine Robert Kagan's claim that 'today, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus'. (3) Kagan's argument about the difference between Anglo-Saxon and Continental political attitudes is close to the mark, but not, as he would have it, because of the respective psychological dispositions of Americans and Europeans, whose differences in the possession of power are supposedly at the root of their comportment towards, for example, the war in Iraq. I will show how these differences can be traced to modern political philosophies. (4) However, it is not the purpose of this paper to offer another explanation as rigid as Kagan's. Instead, I point towards the different models of society which underpin the origins of modern political philosophy and show how in Kagan's work the language of power overrides the language of rights. I suggest that Kagan's view is seriously misguided. The language of rights must govern the use of power.

In 2002, Kagan published an article titled 'Power and Weakness'. A year later, he extended it into the short book Of Paradise and Power. (5) According to Kagan, Europeans--mistakenly--subscribe to the Kantian notion of 'Eternal Peace' and a strategy involving negotiations, while Americans, 'mired in history', tarry in an uncertain 'Hobbesian world' where the only means to security is unrivalled military power. (6) His argument is based on Hobbes' foundational allegory which inaugurated modern Anglo-Saxon political theory. For Hobbes, to avoid death in the lawless state of nature, the only secure sphere for individuals is the state ruled by the iron hand of Leviathan. Outside of its borders, according to Hobbes, the same scenario prevails. By way of the pathetic fallacy, states become individuals, possessing human attributes such as envy, avarice and a desire to preserve their 'lives'. The nonexistence of international laws forces these 'anthropomorphic' sovereign states, taken as individuals, to co-exist in a state of nature, where a bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all, rages under Behemoth and where each state must singularly make sure that it is strong enough to protect its borders to survive. Given that we are living in a global village, as Marshall McLuhan famously declared, and that we are told that the idea of economic globalization presupposes the end of the nation-state, where does Kagan's way of thinking belong? If we accept that the logic of the free market ruled by an invisible hand is another gospel of globalization, supposedly eliminating national boundaries in the name of free trade, it seems that Kagan's appropriation of the Hobbesian metaphor goes against the grain of that order in defending the idea of the American nation-state.

After World War II, Kagan implies, American power enabled the states in continental Europe to enter onto a 'postmodern' political stage where European nations would no longer be concerned with power but rather with the 'transcendence of power'. (7) In short, Americans see the world as a constant struggle to survive while Europeans live in an illusory world where all conflicts can be resolved by diplomacy. As he declares, Americans and Europeans 'agree on little and understand one another less and less'. Hence, for Kagan, 'when it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies', the United States and Europe went their separate ways. (8)

An analogous recognition of differences between Europeans and Anglo-Americans is expressed in the conviction that mutual understanding is possible only within the so-called 'Anglosphere of Influence'. (9) Given Kagan's reasoning, it is understandable that for Mark Steyn, for example, the French and German opposition to the use of military power against Iraq is not, as one might mistakenly suspect, an attempt to safeguard peace, but rather a result of European military impotence. 'Old Europe', presenting its own 'arthritic defects as a virtue' tries to reclaim this powerlessness as 'the new global norm'. (10) Steyn buttresses his 'analysis' by statistics and faith. If it is not the high 'US fertility rate', then it must be the 'US's religiosity ... unique in the Western World' that generates the American will to live. This willpower is reinforced by the political friendship of the 'Three Amigos'--George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard (11)--who realized that to secure peace in the world it had to be renounced in Iraq. All of a sudden, world security depended on the 'liberation' of Iraq. As Harold Meyerson writes, 'from the folks who brought us preemptive war, here comes preemptive peace'. (12) After all, according to Kagan, eternal peace is a sign of weakness. If the world is blinded by European short-sightedness, the 'alliance of the willing' has the foresight to shoulder world security on its own.

For Kagan, after the collapse of the Soviet 'Evil Empire', American power is the only guarantee of the peaceful functioning of a world threatened by terrorism. One could object, of course, by pointing out that terrorism is not a new phenomenon. (13) When an oppressed group does not have the means to confront the oppressing power, the only likelihood of resistance is by recourse to subversive tactics to undermine such power. Various European resistance movements such as that against Nazism, the French in Algeria, the Spanish in Basque territory, or the Russians in Chechnya, to name just a few, all stand witness to desperate clandestine opposition in the face of overwhelming dominance. To reduce every resistance movement to terrorism is to refuse to listen to the pleas of subjugated populations and to wage perpetual war. It is to declare all the dominated inhabitants' demands to be, by definition and without question, terrorist ultimata, with all the concomitant attributes of illegality, irrationality and immorality. As Jacques Ranciere notes, '"infinite justice" states exactly what's at stake: the assertion of a right identical to the omnipotence hitherto reserved for the vindictive God. All traditional distinctions end up by being abolished with the erasure of international forms of law'. (14) The reduction of every resistance to terrorism is a recipe for disaster, creating perpetual instability in the international community. Yet this is not the way Kagan sees it. Turning the tables, he argues that it is not American power that renders international law ineffective, it is because of the impotence of international law that American power is required. In the end, this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, given the United States' flagrant disrespect of the United Nations' opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Disregarding the United Nations, the United States tried to make it irrelevant as an institution. (15)

It may be timely to recall the historical trajectory of international law. Henry Sumner Maine wrote that it is an entirely modern mistake to conflate the notions of 'Law common to all Nations, and international law'. According to his interpretation, international law is neither effective nor impotent, since Jus Feciale is 'the law of negotiation and diplomacy'. (16) It is not a mechanism used by a dominant power to regulate a different people's conduct.

To return to Kagan, since international law is ineffective, for him, the prototype for the new political arrangement can be found not in the international order, but in the American Western High Noon. (17) A moral sheriff decides to save his town from an evil gang whose leader is returning from the jail to which he sent him some years previously. Likewise, Americans, as Kagan puts it, 'can still sometimes see themselves in heroic terms--as Gary Cooper at high noon. They will defend the townspeople, whether the townspeople want them to or not'.18 Staying with the film narrative, one can point out that the sheriff's wife 'pre-emptively' shoots a gang member in the back while he is reloading his gun, (19) thus securing the final victory of the moral sheriff. Strictly speaking, then, the heroic act of the sheriff is not that heroic after all. In the end, by killing off all the villains, any interrogation into the ethical conduct of this fight is rendered superfluous. No living combatant remains to question the means employed.

The film High Noon belongs to the genre which Andre Bazin calls a myth. It might be helpful to recall Bazin's thesis that the Hollywood western is couched in the myth of 'strong, rough, and courageous men' who must be 'just as strong and just as daring as the criminals', while 'the administration of justice which, if it is to be effective, must be drastic and speedy--short of lynching, however ... must ignore extenuating circumstances, such as alibis that would take too long to verify'. (20) In a similar vein, the United States disregarded calls for weapons inspections to continue and went to 'liberate' the Iraqis without wasting time looking for proof of Saddam Hussein's possession of weapons of mass destruction, rendering all international efforts to maintain peace futile. (21) However, this war is illegal because it violates the principle of international law. Might does not make right! It may well be, as the United States assumes, that the blessing will come a posteriori. As far as the United States is concerned, the war is over. Now we are one step ahead; as Secretary of State Colin Powell has said, 'the international tension over UN authorization of the war is "all behind us now"'. The task in front of us is to secure the new Iraqi government, so 'let's not re-fight old battles'. (22) Thus, American policy is, once again, a fait...