Robert D. Kaplan
Stratfor's chief
geopolitical analyst
The worst years of the Iraq War were boom times for European triumphalists. I remember going to conferences in Europe in the middle of the last decade when one Brussels Eurocrat after another spoke with barely concealed arrogance about Europe's moral superiority to the United States. Whereas the United States, with its so-called muscle-bound military, was bogged down in an unwinnable violent conflict in Mesopotamia, proving the limits and pitfalls of an over-reliance on hard power, Europe was basking in the worldwide influence of its soft power, built on suave diplomatic and regulatory compromise and the humaneness of the social welfare state.
Indeed, it is the economic decline of this very model –
that of the European social welfare state – over the past few years
that now threatens Europe's soft power and, therefore, its own moral
conception of itself. Soft power, as defined by Harvard political
scientist Joseph Nye Jr. is, among other things, the power to
persuade in a media-driven world. And for Europe, such power
ultimately came from its economic and political model.
The
welfare panacea
In
“Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945” (2005), the late New
York University historian Tony Judt documents how the state – the
modern welfare state – which reached its apogee in the 1960s and
early 1970s, was seen back then as the decisive bureaucratic panacea
to Europe's horrific recent past. The response to the mass killings
of two world wars – in terms of government policy – was a
benevolent administrative order that “would always do a better job
than the unrestricted market” in protecting people's interests, in
dispensing social justice and allowing for “cultural vitality.”
The state, as Judt describes the halcyon middle decades of the Cold
War in Western Europe, “lubricated the wheels of commerce,
politics, and society in numerous ways.”
Government jobs
were plentiful, and so were generous pensions and health care. The
philosopher and historian might have had a more profound answer to
the Holocaust and other outrages of the first half of the 20th
century in Europe, but the European politician and the economist had
a specific, not-to-be-disparaged answer as well: the modern social
welfare state.
The full-bodied administrative state was until
recently instantly appealing, not only to Europeans themselves but to
American tourists, who came from a land of embarrassingly poor train
and bus service, slummy big-city airports and decaying highways and
bridges – not to mention poor public service in general – and
found in places like France, Germany and the Netherlands a paradise
of sleek trains, postmodern air terminals and wondrous nighttime
lighting across bridges and along highways. The European state with
its high taxes could certainly deliver, it seemed. It was why
conservative politicians in Europe were often proudly to the left of
liberal politicians in the United States.
The
state itself was the foundation upon which so much else rested in
Europe. In his academic classic, “The Reconstruction of Nations:
Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, Belarus 1569-1999” (2003), Yale
historian Timothy Snyder talks about “European standards” that
the Poles and other subject peoples of the communist bloc aspired to
upon their liberation in 1989-1991. European standards meant
“territorial integrity … and the protection of the cultural
rights of minorities.” European standards meant that the “crucial
categories” were the “state and its citizens;” not the ethnic
nation and its members. For the state enforced the same rules for all
people without regard to their ethnicity or religion. Thus was
fascism and Nazism legally vanquished. And while these laws and
values did not directly rest on reasonably high economic growth, the
success of the social welfare state provided added legitimacy to this
morals-based system.
The
European Union itself, which grew out of the Franco-German Coal and
Steel Community of the early Cold War days and the European Common
Market (European Economic Community) of the middle ones, was the
supreme culmination of social welfare economics and international
legal and diplomatic norms within the Continent. Because France and
Germany had been repeatedly at war over the previous century, the
European Union would henceforth bind them together through common
economic and fiscal interests. And from the reconciliation between
those two giants, unity would radiate throughout Europe.
But
it all rested, in varying degrees, on a prosperous social welfare
state.
'European standards'
That is why the
European debt crisis is so troubling. It is troubling not just in an
economic and political sense, but in a moral sense as well. Europe
could bounce back much quicker than expected – economists have been
proved wrong before. More likely, however, the euro zone on the whole
will be sunk in zero growth rates or thereabouts for a few years to
come, with consequent cuts in social benefits and continued high
unemployment. And if that happens, the legitimacy of both the
European Union and the social welfare model will continue to erode,
whittling away the very basis of European soft power and, perhaps,
the norms of behavior that such soft power has represented.
Poland
especially offers the most poignant example of why such norms are
vital to peace. In “The Reconstruction of Nations,” Snyder
meticulously narrates how Polish thinkers and officials had made a
conscious choice toward the latter years of the Cold War to accept
Poland's eastern borders with the Soviet republics of Lithuania,
Belarus and Ukraine, assuming, as they did, that the Soviet Union
would collapse and those republics would become independent states.
This was, as he explains, an extraordinary decision after a fashion,
because it meant dropping historical claims to ethnic-Polish lands to
the east of the current Polish state. Concomitantly, Poland asked
Germany to make no such claims on historic German lands in western
Poland. However brutal and unfair were the border arrangements that
were the outgrowth of Nazi and Soviet aggression in World War II,
Polish officials decided not to question them. And the overpowering
force helping them toward such brave, conciliatory thinking and
diplomacy was the example of “European standards” that were, in
turn, the outgrowth of the economic and cultural experience of
postwar Europe as chronicled by Judt in his own book.
In other
words, peace in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Berlin
Wall depended on applying the diplomatic rules of Western Europe. And
the diplomatic rules of Western Europe had long been fortified by the
very success of the European welfare project as a whole, in all its
economic and integrationist manifestations.
No
gloating
But now Eurocrats can no longer gloat about the
European Union's soft power and its consequent moral superiority
compared to the United States. The American economy is chugging along
nicely at 2.7 percent annual growth – around 2.7 percent higher
than Europe's. Whereas America's economic problems are mainly
political – the difficulty Republicans and Democrats often have in
reaching efficient compromises – Europe's problems are more
fundamental and structural: the very viability of the euro zone and
the enormous promises to the citizenry implied by the welfare state
model.
Yet, this is no reason for Americans to gloat. No one
should want to see the continued erosion of European institutions and
models, for that will negatively affect the very attraction of
European civilization in the 21st century world: a civilization built
on tolerance in the late-20th.
