Are Europe and America drifting apart?

Are Europe and America drifting apart? Dear Tim

8th April 2002

Britain is a European country with European values. Its home is in the European Union-the most successful political and economic institution in the world. The enormous concentrations of private power set in train by globalisation are triggering an accompanying imperative to create global public goods-from policing the environment to ensuring trustworthy accounting standards. For these tasks a multilateral institution like the EU is a precious asset.



Our obligation is to uphold and deepen the EU, to entrench European values at the same time as deploying the EU's power to underwrite a liberal global order. These goals are jeopardised by a US where the 30-year rise of conservatism has left it more philosophically, culturally and politically detached from the mainstream western tradition than ever. Indeed, until American liberalism reasserts itself, the EU will have to do what the US is no longer willing or capable of doing.

These are big claims, and profoundly controversial in Britain where even the pro-Europeans in New Labour are cautious about asserting our Europeanness. The fact that Blair is the most pro-European prime minister the British political system could throw up is a tribute to the British political class's suspicion of Europe-although, given the chance, I believe the British people would recognise they have more in common with their fellow Europeans than the consensus admits.

For a start, the British, like other Europeans, are profoundly committed to the idea of a social contract. The NHS, universal education, the treatment of the old and the provision of social housing are British expressions of a European set of values-the idea that society must sustain social institutions that underwrite individual risk and give every citizen an opportunity. These values have different manifestations around Europe but everywhere they seek broadly the same outcomes. Even Europe's attitude to prisoner rehabilitation is part of the same approach.

The American conservative tradition is wholly opposed to the entire social contract conception, which it characterises as threatening liberty, undermining self-reliance and leading to coercive taxation. It has successfully resisted attempts to build an American social contract and, over the last 30 years, has scaled back what little existed. Thus the US has incomplete health coverage, offers very little vocational training, has scant social housing, has virtually abandoned rehabilitation in its prison system and only offers highly conditional support for those on low incomes. As a result, its social performance is much worse than Europe. Exit rates from poverty are low; male life expectancy is lower; and social mobility is weak, despite extravagant claims to the contrary. Yet Europeans, lacking in self-confidence about their beliefs, have begun to accept the barrage of American conservative propaganda that their social contract should be dismantled and rebuilt around American lines.

The British-again like the rest of Europe-have a better-developed idea of the public domain than Americans. Whether in public service broadcasting or the commitment to ensuring that the results of scientific inquiry are publicly available, the European view-descended from the Enlightenment-is that a vigorous public realm is fundamental to the good society. And even though European democracies have their share of financial scandal and skulduggery, none of them are as subservient to money as America.

Equally, Britain shares the European view-influenced by the same experience of feudalism, the medieval church and the rise of socialism-that the propertied have obligations to society. The conservative American idea that property holders have a sacred right to hold their property autonomously, and that any claim on them is an infringement of liberty, finds no echo in Europe. Of course, Britain does not have the well-developed panoply of social partnership between workforce and business that exists in Europe, and has a dominant stock exchange along US lines-but it is still possible to discern the same attitudes. The British object to excessive executive pay, think companies should earn their right to trade by behaving ethically, impose planning restrictions on how they use their land and regulate them extensively. Two decades of propaganda for the American economic model has made surprisingly little progress at the level of core values. Moreover, the European approach to enterprise, in which organisations are seen as collective endeavours, has been devastatingly if quietly effective-European productivity has caught up sharply with the US in the past 30 years.

My contention is that much more connects Europe than divides it; that it is much more successful on key economic and social indicators than is widely recognised; and that Britain subscribes to the same set of values. So where does this leave the relationship between Europe and America? Is the gulf now unbridgeable? A lot depends upon whether liberal America can reassert itself: if it could, then the relationship would be incomparably healthier, and the future of global multilateral institutions more assured. Even without it these two most important building blocks of the west share much in common-they are committed to democracy, the rule of law and the market economy. But with conservatism remaining the dominant influence in the US, we have to accept our interests and values are likely to diverge more, not less, over the coming decades. Both sides need to prepare themselves for this and learn to live with it. It need not be a disaster. Indeed, for Europe it will be a liberation of a kind-a chance to affirm what it is, what it stands for and what its future global role should be.

Yours

Will

Dear Will

11th April 2002

Britain is a European country and should be fully engaged in the EU, working to build a liberal order for the whole of Europe. You will not be surprised that I agree with you there. Let me proceed to where I disagree.

You argue that Europe, and Britain with it, should define itself against America. We should then "deploy the EU's power" to underwrite a liberal international order capable of delivering global public goods. It will be a very bad day for Europe, and particularly Britain, if we take our lead from the traditional French left and choose America as Europe's defining Other. I don't think such a definition of Europe against America bears scrutiny. I don't think it will wash with our own people, who have America in their heads and sometimes in their hearts. Anyway, the only realistic prospect for developing the liberal global order you and I both desire is if Europe and the US work together to build it-as Harvard's Joseph Nye argues in his new book, The Paradox of American Power. Even taking the most optimistic view of European developments, "the EU's power" will not be enough. Isn't it obvious that to build a liberal global order we need the power of the US as well?

Actually, both in your letter and in your new book you float around between two different views. The first is that US conservatives, who you suggest dominate American economic, social and political life, have departed the western mainstream for a wild western terrain of unbridled libertarian individualism, which makes Margaret Thatcher look like a mild-mannered social democrat. The second, is that there are two fundamentally different models of democratic capitalism, the European and the American; that the European is better; and that Britain, which has more in common with the European one anyway, should throw in its lot with the European model against the American.

But these are two different arguments. If American liberals coming back to power would redress the balance, as you suggest at the end of your letter, then your second argument must be wrong. A tank does not become a hydrofoil simply because the driver changes. I think there is a good deal of truth in your characterisation of the American right. Listening to Steve Forbes last year argue here at Stanford (where I am writing this letter) that essentially all taxes are bad, I did feel myself to be in a different world. However, I don't think the right is as dominant as you make out-after all, for eight years until 2001, America was presided over by Bill Clinton, who, however much he trimmed, surely still qualifies as a liberal. I also think you caricature some aspects of American conservatism. For example, you say they think the propertied have no social obligations, but America has much more private charitable giving than Europe does.

My real quarrel, though, is with your second argument. I think it is wrong to suggest that there are quite separate and distinct European and American models of democratic capitalism. If we think of a Venn diagram, you picture European and American circles that have only a small intersection. But the reality is two circles, of which the largest part is the intersection. To the right, there is a banana-shaped area of American exceptionalism. To the left, there is a banana-shaped area of what Europeans have in common with each other, but not with Americans. Most of it, however, is overlap.

I favour a stronger European identity. But one problem is that it is very difficult to identify a discrete set of distinctively European values, which are not shared by most Americans, Canadians, Australians and so on. (The separateness even of "western values" has been disputed by, among others, Amartya Sen.) Perhaps in your next letter you would like to send me a short list of what you consider to be the "European values" not shared by other liberal democracies of the English-speaking world?

Moreover, you understate the extraordinary diversity of models and customs within geographical Europe. Do you really think the life of, say, a lawyer in London has more in common with that of a lawyer in Minsk than it does with that of a lawyer in New York or Melbourne?

I agree that Britain has long suffered illusions about its political special relationship with the US, and risks doing so again with the Blair-Bush love-in. But it seems to me impossible to deny that Britain does have a cultural and historical special relationship with the US, as also with the English-speaking peoples of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Oversimplifying, one could say that all four countries started life as new versions of England. What we have in common, from language, law and parliamentary tradition to education and culture, is very rich and still very much alive. Certainly many people in Britain feel this way. Britain is the Janus of Europe, with one face looking to the continent and the other across the seas. To ask the British to choose Europe against America is to ask Janus to cut off one face.

So, in this respect, Blair's instincts are right. To encourage Europe to define itself against America would be bad for Britain. It would be bad for Europe. And it would be bad for the world. The only realistic chance we have of building that liberal global order you and I both want is to bring the US and Europe as close as possible together to work towards it. What you call a "liberation" for Europe would be a curse, condemning that endeavour to certain failure.

Best

Tim

Dear Tim

13th April 2002

You have not engaged with my central point and one of the great truths of the last 30 years-the rise in the US of a very particular conservatism. At least you agree-witness your Forbes anecdote-that the American right do belong in a different world. A conservatism that stresses individualism, the sanctity of property rights and the need unilaterally to assert American power and interests now dominates the US; liberalism is a much reduced creed. Clinton was a liberal, but his achievement was to slow the pace of American conservatism's advance rather than establish a liberal programme-he called himself an Eisenhower Republican. His early ambitions to extend healthcare and training opportunities to every American were eviscerated; his legislative successes-scaling back welfare, hardening criminal justice, scrapping banking regulation-were where he made common cause with the conservatives. As for foreign policy, Joseph Nye represents, I fear, a generation that is passing. Your Venn diagram depiction of the relationship between US and European values describes the way things were from the New Deal to the 1970s. But the world has changed and it has changed the dynamics of how we can sustain a liberal world order.

You talk about a London lawyer having more in common with peers in Melbourne and New York than Minsk (why not Munich or Marseilles?). But in areas of employment or administrative law, say, European lawyers do share values and legal conventions (a number of London-based law firms are built on this reality) and an interesting fusion of European codes and English common law is under way (as an article by David Robertson in the February Prospect argued).

Think more broadly. I would claim the same shared European distinctiveness for, say, trade union officials, public service broadcasters, church leaders, prison governors and many, many more. I would also argue that the countries that you describe as versions of England-Canada, New Zealand and Australia-are closer to us Europeans than to where American conservatism has carried the US centre of gravity.

I am not asking the British to give up their affection for America-any more than I expect the French, German and Italians to, for America looms nearly as large in their countries. However, globalisation combined with US conservative propaganda is laying siege to important European values and institutions which underpin the varieties of our distinctive model. I want to be more clearheaded about its advantages-and as clearheaded as any American conservative that power has to be exercised in its protection.

I set out what I believed Europe held in common and distinct from conservative America in my first letter-a belief in the social contract, just capitalism, the public realm, equity and qualified property rights (more in Chapter 2 of my book The World We're In). American charitable giving does not spring from the same values that underpin the social contract; one is an individualistic act of conscience which is believed not to corrupt the receiver into sustained dependence, the other is a social compact in which a degree of individual autonomy is surrendered to achieve a greater social good.

How do we proceed politically? The EU must now assert common European values, and act to underpin a liberal global order-proceeding without America in areas as disparate as the International Criminal Court or the Kyoto climate accords, instances which are likely to multiply in future. This requires an important rebalancing of Britain's foreign policy. Britain's capacity to side with two increasingly incompatible blocs simultaneously is becoming untenable-not just over Bush's steel tariffs, the conservative US attitude to Iraq and Israel, but over issues like the role of international law and the damaging effect of US-style capital markets. Joseph Nye's tradition may one day have real influence again in the US, but until then we must look to the EU, for all its frailties, as the political grouping with the global clout to uphold the values and institutions in which we both believe.

All the best

Dear Tim

15th April 2002

As you say, we need to strengthen Europe fast, both as a counterweight and credible partner to the US. You have also agreed that the American right belongs in another world, even as you insist that we are all part of the same happy continuum of liberal values. But I see more discontinuity than you do between American conservatism and the mainstream of western values: I believe this conservatism is powerfully in the ascendant in the US-and very entrenched. Of course Rawls is a great liberal thinker-but he has made little impact in his own country. And don't get too starry-eyed over the US constitution's commitment to equality; it conspicuously omitted blacks.

In any case my position should not be characterised as pitching Europe against America. We will make no progress in building the world we both want without the US. But I believe that we should engage from a European base with an articulate view of our own values and goals. You, on the other hand, are so busy identifying trees-complexities, continuums and mosaics-that you lose sight of the wood.

Yours

Will

Dear Will

16th April 2002

I may have felt, listening to Steve Forbes decrying all taxes, that I was in a different world, but I don't agree with you that American conservatism is something right outside the mainstream of western values. That mainstream is very broad, and don't forget that the European right has some pretty far-out parts too.

There is a vital difference between a nuanced analysis and a hazy one. Far from failing to see the wood for the trees, I am pointing out the true shape of the wood. You argue that there are two separate and distinct value woods-Europe and America. I don't think that case is sustainable. And I don't think I need to believe that in order to argue for what we both believe in: a stronger Europe.

My big concern is this. The identities of political communities are most often defined against some Other: Britain against France in the 18th and 19th centuries, Poland against Russia and Germany, and so on. Europe historically defined itself against the Arab-Islamic world and against Asia; then, after 1945, against its own disastrous past and against the Soviet threat. Now the old Others have gone or faded, and the biggest temptation for Europe is to define itself against America. I think that would be disastrous, for the reasons that I've spelled out. And I fear that your current argument will contribute to the temptation, even if you don't succumb to it yourself. I want a Europe that defines itself not by who it is against but by what it is for.

Best

Tim