20 June 2008

Trans-Atlantic Relationships. A Cultural View, June 20, 2008

by Marcello Pera

(Rome , Villa Taverna, Niaf Meeting )

As I do agree with what Ambassador Spogli has just said, I will not discuss the trans-Atlantic relationships from a political, military and technical point of view. Rather I will touch upon the very concept of the trans-Atlantic relationships. My question is: what are these relationships based on? What are they for? Precisely what goal do they pursue?

Up to 1989 ― the year of the Fall of the Berlin wall ― the answer to this question was quite obvious: trans-Atlantic relationships aimed at containing communism. As the world has changed, Soviet communism collapsed and the Soviet Union faded away, this answer is no longer valid. Although Russia is not a close ally of Western Europe and does not belong to its geo-political area, although the democratic process in Russia is not yet complete, and although Russia’s great power tendency or aspiration is still rather strong, the fact remains that Russia today is not a threat to coexistence and peace as was the Soviet Union yesterday. We disagree on many points but we accommodate them in the standard political and diplomatic way.

Beginning from at least 2001, a different answer was provided to our question, with terrorism, I mean Islamic terrorism, replacing communism. We started saying that the main aim of the trans-Atlantic relationships is to fight Islamic fundamentalism and those states, either failed or rouge, that host it. The war in Afghanistan, for example, was justified as a reaction to the September 11th attack on America, according to the terms of Article 5 of NATO, which is the military heart of the trans-Atlantic relationships.

One might then generalize and say that the trans-Atlantic relationships aim at defending the West from its enemies, the “free World”, as we used to call it, from those who intend to impose their totalitarian ideologies, or Western democracies from those who want to destroy them. Or, still by generalization, one might say that the trans-Atlantic relationships’ aim is to keep the West free and peaceful.

All this is true. There is no doubt that yesterday the trans-Atlantic relationships were crucial in the fall of communism, much the same way as today they are the main deterrent against Islamic fundamentalism. And without doubt they have been an indispensable tool for the well-being of America, Europe and their allies. Though all this is true, and should not be forgotten, it is not the whole truth, not even the most interesting truth.

The fact is that the trans-Atlantic relationships cannot be confined within a defensive dimension alone. The defensive dimension is negative: it is a relation against or a relation to exclude, to expel, to reject. But historically and culturally the link between Europe and America is civilizational: it has to do with certain principles and values that both shores of the Atlantic share and respect. Of course, such principles and values exclude others, namely those which are not liberal and democratic, but their very function is not to exclude, rather to include, to form a community of people, to spread out the corresponding civilization. Therefore, the trans-Atlantic relationships have to be put within a positive dimension, that is to say, they have to be understood in the sense of including, uniting, allying those peoples and countries who intend not only to defend their way of life but also to extend and promote it.

The question now boils down to this: what is our way of life? What are its main tenets? What is peculiar and special about it? Can we say that it is preferable, more useful, more congenial to the people, more akin to the ideal ones ― in one word: “better” ― than others? Or can we say that our way of life, our idea of the good life, is just ours, that it has no special value apart from being more familiar to us, more entrenched in our history and tradition, more pleasant by our own standards?

Recently, the trans-Atlantic relationships have been shaken precisely on this point. And it is easy to understand why. If we believe that our civilization is simply the way we live and want to live, but with no special emphasis on the “we”, then those relationships can only be defensive and negative: they merely perform the function of protecting ourselves and rejecting possible attacks by the others. If, on the contrary, we believe that our civilization is not just one of the many and as good as any other but possesses some intrinsic merits that everybody cannot but agree with, then those relationships can also be inclusive and positive: their function becomes that of promoting those principles and values that not only our, but everybody’s else’s, way of life is and should be based on.

The war in Iraq and the war on terrorism have put this dilemma on the forefront, and the trans-Atlantic relationships at a crossroad: defending ourselves or exporting democracy? Protecting our well-being or promoting the welfare of everyone? In particular, the European Union has confronted itself with the question as to whether to take part in the war and conducting it as its own, or whether to desert it as an American affair.

As is well known, the dilemma has divided the West, especially Europe from the United States. What is less well known and should be emphasized is that the division was not only incidental and political, but deep and cultural. When President Chirac and Chancellor Schroeder opposed President Bush over the war on Iraq, their main argument had less to do with the national, economical and political interests of their own countries or with the standard division between left and right than with different views about our, that is, European-American, civilization. They clearly believed that this civilization is not unique, that Europe and America each have their own, that they do not necessarily overlap, that they may even collide. It’s true that in their view European civilization is valuable, but not the most valuable, and in any case not the only valuable one. This is why they conceived of Europe as a “counterweight” to America, with the one devoted to “dialogue” and the other more inclined to violence, or, to use the famous phrase by Robert Kagan, with Europe playing Venus and America Mars.

Notice that the European cultural mainstream had, and continue to have, the same view. Although our intellectual celebrities admit that the American experiment has given rise to the most successful and over lasting democratic regime ever produced, they oppose that sense of religious mission, the so called “American civil religion”, which is typical of American history, not only of President Bush’s administration. When in 2003 Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, two famous European philosophers and intellectuals, published their manifesto against the Iraq war in which, among the others, they wrote that “in Europe, a president who begins his official functions every day with a public prayer … is difficult to imagine”, they did not just wanted to maintain that they are secular or agnostic, most of all they wanted to stress a crucial difference which, according to them, exists between Europe and America: that Europe, unlike America, faces the “challenge of defending and advancing a cosmopolitan global order based on international law”. In other terms, that Europe believes in the United Nations as a source or a custodian of law and America doesn’t.

Considered from this vantage point, the trans-Atlantic relationships are not within the same framework, they are between two cultures, they do not belong to the same civilization, they refer to two different areas of the world, no matter how mingled they are and how dependent one upon the other they have been.

The main reason why I stress this cultural point is that when we ― especially we Italians and Italian Americans ― speak of the trans-Atlantic relationships we should not let everyday politics prevail. It is one thing to maintain that different administrations on the two shores of the Ocean entertain different relations, some better than others. For example, it is true that the present day Italian and French administrations have relationships with the United States which are closer than the previous ones. But it is a quite different thing to believe that the Ocean divides two worlds, and that these worlds tend toward opposite directions. Politics and personal links count, but history and culture count more. If I am not wrong, it was President Eisenhower who said that the Americans and the British are divided by the same language: what he meant with this illuminating witticism is that circumstantial and temporary episodes of diverging interests cannot prevail over deep consensus on fundamental principles and values.

We are then back to the question: what are these principles and values? What is special, if anything, about them? Differences of opinions and interests can never be eliminated, they are always around the corner, and most of the time they are even useful because it is through confrontation of our views that we make progress and mutually correct our mistakes. But any time different opinions arise on the two sides of the Atlantic we should raise that question. Do we belong to the same civilization? Do we trust it? Are we ready to defend it?

After the fall of communism, we in the West became so optimistic as to fall victims of the intellectual dream of “the end of history”. We thought that we no longer had serious enemies, that the world was marching on toward a predetermined goal. Several recent dramatic events, especially terrorism and the resurgence of fundamentalist Islam, have proved that this was an illusion. Freedom continues to have enemies, because freedom itself is the true enemy of those who are afraid of it. If we believe ― as I do strongly believe ― that freedom is fundamental and universal, non-negotiable and non-dismissible, then there will continue to be many occasions for the two sides of the Atlantic to diverge, but with no risk that our trans-Atlantic friendship and solidarity fail. This is both my view and commitment. I have no doubt it is yours, too.