Monday, December 06, 2004

Fukuyama in a review of www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11805072_1 Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash Random House. 286 pp. $24.95 Reviewed by Francis Fukuyama   While I would very much like to be persuaded that Ash is right, I think that in the end he underestimates not only the depth of existing differences but the difficulty of coming to an agreement on a common agenda."   This is important because Fukuyama is the writer of "the end of history" and here is taking a very different perspective.   he continues In the American national story, force has been employed repeatedly to achieve ends that are ultimately interpreted as morally redemptive. This is especially true in the case of the Civil War, World War II, and the cold war. By contrast, much of present-day European consciousness is still shaped by the senseless slaughter of World War I and, in Germany, by the Nazi debacle. Thus, in the decades after 1945, the Germans sought to reclaim their moral standing by, as it were, unloading their sovereignty onto a host of international institutions and by turning their children into pacifists. Since this was a transformation we applauded, it should not surprise us that Germans now denounce the American strategy of preemptive war. and then To help bring this future closer, Ash proposes a set of common projects. They include bringing about political reform in the Middle East—where, he argues, Americans and Europeans differ not on ends but only on means; addressing environmental threats like global warming; and, most importantly, dealing with global poverty and underdevelopment. Even the Bush administration, Ash argues, has seen these last conditions as an underlying cause of terrorism, and they offer especially fruitful occasions for trans-Atlantic cooperation and joint planning. This is one of those awkward paragraphs that give and take away as they cross logical categories. "underdevelopment" for example is a core word for increasing the power of the market commercial side of the world, without recognition that it is the expansionist (rather than justice seeking) side of action that leads to wars (my post about China and Japan in increasing competition.). The idea that alleviating poverty requires economic expansion is one of the fulcrum points, because more people disagree. Economic expansion undermines the environment and marginalizes some parentage of every population.   and how is this for pessimism. Not only is it inconceivable that any foreseeable Republican administration would place the environment or global poverty front and center in its foreign policy, there are good reasons for thinking that even a Democratic administration, even one led by John Kerry, would find it extremely difficult to arrive at a meeting of minds with Euro-Atlanticists.   And this is helpful   Americans tend to believe that September 11 represents only the beginning of a new age of nihilistic, mass-casualty terrorism, while Europeans tend to think of it as a single lucky shot, of a kind familiar to them through their experience with the IRA or the Baader-Meinhoff gang.   He ends with It would probably take the pressure of unforeseen future events, like a major terrorist attack in “old” Europe, or a wholesale domestic realignment that moves American politics sharply leftward, to put the Western Humpty-Dumpty back together again. In the meantime, Europeans who lay the blame for the current rift on the personality of George W. Bush have been looking in the wrong place. The idea that the problem is not (just)Bush is one we have to take seriously, including his view (see article) that Kerry would not have been able to solve the problems but would be constrained by (and participate in) many of the same trends.   To me this makes it more mandatory to participate in American politics and help bring about a real shift. This, to my mind, means helping Blue voters to be more understanding of what scares red voters, and helping red voters see that their interests are not served by  a unilateralist empire centered US that evades almost all the real issues, of jobs, income distribution, wealth distribution, environment and education.  another good reading.. http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/lsf/bonsignore1.htm> There is a whole law and lit movement that claims that good law must be good lit. if only that applied to psychiatry. 2:21:34 PM