FES Analyse The End of Atlanticism: America and Europe beyond the U.S. Election Michael Lind October 2004 • The claim that the U.S. and Europe are diverging in their values and social structure is a myth. Several factors – the exaggerated power of the American South in national politics, great numbers of poor immigrants, and the role of employers in administering the American wel fare state – make the U.S. appear to be more conservative, unequal and ungenerous than it is in fact. In reality the U.S. is becoming more like Western Europe in its growing secularism, liberalism, and high proportion of the aged to the young. • The long term convergence between the U.S. and Europe in social values and social structure will not produce a transatlantic consensus in foreign policy. In the absence of the Soviet threat, the geopolitical interests of Europe and the U.S. are different in the Middle East and Asia. • In addition to defining U.S. interests differently, Americans will continue to disagree with some Europeans about questions of world order. The U.S. tradition has been one of uni lateralism in the Western Hemisphere, Asia and the Middle East. And Americans traditionally have assumed that liberal democracy can best flourish in a world of sovereign nation states, rather than in a world with supra national structures like the European Union. • Recognition of the geopolitical differences between the U.S. and Europe will lead to the ero sion of the idea of a transatlantic“West.” The decline of the older Atlanticist establishment, the rise of a monolingual foreign policy elite, and the disappearance of the European ethnic diasporas in the U.S. are reinforcing the diminishing interest of Americans in continental Europe. Britain and Israel will continue to be the foreign countries that Americans know best. Herausgeber und Redaktion: Hans Mathieu, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Internationale Politikanalyse, 10785 Berlin, Tel.: 030-26935-838, Fax: 26935-860, e-mail: hans.mathieu@fes.de

2 FES Analyse: USA The author Michael Lind is the Whitehead Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., USA.

FES Analyse: USA 3 The Myth of Social Divergence In recent years both American and European writers have claimed that the differences in society and values between the U.S. and Europe are deep and growing. Similar claims are made by Americans hostile to Europe and Europeans hostile to America. Most of these assertions are not supported by the evidence. To begin with, it is a mistake to create a mythical“European” average and then to contrast it with the United States. If individual countries are ranged along a spectrum of political values, from statist Sweden to libertarian America, Britain and the Netherlands are closer to the American side than to the Swedish side. American statistics in areas ranging from violence to poverty and inequality are distorted by three factors: failure to count employer-provided benefits as part of the American welfare state, the inclusion of recent Latin American immigrants and the American South. The U.S. would look more like Europe if employer-provided benefits were counted as part of the American welfare state. Many social programs like health insurance and pensions which are provided by the government in Europe are provided by tax-favored employer programs in the U.S. This system of social welfare leaves out many part-time workers and the unemployed. But when the spending of the“hidden welfare state” of employer-based programs is added to direct government welfare-state spending on entitlements for the elderly, the overall size of the American welfare state is similar to those of Western Europe. The claim that the American welfare system is uniquely small and ungenerous, compared to those of Europe, is simply not true. The U.S. would also look more European if post-1965 immigrants were factored out. Many of these immigrants have been poor people with little education from Mexico and other Latin American countries. While they have improved their condition by moving to the U.S., their presence increases inequality and lowers the national averages of the U.S. in the areas of education, health and property ownership. Finally, the U.S. would resemble a Western European country more if the American South were factored out. The South is still, to some degree, a Third World plantation economy within the borders of a First World state. Southerners, white and black, are poorer, less educated and more violent on average than most other Americans. The gun culture, which many mistakenly associate with America as a whole, is part of Southern and Western culture, not of the culture of other parts of the United States. The South has the same distorting effect on American national statistics that former East Germany has on nation-wide indices in the Federal Republic of Germany. In addition to making the U.S. as a whole seem poorer and more violent than it really is, the South makes the U.S. seem more conservative than it really is. The Republican Party is based primarily in the South and secondarily in the Western states allied with the South. The artificial exaggeration of the political power of the Western states is the basis for the Republican Party’s control of all three branches of the U.S. government at present. As the 2000 election reminded the world, the American president is selected by the electoral college, not elected by a popular vote. The electoral college dilutes the political influence of the mostly-liberal populous states of the coasts and exaggerates the influence of thinlypopulated, conservative Western states. The small populations of the same conservative Western states are over-represented in the U.S. Senate, which awards two Senators to each state, no matter its size. Wyoming, with half a million people, has as many Senators as California, with more than thirty million. Slightly more than ten percent of the American people elect half the U.S. Senate. Only Brazil has a more malapportioned upper house. The power of conservative Republicans is also exaggerated in the U.S. House of Representatives. The U.S. constitution permits each state to draw the districts of its representatives in Washington, D.C. The party that controls a state government tends to“gerrymander” districts or draw them in order to favor its own candidates. The great number of Republican state legis-

4 latures and governors has permitted the Republican party to rig the U.S. House in its favor. While America’s peculiar constitution has permitted conservatives in the South and West to dominate Washington in recent years, long-term social trends favor centrists and liberals. The most rapidly growing part of the population is the Latino immigrant community. While Latinos, like black Americans, tend to be socially conservative, they tend to vote for Democrats because they benefit from the pro-worker policies associated with the left wing of the Democratic party. The growth of the Latino population transformed California from a Republican into a majority-Democratic state. The white conservative coalition lost out to a coalition of Latinos, blacks and white urban liberals. The same thing is likely to happen in Texas and Florida in the next generation. If this does occur, then the Democrats will control the most populous states, all of which soon will have nonwhite majorities: California, Texas, Florida and New York. The result could be Democratic control of the electoral college and thus the White House for many years. Because the populous nonwhite states will dominate the House of Representatives, too, the conservatives may be confined to the Senate, where mostly-white Western states will continue to be over-represented. In order to avoid becoming a minority party, Republicans nation-wide are likely to adopt more liberal positions on social issues and economic issues. This has been the strategy of successful Republican governors like Pataki in New York and Schwarzenegger in California. Even George W. Bush, an extreme Southern conservative, has greatly expanded the prescription-drug entitlement for the elderly and is backing away from his administration’s opposition to stem-cell research. The idea that the U.S. is far more conservative than Europe is also refuted by the fact that on every major issue the Right has lost to the Left since the 1960s. Conservatives opposed the civil rights revolution in the 1960s; now they embrace its ideal of a post-racist society. Conservatives have failed to amend the U.S. constitution to outlaw abortion. Conservatives may succeed in thwarting gay marriage(which is controverFES Analyse: USA sial in Europe as well) and the inclusion of gays in the military, but more and more Republican politicians support basic gay rights. And conservatives have not destroyed a single federal program created by liberals between the 1930s and the 1960s. Even Aid for Families with Dependent Children(AFDC), the anti-poverty program that conservatives claim to have abolished, still exists under another name. Conservatism has failed in the realm of culture as well as that of politics. Where issues of sex and reproduction are concerned, Americans are steadily becoming more“European” in outlook – even in the conservative heartland. As the sociologist Alan Wolfe has pointed out, even evangelical Protestants are growing more liberal over time. Gay marriage is still controversial, but acceptance of gay rights is growing. The controversy over stem-cell research is likely to accelerate the defeat of the religious right’s crusade against human biotechnology. In the realm of the media, the U.S. is becoming more European as well. For most of American history, what was banned in Boston could be found in Paris. Europe continues to break down barriers in censorship – not necessarily for the better, as the European invention of reality TV proves. But the American media tend to follow in a few years. Thanks to cable television and, soon, Internet programming, the efforts of American conservatives to censor what Americans can read and view and listen to will be thwarted. While the U.S. remains far more religious than Europe, the long-term trend is toward European-style secularism. The number of purely secular Americans has grown dramatically between the middle of the twentieth century and the present. The growth has come at the expense of the liberal denominations of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism. As a result, hard-line traditionalists make up a growing sector of the shrinking religious population in the U.S. This creates a misleading image of a religious revival in the U.S., where religious belief is in longterm decline. Is there a demographic difference between the U.S. and Europe? According to the UN, without immigration the population of Europe will shrink by 124 million between now and 2050.

FES Analyse: USA That is greater than the combined populations of present-day France and Italy. In Europe, there will be 2.1 old people per child by 2025 and 2.6 by 2051. Along with Japan, some European nations will be the oldest in the world. The contrast with the U.S. seems striking, at first glance. The U.S. has a fertility rate hovering around the 2.1 child per family replacement level. This is substantially higher than the European rate, which is well below replacement and ranges from 1.2 at the low end(Italy and Spain) and 1.8 at the upper end(France and Ireland). But the“demographic exceptionalism” of the United States is something of a myth as well. Most of the higher fertility rate in the U.S. is due to the native black and immigrant Latin American populations. The fertility rate of“Anglos” – non-Hispanic white Americans – is 1.84, which is comparable to that of France and Ireland. As a result chiefly of high immigrant fertility, the U.S. population is expected to grow from 283 million in 2000 to 397 million in 2050, while the German population, absent greater immigration, may shrink from 82 million to 70.8 million (France, by contrast, is expected to grow from 59.2 million to 61.8 million). But the assumption of both continued high U.S. fertility and low migration to Europe may be unrealistic. While Mexican and other Latin American immigrants have large families, their assimilated children and grand-children are likely to adapt to the small-family norm which white English-speaking Americans share with Europeans and East Asians. Even now, with more than one million legal immigrants a year, the U.S. is on the verge of falling below the replacement fertility rate of 2.1 percent. Immigration from Mexico itself will decline because of falling 5 Mexican fertility. And it seems likely that an aging Europe will accept far more young immigrants in the future. The idea that the U.S. in the future will be a young, dynamic“demographic superpower” while Europe is a decrepit retirement home is as much an exaggeration as Robert Kagan’s contrast of the militaristic American“Mars” with the pacifist European“Venus.” In its demographic profile the U.S. will resemble Europe and East Asia, even if on average the U.S. is somewhat younger. Europe and North America will face similar challenges in dealing with a larger number of the elderly and a smaller population of young people. While aging will“Europeanize” America, immigration to Europe will“Americanize” Europe. A source of emigrants in the past, Europe, graying and with low fertility, is now the destination of growing inward migration. As a result, Europeans must deal with challenges of assimilation and ethnic politics with which Americans have long been familiar. Even as the U.S. is moving toward Europeanstyle social liberalism and secularism, Europe is becoming ever more American in the realms of the economy and constitutional politics. Since the 1980s, under the influence of neoliberalism, European governments of both left and right have been moving away from statist social democracy toward more market-based economies with less generous entitlements. American constitutional theories are conquering Europe as well as American economics. Parliamentary democracy rather than Americanstyle separation of powers remains the European norm. But the American constitutional devices of judicial review, bills of rights, and federalism have been adopted by many European countries that used to dismiss them, such as Britain. Geopolitics: Diverging Interests The long-term trans-Atlantic convergence in social structure and values does not translate into foreign policy harmony. Even as their societies are becoming more alike, the geopolitical interests of the U.S. and Europe are diverging. During the Cold War, the United States pursued a policy of“dual containment” which sought to counter Soviet intimidation of Western Europe and East Asia while preventing the reemergence of West Germany and Japan as re-

6 latively independent, nuclear-armed great powers like America’s other allies Britain and France. West Germany and Japan were semi-sovereign states, under the military protection of the U.S. West Germany, however, became integrated in the EU and NATO. No similar institutions in East Asia existed to permit Japan to become a “good citizen” of its region. The People’s Republic of China went from being a satellite of the Soviet Union to an enemy both of the Soviet Union and the U.S. in the 1960s and finally, in the late Cold War, became a de facto ally of the U.S. against the USSR. With the end of the Cold War, America’s geopolitical priorities changed dramatically. During the 1990s, Russia was still considered a threat. But by the early 2000s, the combination of high mortality and low fertility along with economic stagnation and military decay had given Russia the role once assigned to the disintegrating Ottoman empire – the“sick man of Europe.” Meanwhile, the two presidents Bush sought to establish U.S. military hegemony over the Middle East. This marked a break with traditional American foreign policy. Until the 1960s, the area was a British sphere of influence. Then from the 1970s until the end of the Cold War it was divided between Soviet and American client states. But even in the 1970s the rise of militant Islam, in both Sunni and Iranian Shia form, was replacing the Cold War rivalry in the region. The Iranian revolution brought to power a theocracy that was hostile both to communism and liberalism. So was Osama Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, which saw the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Europe as“Crusaders” to be driven out of the Muslim world. The decline of Soviet power permitted the U.S. to intervene with little cost in the region. The Gulf War of 1991 created a foothold for American power which was expanded in the Iraq War. The pretexts for the Iraq War – weapons of mass destruction, the false claim that Saddam Hussein was linked to al-Qaeda – disguised the true reasons. Much of the American foreign policy elite, of both parties, viewed American military hegemony in the Persian Gulf as a way of keeping Middle Eastern oil supplies out of the hands of hostile governments and increasing FES Analyse: USA the security of Israel, which has an importance in American domestic politics far out of proportion to any strategic value it might possess. While most Middle Eastern states supported the Gulf War, most opposed the Iraq War, which triggered a national insurgency against the American occupiers and their hand-picked rulers. In the long run, it is unlikely that the Americans will succeed where the British failed to establish a legitimate hegemony in this turbulent region. In the near term, however, the U.S. is likely to be dragged deeper and deeper into the Middle East, under presidents of both parties. If John Kerry is elected, his announced plan to share the burden with more allies will fail. Afraid of being accused of being“soft on terrorism” by the right, President Kerry would probably continue to commit the U.S. to a war of indefinite duration on behalf of a weak, U.S.-backed client regime. Under Kerry or Bush, this is likely to lead to confrontations with Iran and Syria and to further inflame antagonism to the U.S. in the region. America’s embroilment in the Middle East is accelerating the disintegration of NATO and America’s Cold War alliance system in East Asia. In the name of a“coalition of the willing,” the Bush administration played a divide-andrule policy toward its NATO allies, rewarding those which behaved like American satellites (Britain, Poland, Spain) and punishing France, Germany and other countries which correctly claimed that Saddam Hussein was not a threat either to the region or the world. The Bush administration has announced that it will shift tens of thousands of U.S. troops from Germany and South Korea either to the Middle East or to U.S. bases. At the same time, the U.S. has been gaining basing rights in former Soviet Central Asian states. Russia is now viewed as an ally in the “war on terror” rather than as a potential threat. America’s Cold War“empire” resembled a dumb-bell, with the thickest concentrations of troops and pre-positioned equipment in West Germany and Japan. America’s emerging Middle Eastern“empire” resembles a bull’s-eye. The Persian Gulf is the center of a circle that includes most of the oil reserves in the Middle East and Central Asia. Soldiers and materiel will be prepositioned on bases in Iraq(so it is hoped) as well as on bases in Central Asia, the Balkans and

FES Analyse: USA Eastern Europe and perhaps in time Russia. In this emerging American strategy, Europe is of secondary importance to the Middle East – and Eastern Europe and Russia, because of their proximity to the Middle East, are more important than Western Europe. Europe and the U.S. share a common focus on the zone of Muslim societies from North Africa to Pakistan. Both sides of the Atlantic share a common interest in thwarting al-Qaeda and similar jihadist movements. But in many ways the interests of the U.S. and Europe in the Middle East diverge. Unlike Europe, Russia, China and India, the U.S. neither borders the Muslim world nor contains a substantial Muslim population in its own borders. This means that the American leadership is less constrained by Muslim opinion, both within and outside of U.S. borders, than are European governments. The relative indifference of American leaders to Arab and Muslim opinion is the necessary condition for Washington's attitude toward the Arab-Israeli conflict – determined chiefly by the U.S. Israel lobby and its Christian Zionist supporters – and the Bush administration's effort to turn Iraq, the world's second largest oil-producing country, into an American client state. The rise of Asia will also affect the U.S. and Europe differently. Asia’s economic growth has the potential to reshape the geopolitical landscape. In 1750, China and India together were responsible for more than 50 percent of global manufacturing. Their share fell to 5 percent by World War I. The share of world manufacturing accounted for by Europe and North America rose from 18 percent in 1750 to 82 percent in 1913 before declining to slightly more than 50 percent by the 1980s. As the dominant power in East Asia, the U.S. worries about the military implications of the rise of China. This is not a concern for Europe, for which China is a source of economic opportunity. In the event of a Sino-American military rivalry, the U.S. is unlikely to find much support from its former Cold War allies in Europe. 7 Sovereignty versus Multilateralism The divergence of interests between the U.S. and Europe in the Middle East and Asia will continue to be accompanied by disputes over the norms of world order. Here there are deep philosophical differences which will continue, no matter which political party controls Washington. From the time that it broke away from the British empire, the U.S. has jealously guarded its national sovereignty. Americans see the nationstate as the locus of democracy not only for themselves but also for others. Americans encouraged the dissolution of the Habsburg, Romanov, Ottoman and British empires and the formation of new nation-states. The American ideal was a world of independent nation-states which would cooperate without sacrificing their sovereignty. Many, though not all, Europeans can be described as“post-nationalist.” The success of the EU has encouraged them to think that the nationstate can be transcended in the world as a whole, as it has been transcended, to a degree, in Europe. Today Europeans are the strongest defenders of multilateral institutions like the United Nations. Democrats are more sympathetic to multilateralism than Republicans in the U.S. Nevertheless, even a Democratic president would engage in a degree of unilateralism. While George W. Bush has made unilateralism the center of his foreign policy, it is an exaggeration to say that the U.S. before Bush was routinely multilateralist. In fact the U.S. acted unilaterally throughout the Cold War outside of Europe, in Asia, the Middle East, and the Western hemi-sphere. The U.S. did not seek European permission to intervene in these areas in the past and it is not likely to do so in the future. For that matter, Britain and France, in their spheres of influence, have often intervened unilaterally in the last half century. The Gulf War, in which the U.S. collaborated with the UN, its NATO allies and most of the Middle Eastern states, was an exception. Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait violated the basic norm of the sovereign state system – the prohibition against conquest and annexation. All states had an interest in having this norm enforced. In addition, the threat to the industrial

8 world’s oil supplies provided an additional incentive for diplomatic unity. The unity produced by such a coincidence of factors is rare, as the widespread opposition to the U.S. invasion of Iraq demonstrates. Unfortunately, the Iraq War is more likely to be typical of future U.S. interventions than the Gulf War. Even the Kosovo War, supported by most of America’s NATO allies, was opposed by Russia and China and therefore was not authorized by the Security Council. The rising great powers of the twenty-first century like Asia and India are likely to prefer America’s vision of world order to Europe’s. Like the U.S., they are jealous of their sovereignty. And unlike the nations of Western Europe, they have no experience of regional institutions. Indeed, their neighbors tend to be their worst enemies. Supporting this contention is the fact that the international criminal court was opposed not only by the U.S. but also by the non- or quasi-European powers: Russia, China and India. The contemporary European ideal of multilateralism, then, will find few supporters outside of Europe in the twenty-first century. The real debate, in the U.S. and other extra-European great powers, will be between a more modest liberal internationalism and a quasi-imperial unilateralism. Both liberal internationalism and unilateralism will share the assumption that the nation-state will and should remain the primary unit in world affairs. As for the use of military force, this is not so much a disagreement between the U.S. and Europe as it is one within Europe. For historical reasons the British and French tend to have a much greater willingness to employ force in international affairs than the Germans or Scandinavians. The aging of the population of the U.S., by putting a premium on the labor of young people, is likely to make it even more difficult for the U.S. military to obtain recruits. Manpower shortages, already manifested as a result of the small wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, will force the U.S. to rely to a greater degree on proxies and on technology. Already neoconservative proponents of an aggressive, expansive American foreign policy are suggesting a new draft. But the draft, FES Analyse: USA abolished in 1973, will not be reinstated in the U.S., and military service has little appeal to most Americans. The U.S. remains a deeply civilian society. In dealing with these military manpower challenges, the U.S. will be in the same position as other aging, civilian, industrial democracies like those of Western Europe and Japan. Eclipse of the Atlanticists These kinds of disagreements over both goals and methods between the U.S. and Europe are bringing about the end of the Western alliance in its familiar form. The idea of the West or the Atlantic Community was devised to rationalize the NATO alliance of the U.S. and Western Europe against the Soviet bloc during the Cold War. Samuel Huntington’s definition of the West as including the U.S. and Canada and Protestant and Catholic- but not Orthodox- Europe reflects this idea. Never plausible, this conception of the West is now obsolete. From the eighteenth century until World War I, Americans either thought of themselves as uniquely modern inhabitants of“the New World” or as an offshoot, along with Britain, of the Germanic Protestant community. Between World War I and the early years of the Cold War, the American elite dropped the idea of a Germanic Protestant group of nations and fostered the myth of a secular liberal West founded on the Enlightenment ideals of the American and French revolutions. The US-Britain-Germany trinity was replaced by a US-British-French trinity. Interestingly, the Catholic heritage of Europe was minimized in both the Germanic Protestant theory and the liberal Western theory. Americans in both the Reformation and Enlightenment traditions have usually feared and distrusted the Catholic Church. In the United States, the idea of the liberal West was spread to the college-educated elite by courses in“Western Civilization” which traced a direct line from ancient Greece and Rome to the American and French Revolutions and the modern West. Aspects of European history which did not fit the Athens-to-Brussels paradigm, like Hellenistic and Roman imperialism and medieval Christendom, were treated as embarrassing

FES Analyse: USA deviations from the supposed rational, secular, liberal Western norm. The contributions of Germany and Russia, the major geopolitical antagonists of the U.S. in the twentieth century, were minimized. The Danish historian David Gress has described this approach as“Plato to NATO.” Among America’s NATO partners, however, the idea of a trans-Atlantic Western community had to compete with the idea of“Europe.” The myth of“Europe,” like that of“the West,” identified Europe in terms of Enlightenment liberal and democratic values. But the project of a European community, founded by Catholics like Adenauer, Schumann and de Gasperi, incorporated concepts of Catholic social thought, like the principle of subsidiarity and policies protecting small proprietors. As many have pointed out, the core of the European Union corresponds more or less to the Carolingian West of the days of Charlemagne. Far more Europeans identify with“Europe” than with the“West” or“Atlantic Community.” NATO, as an institution, is no rival for the EU, when it comes to the affections and identities of Europeans. The absence of any trans-Atlantic institutions except for a military alliance of declining value has doomed the concept of the Atlantic Community. The number of Atlanticists on both sides of the Atlantic is dwindling. Ironically, one reason for the decline in American Atlanticism is the democratization of American society itself. From the end of the U.S. Civil War and Reconstruction in 1876 until the New Deal, American politics was dominated by the Northeast and Midwest. Southerners and Westerners became more important in domestic politics beginning with the election of the Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. But American foreign policy and international commerce continued to be dominated by an“Establishment” of affluent northeastern Anglo-American Protestants educated at the Ivy League and with close ties to Wall Street. The Northeastern establishment was based on exclusion – of Jews, Catholics, nonwhites, and white Americans from the South and West. The establishment tried to coopt some members of various other groups, but its efforts were too little and came too late. Following World War II, the expansion of the university system ended the role of a college 9 education as a monopoly of the upper class. And a new foreign policy elite of professors found jobs in government. These individuals are known as“in-and-outers.” In between jobs as presidential political appointees, they often teach in universities or work in think tanks. Many of these foreign policy intellectuals were European immigrants, like Kissinger and Brzezinski, or came from middle-class or working-class Jewish, Catholic, Southern or Western backgrounds, like many of the liberal and leftist leaders who later became“neoconservatives.” Over time, the role of meritocratic academics in the foreign policy elites of both parties has grown, while that of patrician investment bankers and corporate lawyers from the old Establishment has declined. At the same time, the permanent expansion of the U.S. military following World War II made room for a number of military intellectuals who are themselves soldiers, CIA officers or other career public servants. While the American state is weak and fragmented in domestic politics, the U.S. has a very powerful, traditional Europeanstyle state in the form of the career foreign policy services. The military in particular has grown in influence at the expense of the State Department. In general, American military officers, senior diplomats and career intelligence officers are among the most sophisticated, intelligent and experienced individuals in the U.S. government. While the officer corps is still disproportionately Southern and the diplomatic service disproportionately Northeastern, the foreign policy career services, like the universities, are far more inclusive and meritocratic than the old Northeastern establishment. The contemporary U.S., then, has three different foreign policy establishments: the Northeastern patricians, the academics, and the career public servants. In the administration of the first Bush, the old Northeastern patrician establishment, symbolized by George Herbert Walker Bush, the son of a Connecticut Senator, and his partner James Baker, a rich Texan educated at Princeton had a final moment of glory. But Clinton’s foreign policy team was drawn largely from academics and think-tank scholars, as was that of George W. Bush. For example, before becoming Assistant Secretary of Defense, Paul

10 Wolfowitz had been the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. The disintegrating Northeastern establishment did little to restrain neoconservative intellectuals in the government like Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and their allies Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Instead, the most effective opposition came from career military and intelligence officers and diplomats. An unprecedented number of retired military officers, intelligence agents and diplomats went public with their criticism of George W. Bush’s foreign policy in 2004. This indicates not only the depth of the divide between the neoconservative branch of the academic appointee elite but also the growing sense of self-consciousness and civic duty of the career foreign policy elite, particularly the military. The eclipse of the Northeastern establishment by the rising academic elite and the military and other career elites has meant diminishing knowledge about or interest in Europe at the elite level. Even before the U.S. became involved in European power politics in World War I, the patricians of the Northeast vacationed in Europe and often sent their children on“grand tours” of the continent, after the manner of the English. Many learned French, the language of international“society” as well as of diplomacy, and the more scholarly – including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson – read and spoke German. By contrast, the growing number of American academics and military officers in the U.S. foreign policy elite generally come from modest backgrounds; some never had the means to travel abroad before adulthood. Even for academics, the incentives for learning French, German or other European languages have shrunk. Between 1870 and 1914, Germany led the world in academic research. Many American academics studied at German universities, and many others learned to read German, the language of scholarship. The American university system, modeled on the German university system, replaced the older Anglo-American liberal arts college. A second wave of influence from German-speaking Europe came with the wave of émigré intellectuals in the 1930s, whose ranks included Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Hans Morgenthau and Leo FES Analyse: USA Strauss(whose thought has influenced American neoconservatives). But intellectual life in the U.S. has been conducted almost entirely in English since World War II. While a few continental thinkers like Habermas have trans-Atlantic reputations, the only flow of ideas across the Atlantic from Europe to America in recent generations was that of French structuralism and deconstructionism in the 1980s. The nineteenth-century pattern is being reversed: increasingly, Europe is the audience for intellectual fashions that originate in the United States, like neoliberalism in economics and multiculturalism. At the elite level, then, the decline of the Northeastern establishment has meant the decline in number of elite policymakers with a deep personal acquaintance with France, Germany and the rest of continental Europe. A similar trend is apparent at the mass level. The United States experienced two massive waves of emigration from continental Europe. The“Old Immigrants” were chiefly Germans, from the 1840s until the late nineteenth century; the other major group was the Irish. From the late nineteenth century until the 1920s, when Congressional legislation radically restricted immigration, a second wave of“New Immigrants” came from Southern and Eastern Europe – Italians, Greeks, Slavs and Ashkenazic Jews. All of these groups formed flourishing ethnic diasporas in the United States which strengthened the ties between the New World and the Old. The German diaspora in the U.S. was the largest, accounting for much of the ancestry of today’s white American population. As Germany industrialized in the late nineteenth century, fewer and fewer Germans emigrated to the U.S. The German diaspora culture, with its own newspapers and clubs, was already in long-term decline as a result of the assimilation of GermanAmericans even before anti-German hysteria during World War I dealt it a death-blow. By the 1970s, the New Immigrants like Italian-Americans were disappearing through assimilation and intermarriage into the white American population. Today a majority of white Americans outside of the South(which remains the most homogeneous Anglo-American region) have an-

FES Analyse: USA cestors from two or more European nations, including Britain. Thanks to the American“melting-pot” the European diaspora subcultures have died out. Little Italy in New York is now a Chinese immigrant neighborhood. Most Americans of European ancestry have become so“Americanized” that they do not object to being labeled as“Anglos” as opposed to “Latinos,” even though most American“Anglos” (English-speaking whites) are not primarily of British descent. The loss of their ancestral languages means that third- and fourth-generation German, French, Italian and Czech-Americans feel far more at home in the countries of the English-speaking world. Will the growth of Latino and AsianAmericans as a result of immigration alter this? Probably not. Asian-Americans come from a variety of countries and assimilate rapidly. A Chinese-American who speaks no Chinese will be more at home in Britain than in China. So will a Mexican-American whose native language is English and knows little or no Spanish. The size of the Mexican-American diaspora has caused concern among some about a permanent Spanish-speaking minority in the Southwest. But Mexico’s fertility is dropping rapidly, and large-scale immigration from Mexico is likely to fall as a result in the next generation or two. And English usage and intermarriage rates are comparable to those of previous generations of European immigrants among second- and thirdgeneration Latinos. As for black Americans, most have spoken American English since the eighteenth century. They are heirs to aspects of the older Anglo-American culture. This phenomenon reinforces the argument of a small group of anti-European British conservatives and Americans who argue that NATO should be replaced by the“Anglosphere,” an alliance of English-speaking nations sharing values like a preference for small government that allegedly distinguish them from continental democracies like Germany and France. The idea of a union of English-speaking nations goes back to the rapprochement between the U.S. and the British empire around 1900. Many continental Europeans like de Gaulle have feared world domination by the“Anglo-Saxons.” 11 As a basis for American grand strategy, the Anglosphere concept has few supporters, even among American neoconservatives. If the U.S. objects to sharing decision-making with France and Germany, it certainly is not going to give a veto over its actions to Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Those countries are free to follow the U.S. in ventures like the Iraq War, but as clients of the U.S., not as equals. In the realm of culture, however, the Anglosphere is likely to become more important, for the reason mentioned above: the declining proficiency of Americans in French, German and other European languages. The Anglosphere countries form a single linguistic community the way that the Spanish-speaking countries and Arabic-speaking countries do. Their citizens can read each other’s newspapers and watch each other’s television shows without translation. As a result, the decline of continental Europe in America’s consciousness will not be accompanied by a decline in American knowledge of Britain. On the contrary, the British are likely to have more influence in Washington, as fewer and fewer Americans have close contact with the cultures of continental European nations. The growing importance of Asia, particularly of China and India, in American strategic and economic calculations will reinforce this trend, because English is the lingua franca of Asia. While there will be no institutionalized Anglosphere, an informal Anglosphere will exist and grow more important as fewer and fewer Americans, of all races, speak French, German or other continental European languages. The Atlantic Community of NATO is likely to decompose into an informal Anglosphere based on the U.S. and an enlarged, loose Europe centered on a more assertive and independent Germany. While English will be the global lingua franca, German is likely to join French as a lingua franca of the new European system. For linguistic reasons, Britain will continue to be the“second country” for most Americans, including most nonwhite Americans whose primary language is English. However, for ethnic and religious reasons, among some American groups Israel will compete with Britain for this role.

12 Although they make up only two percent of the U.S. population, Jewish-Americans make up a substantial portion of the American political, social and economic elite. Jewish-American opinion about Israel includes all schools of thought, from some religious Jews who think that the state of Israel is blasphemous because it was not established by God to secular Jews who are indifferent to Israel. Nevertheless, two generalizations hold. The first is that since the 1967 War JewishAmericans have increasingly defined support for Israel as part of Jewish identity. The second is that even among Jewish-Americans with liberal views in domestic policy, support for hardline Israeli governments like Ariel Sharon’s has been increasing, even before the second Intifada. The tilt toward the Israeli Right within the U.S. Jewish community is the result in part of demographic factors. As secular and liberal Jews vanish into the national majority through intermarriage, conservative and Orthodox Jews opposed to intermarriage will make up an everincreasing proportion of the Jewish-American community. The same trend is occurring in Israel, where the secular leftists are being eclipsed by religious conservatives. While Jewish-American support for Israel is important at the elite level, at the voter level, the most important constituency for the Israeli Right consists of Protestant fundamentalists in the American South and elsewhere.“Christian Zionism” was originally a British tradition that influenced the founding of Israel by the British empire. As Britain has become more secular, however, Christian Zionism has died out there. But it has taken root in the American South. Many Southern Protestants interpret current events in terms of the Book of Revelation and believe that Israel is to be the site of the Battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Jesus. The influence of both constituencies has peaked in the presidency of George W. Bush – FES Analyse: USA a born-again Texas Protestant whose political base consists of pro-Likud born-again Protestants like him, and whose neoconservative appointees include many Jewish-Americans with close personal or political ties to Israel’s Likud Party. In the long run, however, the political influence of both constituencies is likely to decline. At the elite level, the“new Jews” – talented immigrants from East Asia and South Asia and their descendants – are growing in importance. At the mass level, Southern Protestant fundamentalists are shrinking as a percentage of the U.S. population. Whether or not there remains a Republican political majority, their influence will decline with time. But the long run could be a generation or more. In the short term, presidents of both parties will tend to uncritically support Israel’s actions, no matter what they are. The difference between the U.S., with its uncritical, one-sided approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and Europe will continue to be sources of friction between the U.S. and Europe. Over time the U.S. will increasingly resemble Western Europe in its social values and its age profile. However, the policies of the U.S. and Europe toward the Middle East and Asia will increasingly diverge. In addition, the U.S., like the other great powers outside of Europe, will reject ambitious versions of multilateralism favored by many Europeans, although liberal Democrats will favor international cooperation more than conservative Republicans. The declining knowledge of Europe, apart from Britain, among America’s elite and its population will reinforce these trends. The Cold War alliance of the U.S. and Europe was a product of temporary conditions which no longer exist. The U.S. and Europe need not be rivals in world politics. But except on a few issues of mutual concern they are unlikely to be partners in the twenty-first century.