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| 2004/10/29 [Politics/Foreign/Asia/China, Politics/Foreign/Europe] UID:34425 Activity:nil |
10/28 Gulliver's travails: The U.S. in the post-Cold-War world
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/oct04/osull.htm
Yearning to be liked
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/nov02/derby.htm |
| 5/24 |
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| www.newcriterion.com/archive/23/oct04/osull.htm Towards the close of the twentieth century a metaphor entered circulation that compared the United States to Lemuel Gulliver at the start of his visit to Lilliput. Gulliver in Swifts satire was, you recall, an Englis h sea doctor who, having sunk exhausted on a foreign beach after his shi p was wrecked, woke up to discover miniscule Lilliputians had tied him d own with slender threads and tiny pegs. It is a passably accurate account of the international status quo a decad e after the fall of the Berlin Wall. That status quo looks somewhat diff erent five years later. But the history of the intervening period is the story of how the United States and the international community continue d to grapple with each other in the process of seeking to contain or def eat Islamist terrorism. Gulliver among the Tranzis The first episode is the globalizing decade that ran from the final colla pse of the Soviet Union to September 11th. This was a period in which tr ade walls were reduced, barriers to capital movements liberalized, and t he factors of production loosened up to move around the world more freel y than at any time since 1914. These economic changes brought political ones in their train. Governments had to introduce such reforms as market transparency and the rule of law in order to attract and keep the forei gn investment they needed for sustained prosperity. But two other global developments passed unnotice d under the radar of conventional politics. In retrospect it is astou nding that we failed to react more strongly to the first bombing of the World Trade Center, the bombings of the American embassies in East Afric a, and the attack on the USS Cole. Maybe Americans were insulated from a sensible anxiety by their victory in the Cold War, their status as the sole remaining superpower, and the sedative effects of the long Reagan-C linton prosperity. Whatever the reason, Islamist terrorism grew througho ut the 1990s partly because it was ignored. The second global development was the quiet revolution of transnationalis m Its exact lineaments are open to debate, but I would suggest that it consists of five overlapping developments: First, the growing power and authority of international, transnational, a nd supranational organizations such as the UN and its various agencies , the European Union, and the World Trade Organization. Second, the transformation of international law from the arbitration of d isputes between sovereign states into laws that have a direct impact on individual citizens and private bodies through treaties and conventions that override domestic legislation. Third, the dramatic increase in the number of non-governmental organizati ons (NGOs in the jargon) and their increasing influence on international politics both as pressure groups and as providers of services to govern ments and international agencies. Fourth, the spread of economic, environmental, and social regulation from the national to the international level through laws, treaties, and st andards by, among other bodies, UN conferences on such topics as wome ns rights and racism. Finally, the emergence of common values, a common outlook, and even a cla ss consciousness among the diplomats, lawyers, and bureaucrats in intern ational organizations, NGOs, multinational corporations, and those acade mic centers that serve them. Kenneth Minogue calls this structure of governance Acronymia after the UNOs and NGOs that constitute it. He credits the present author with giv ing the name Olympians, after the gods of Antiquity, to those who admi nister it. Ancient gods used to kill us for their sport, but modern Ol ympians are content to regulate and preach at us. John Fonte has defined the common ideology they preach as transnational progressivism: natio nal sovereignty and the nation-state are disappearing in favor of a new structure of international organizations and rules that goes by the slip pery name of global governance. In domestic politics, it argues that l iberal democracybuilt upon majority rule, individual rights, and a comm on cultureis being replaced by post-democracy that emphasizes group r ights, multiculturalism, and politics as endless negotiations between et hnic groups. But the theory hardly distinguishes international from dome stic politics and policy. The philosopher Jrgen Habermas coined the ter m global domestic policy that erases a distinction hitherto important outside Germany. As a term for those holding this ideology, transnational progressives i s too big a mouthful. A London lawyer, David Carr, of the libertarian blog Samizdata, compressed the former in to the Tranzis, now in common circulation. The Tranzis had (and have) a very complicated relationship with Gulliver. Because of Americas overwhelming power, they hoped that the United Sta tes could be conscripted to serve the purposes of the international com munity (ie themselves) in a series of humanitarian interventions. But they recognized dimly that the United States, as a constitutional liber al democracy, would never fit comfortably into the post-democratic struc tures of global governance they were constructing. Thus Jeremy Rabkin po ints out in Sovereignty that America stands out from almost all other ad vanced states in this regard: Every state in the European Union now acknowledges that its constitution can be overturned by mere bureaucratic directives from the European Co mmission in Brussels; there is nothing like a fixed constitution to con strain the Commission itself. The arrangement is unthinkable in America but taken for granted in Europe. Because the United States has a strong constitutional tradition, it regul arly attaches a rider to treaties and UN conventions that forbids the overriding of the US Constitution. These riders come under occasional attack from international lawyers and activist NGOs that would like, for instance, to override the First Amendment in order to outlaw hate spee ch. These pressures are growing and, as Judge Robert Bork points out in his recent book Coercing Virtue, American judges have begun to cite for eign precedents in their legal reasoning. Even so, the United States will always be an awkward irritant in post-dem ocratic structuresjust as the British, with their similar liberal tradi tion, are the awkward squad inside the EU And if the United States is going to be an irritant, then its superpower status would make it a very serious irritant indeed. Tranzis were busily wrapping it around with as many legal and regulatory threads as possible when Al Qaeda struck at t he World Trade Center and the Pentagonand Gulliver woke up. Gulliver Unbound It is often said that September 11 changed the United States dramatically as no other country understands. A direct attack on American soil served to unite, if briefly, the four American t raditions in foreign policy identified by Walter Russell Mead in his Spe cial Providencemoralistic Jeffersonians, commercial Hamiltonians, evang elical humanitarian Wilsonians, and vengeful Jacksoniansin favor of a s trong response. Wilsonians saw the attack as a chance to bring democracy to similar breeds without the law; Hamiltonians judged that a short war would be a prudent disincentive to future attacks; Jacksonians wanted t o punish Osama, Saddam, and anyone else who had trodden on the United St ates, and Jeffersonians (who overlap heavily with Tranzis) sought a stro ng response blessed by the international community. After Afghanistan, Jeffersonians reverted to t ype and became more pacific. But even now many of them are significantly more hawkish than European social democrats with whom they usually find common ground. Britains participation in Iraq is a reminder that Mead s four traditions have substantial roots in the four British folkways that the historian David Hackett Fischer identifies as the principal cur rents in American culture. Blair, who comes from the Borders, should be a Jacksonian but is actually a muscular Wilsonianin Britain a Gladstoni an. In addition to shocking America into a strong response, September 11 was also the confirmation of a foreign policy analysis and set of proposals that ha... |
| www.newcriterion.com/archive/21/nov02/derby.htm Let me begin with a story, a true storythe story of my one appearance on a lecture stage with Dr. This happened, or rather fail ed to happen, in the month of September, 2001. The US State Department runs a Foreign Visitors Program, under whose au spices people from various parts of the world, people distinguished in t he arts or professions, are brought to the United States to meet with Am erican counterparts from their own lines of work. I suppose the idea is that mutual understanding will be created thereby, the veil of ignorance lifted, the fetters of ancient prejudice struck off, the dogs of war si lenced, and so on. Whether this result is actually attained in many case s, I cannot say. In the particular case I am going to tell you about, it never had a chance to happen. As a journalist who has been writing about Chinese affairs for nearly twe nty years, I am sometimes asked to participate in these functions. The u sual course of events is that the State Department will call to tell me that such-and-such a person is being brought over from China under the F oreign Visitors Program, and they think it would be a good idea for me t o meet with him or her. If the name is n ot familiar to me (which, I am sorry to say, is more often the case than not), they give me the visitors curriculum vitae. If I then express in terest, a date is set up, almost invariably a lunch date. I do it for the opportunity to meet interest ing people, and in the hope that I might get a column out of it. Well, one day last summer I took a call from my contactI had done this o ften enough that we were on first-name termsat the Foreign Visitors Pro gram. A large group of Chi nese media people, TV producers and the like, were coming over in a sing le batch. The cream of 30-40-year-olds at major Chinese media outlets, he gushed. A series of discussion groups and lectures was being arrange d Would I care to address these people? These wer e indeed heavy hitters in Chinese media circles. News Director, Shanghai Broadcasting Network Deputy Editor-in-Chief, China Newsweek Magazine Editor, International Affairs, Global Times News Anchor, CCTV. In the fullness of time, arrangements were made, a program published. The re would be an event at the State Departments New York City office on 5 3nd Street. I would speak for an hour, 10:30 to 11:30, on the subject P erceptions of China in Americas Right-Wing Press. And the speaker right before me, 9:30 to 10:30, would be Dr. On the Friday following the September 11th attacks, I got a call from my man at State. In the weeks that followed I was able to piece together what had happened . This, I should say, was from informal sources, whose versions of event s did not always agree in precise detail. They were in a room together with some State Department minders, recei ving some kind of cultural acclimitization, when the World Trade Center was hit. There was a TV set in the room, and everyone got to see the sec ond plane hit. When this happened, some of the Chinese party stood up an d cheered. My informants differ on how many, from a lower bound of only three or four up to at least half a dozen. Whether it went all the way to Colin Powell I am not c lear; it certainly went as far as Richard Armitage, Powells second-in-c ommand. The Chinese media people flew back to China shortly afterwardsw hether voluntarily or not, my informants do not agree. There, in the reactions of those successful, well-educated, middle-class Chinese people, you see instinctual Third World anti-Americanism unmaske d and unashamed. It is always tempting, especially for those of us who think too much, to neglect the simplest explanations for things. I recently came upon a survey conducted earli er this year by two scholars at Boston University, Margaret and Melvin D eFleur, called The Next Generations Image of Americans: Attitudes and Beliefs Held by Teen-Agers in Twelve Countries. They had questioned one hundred teenagers from each of twelve countries in various parts of the world, to see what kind of image of the United States these young peopl e had. Mostly negative, was the answer, but the report also showed that less than twelve percent had actually visited the US In other words, t heir images of the United States were secondary onesfrom movies, TV pro grams, and popular music, and through their own countries educational s ystems and news outlets. A great deal of rather obvious blame can be placed there right away. Try to imagine that your own notion of life in the United States was constru cted entirely from American movies and TV programs. You would perceive m y country as being inhabited by a mix of gigantic, steroid-enhanced bask etball stars, exquisitely beautiful young people with perfect teeth and musculature, gangsters, detectives, lawyers, and freakish pop singers. W e live in palatial apartments, do very little work, sleep around a lot, and get our way mainly by murdering each other. It is not much of a secr et, I think, that a large proportion of American movies are made for exp ort. The people of the Third World watch them with fascination. Unfortun ately, fascination is not the same as admiration or fondness. It can coe xist very happily with, for example, disgust. The other factor is the presentation offered to Third Worlders by their o wn news media, and through their educational system. I can speak with so me authority here, having taught English to university students in mainl and China, from Chinese texbooks. Here is one titled simply English, by a person named Xu Y anmou, consisting of eighteen extracts from English and American authors , with commentary. labored under the illusion that bourgeois revolution would lead to the establishment of the kingdom of reason. However, he lived long enough to see this illu sion shattered by the reality of the American bourgeois state. A very common expression in all our textbooks, one the students trotted o ut frequently in both conversation and examinations, was The darkness a nd oppression of bourgeois society. Now on the one hand, you may say th at people in that kind of country take the state propaganda with a pinch of salt. On the other hand, when you are bathed in this stuff all day long, and never hear anything else, from infancy on, a great deal of it is going to stick. The end result is a topcoat of cynicism painted over a foundation of ignorance and misconception. In t he spring vacation of that teaching year, I took a trip to Hong Kong for a breath of fresh air. On returning, I tried to discuss Hong Kong with my students. I asked onea very intelligent young lady, more worldly tha n mostwhether she wouldnt like to go to Hong Kong. Im afraid I would end up as the slave of some rich boss! It is true that these things happened nearly twenty years ago, and that C hinese people are somewhat more sophisticated now. It is also true, howe ver, that the older members of that delegation Dr. Kissinger and I never had the opportunity to address were coevals of the students I was teach ing in 1983. And while the extramural life of young Chinese people is in deed a good deal freer and more colorful now than it was then, the educa tion system is little improved. Staying with my wifes family in North-E ast China last summer, I had the opportunity to look at some of the scho ol textbooks being used by her 11-year-old nephew. It did not take long for me to find the remembered phrase: The darkness and oppression of bo urgeois society. One thing you find again and again when you look into anti-Americanism is the conviction that we are a fundamentally immoral nation. I wish I had a dollar for every time I have heard, when living in China, something a long the following lines: People in the West have no deep feelings. I used to counter this, once I got us ed to it, by pointing out the true fact, perfectly well-known in China, that during the Mao Tse-tung despotism, when a person was branded count er-revolutionary and hustled off to a camp, that persons spouse would frequently divorce him or her, sometimes from fear, sometimes on explici t orders from the local Party committee, sometimes in the well-founded c o... |