Friday, August 08, 2003
Comic Relief in Cairo. How the Arab world is refusing to recognize the Iraqi Governing Council on the basis of it not having been " democratically elected "
A real hoot.
A real hoot.
TASHKENT DISPATCH
Steppe Back
by Robert Templer
Post date: 08.06.03
Issue date: 08.18.03
f you doubt our achievements, look at our buildings." This is the slogan of the moment in Uzbekistan, painted in letters three feet high on banners in the capital, Tashkent. Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, likes to think of himself as a latter-day Tamerlane, the conquering Central Asian emperor of the fourteenth century who uttered the phrase to boast of his extraordinary azure-tiled mosques. But the vast new ministries of the Uzbek capital, all mirrored glass and cheap moldings, hardly recall the grandeur of Central Asia's past. Instead, Tashkent's joyless boulevards, high fences, and bombastic palaces feel like Baghdad in better days.
It's not just the pompous architecture that evokes Iraq. Uzbekistan under Karimov is becoming an increasingly repressive and impoverished place, with a horrible human rights record. Economic power has been grabbed by a tiny corrupt elite who have enriched themselves on the back of an exploitative cotton industry. At least 6,000 people are in prison for their religious beliefs. Men who venture outside their homes wearing skullcaps and beards are arrested for being "wahhabis," the local term for anyone who spends too much time at the mosque. The police extract confessions through torture, and compliant judges sentence dissidents to lengthy terms in Jaslyk, a notorious prison camp where last year two religious detainees were boiled to death. An accident with a kettle, the government says. An example of systematic abuse of prisoners, says the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture.
Once, American conservatives allied themselves with Islamic extremists in Central Asia to fight Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union. Now, they are eagerly developing a friendship with a ruler little different than Brezhnev to fight Islamic extremists. In exchange for U.S. use of an isolated air base in southern Uzbekistan, Karimov has received hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance and a free ride on human rights and economic reform. Uzbekistan has agreed to make some minor political and economic adjustments, yet the past year has seen the Karimov government's repression and economic mismanagement worsen. The response from Washington has been silence and more money. This is money badly spent: U.S. support for Karimov will backfire, hurting U.S. interests in the region.
Conservatives have begun touting Karimov. As Stephen Schwartz wrote in a recent issue of The Weekly Standard, the United States "must support the Uzbeks in their internal as well as their external combat, and must repudiate the blandishments of the human rights industry."
But, far from helping in the fight against terrorism, this support is likely to spawn new extremists. Alan Kreuger, a Princeton economics professor, and Jitka Maleckova, a Middle East expert at Charles University in Prague, have found that, while it is difficult to demonstrate links between terrorism and poverty or education, there is a close correlation between countries producing terrorists and having a poor record of political rights and civil liberties. Freedom House ranked Uzbekistan just a little above Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This year, the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal put it one hundred forty-ninth on their joint rankings of economic freedom in 156 countries--worse than Burma. Indeed, Uzbekistan's mix of political and economic repression; underground Islamic movements; and a youthful, disillusioned, and unemployed population could prove fertile ground for terrorist recruiters.
There are some legitimate security concerns in Uzbekistan, but Karimov has blown them out of proportion to justify his hard-line rule. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a militant group the White House labeled as terrorist even before September 11, 2001, was decimated fighting alongside the Taliban in fall 2001. An underground group of Islamists known as Hizb-ut-Tahrir have never advocated violence in their call for a Central Asian Islamic caliphate.
These groups have relatively little backing right now, but their popular support is growing--mostly because of Karimov. The concentration of wealth and power in an ever-smaller number of hands close to the president, combined with increasing repression and a weakening economy, is fueling widespread discontent that could turn violent. Visiting officials who lecture Karimov on his economic failures are firmly reminded that his education was in the dismal science. Indeed, during Soviet times, he worked at the Uzbek branch of Gosplan, the central planning agency, where he shuffled goods from one unproductive factory to another while skimming a cut. That's still how he sees economic management. Last year, he effectively closed down Uzbekistan's bazaars, the wholesale markets that are the center of commerce, in an attempt, many believe, to enrich members of the government trying to control wholesale trade. He has had the government buy back, at their original price, businesses that were privatized years ago. Many businesses that are then taken over by families of politicians.
But economic mismanagement is only part of a pattern of ultimately self-destructive behavior by Karimov. He has fomented a rebellion in Tajikistan, armed Abdulrashid Dostum--a particularly vicious warlord in Afghanistan--and even bombed villages in Kyrgyzstan, a country he feels has been too lax in tackling Islamic groups. He has mined the once permeable borders of his country so that farmers visiting their cousins in neighboring countries across the hills have had their feet blown off. He has virtually closed Uzbekistan's borders to trade. Meanwhile, the corrupt and powerful benefit from their complete control over the few flourishing areas of the economy, such as cotton production.
All this has helped the radicals. For most people in Uzbekistan, particularly farmers, there is the same drudgery and abusive state control that existed under the Soviet Union but none of the educational or economic opportunities, medical care, or Black Sea vacations. During Soviet times, Uzbekistan was a well-developed industrial center, because Stalin placed heavy industry far from any frontier that could be overrun during a war. All that has gone, the victim of failed economic policies. Former mining towns, such as Angren at the edge of the Ferghana Valley, appear almost completely dead. There is no visible economy, no shops, no market stalls. Enterprising men go to Russia to work. Unfortunate young women get lured into jobs "waitressing" in Dubai.
As a result, across the country there is an increasing sense of economic failure, political paralysis, and popular discontent. It is now easy to find men in Tashkent who, though fond of their vodka and pork sausages, are drawn to the IMU, which had been a feeble movement, because the IMU is one of the only groups that has ever stood up to the government. Underground mosques are gaining in popularity, since they, like the IMU, are one of the only avenues open to people who wish to express their discontent over Karimov's corruption and mismanagement.
It might make more sense for the United States to tolerate Karimov's misrule if Uzbekistan were delivering important assets. But the long-term risks of uncritical support for Karimov, who has nothing in common with the United States other than a shared fear of Islamic extremism, do not outweigh the limited strategic benefits of a base in Uzbekistan. The Uzbek base is of little help to the Pentagon in the war on terrorism, since it already has bases in Afghanistan from which it can battle Al Qaeda offshoots, as well as in Kyrgyzstan for operations in other parts of Central Asia.
arimov, however, is prospering on the back of his new relationship with the United States. He can now ignore diplomats who, several years ago, used to raise concerns about human rights abuses and lack of economic reform. In 2002, the State Department issued a limp statement criticizing a fraudulent referendum Karimov held to extend his term in office. Two days after the statement was released, a senior American official announced a tripling of aid for Uzbekistan. Like Hosni Mubarak and other despots who regard themselves as indispensable to Washington, Karimov only has to make the occasional concession to the United States: A few prisoners may be released ahead of a presidential visit to Washington or a new nongovernmental organization may be allowed to register just as a U.S. aid package is under consideration.
The sort of real changes that are needed--changes that might bring democracy and economic opportunity to Uzbeks--will never occur as long as Karimov is running the country. And so a population that aspires to all things that the United States offers is starting to become sullen and resentful at the unquestioning support Washington gives their dictator. Moderate Muslims who want to worship in peace are finding all forms of religious expression and political opposition closed off to them except the underground mosques. Middle-class families are being squeezed out of their businesses by a rapaciously corrupt elite. Young men with no prospects are turning bitter and disillusioned. We know how this story ends.
Steppe Back
by Robert Templer
Post date: 08.06.03
Issue date: 08.18.03
f you doubt our achievements, look at our buildings." This is the slogan of the moment in Uzbekistan, painted in letters three feet high on banners in the capital, Tashkent. Uzbekistan's president, Islam Karimov, likes to think of himself as a latter-day Tamerlane, the conquering Central Asian emperor of the fourteenth century who uttered the phrase to boast of his extraordinary azure-tiled mosques. But the vast new ministries of the Uzbek capital, all mirrored glass and cheap moldings, hardly recall the grandeur of Central Asia's past. Instead, Tashkent's joyless boulevards, high fences, and bombastic palaces feel like Baghdad in better days.
It's not just the pompous architecture that evokes Iraq. Uzbekistan under Karimov is becoming an increasingly repressive and impoverished place, with a horrible human rights record. Economic power has been grabbed by a tiny corrupt elite who have enriched themselves on the back of an exploitative cotton industry. At least 6,000 people are in prison for their religious beliefs. Men who venture outside their homes wearing skullcaps and beards are arrested for being "wahhabis," the local term for anyone who spends too much time at the mosque. The police extract confessions through torture, and compliant judges sentence dissidents to lengthy terms in Jaslyk, a notorious prison camp where last year two religious detainees were boiled to death. An accident with a kettle, the government says. An example of systematic abuse of prisoners, says the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture.
Once, American conservatives allied themselves with Islamic extremists in Central Asia to fight Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union. Now, they are eagerly developing a friendship with a ruler little different than Brezhnev to fight Islamic extremists. In exchange for U.S. use of an isolated air base in southern Uzbekistan, Karimov has received hundreds of millions of dollars in assistance and a free ride on human rights and economic reform. Uzbekistan has agreed to make some minor political and economic adjustments, yet the past year has seen the Karimov government's repression and economic mismanagement worsen. The response from Washington has been silence and more money. This is money badly spent: U.S. support for Karimov will backfire, hurting U.S. interests in the region.
Conservatives have begun touting Karimov. As Stephen Schwartz wrote in a recent issue of The Weekly Standard, the United States "must support the Uzbeks in their internal as well as their external combat, and must repudiate the blandishments of the human rights industry."
But, far from helping in the fight against terrorism, this support is likely to spawn new extremists. Alan Kreuger, a Princeton economics professor, and Jitka Maleckova, a Middle East expert at Charles University in Prague, have found that, while it is difficult to demonstrate links between terrorism and poverty or education, there is a close correlation between countries producing terrorists and having a poor record of political rights and civil liberties. Freedom House ranked Uzbekistan just a little above Saddam Hussein's Iraq. This year, the Heritage Foundation and The Wall Street Journal put it one hundred forty-ninth on their joint rankings of economic freedom in 156 countries--worse than Burma. Indeed, Uzbekistan's mix of political and economic repression; underground Islamic movements; and a youthful, disillusioned, and unemployed population could prove fertile ground for terrorist recruiters.
There are some legitimate security concerns in Uzbekistan, but Karimov has blown them out of proportion to justify his hard-line rule. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), a militant group the White House labeled as terrorist even before September 11, 2001, was decimated fighting alongside the Taliban in fall 2001. An underground group of Islamists known as Hizb-ut-Tahrir have never advocated violence in their call for a Central Asian Islamic caliphate.
These groups have relatively little backing right now, but their popular support is growing--mostly because of Karimov. The concentration of wealth and power in an ever-smaller number of hands close to the president, combined with increasing repression and a weakening economy, is fueling widespread discontent that could turn violent. Visiting officials who lecture Karimov on his economic failures are firmly reminded that his education was in the dismal science. Indeed, during Soviet times, he worked at the Uzbek branch of Gosplan, the central planning agency, where he shuffled goods from one unproductive factory to another while skimming a cut. That's still how he sees economic management. Last year, he effectively closed down Uzbekistan's bazaars, the wholesale markets that are the center of commerce, in an attempt, many believe, to enrich members of the government trying to control wholesale trade. He has had the government buy back, at their original price, businesses that were privatized years ago. Many businesses that are then taken over by families of politicians.
But economic mismanagement is only part of a pattern of ultimately self-destructive behavior by Karimov. He has fomented a rebellion in Tajikistan, armed Abdulrashid Dostum--a particularly vicious warlord in Afghanistan--and even bombed villages in Kyrgyzstan, a country he feels has been too lax in tackling Islamic groups. He has mined the once permeable borders of his country so that farmers visiting their cousins in neighboring countries across the hills have had their feet blown off. He has virtually closed Uzbekistan's borders to trade. Meanwhile, the corrupt and powerful benefit from their complete control over the few flourishing areas of the economy, such as cotton production.
All this has helped the radicals. For most people in Uzbekistan, particularly farmers, there is the same drudgery and abusive state control that existed under the Soviet Union but none of the educational or economic opportunities, medical care, or Black Sea vacations. During Soviet times, Uzbekistan was a well-developed industrial center, because Stalin placed heavy industry far from any frontier that could be overrun during a war. All that has gone, the victim of failed economic policies. Former mining towns, such as Angren at the edge of the Ferghana Valley, appear almost completely dead. There is no visible economy, no shops, no market stalls. Enterprising men go to Russia to work. Unfortunate young women get lured into jobs "waitressing" in Dubai.
As a result, across the country there is an increasing sense of economic failure, political paralysis, and popular discontent. It is now easy to find men in Tashkent who, though fond of their vodka and pork sausages, are drawn to the IMU, which had been a feeble movement, because the IMU is one of the only groups that has ever stood up to the government. Underground mosques are gaining in popularity, since they, like the IMU, are one of the only avenues open to people who wish to express their discontent over Karimov's corruption and mismanagement.
It might make more sense for the United States to tolerate Karimov's misrule if Uzbekistan were delivering important assets. But the long-term risks of uncritical support for Karimov, who has nothing in common with the United States other than a shared fear of Islamic extremism, do not outweigh the limited strategic benefits of a base in Uzbekistan. The Uzbek base is of little help to the Pentagon in the war on terrorism, since it already has bases in Afghanistan from which it can battle Al Qaeda offshoots, as well as in Kyrgyzstan for operations in other parts of Central Asia.
arimov, however, is prospering on the back of his new relationship with the United States. He can now ignore diplomats who, several years ago, used to raise concerns about human rights abuses and lack of economic reform. In 2002, the State Department issued a limp statement criticizing a fraudulent referendum Karimov held to extend his term in office. Two days after the statement was released, a senior American official announced a tripling of aid for Uzbekistan. Like Hosni Mubarak and other despots who regard themselves as indispensable to Washington, Karimov only has to make the occasional concession to the United States: A few prisoners may be released ahead of a presidential visit to Washington or a new nongovernmental organization may be allowed to register just as a U.S. aid package is under consideration.
The sort of real changes that are needed--changes that might bring democracy and economic opportunity to Uzbeks--will never occur as long as Karimov is running the country. And so a population that aspires to all things that the United States offers is starting to become sullen and resentful at the unquestioning support Washington gives their dictator. Moderate Muslims who want to worship in peace are finding all forms of religious expression and political opposition closed off to them except the underground mosques. Middle-class families are being squeezed out of their businesses by a rapaciously corrupt elite. Young men with no prospects are turning bitter and disillusioned. We know how this story ends.
WSJ Opinion Page
Our Friends the Saudis
Riyadh's faithlessness becomes an American political issue.
Friday, August 8, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
There was a day when those words didn't invite cynicism. Since World War II, the mutual interests involved in America's need for Saudi oil and the Saudis' need for American protection created a happy marriage of convenience. Recent events on Capitol Hill, however, suggest that too many inside the U.S. and Saudi governments have not yet grasped that this old model was forever buried in the rubble of 9/11.
It's not just that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. It's that subsequent investigations have exposed the nastier aspects of a Saudi regime that has tried to straddle the fence between an America it knows it needs and an extremist Wahhabi Islam movement it only now seems to realize it can't buy off.
A hearing last Thursday before the Senate Government Affairs Committee exposed the two large public questions at issue: Whether the Saudis are doing all they should to crack down on terrorists and their support network, and whether our own government has been too inclined to look the other way when they don't.
Let's start with two uncontested facts. The first is that Saudi Arabia is the "epicenter" of funding for terrorism in general and al Qaeda in particular. That's not our word. That was the Senate testimony only a month ago of David Aufhauser, general counsel for the Treasury Department.
The other disturbing fact is that two years after 9/11 the Saudis still have not yet done all they need to do to stop the flow of Saudi money to the world-wide terror network. Again this is not our judgment. Secretary of State Colin Powell said as much in a radio interview earlier this week in which he applauded the Saudis for their "especially aggressive" cooperation but noted America still has "issues" with them on terrorist financing.
Now, we're prepared to believe the Saudis when they say they're helping us more than most Americans know. In recent weeks, they have arrested or killed a number of al Qaeda operatives and cracked down on extremist clerics. The FBI's acting director for counterterrorism, John Pistole, confirmed to the Senate that Saudi cooperation has been "unprecedented," though he says "the jury's still out" on terror financing.
Mr. Pistole, moreover, was careful to date Saudi cooperation to very recently--the May 12 bombing in Riyadh. Like others, he saw the bombing as a "wake-up call" to the House of Saud. And he added that a particular FBI sore spot was the Saudi government's continued willingness to pick up the legal tab for Saudi citizens charged here in connection with terrorist investigations, something the FBI views as "tantamount to buying off a witness."
Richard Newcomb, director of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, raised equally disquieting questions. Essentially he confirmed that in a number of instances where Treasury had recommended that specific Saudi charities be placed on the terror watch list, its recommendation was rejected by the U.S. interagency group responsible. Sometimes this was for appropriate reasons, such as an ongoing FBI investigation. But frequently, he confirmed, it was because of objections from the State Department.
Mr. Newcomb made clear that Treasury does not recommend a charity for the terror list without ironclad evidence that can stand up in federal court. No doubt there are legitimate law-enforcement and intelligence concerns about making all of this public. But there's no reason for the Bush Administration not to make good on Mr. Newcomb's promise, stated at an open hearing, to give Maine Republican Susan Collins an answer to her more telling question: How often were Treasury's recommendations about Saudi charities vetoed?
The larger point is that America's post-9/11 relationship with Saudi Arabia is no longer a matter of private diplomacy that can be resolved by President Bush and Prince Bandar at the Crawford ranch. To the contrary, the American public and its representatives are now involved, and properly so given the consequences of terror.
The White House is simply not going to be able to get away with the same old secrecy. The furor over the Administration's recent insistence on redacting 28 pages of a 9/11 report related to the Saudis has made that clear enough. The Saudi question has finally given opportunistic Democrats a chance to get to the President's political right on fighting terror.
We are not indifferent to the worry that destabilizing the regime in Saudi Arabia could lead to its replacement by one far more hostile to U.S. interests. But if Saudi foot-dragging these last two years has taught us anything, it's that the divided royal family in Riyadh will never be able to muster the resolve to assist on terror without more or less constant U.S. pressure.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, President Bush vowed that henceforth nations will have to choose between America and its enemies. Right now Americans need an equally public demonstration that this applies to the Saudis too.
Our Friends the Saudis
Riyadh's faithlessness becomes an American political issue.
Friday, August 8, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
There was a day when those words didn't invite cynicism. Since World War II, the mutual interests involved in America's need for Saudi oil and the Saudis' need for American protection created a happy marriage of convenience. Recent events on Capitol Hill, however, suggest that too many inside the U.S. and Saudi governments have not yet grasped that this old model was forever buried in the rubble of 9/11.
It's not just that 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals. It's that subsequent investigations have exposed the nastier aspects of a Saudi regime that has tried to straddle the fence between an America it knows it needs and an extremist Wahhabi Islam movement it only now seems to realize it can't buy off.
A hearing last Thursday before the Senate Government Affairs Committee exposed the two large public questions at issue: Whether the Saudis are doing all they should to crack down on terrorists and their support network, and whether our own government has been too inclined to look the other way when they don't.
Let's start with two uncontested facts. The first is that Saudi Arabia is the "epicenter" of funding for terrorism in general and al Qaeda in particular. That's not our word. That was the Senate testimony only a month ago of David Aufhauser, general counsel for the Treasury Department.
The other disturbing fact is that two years after 9/11 the Saudis still have not yet done all they need to do to stop the flow of Saudi money to the world-wide terror network. Again this is not our judgment. Secretary of State Colin Powell said as much in a radio interview earlier this week in which he applauded the Saudis for their "especially aggressive" cooperation but noted America still has "issues" with them on terrorist financing.
Now, we're prepared to believe the Saudis when they say they're helping us more than most Americans know. In recent weeks, they have arrested or killed a number of al Qaeda operatives and cracked down on extremist clerics. The FBI's acting director for counterterrorism, John Pistole, confirmed to the Senate that Saudi cooperation has been "unprecedented," though he says "the jury's still out" on terror financing.
Mr. Pistole, moreover, was careful to date Saudi cooperation to very recently--the May 12 bombing in Riyadh. Like others, he saw the bombing as a "wake-up call" to the House of Saud. And he added that a particular FBI sore spot was the Saudi government's continued willingness to pick up the legal tab for Saudi citizens charged here in connection with terrorist investigations, something the FBI views as "tantamount to buying off a witness."
Richard Newcomb, director of Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, raised equally disquieting questions. Essentially he confirmed that in a number of instances where Treasury had recommended that specific Saudi charities be placed on the terror watch list, its recommendation was rejected by the U.S. interagency group responsible. Sometimes this was for appropriate reasons, such as an ongoing FBI investigation. But frequently, he confirmed, it was because of objections from the State Department.
Mr. Newcomb made clear that Treasury does not recommend a charity for the terror list without ironclad evidence that can stand up in federal court. No doubt there are legitimate law-enforcement and intelligence concerns about making all of this public. But there's no reason for the Bush Administration not to make good on Mr. Newcomb's promise, stated at an open hearing, to give Maine Republican Susan Collins an answer to her more telling question: How often were Treasury's recommendations about Saudi charities vetoed?
The larger point is that America's post-9/11 relationship with Saudi Arabia is no longer a matter of private diplomacy that can be resolved by President Bush and Prince Bandar at the Crawford ranch. To the contrary, the American public and its representatives are now involved, and properly so given the consequences of terror.
The White House is simply not going to be able to get away with the same old secrecy. The furor over the Administration's recent insistence on redacting 28 pages of a 9/11 report related to the Saudis has made that clear enough. The Saudi question has finally given opportunistic Democrats a chance to get to the President's political right on fighting terror.
We are not indifferent to the worry that destabilizing the regime in Saudi Arabia could lead to its replacement by one far more hostile to U.S. interests. But if Saudi foot-dragging these last two years has taught us anything, it's that the divided royal family in Riyadh will never be able to muster the resolve to assist on terror without more or less constant U.S. pressure.
In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, President Bush vowed that henceforth nations will have to choose between America and its enemies. Right now Americans need an equally public demonstration that this applies to the Saudis too.
Thursday, August 07, 2003
Measuring Achievement
The West and the Rest
By Charles Murray
Posted: Wednesday, August 6, 2003
ARTICLES
The Public Interest
Publication Date: June 1, 2003
Eurocentrism has in recent years joined racism and sexism as one of the postmodern mortal sins. The Left's fight against Eurocentrism explains why students in elementary school are likely to know more about Mayan culture than French culture, and why liberal arts students at elite universities can graduate without taking a course that discusses the Renaissance. The assumption that Eurocentrism is a real problem accounts for the reluctance of many to celebrate Western culture-or even defend it.
Part of the Eurocentric critique is based on an open hostility to Western culture. Other cultures, it is claimed, were more in tune with the earth, fostered more nurturing personal relationships, or were more cooperative than the despoiling, competitive Europeans. These are not positions to be refuted by logic and evidence-the West's arbitrary allegiance to "logic" and "evidence" is one of its supposed evils. Another rationale for increasing attention to non-Western cultures is simple historical accuracy and balance. This is the "Eurocentric hypothesis," which might be put as follows: When Westerners set out to survey history, they conveniently find that most of it was made by people like themselves. Sometimes this parochialism is fostered by a prescribed canon of fine art, music, and literature that marginalizes non-Western traditions. Other times it is a function of ignorance, which leads Western historians to slight the scientific and technological achievements of other parts of the world. In either case, the result is a skewed vision that does not reflect real European preeminence, but rather Eurocentric bias.
This argument is plausible. It is easy to mock today's New Age deference to the Mayans, but the great civilizations of East Asia, South Asia, and the Arab world left splendid legacies in the arts and sciences. The West may have been pivotally important, but has it been too much at center stage?
Measuring Excellence
The data I collected for a book on human accomplishment left me with a way to explore that question. The data consist of inventories of people and events assembled from major histories and encyclopedic sources, covering the period from 800 BC to 1950. Each inventory was based on a dozen or more sources widely regarded as authoritative, drawn from a mix of countries. For example, the Western visual-arts inventory used 14 sources from the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, ranging in length from single-volume histories such as Janson's History of Art to the 34-volume Grove Dictionary of Art. The methods are described fully in my forthcoming book. Here, I limit myself to a few basics.
The science inventories (subdivided into astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics, mathematics, medicine, and technology) were worldwide-that is, Chinese and Arab scientists were part of the same inventory that contained Copernicus and Newton. My working assumption was that historians of science are able to identify important scientific achievements independently of the culture in which they occur.
The arts inventories (subdivided into the visual arts, music, and literature) and the philosophy inventory could not be worldwide. Even though some sources for these topics purported to cover the entire world, the weight given to different artistic traditions involves judgments and preferences in ways that accounts of scientific accomplishment do not. It could not be assumed, for example, that a history of the visual arts written by a German would use the same standards for Chinese or French art as for German art. To avoid the problem of cultural chauvinism within the Western world, I selected sources balanced among the major Western countries (along with other precautions discussed in the book). For non-Western countries, the most direct way to sidestep this problem was to prepare independent inventories. For philosophy, I prepared separate inventories for the West, China, and India. For the visual arts, I made use of distinct inventories for the West, China, and Japan. For literature, I used separate inventories for the West, the Arab world, China, India, and Japan. Music was restricted to the West. Altogether, 4,002 people qualified as "significant figures," defined as those who were mentioned in at least 50 percent of the sources, in one or another of the inventories.
As the entry point for exploring the Eurocentric hypothesis, consider the simplest of all questions: If the 4,002 significant figures are divided into three groups consisting of European peoples, people from the rest of the West (the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand), and non-Western peoples, how are they distributed over the period from 800 BC to 1950? Figure 1 below shows the results.
The story line implied by the graph is that little happened from 800 BC until the middle of the fifteenth century, that really intense levels of accomplishment didn't begin until a few centuries ago (fully half of all the significant figures make their appearance after 1800), and that from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, almost everything came from Europe. As late as the 1890s, 81 percent of the newly entering significant figures were European. Thirteen of the remaining 19 percent were from North America. But if this is the most direct story line, it is also one that leaves open many reasons to suspect that various factors are misleading us. The rest of the discussion works through the major possibilities.
Populations and Prejudices
The bulge in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries shown in figure 1 will prompt many readers to ask whether we are seeing the effects of "epochcentrism" (paying excessive attention to people in the recent past) and a growing population. A detailed answer to these questions consumes the better part of two chapters in my book. The short answer is that these phenomena do have a limited influence on the data, but do not bear importantly on the Eurocentric hypothesis.
The problem of epochcentrism is concentrated in the recent past. Cutting off the inventories at 1950 eliminates most of it, and the rest is concentrated in the first half of the twentieth century. In any case, epochcentrism applies equally to the Western and non-Western worlds. You may visualize figure 1 stopping at 1900, or visualize it with the totals for all three groupings somewhat reduced. Neither alternative changes the overall shape of graph.
In the case of population change, it is true that a country of 100 million people tends to produce more significant figures than a country of 10 million people, and the growth in Western significant figures is related to the increase in Western population. But the non-West has always had a larger population than the West, and in raw numbers, population growth in the last three centuries was greater outside the West than within the West. A revised graph that takes population into account would make Western dominance since 1400 greater, not smaller.
Geniuses and Giants
The most obvious objection to the story told by figure 1 is that a head count of significant figures is the wrong way to think about the distribution of accomplishment. The reason for teaching ancient Greek philosophy is not that 32 significant figures in Western philosophy come from ancient Greece, but that 2 of those 32 were Plato and Aristotle. The reason for teaching nineteenth-century European literature is not that it produced 293 significant figures, but that the 293 include writers of the stature of Tolstoy, Hugo, Keats, and Heine.
True enough. But as history has worked out, the ages rich in giants have also been rich in near-giants and the rest of the significant figures who make up the inventory. This point can be made more fully by examining the actual rosters of significant figures, but for the sake of brevity consider what happens when the raw numbers are weighted by the eminence of the people in question. The "eminence scores" I calculated for the significant figures used techniques for measuring eminence-essentially, by measuring the amount of attention given to people-that were originated by polymath Francis Galton in the 1860s and have been refined by succeeding generations of scholars. The specific method I employed produced scores ranging from 1 to 100.
These scores have the potential to shift the pattern shown in figure 1 substantially-one Aristotle, with his eminence score of one hundred, counts the same as a hundred Antiphons, and one Shakespeare counts the same as a hundred Dubose Heywards. Because I prepared separate inventories for the non-Western traditions, Eurocentrism cannot deflate the scores of the non-Western giants in the arts-Shakespeare and the Chinese poet Du Fu both have scores of one hundred, for example. However, as one can see in figure 2 below, employing eminence scores in place of a head count does not change the main outlines of the distribution of accomplishment shown in figure 1, either across time or geography.
The second graph shows an increased visibility of non-Western cultures after about 500 AD. However, the main point of Western dominance after 1400 persists, with West meaning Europe until the late nineteenth century.
The effects differ across inventories, but only in the case of the Western philosophy inventory, where the eminence scores drastically raise the importance of ancient Greece, does the balance between pre- and post-1400 visibly shift. Take Western literature as an example. Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles are giants of Western literature-but the post-1400 era has its own giants (Shakespeare, Goethe, and Moliere, for example) plus dozens of other near-giants who merit attention, compared with only a handful of near-giants from ancient times. In the end, a student with unlimited time to study Western literature has as much great literature post-1400 as pre-1400 (more, by most estimates), and a vastly larger number of works that are worthy of study. Taking eminence into account does not (again, with the exception of Western philosophy) radically elevate the importance of pre-Renaissance accomplishment.
An examination of significant figures in the sciences shows the same profile, but with even fewer people coming from outside the West. One might object that the role of the non-West is underestimated because of anonymous scientific discoveries, which might be more numerous in China, India, or the Arab world than in the West. Another possibility is that the number of significant figures after the mid-1800s is inflated because, as scientific teams have become more common, more scientists are identified with a single invention or discovery. Both possibilities may be checked by turning to the inventory of "significant events" in the sciences, compiled in the same way as the inventories of significant figures. (Specifically, a significant event refers to one mentioned in at least 50 percent of a large set of chronologies of scientific events.) An inventory of significant events shows the same Western dominance as the inventory of significant figures. Europe and North America together account for 97 percent of both the significant figures and significant events.
The Record in the Sciences
Are these "Eurocentric" numbers? In science as in the arts, we have grown accustomed to hearing the claim that the European contribution is overrated. In his Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), David Landes quotes a historian of Chinese science, Nathan Sivin, to represent the essence of the new historical perspective:
The historical discoveries of the last generation have left no basis for the old myths that the ancestry of modern science is exclusively European and that before modern times no other civilization was able to do science except under European influence. We have gradually come to understand that scientific traditions differing from the European tradition in fundamental respects-from techniques, to institutional settings, to views of nature and man's relation to it-existed in the Islamic world, India, and China, and in smaller civilizations as well. It has become clear that these traditions and the tradition of the Occident, far from being separate streams, have interacted more or less continuously from their beginnings until they were replaced by local versions of the modern science that they have all helped to form.
Landes then gives the essence of the countervailing view in his response:
This [Sivin's view] is the new myth, put forward as a given. Like other myths, it aims to shape the truth to higher ends, to form opinion in some other cause. In this instance, the myth is true in pointing out that modern science, in the course of its development, took up knowledge discovered by other civilizations; and that it absorbed and combined such knowledge and know-how with European findings. The myth is wrong, however, in implying a continuing symmetrical interaction among diverse civilizations.
In the beginning, when China and others were ahead, almost all the transmission went one way, from the outside to Europe. That was Europe's great virtue: unlike China, Europe was a learner... Later on, of course, the story was different: Once Europe had invented modern science, the current flowed back, though not without resistance. Here too, the myth misleads by implying a kind of equal, undifferentiated contribution to the common treasure. The vast bulk of modern science was of Europe's making... Not only did non-Western science contribute just about nothing (though there was more there than Europeans knew) but at that point it was incapable of participating, so far had it fallen behind or taken the wrong turning. This was no common stream.
This may seem to be one of those conflicts between experts that a layman is unable to assess, but it is not. On the contrary, it is easy to reach an independent judgment about allegations of Eurocentrism if one subjects the allegations to close scrutiny. Reread Sivin's passage, and note how effectively his language evokes the image of an exaggerated European contribution without ever specifying that it is in fact exaggerated. This is standard practice. Two other examples demonstrate how the evocation differs from the evidence actually presented. The first is taken from the publicity copy of the 1998 edition of Arnold Pacey's Technology in World Civilization:
Most general histories of technology are Eurocentrist, focusing on a main line of Western technology that stretches from the Greeks through the computer. In this very different book, Arnold Pacey takes a global view ... portray[ing] the process as a complex dialectic by which inventions borrowed from one culture are adopted to suit another.
The other is from the publicity copy of the 1999 edition of an introductory college history text, Science and Technology in World History by James McClellan and Harold Dorn:
Without neglecting important figures of Western science such as Newton and Einstein, the authors demonstrate the great achievements of non-Western cultures. They remind us that scientific traditions took root in China, India, and Central and South America, as well as in a series of Near Eastern empires.
Lest we fail to get the point, the publisher adds a blurb from a professor at Stanford, who tells us that
Professors McClellan and Dorn have written a survey that does not present the historical development of science simply as a Western phenomenon but as the result of wide-ranging human curiosity about nature and attempts to harness its powers in order to serve human needs.
But do these two books in fact challenge my assertion that 97 percent of both significant figures and events in the sciences occurred in Europe and North America? Pacey's Technology in World Civilization is a wide-ranging account of the ways in which the recipients of new technology do not apply it passively, but adapt it to their particular situation. With this interaction between technology and culture as his topic, Pacey does indeed spend more time on non-Western civilizations than would a historian describing who invented what, where, and when. For example, he has a chapter on railroad empires, with 18 pages of material on how railroads developed in Russia, Japan, China, and India. But who invented the railroad engine, tracks, trains, and the infrastructure of complex railroads? All this occurred in England.
Similarly, McClellan and Dorn's Science and Technology in World History presents material on non-Western societies. But McClellan and Dorn, unlike Pacey, are writing a history of science. The 10 scientists with the most index entries are, in order, Aristotle, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Ptolemy, Kepler, Descartes, Euclid, and Archimedes-a wholly conventional roster of stars. Of all the scientific figures mentioned in McClellan and Dorn's index, 97 percent come from Europe and the United States-precisely the same percentage yielded by the inventories I compiled.
There is nothing wrong with the historiography of either of these books. Both are consistent with the sources used to compile my science inventories. The contrast between the packaging for the books and the facts within them is emblematic of our times. The packaging illustrates how intellectual fashion says things should be. The facts contained therein reflect the way things really are.
The reason that any responsible history of science and technology will end up with these numbers is that historians of science and technology are all working with the same data which are, for the period we are exploring, reasonably complete. Gaps still exist, but none of them is large enough to do more than tweak the details of the general portrait of historical achievements.
Herein lies a difference between the layman and the specialist. Is the average European or American often unaware of the technological sophistication achieved by non-Western cultures? No doubt about it, and in this sense the charge of Eurocentrism is often appropriate. But what is really at issue is whether historians of science and technology in the last half-century are aware of the non-Western record-and it is clear that they are. Europeans used the works of the great Arab scholar-scientists of a millennium ago as the foundations for European science (which is why so many Arab scholars are known by their Latinized names). The great works of Indian mathematicians have long since been translated and incorporated into the history of mathematics, just as the works of Chinese naturalists and astronomers have been translated and incorporated into the narratives of those fields.
In recognizing how thoroughly non-Western science and technology have been explored, let's also give credit where credit is due: By and large, it has not been Asian or Arab scholars, fighting for recognition against Western indifference, who were responsible for piecing together the record of accomplishment by non-Western cultures, but Westerners themselves. Imperialists they may have been, but one of the byproducts of that imperialism was a large cadre of Continental, British, and American scholars who, fascinated by the exotic civilizations of Arabia and East Asia, set about uncovering evidence of their accomplishments that inheritors of those civilizations had themselves neglected. Joseph Needham's seven-volume history of Chinese science and technology is a case in point. Another is George Sarton's Introduction to the History of Science, five large volumes published from 1927 to 1948, all of which are devoted to science before the end of the fourteenth century-including meticulous accounts of scientific accomplishment in the Arab world, India, and China.
Of the remaining ways in which one could attenuate the 97-percent proportion I assign to both significant figures and significant events in the sciences, my proposition is that none work. I attach two provisos to that claim: First, attempts to add new events to the non-Western roster must consist of discoveries, inventions, and other forms of "firsts." No fair adding the first Indian suspension bridge to a catalog of Indian technology if suspension bridges were already in use elsewhere.
The other proviso is that the rules for inclusion of a person or event must be applied evenly. If one augments the inventory of non-Western accomplishment by going to Joseph Needham's seven-volume account of Chinese science and technology, one must also augment the inventory of Western accomplishment by going to comparably detailed histories dealing with German science (for example)-in other words, no fair using the naked eye to search for Western accomplishments and a microscope to search for non-Western ones.
If one observes these two constraints, the Western dominance of people and events cannot be reduced more than fractionally. For every new non-Western person or event that is added to the list, dozens of new entries qualify for the Western list, and the relative proportions assigned to the West and the non-West do not change. The differential may become even more extreme, because the reservoir of Western scientific accomplishment that did not qualify for the inventories is so immense.
The Record in the Arts
In compiling the inventories for the arts, I assumed that my method precluded direct comparisons of artistic activity in the West and non-West. It did indeed prevent comparisons that would assign specific percentages to the West and non-West of the type presented for the sciences. But nevertheless a few observations are possible.
The Western arts inventories are much larger in total numbers than their non-Western counterparts. In the visual arts, the West produced 479 significant figures, compared to just 111 and 81 for China and Japan respectively. In literature, the West has 834 significant figures, compared to 82, 83, 43, and 85 for the Arab world, China, India, and Japan respectively. Is this a function of different levels of detail in the sources? Not in any readily apparent way. Encyclopedic sources specific to each inventory were used to establish the universe of potential significant figures. The mix of sources for each inventory-encyclopedic sources versus major histories, for example-was comparable across inventories. For whatever reason, references of comparable scope-encyclopedic sources compared with encyclopedic sources, histories compared with histories-of art and literature in non-Western cultures do not contain nearly as many people as sources dealing with the West. As far as I was able to determine, the pattern applies equally to sources written by the native-born of a given culture and sources written by foreigners.
How might the differences in numbers falsely underestimate the contribution of the non-West? No important parts of the world have been left out-the inventories include all of the countries with long-standing traditions of named writers, painters, sculptors, and composers. Any alternative conclusion requires that we assume that the distribution of artistic excellence among the significant figures is utterly different in Western versus non-Western cultures, and that the quality of artists in the non-Western traditions is so much higher than in the West that even though their numbers are far fewer, virtually all of them are worthy of extended study, whereas only a small proportion of the significant figures of the West are worthy of study. But this line of argument has neither a rationale nor evidence.
What if we were to discard artists as the unit of analysis, and substitute artistic works for assessing relative contributions? If we limit ourselves to attributed works, the substitution of works for artists will have no effect, or will be in the West's favor. The authors, composers, painters, and sculptors of the post-1400 West were, as a rule, prodigiously productive. Compare the body of work by Shakespeare or Goethe with that of Li Bo or Murasaki; that of Michelangelo or Picasso with that of Sesshu or Zhao Mengfu; and so on down the list from the giants to the merely excellent. At every level, the aggregate number of major works is at least as large for Western as for non-Western artists.
Shall we consider lost works? Some of the most highly regarded Chinese artists have no surviving works at all. But the West similarly has painters such as Zeuxis, Polygnotos, and Apelles, considered by their contemporaries as artistic equals to the sculptor Phidias. None of their paintings survive, nor does any work of their lesser contemporaries. Even in literature, the masterpieces the West retains from ancient days are probably outnumbered by the ones we have lost. We know that Euripides wrote at least 90 plays, for example, and only 18 of them survive. One of the greatest of the surviving Greek dramas, The Trojan Women, won only second prize in a contemporary competition. We know nothing about the play that took first place. Inserting a correction for lost works will not redress the imbalance between West and non-West.
Adding anonymous works also won't alter the picture. In literature, many non-Western cultures have traditions of authorless folklore, but so does Europe, with separate and rich traditions ranging from ancient Greece through the Norse Sagas and into the Renaissance, with contributions from every European language. In the visual arts, countries such as India and Persia have important bodies of unattributed painting and sculpture, but so do the countries of Europe, embracing virtually all the sculpture, paintings, and mosaics from the fall of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages.
Expanding the definition of artistic accomplishment to include other forms of art that existed in East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and pre-Columbian America runs into the same problem. Shall we add architecture, a category omitted from the visual-arts inventory? Certain structures in Asia and Central America belong on any list of great architectural accomplishment. But the entire roster of such architectural landmarks from outside Europe will be exceeded by comparable landmarks in medieval and Renaissance Europe alone, before we even look at European architectural accomplishment since then. Shall we introduce the decorative arts and crafts into the inventory of art works? Whatever gems of fine artisanship are introduced from Asia, Africa, and the Americas are going to be matched in quality and outnumbered by orders of magnitude by those originating in Europe. Consider the sheer volume of fine artisanship in stone masonry, stained glass, tapestry, and painted decoration from European churches and cathedrals alone.
Just as in the sciences, whatever mechanism one uses to try to augment the non-Western contribution in the arts will backfire if the same selection rules are applied to the West. It is impossible to be as precise about the relative contributions of West and non-West in the arts as in the sciences, but the generalization seems as valid: A balanced presentation of human accomplishment in the arts will naturally devote the large bulk of its attention to the West, and a large portion of this to Europe from the Renaissance onward.
The End of European Dominance?
I have gone to considerable lengths to document facts about the geographic and chronological distributions of human accomplishment that are controversial mainly because of intellectual fashions, not because the facts themselves can be disputed. Now is the time to introduce some cautions about the interpretation of those distributions.
The first caution is directed to those of us in the United States. Many Americans combine our civilization with that of Europe under the broad banner of "the West," but this is presumptuous. In his landmark Configurations of Culture Growth, written during the 1930s, anthropologist A.L. Kroeber observed that "it is curious how little science of highest quality America has produced"-a startling claim to Americans who have become accustomed to American scientific dominance since 1950. But Kroeber was right. Compared to Europe, the American contribution was still small then. In the arts as well, a large dose of American humility is in order. Much as we may love Twain, Whitman, Whistler, and Gershwin, they are easily lost in the ocean of the European oeuvre. What we Americans are pleased to call Western civilization was overwhelmingly European civilization through 1950.
The second caution is not to place too much weight on the numbers. The number of lost works and forgotten artists in the period before 1400 would, if taken into account, increase the pre-1400 proportion somewhat. Not a lot-even very generous estimates of the bias created by lost works only modify the dominance of modern Europe-but some. It is also important to remember that the period prior to 1400 may have had comparatively few significant figures, but it was rich in giants.
Furthermore, much of that genius came from outside Europe. Aristotle had different insights into the human condition than Confucius and Buddha, but not necessarily more profound ones. Those who are in a position to make such judgments describe the greatest poetry from China as among the greatest poetry ever written. A fine Japanese rock garden or ceremonial tea bowl expresses an aesthetic sensibility as subtle as humans have ever known.
The third caution is to remember that many civilizations arose independently of Europe, and rose to similar technological levels-developing tools and techniques that enabled them to build large structures and road networks, develop complex agricultural practices and distribution mechanisms, conduct commerce, and build thriving cities. Evidence scattered from Angkor Wat to Machu Picchu attests to the ability of human beings throughout the world to achieve amazing technological feats.
And yet the underlying reality is that Europe since 1400 has overwhelmingly dominated accomplishment in both the arts and sciences. The estimates of the European contribution are robust. I write at a time when Europe's run appears to be over. Bleaker yet, there is reason to wonder whether European culture as we have known it will even exist by the end of this century. Perhaps this is an especially appropriate time to stand back in admiration. What the human species can claim to its credit in the arts and sciences is owed in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just a half-dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass.
Charles Murray is a senior fellow at AEI.
The West and the Rest
By Charles Murray
Posted: Wednesday, August 6, 2003
ARTICLES
The Public Interest
Publication Date: June 1, 2003
Eurocentrism has in recent years joined racism and sexism as one of the postmodern mortal sins. The Left's fight against Eurocentrism explains why students in elementary school are likely to know more about Mayan culture than French culture, and why liberal arts students at elite universities can graduate without taking a course that discusses the Renaissance. The assumption that Eurocentrism is a real problem accounts for the reluctance of many to celebrate Western culture-or even defend it.
Part of the Eurocentric critique is based on an open hostility to Western culture. Other cultures, it is claimed, were more in tune with the earth, fostered more nurturing personal relationships, or were more cooperative than the despoiling, competitive Europeans. These are not positions to be refuted by logic and evidence-the West's arbitrary allegiance to "logic" and "evidence" is one of its supposed evils. Another rationale for increasing attention to non-Western cultures is simple historical accuracy and balance. This is the "Eurocentric hypothesis," which might be put as follows: When Westerners set out to survey history, they conveniently find that most of it was made by people like themselves. Sometimes this parochialism is fostered by a prescribed canon of fine art, music, and literature that marginalizes non-Western traditions. Other times it is a function of ignorance, which leads Western historians to slight the scientific and technological achievements of other parts of the world. In either case, the result is a skewed vision that does not reflect real European preeminence, but rather Eurocentric bias.
This argument is plausible. It is easy to mock today's New Age deference to the Mayans, but the great civilizations of East Asia, South Asia, and the Arab world left splendid legacies in the arts and sciences. The West may have been pivotally important, but has it been too much at center stage?
Measuring Excellence
The data I collected for a book on human accomplishment left me with a way to explore that question. The data consist of inventories of people and events assembled from major histories and encyclopedic sources, covering the period from 800 BC to 1950. Each inventory was based on a dozen or more sources widely regarded as authoritative, drawn from a mix of countries. For example, the Western visual-arts inventory used 14 sources from the United States, Britain, Germany, Italy, and Japan, ranging in length from single-volume histories such as Janson's History of Art to the 34-volume Grove Dictionary of Art. The methods are described fully in my forthcoming book. Here, I limit myself to a few basics.
The science inventories (subdivided into astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth sciences, physics, mathematics, medicine, and technology) were worldwide-that is, Chinese and Arab scientists were part of the same inventory that contained Copernicus and Newton. My working assumption was that historians of science are able to identify important scientific achievements independently of the culture in which they occur.
The arts inventories (subdivided into the visual arts, music, and literature) and the philosophy inventory could not be worldwide. Even though some sources for these topics purported to cover the entire world, the weight given to different artistic traditions involves judgments and preferences in ways that accounts of scientific accomplishment do not. It could not be assumed, for example, that a history of the visual arts written by a German would use the same standards for Chinese or French art as for German art. To avoid the problem of cultural chauvinism within the Western world, I selected sources balanced among the major Western countries (along with other precautions discussed in the book). For non-Western countries, the most direct way to sidestep this problem was to prepare independent inventories. For philosophy, I prepared separate inventories for the West, China, and India. For the visual arts, I made use of distinct inventories for the West, China, and Japan. For literature, I used separate inventories for the West, the Arab world, China, India, and Japan. Music was restricted to the West. Altogether, 4,002 people qualified as "significant figures," defined as those who were mentioned in at least 50 percent of the sources, in one or another of the inventories.
As the entry point for exploring the Eurocentric hypothesis, consider the simplest of all questions: If the 4,002 significant figures are divided into three groups consisting of European peoples, people from the rest of the West (the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand), and non-Western peoples, how are they distributed over the period from 800 BC to 1950? Figure 1 below shows the results.
The story line implied by the graph is that little happened from 800 BC until the middle of the fifteenth century, that really intense levels of accomplishment didn't begin until a few centuries ago (fully half of all the significant figures make their appearance after 1800), and that from the middle of the fifteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century, almost everything came from Europe. As late as the 1890s, 81 percent of the newly entering significant figures were European. Thirteen of the remaining 19 percent were from North America. But if this is the most direct story line, it is also one that leaves open many reasons to suspect that various factors are misleading us. The rest of the discussion works through the major possibilities.
Populations and Prejudices
The bulge in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries shown in figure 1 will prompt many readers to ask whether we are seeing the effects of "epochcentrism" (paying excessive attention to people in the recent past) and a growing population. A detailed answer to these questions consumes the better part of two chapters in my book. The short answer is that these phenomena do have a limited influence on the data, but do not bear importantly on the Eurocentric hypothesis.
The problem of epochcentrism is concentrated in the recent past. Cutting off the inventories at 1950 eliminates most of it, and the rest is concentrated in the first half of the twentieth century. In any case, epochcentrism applies equally to the Western and non-Western worlds. You may visualize figure 1 stopping at 1900, or visualize it with the totals for all three groupings somewhat reduced. Neither alternative changes the overall shape of graph.
In the case of population change, it is true that a country of 100 million people tends to produce more significant figures than a country of 10 million people, and the growth in Western significant figures is related to the increase in Western population. But the non-West has always had a larger population than the West, and in raw numbers, population growth in the last three centuries was greater outside the West than within the West. A revised graph that takes population into account would make Western dominance since 1400 greater, not smaller.
Geniuses and Giants
The most obvious objection to the story told by figure 1 is that a head count of significant figures is the wrong way to think about the distribution of accomplishment. The reason for teaching ancient Greek philosophy is not that 32 significant figures in Western philosophy come from ancient Greece, but that 2 of those 32 were Plato and Aristotle. The reason for teaching nineteenth-century European literature is not that it produced 293 significant figures, but that the 293 include writers of the stature of Tolstoy, Hugo, Keats, and Heine.
True enough. But as history has worked out, the ages rich in giants have also been rich in near-giants and the rest of the significant figures who make up the inventory. This point can be made more fully by examining the actual rosters of significant figures, but for the sake of brevity consider what happens when the raw numbers are weighted by the eminence of the people in question. The "eminence scores" I calculated for the significant figures used techniques for measuring eminence-essentially, by measuring the amount of attention given to people-that were originated by polymath Francis Galton in the 1860s and have been refined by succeeding generations of scholars. The specific method I employed produced scores ranging from 1 to 100.
These scores have the potential to shift the pattern shown in figure 1 substantially-one Aristotle, with his eminence score of one hundred, counts the same as a hundred Antiphons, and one Shakespeare counts the same as a hundred Dubose Heywards. Because I prepared separate inventories for the non-Western traditions, Eurocentrism cannot deflate the scores of the non-Western giants in the arts-Shakespeare and the Chinese poet Du Fu both have scores of one hundred, for example. However, as one can see in figure 2 below, employing eminence scores in place of a head count does not change the main outlines of the distribution of accomplishment shown in figure 1, either across time or geography.
The second graph shows an increased visibility of non-Western cultures after about 500 AD. However, the main point of Western dominance after 1400 persists, with West meaning Europe until the late nineteenth century.
The effects differ across inventories, but only in the case of the Western philosophy inventory, where the eminence scores drastically raise the importance of ancient Greece, does the balance between pre- and post-1400 visibly shift. Take Western literature as an example. Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles are giants of Western literature-but the post-1400 era has its own giants (Shakespeare, Goethe, and Moliere, for example) plus dozens of other near-giants who merit attention, compared with only a handful of near-giants from ancient times. In the end, a student with unlimited time to study Western literature has as much great literature post-1400 as pre-1400 (more, by most estimates), and a vastly larger number of works that are worthy of study. Taking eminence into account does not (again, with the exception of Western philosophy) radically elevate the importance of pre-Renaissance accomplishment.
An examination of significant figures in the sciences shows the same profile, but with even fewer people coming from outside the West. One might object that the role of the non-West is underestimated because of anonymous scientific discoveries, which might be more numerous in China, India, or the Arab world than in the West. Another possibility is that the number of significant figures after the mid-1800s is inflated because, as scientific teams have become more common, more scientists are identified with a single invention or discovery. Both possibilities may be checked by turning to the inventory of "significant events" in the sciences, compiled in the same way as the inventories of significant figures. (Specifically, a significant event refers to one mentioned in at least 50 percent of a large set of chronologies of scientific events.) An inventory of significant events shows the same Western dominance as the inventory of significant figures. Europe and North America together account for 97 percent of both the significant figures and significant events.
The Record in the Sciences
Are these "Eurocentric" numbers? In science as in the arts, we have grown accustomed to hearing the claim that the European contribution is overrated. In his Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998), David Landes quotes a historian of Chinese science, Nathan Sivin, to represent the essence of the new historical perspective:
The historical discoveries of the last generation have left no basis for the old myths that the ancestry of modern science is exclusively European and that before modern times no other civilization was able to do science except under European influence. We have gradually come to understand that scientific traditions differing from the European tradition in fundamental respects-from techniques, to institutional settings, to views of nature and man's relation to it-existed in the Islamic world, India, and China, and in smaller civilizations as well. It has become clear that these traditions and the tradition of the Occident, far from being separate streams, have interacted more or less continuously from their beginnings until they were replaced by local versions of the modern science that they have all helped to form.
Landes then gives the essence of the countervailing view in his response:
This [Sivin's view] is the new myth, put forward as a given. Like other myths, it aims to shape the truth to higher ends, to form opinion in some other cause. In this instance, the myth is true in pointing out that modern science, in the course of its development, took up knowledge discovered by other civilizations; and that it absorbed and combined such knowledge and know-how with European findings. The myth is wrong, however, in implying a continuing symmetrical interaction among diverse civilizations.
In the beginning, when China and others were ahead, almost all the transmission went one way, from the outside to Europe. That was Europe's great virtue: unlike China, Europe was a learner... Later on, of course, the story was different: Once Europe had invented modern science, the current flowed back, though not without resistance. Here too, the myth misleads by implying a kind of equal, undifferentiated contribution to the common treasure. The vast bulk of modern science was of Europe's making... Not only did non-Western science contribute just about nothing (though there was more there than Europeans knew) but at that point it was incapable of participating, so far had it fallen behind or taken the wrong turning. This was no common stream.
This may seem to be one of those conflicts between experts that a layman is unable to assess, but it is not. On the contrary, it is easy to reach an independent judgment about allegations of Eurocentrism if one subjects the allegations to close scrutiny. Reread Sivin's passage, and note how effectively his language evokes the image of an exaggerated European contribution without ever specifying that it is in fact exaggerated. This is standard practice. Two other examples demonstrate how the evocation differs from the evidence actually presented. The first is taken from the publicity copy of the 1998 edition of Arnold Pacey's Technology in World Civilization:
Most general histories of technology are Eurocentrist, focusing on a main line of Western technology that stretches from the Greeks through the computer. In this very different book, Arnold Pacey takes a global view ... portray[ing] the process as a complex dialectic by which inventions borrowed from one culture are adopted to suit another.
The other is from the publicity copy of the 1999 edition of an introductory college history text, Science and Technology in World History by James McClellan and Harold Dorn:
Without neglecting important figures of Western science such as Newton and Einstein, the authors demonstrate the great achievements of non-Western cultures. They remind us that scientific traditions took root in China, India, and Central and South America, as well as in a series of Near Eastern empires.
Lest we fail to get the point, the publisher adds a blurb from a professor at Stanford, who tells us that
Professors McClellan and Dorn have written a survey that does not present the historical development of science simply as a Western phenomenon but as the result of wide-ranging human curiosity about nature and attempts to harness its powers in order to serve human needs.
But do these two books in fact challenge my assertion that 97 percent of both significant figures and events in the sciences occurred in Europe and North America? Pacey's Technology in World Civilization is a wide-ranging account of the ways in which the recipients of new technology do not apply it passively, but adapt it to their particular situation. With this interaction between technology and culture as his topic, Pacey does indeed spend more time on non-Western civilizations than would a historian describing who invented what, where, and when. For example, he has a chapter on railroad empires, with 18 pages of material on how railroads developed in Russia, Japan, China, and India. But who invented the railroad engine, tracks, trains, and the infrastructure of complex railroads? All this occurred in England.
Similarly, McClellan and Dorn's Science and Technology in World History presents material on non-Western societies. But McClellan and Dorn, unlike Pacey, are writing a history of science. The 10 scientists with the most index entries are, in order, Aristotle, Newton, Copernicus, Galileo, Darwin, Ptolemy, Kepler, Descartes, Euclid, and Archimedes-a wholly conventional roster of stars. Of all the scientific figures mentioned in McClellan and Dorn's index, 97 percent come from Europe and the United States-precisely the same percentage yielded by the inventories I compiled.
There is nothing wrong with the historiography of either of these books. Both are consistent with the sources used to compile my science inventories. The contrast between the packaging for the books and the facts within them is emblematic of our times. The packaging illustrates how intellectual fashion says things should be. The facts contained therein reflect the way things really are.
The reason that any responsible history of science and technology will end up with these numbers is that historians of science and technology are all working with the same data which are, for the period we are exploring, reasonably complete. Gaps still exist, but none of them is large enough to do more than tweak the details of the general portrait of historical achievements.
Herein lies a difference between the layman and the specialist. Is the average European or American often unaware of the technological sophistication achieved by non-Western cultures? No doubt about it, and in this sense the charge of Eurocentrism is often appropriate. But what is really at issue is whether historians of science and technology in the last half-century are aware of the non-Western record-and it is clear that they are. Europeans used the works of the great Arab scholar-scientists of a millennium ago as the foundations for European science (which is why so many Arab scholars are known by their Latinized names). The great works of Indian mathematicians have long since been translated and incorporated into the history of mathematics, just as the works of Chinese naturalists and astronomers have been translated and incorporated into the narratives of those fields.
In recognizing how thoroughly non-Western science and technology have been explored, let's also give credit where credit is due: By and large, it has not been Asian or Arab scholars, fighting for recognition against Western indifference, who were responsible for piecing together the record of accomplishment by non-Western cultures, but Westerners themselves. Imperialists they may have been, but one of the byproducts of that imperialism was a large cadre of Continental, British, and American scholars who, fascinated by the exotic civilizations of Arabia and East Asia, set about uncovering evidence of their accomplishments that inheritors of those civilizations had themselves neglected. Joseph Needham's seven-volume history of Chinese science and technology is a case in point. Another is George Sarton's Introduction to the History of Science, five large volumes published from 1927 to 1948, all of which are devoted to science before the end of the fourteenth century-including meticulous accounts of scientific accomplishment in the Arab world, India, and China.
Of the remaining ways in which one could attenuate the 97-percent proportion I assign to both significant figures and significant events in the sciences, my proposition is that none work. I attach two provisos to that claim: First, attempts to add new events to the non-Western roster must consist of discoveries, inventions, and other forms of "firsts." No fair adding the first Indian suspension bridge to a catalog of Indian technology if suspension bridges were already in use elsewhere.
The other proviso is that the rules for inclusion of a person or event must be applied evenly. If one augments the inventory of non-Western accomplishment by going to Joseph Needham's seven-volume account of Chinese science and technology, one must also augment the inventory of Western accomplishment by going to comparably detailed histories dealing with German science (for example)-in other words, no fair using the naked eye to search for Western accomplishments and a microscope to search for non-Western ones.
If one observes these two constraints, the Western dominance of people and events cannot be reduced more than fractionally. For every new non-Western person or event that is added to the list, dozens of new entries qualify for the Western list, and the relative proportions assigned to the West and the non-West do not change. The differential may become even more extreme, because the reservoir of Western scientific accomplishment that did not qualify for the inventories is so immense.
The Record in the Arts
In compiling the inventories for the arts, I assumed that my method precluded direct comparisons of artistic activity in the West and non-West. It did indeed prevent comparisons that would assign specific percentages to the West and non-West of the type presented for the sciences. But nevertheless a few observations are possible.
The Western arts inventories are much larger in total numbers than their non-Western counterparts. In the visual arts, the West produced 479 significant figures, compared to just 111 and 81 for China and Japan respectively. In literature, the West has 834 significant figures, compared to 82, 83, 43, and 85 for the Arab world, China, India, and Japan respectively. Is this a function of different levels of detail in the sources? Not in any readily apparent way. Encyclopedic sources specific to each inventory were used to establish the universe of potential significant figures. The mix of sources for each inventory-encyclopedic sources versus major histories, for example-was comparable across inventories. For whatever reason, references of comparable scope-encyclopedic sources compared with encyclopedic sources, histories compared with histories-of art and literature in non-Western cultures do not contain nearly as many people as sources dealing with the West. As far as I was able to determine, the pattern applies equally to sources written by the native-born of a given culture and sources written by foreigners.
How might the differences in numbers falsely underestimate the contribution of the non-West? No important parts of the world have been left out-the inventories include all of the countries with long-standing traditions of named writers, painters, sculptors, and composers. Any alternative conclusion requires that we assume that the distribution of artistic excellence among the significant figures is utterly different in Western versus non-Western cultures, and that the quality of artists in the non-Western traditions is so much higher than in the West that even though their numbers are far fewer, virtually all of them are worthy of extended study, whereas only a small proportion of the significant figures of the West are worthy of study. But this line of argument has neither a rationale nor evidence.
What if we were to discard artists as the unit of analysis, and substitute artistic works for assessing relative contributions? If we limit ourselves to attributed works, the substitution of works for artists will have no effect, or will be in the West's favor. The authors, composers, painters, and sculptors of the post-1400 West were, as a rule, prodigiously productive. Compare the body of work by Shakespeare or Goethe with that of Li Bo or Murasaki; that of Michelangelo or Picasso with that of Sesshu or Zhao Mengfu; and so on down the list from the giants to the merely excellent. At every level, the aggregate number of major works is at least as large for Western as for non-Western artists.
Shall we consider lost works? Some of the most highly regarded Chinese artists have no surviving works at all. But the West similarly has painters such as Zeuxis, Polygnotos, and Apelles, considered by their contemporaries as artistic equals to the sculptor Phidias. None of their paintings survive, nor does any work of their lesser contemporaries. Even in literature, the masterpieces the West retains from ancient days are probably outnumbered by the ones we have lost. We know that Euripides wrote at least 90 plays, for example, and only 18 of them survive. One of the greatest of the surviving Greek dramas, The Trojan Women, won only second prize in a contemporary competition. We know nothing about the play that took first place. Inserting a correction for lost works will not redress the imbalance between West and non-West.
Adding anonymous works also won't alter the picture. In literature, many non-Western cultures have traditions of authorless folklore, but so does Europe, with separate and rich traditions ranging from ancient Greece through the Norse Sagas and into the Renaissance, with contributions from every European language. In the visual arts, countries such as India and Persia have important bodies of unattributed painting and sculpture, but so do the countries of Europe, embracing virtually all the sculpture, paintings, and mosaics from the fall of the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages.
Expanding the definition of artistic accomplishment to include other forms of art that existed in East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, Africa, and pre-Columbian America runs into the same problem. Shall we add architecture, a category omitted from the visual-arts inventory? Certain structures in Asia and Central America belong on any list of great architectural accomplishment. But the entire roster of such architectural landmarks from outside Europe will be exceeded by comparable landmarks in medieval and Renaissance Europe alone, before we even look at European architectural accomplishment since then. Shall we introduce the decorative arts and crafts into the inventory of art works? Whatever gems of fine artisanship are introduced from Asia, Africa, and the Americas are going to be matched in quality and outnumbered by orders of magnitude by those originating in Europe. Consider the sheer volume of fine artisanship in stone masonry, stained glass, tapestry, and painted decoration from European churches and cathedrals alone.
Just as in the sciences, whatever mechanism one uses to try to augment the non-Western contribution in the arts will backfire if the same selection rules are applied to the West. It is impossible to be as precise about the relative contributions of West and non-West in the arts as in the sciences, but the generalization seems as valid: A balanced presentation of human accomplishment in the arts will naturally devote the large bulk of its attention to the West, and a large portion of this to Europe from the Renaissance onward.
The End of European Dominance?
I have gone to considerable lengths to document facts about the geographic and chronological distributions of human accomplishment that are controversial mainly because of intellectual fashions, not because the facts themselves can be disputed. Now is the time to introduce some cautions about the interpretation of those distributions.
The first caution is directed to those of us in the United States. Many Americans combine our civilization with that of Europe under the broad banner of "the West," but this is presumptuous. In his landmark Configurations of Culture Growth, written during the 1930s, anthropologist A.L. Kroeber observed that "it is curious how little science of highest quality America has produced"-a startling claim to Americans who have become accustomed to American scientific dominance since 1950. But Kroeber was right. Compared to Europe, the American contribution was still small then. In the arts as well, a large dose of American humility is in order. Much as we may love Twain, Whitman, Whistler, and Gershwin, they are easily lost in the ocean of the European oeuvre. What we Americans are pleased to call Western civilization was overwhelmingly European civilization through 1950.
The second caution is not to place too much weight on the numbers. The number of lost works and forgotten artists in the period before 1400 would, if taken into account, increase the pre-1400 proportion somewhat. Not a lot-even very generous estimates of the bias created by lost works only modify the dominance of modern Europe-but some. It is also important to remember that the period prior to 1400 may have had comparatively few significant figures, but it was rich in giants.
Furthermore, much of that genius came from outside Europe. Aristotle had different insights into the human condition than Confucius and Buddha, but not necessarily more profound ones. Those who are in a position to make such judgments describe the greatest poetry from China as among the greatest poetry ever written. A fine Japanese rock garden or ceremonial tea bowl expresses an aesthetic sensibility as subtle as humans have ever known.
The third caution is to remember that many civilizations arose independently of Europe, and rose to similar technological levels-developing tools and techniques that enabled them to build large structures and road networks, develop complex agricultural practices and distribution mechanisms, conduct commerce, and build thriving cities. Evidence scattered from Angkor Wat to Machu Picchu attests to the ability of human beings throughout the world to achieve amazing technological feats.
And yet the underlying reality is that Europe since 1400 has overwhelmingly dominated accomplishment in both the arts and sciences. The estimates of the European contribution are robust. I write at a time when Europe's run appears to be over. Bleaker yet, there is reason to wonder whether European culture as we have known it will even exist by the end of this century. Perhaps this is an especially appropriate time to stand back in admiration. What the human species can claim to its credit in the arts and sciences is owed in astonishing degree to what was accomplished in just a half-dozen centuries by the peoples of one small portion of the northwestern Eurasian land mass.
Charles Murray is a senior fellow at AEI.
Wednesday, August 06, 2003
From the American Enterprise Institute website ( Neocon Central ):
Divergent Paths and Common Values in Old Europe and the United States
Posted: Tuesday, August 5, 2003
SPEECHES
Hayek Foundation, Bratislava (Slovakia)
Publication Date: July 3, 2003
To speak of Europe is not to speak of geography, but of a civilization.
It is to speak of a centuries-long argument about the deepest meaning of such terms as God, truth, freedom, justice, and community. At the same time, to speak of Europe is also to speak of the extension of its noble and distinctive civilization (and its passionate arguments) far beyond the geography of Europe itself. It is to speak of the civilization of the North Atlantic, so as to include those far-off children of Europe: Canada and the United States.
It was to protect that whole civilization, the civilization of the North Atlantic, that NATO was formed, the Alliance that forced the peaceful capitulation of the Soviet Union in 1989, and that has so changed the perspective of formerly divided nation states within Europe, that for the first time in a thousand years there is very little prospect of war among them.
Because of that extension westward and the stunning Alliance to which it gave birth, the North Atlantic Community is a grander concept than the European Community. The great oak springing from the roots of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome spreads far outwards over the Atlantic. Its religious vitalities have flourished generation after generation in America, while they have seemed to wither in Europe. The American people are confident and vigorous, while Europe in its secularism seems (from America) to have become complacent, risk-averse, devoted to economic security, its population no longer reproducing itself even to replacement levels.
Forgive me for not being more diplomatic. This is a moment in which anti-American propaganda, most of it false, is so powerful in Europe that it is stirring in America the need to be more frank with our European friends. "The American street" is out of patience with France, in particular, and anti-American journalism in general. A few on the American left--Bill Clinton was one--do see European social democracy as morally advanced. Observing Europe, however, most Americans see few signs of European moral superiority. On the contrary, they see moral decline.
Before addressing the divergences between Old Europe and America, however, let me first count up the strengths of NATO, and then its weaknesses.
1. The Greatest Alliance
NATO is the most successful Alliance in history. For more than fifty years, it protected its member nations from violent attack by the most powerful external military force ever assembled in history, the armies and intelligence forces of the Soviet Union. It also carried through an internal harmonization of its own command structures, communications, and (most impressive of all) military industrial production. These are great achievements.
Let me underline the importance of having attained internally harmonious command structures. Whatever the particular national make-up of its leadership and component units at any one time, a NATO unit can in principle work with others under unified command. Furthermore, all units are well practiced in certain basic systems of communication.
It is also a great achievement of NATO to have harmonized the specifications of its military equipment, so that nearly all of it is usable by all troops, no matter where it has been manufactured. To have brought about such technical harmony has required very close unity of purpose. To have done so on a Continent whose various peoples have long prided themselves on their stubborn independence and the charming disparity of their ways verges on the amazing. One might say, in a way, that the experience of blending together such a vast and potent military force as NATO prepared the way for the political and civil unification of a European Community. NATO has been a formidable military force, not only in its superior technology, but also in its moral determination to defend liberty at all costs, and with all possible attention to the humble detail of squad-level coordination.
Yet NATO itself faces a crisis springing from its own success. Less than a decade ago, many scholars were predicting at least the relative "decline" of the United States, as the Japanese economic model blossomed, and as the European Community was nearing its formal debut. Europe, it was said, had a much larger internal market than the United States--380 million v. 280 million--and a newfound determination to surpass the United States in economic power.
But in the decade since 1990, Japan has fallen into a twelve-year recession and the European economic model has sputtered in fitful stops and starts. Germany and France in particular show woefully high unemployment and forbidding costs for domestic production. (To produce an automobile in Germany, for example, costs nearly nine times more than in Slovakia). Between 1990 and 2000, the European Monetary Union nonetheless managed to add to its gross domestic product an increase of just over 20 percent [from 6.6 trillion dollars to 8 trillion dollars in chained 1995 U.S. dollars], an increase of 1.4 trillion dollars. By contrast, the United States has added to its GDP an increase approaching 40 percent [from 6.5 trillion dollars to 9 trillion dollars], an increase of 2.5 trillion dollars. Similarly, the per capita GDP in the U.S. (in chained 1995 U.S. dollars) spurted from $26,141 to $31,996--an increase of 22%.1
U.S. firms have also benefitted by a fresh burst of inventions and discoveries during this decade, particularly in communications, precision instruments, lasers, "stealth" metallic surfaces and other militarily useful technologies.
For instance, the weaponry and communications used by American forces in the Gulf War of 1991 were already so advanced that most allies could not operate on a par with American forces. By 2003, no military units, except perhaps the British, could operate at the same level. Through the use of communications drones over target areas and all-weather detection instruments, the American forces were at most times able to see the enemy out in front of them, even when they could not be seen by the enemy. Because of the interconnectedness of all U.S. forces--air, sea, and ground--by means of television images, voice, and instantaneous e-mail communications, American commanders in command centers hundreds or even thousands of miles away were privy to the same intelligence and communications as their front line forces, and in real time. Never in history had a war been fought under such conditions of instantaneous intelligence, universal communication, and informed command.
Because of these advances, the American forces launched barely twenty-percent of the bombs--the iron, so to speak--expended in 1991. They did not have to use most of their projected supplies of precision rockets and other weapons. Their intelligence concerning where to place their explosives, and the precision guidance systems that allowed them to target a specific aperture (window or chimney) through which to place them, and a specific room within which to explode them, allowed them to use far less ordinance, while achieving far superior results.
During World War II, bombs were so imprecise that the quantity of explosives packed into each bomb had to be in the thousands of pounds. In those days, to strike within a half-mile of a factory, say, was considered damaging. This may be why, as the Second Iraq war impended, Europeans mindful of World War II imagined Dresden, while the Americans were imagining something many magnitudes less damaging. In 2003, the bombing of Baghdad left virtually all civilian buildings untouched, even when a military targets in an adjoining building had been destroyed. Moreover, in the buildings selected as military targets, the explosives nearly always went off in particular rooms or sections of the building--and with the amount of force chosen in advance. Those choosing targets wanted to save file rooms, for instance.
In terms of "re-building" Baghdad, therefore, remarkably little needs to be done, except for the thirty years of neglect that Saddam Hussein visited upon basic infrastructure. Few buildings of a civilian nature were struck by American bombs. The exact targets selected were Saddam’s palaces, and military, secret police, and particular government buildings.
Although the United States has cut its military spending in half since 1989, from about six percent of gdp per annum to three percent, its gross national product has grown so large since the economic reforms of the Reagan Presidency, which began in 1981, that this small three percent still yields a powerful sum of dollars. Even this is far more than any European nation spends, and more than all of them together. Furthermore, a great deal of military spending by European nations tends to go into non-military categories, whereas US spending, while also diffuse, is far more concentrated on military purposes. In addition, the US military is greatly aided by technological research on the part of civilian firms.
For these reasons, the military forces of the European Community are falling ever further behind the war-fighting capacity of the American forces. So much so that this internal disparity is creating a crisis for NATO. I mentioned before the instantaneous intelligence-and-communications capacities of the American forces, all of whom are equipped with a highly secret new cyber-system that allows them to stay in complete and instantaneous contact with one another. In the Second Iraq War, NATO allies in the Coalition understandably wanted access to this system, but the Americans were unable to separate the parts of it they could freely share from the parts that involve secrets too valuable to permit sharing at this time.
On the front edge of the skills proper to warriors, the Americans are now very nearly alone. In more traditional peace-keeping and policing roles, by contrast, all NATO nations are used to working cooperatively and that work keeps increasing in range and numbers. NATO has many crucial assignments to its south (in the Balkans and in Africa) and east (in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere).
2. Growing Divergences
Behind this separation in military capabilities, however, there also lie profound cultural and moral divides. It is true that all of us together, Europe and America, share many common "values," as is often said, or as I prefer to say, "many common arguments." We are part of one same civilization, with the same roots, roots quite different from those of other civilizations.
All of us on this one small blue-green planet spinning in the void, as we have come to see it in photos sent back from space, all of us share one common humanity. "Humanity," however, is differentiated by time and space, and also by culture and civilization. Western civilization, and in particular the civilization of the North Atlantic, is one of the most dynamic of these civilizations, that have ever appeared on earth.
Civilization, Thomas Aquinas once wrote, is constituted by conversation; that is, by argument. Civilized people, treating each other as reasonable, argue with one another. Barbarians club one another, as if values are mere "preferences," and reason has nothing to do with them. For barbarians, nothing matters but power.
Well, between the United States and Europe, real arguments have emerged with ever greater strength during the past fifteen years, especially after the threat from the Soviet Union was finally removed.
In centuries past, European reason was shaped by feudalism and the emphasis it placed on birth and class. European reason was also shaped by tribalism, collectivism and statism of various types. This was especially true in the twentieth-century, from communism through national socialism to socialism, and social democracy. By contrast, as Tocqueville remarked, America was marked from the beginning by a passion for equality, but equality understood in a non-European way: not a leveling, but an equal chance to compete; an acceptance of unequal outcomes, if fair, rather than envy of the successful. America was also marked by a revulsion against European forms of collectivism. Americans are more communitarian than individualistic. The Los Angeles Olympics, for example, were financed and staffed far more by private funds and associations than by government, federal or state, that is, by individual volunteers organizing themselves. In this sense, Americans are more likely than other peoples to pitch in and help in mutual projects large and small, to put up one another’s houses, to work together smoothly in associations, and to enjoy flawless teamwork. But it is also true that they prefer to stand on their own two feet as individuals, with fewer governmental benefits, rather than to endure European forms of collectivism, even the social democratic ones. I admit that the taste for government handouts is growing, even in America, abetted by the American left; but it is the large-scale resistance that in America is so striking, and almost unique. Europe has few equivalents to the Republican Party. (Here candor compels the author to confess to being a lifelong registered Democrat, although in philosophy rather a whig and a liberal, as defined below, than a welfare statist.)
These days, then, NATO suffers from the growing divergence between America and Europe on such points as these. The European political class has been boasting for years that the European economic model--the social welfare state, the "humane capitalism" of the Rhine Valley, the social market economy--is morally far superior to American democratic capitalism, to which they rather refer (against all evidence) as "savage capitalism." There is only one problem. European welfare states have already pledged such high benefits to future retirees and other beneficiaries that in the next fifteen years they will not be able to pay for them, on account of the demographic squeeze caused by lower birth rates.
Welfare states are predicated on three conditions that no longer apply: an average age at mortality of 65 (when Bismarck promised his generals a guaranteed pension after age 65, he knew that few would actually live longer than that); an ever larger proportion of young workers to the elderly, so that young workers could easily pay the pensions of the old ; and complete monetary and fiscal control by individual welfare states over their own territory. These days, none of these conditions are met in "Old Europe" (Germany, France, Belgium). The numbers of newborn have fallen to unprecedented lows, the average age of those over 65 advances steadily higher year by year, and both capital and labor are subject to international pressures beyond the control of the nation state. In these circumstances, the European welfare states are in an ever worsening budgetary bind.
One consequence is that the national budgets of welfare states have no money for new military needs. Strapped down by shortages, NATO suffers. European elected leaders must starve the military, because their first priority is to keep feeding the clamoring clients of insatiable welfare states.
These reflections prompt us to examine on a deeper level the diverging paths of the American experiment and the European experiment.
2. Complementary--or Competitive?
As a general principle, competition between two divergent points of view is quite good. The motto of the American Enterprise Institute, for example, is that "The competition of ideas is essential to a free society." To be confronted with a sharp competitor is a very great gift, for a gifted person faced with no competition has no way to test how deep his gift goes, or to push himself to his limits. A stiff competition is likely to make both competitors better than they would otherwise be. From experience with such lessons, Americans love competition. For them, competition is a moral term. Even in business, they regard competition as a form of checks and balances, not so much Darwinian--"dog eat dog"--as Madisonian (after James Madison, the Father of the American Constitution; see Federalist #10).
In a competition to understand more accurately the nature of political and economic reality, however, if one competitor is more in touch with reality, the loser is partly living on illusions. In that case, competition has fateful consequences. If the loser is not willing to change his ways, his predicament can only grow worse. If he accepts the competition as a valuable wake-up call to change, on the other hand, the competition was a great blessing. Faced with superior competition from the Japanese during 1970-1980, American business was shocked into dramatic self-reform and restructuring, which led to an immense wave of new technological breakthroughs in fiber optics, computers, the internet, cell phones, genetic medicines, telecommunications, satellites, etc.
Europeans are constantly preaching how much more moral they are than Americans, at least in terms of their economic model. The American model is "savage," they say. Further, the fact that about half the states in the United States continue to exercise the death penalty is taken as a confirmation by European elites of their own higher level of humanity. The Europeans, they say, embrace the Kyoto Accords, while the Americans will not ratify them (the U.S. Senate rejected Kyoto by about 99-0, as I recall). In actual fact, of course, the Europeans sign the formal documents while actually doing little to meet the requirements, whereas the United States goes a long way to meeting the requirements, but refuses to sign a protocol that it knows will never be observed.
Not to be less than candid, Americans deeply hold that their own experiment in liberty is morally superior to the ways of the Old World. They have their own views about European perfidies. They think that today’s Europeans are shirkers, who do not work enough hours per day, or week, or year; take too many holidays off; and constantly want something for nothing. Traveling in Europe is frequently a disappointment to Americans, when some form of transport or other is rendered unusable by hostile and arrogant strikers, normally protecting some ancient privilege of their own, and utterly heedless of the common good. Europeans seem to Americans always to be defending their "rights" (i.e., privileges), in a fundamentally self-centered spirit, each protecting his own self-interest, while carrying signboards on which appear professionally painted slogans about high principle. To Americans, Europeans seem risk-averse, slow to experiment with the new, usually quicker with dozens of reasons why something cannot be done than with an obvious and open willingness to give a new idea a try. Europeans seem obsessed with the familiar, the comfortable, and the secure.
So much for cultural divergences on what constitutes moral superiority. There is not much point in shouting recriminations across the Atlantic. But it does seem necessary for an American in Europe, who hears so many negatives hurled at the United States on television and reads many others in the journals, to remind Europeans that Americans have their opinions about Europe, too. One should not, I think, encourage isolationism in America, nor in Europe. To maintain a strong alliance, it is not necessary to be blind to each other’s faults or to disguise our own pronounced preferences for our own ways. It is quite enough to have common interests and, on a deeper level, common roots and values--which are under quite hostile worldwide threat, as was shown on September 11. This threat is not aimed solely at America, but at "crusader" Europe, too.
3. What Is Causing the Recent Cleavages?
In recent years, nonetheless, several sources of new cleavages have opened up. I am not certain I understand these, but let me offer three or four hypotheses.
First, Europeans today have a far weaker belief in the nation state, and have begun to idealize large collective entities, such as the United Nations and the European Community. They are willing to cede sovereignty from one to the other, and in the process to give up a great many safeguards of local democracy. To Americans, in fact, it seems that Europeans revere bureaucrats, in the larger collective, the more so. They certainly pay lavish salaries to countless ranks of them. In addition, the Europeans seem not to be preoccupied with checks and balances, the division of all powers, and other auxiliary precautions, in the protection of liberty from its customary and traditional sources of abuse. Europeans seem relatively passive before their political elites. Europeans even seem to cry out to their elites: "Abuse us!" In other words, to American eyes, Europeans, after all their bad experiences, still seem innocent about concentrations of power. Europeans seem not to believe in original sin, or in the pervasiveness of evil in the hearts of men, for against these they arrange so few protections.
Second, on a planetary scale, Europeans seem to hold that the world is populated by Kantians, eager to accept resolutions after hearing speeches in the UN. The UN Security Council passed seventeen such resolutions for Saddam Hussein, as if they actually expected him to be swayed by patient argument, and then they were miffed not to be able to make it eighteen.
By contrast, Americans do not have much faith in Kantian reason or the rationality of collectives and tyrants. The schoolmaster of the Americans is not Kant but St. Augustine, the teacher both of Aquinas and of eighteenth-century Protestant divines in America. Augustine was more keen to detect the ways in which humans abuse power, even twist reason itself. Robert Kagan has mistakenly asserted in Of Paradise and Power2 that Thomas Hobbes is the teacher of the Americans, but Hobbes was far too cynical, and a lover of illiberal Leviathan. The American master is Augustine, whom Kagan ignores. Augustine urges Americans on toward the City of God, the "shining City on the Hill," while simultaneously warning them against their own inveterate inclinations to sin. Hobbes depresses the spirit; Augustine inspires and arms it. From St. Augustine, the Americans get both their realism and their optimism.
There may be a third reason for the screeching anti-Americanism in Europe, although I sense myself walking on shakier ground. Could it be that some Europeans hate America for not accepting the rationality of the European view of the world? By designating terrorism as "evil," and by designating three states that support terrorism [Iraq, Iran, and North Korea] as "the axis of evil," President Bush flew directly against the worldview of the Europeans. They want rationality, he pointed to the irrational components in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. They want peace at the lowest possible cost, while he was not willing to wait until the terrorists again struck New York or Washington. They want collective security, he had observed what happened in Rwanda, and in the French unilateral intervention into the Ivory Coast, and in the Russian into Chechnya. European elites use the language of bureaucracy and collective negotiation, Bush used the language of Christianity. That language deeply offends secular Europeans. There seems to be great resistance to Bush precisely because he is visibly religious. (Bill Clinton used religious language at least as often as Bush; but perhaps that didn’t worry Europeans because they didn’t think he meant it. Meanwhile, Bush’s religious language may worry Europeans precisely because he does believe it.)
In any case, America is far more religious than Europe, both more Christian and more Jewish. In America, a great number of political and intellectual leaders--yes, and journalists--are serious about their Judaism or their Christianity. As Americans, they feel quite comfortable in expressing that seriousness. In America, from the beginning religion has normally been on the side of liberty, and liberty on the side of religion. We never faced the ancien regime that led so many European lovers of liberty to reject religion outright. We did not experience on our own soil the rise of aggressive atheism under Nazis and Communists.
In short, as Niall Ferguson has suggested,3 it may be American religious seriousness that still leads us to work so hard and with such discipline (Max Weber), and to have high morale, and a deep conviction about the rightness of supporting liberty around the world (Tocqueville). For certain, it is our sense that each woman and each man is made in the image of the Creator that leads us so to emphasize creativity, invention, and enterprise in each sphere of life. As Judaism and then Christianity have taught us, it is the vocation of every woman and man to create–to add to this world before our deaths what was not here at our births. Each American should be creative.
It is one of the ironies of our times that nearly all of the values that America holds most dear derive from Europe, even though today’s Europeans no longer hold them. For instance, all those lessons about Judaism and Christianity mentioned above Americans did not find here in America waiting for us. Just the opposite, they came with the Bibles that were carried in our grandparents’ steamship trunks, and in the lessons they carried in their heads and their hearts from Europe to America.
The public buildings of the United States reflect Greece and Rome. The influence of the Enlightenment--the English, not the French or the German Enlightenment--is reflected in our terse classic speech, such as that of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and other basic documents such as The Federalist. But the deepest impress on America’s soul is biblical realism--a sense of the glories possible to man, chastened by a sense of the pervasiveness in all circumstances of human wickedness and weakness. In our youth, we thought we learned these lessons from Europe. In our maturity, we are surprised that Europe has "outgrown" them. We think these lessons would be useful for Europe to relearn.
We had also thought we learned our "whiggism" and our "liberalism" from Europe, from Scotland to be precise--from moral sense philosophers such as Francis Hutchison and Adam Smith. By the whig tendency, we mean the love for civil and political liberties, along with respect for tradition, experience, the local, the unspoken, the tacit, and the religious dimension of life. By the liberal tendency, we mean the commitment to economic liberty as well as political and civil liberties. In combination, the whig and the liberal tendencies see liberty as the bright red thread which furnishes to human history its central line of institutional progress.
Liberty in this sense is not given, it must be earned. Indeed, it must be learned through hard practice, repetition, trial and error; it must be learned through suffering, failure, and even death. Liberty in this sense means self-government, that is, the conquest of the self. Self-government, in turn, has both a personal, private dimension and a public, institutional dimension. To extend true liberty in both dimensions exacts a high price in vigilance and sacrifice. Liberty is in its own way the way of the cross. It is not won by wishing, but by wagering on it all that one has, by dying or being willing to die. "I regret," said Nathan Hale at his death early in the War of Independence, "that I have but one life to lose for my country." Through such men, the rest of us enjoy today our institutional liberties.
In this sense, Americans do not fear death. We are still, though much besieged, a culture of life. The critic may reply scornfully, But what then about your practice of abortion, the least restrictive on earth, or your tolerance in half your States of the death penalty? Well, to the best of my knowledge, the American people have never voted for abortion in any jurisdiction. Every time the issue comes to a popular vote, abortion loses. It is the American Supreme Court that (illegally, many of us think) has imposed the abortion regime on the people. As for the death penalty, circumstances in America are not the same as in Europe, and what seems reasonable in one continent may to many seem otherwise in another. The laws under which people live are properly their own choice. (It may be that on many issues, such as the death penalty, popular opinion in Europe is much the same as popular opinion in the U.S., despite the fact that in Europe the laws are far more closely controlled by the political elite than is possible in the U.S.)
To resume, I believe it descriptively accurate to state that Americans stand out among our allies as noticeably optimistic, active, vigorous, and not afraid to take chances. Failure does not affright us. Many great ventures succeed only after the learning that takes place through multiple failures.
In all these ways, George Bush after September 11 has been an exemplary American, not at all afraid to trust in liberty and to roll the dice of history for very high stakes. There were a huge number of ways in which the war in Iraq might have gone wrong. A sudden, swift victory was by no means assured. Oil wells might have been sabotaged, pipelines emptying unchecked into the Persian Gulf. Israel and Kuwait might have been bombed. Resistance might have been universal and fierce beyond all previous experience. The small American force--much lighter and smaller than twelve years earlier, and moving without the long weeks of preparatory bombing that marked 1991--might have been surrounded and captured. Bush risked not only his Presidency but the credit of the United States military forces for many decades to come.
Can it be that, precisely for his daring and vigor, he is hated by a different stripe of men?
I hasten to point out that Bush is by choice a man of the American West, and that nearly all American Presidents of the last fifty years have been from that part of America, the most religious, biblical part, the Bible Belt of the South and the West. Let me count them off: Lyndon Johnson from Texas; Richard Nixon from California; Gerald Ford--the exception--from Michigan, in the oval office not by being elected but by succession as Vice-President; Jimmy Carter from Georgia; Ronald Reagan from California; George Bush the First from Texas; Bill Clinton from Arkansas; and George Bush the Second from Texas. The center of gravity in American politics has moved to the part of America that is least like Europe, the vigorous American West, and wise Europeans will want to take that into account.
4. The "Values" We Have in Common
When we look out through the next hundred years, no other potential alliance in the world rivals the European and North Atlantic civilization, not in cultural power, nor in economic power, nor in military power. The only thing that can defeat us is our own disunity. What drive us together in the first place are our own interests and, even more deeply, our ‘common values.’ Statesmen are fond of stressing these ‘common values’ at the end of their speeches. But over the years our ability to state these values has grown weaker and weaker. The reason for this vagueness is that our civilization is distinctive primarily because of its Jewish and Christian roots. But both in America and in Europe, especially in Europe, our elites no longer feel comfortable expressing reality in religious language. Thus, on many important points--noticeably so, under threat from Muslim antagonists--they fall silent, or try too obviously to change the subject.
Specifically, we in the North Atlantic civilization draw four thought-categories, or frameworks, or paradigms, from our Jewish and Christian roots. These four are the rights endowed in all humans by their Creator; liberty of conscience; a regulative idea of truth; and historical consciousness. These are horizon-shaping concepts, which frame the way we look at reality. Each of these boundary concepts may be articulated in secular terms. It is not necessary to be a believing Jew or Christian in order to hold them in mind or, more exactly, to be held in their grip.
As a wise and experienced rabbi once explained to me, it is important in establishing a new synagogue to pay special attention to ‘flying buttresses,’ that is, to those people who support the synagogue from outside, without ever going through the door. In the same way, it is important to find words to express the common values of the West whose origins may be religious, in terms that are graspable by those who no longer go through the doors of churches or synagogues. It is necessary to express these originally religious concepts in non-religious ways.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, no orthodox believer himself, wrote that one of the truths we hold is that "All men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Even those who do not hold that there is a Creator of all things may understand by this locution that each human being, by the very fact of being human, shares in certain inalienable natural rights. Such persons may grasp the essential point, moreover, that these rights are not given to us by the State, nor may they be taken away by States. They are rooted in our own innate capacity to reflect and to choose. They are rooted in our capacity to be self-governing agents, such that each of us is responsible, alone, for choosing our individual destiny.
Again, our commitment to religious liberty, or liberty of conscience, also has a specifically Jewish and Christian historical origin. But it, too, is also understandable in secular terms. After immense suffering from religious warfare, in which human beings seemed to be discrediting religion by the very act of killing one another to vindicate it, certain thinkers began to notice accusatory characteristics of "the Divine Author of our religion" (as Jefferson put it). For instance, the God of Israel wanted to be worshiped "in spirit and in truth," not solely by external motions, and not on false pretences, but with honesty of heart and singleness of mind. In addition, He addressed his word to each individual in solitude (as well as to all together, as a community), in such fashion that each is obliged to reply to him in a way that neither mother nor father nor sister not brother can do in his stead. In that sense, personal responsibility is inalienable. That responsibility belongs to the self alone. And no one can legitimately interfere in the arena in which the soul stands alone and inalienably before God. In brief, States must respect the religious liberty of each person.
Obviously, it is not necessary to be a Christian or Jewish believer to grasp the secular point of that religious discovery. Conscience is inviolable. It is beyond the reach of States. God Himself may have commissioned some few to speak in his name, but in the end even their words may be rejected, or on the contrary accepted, as the conscience of each among the people directs. In religious terms, the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus wants only the worship of free women and free men, not of slaves. In secular terms, every human person is bound to follow his or her own conscience, and to do so conscientiously. This is not to say that all consciences are equal, or that there is no such thing as truth. But it is to insist that in the search for truth, due attention should be paid to evidence. Thus, civilized peoples argue about serious matters in the light of evidence. They respect each other as reasonable creatures, and they hold each other to conducting themselves reasonably. Thus the discovery of the principle of religious liberty leads to discoveries about the nature of truth.
For, in this same spirit, reasonable people recognize the importance to civilized living of a regulative principle of truth. By truth, they mean that which may be affirmed and held in the light of evidence. Without a rule of looking to evidence that may be able to sway reasonable persons, a people would have no rational method for resolving differences. The alternative is a brute appeal to superior power. Indeed, the acceptance or non-acceptance of the regulative idea of truth separates civilized peoples from barbarians. Civilized people argue with one another in the light of evidence. Barbarians club one another.
Finally, one of the great gifts that Judaism conveyed to Christianity, and thence to the civilization of Europe and the North Atlantic, is the sense that, because there is a Creator and a Messiah, history is not a cycle of continuous and eternal return to its starting point, in as it were a circle. Rather, history is an uneven line whose course is determined by human freedom, a line which has a beginning, a middle, and an end--a narrative line, so to speak, whose axial point, whose bright red interpretive thread, is liberty. History is the story of the slow appropriation by the human race of the full meaning of human liberty--that is, the liberty that is constituted by deliberate self-government. It is, therefore, the story of countless personal appropriations of liberty. It is also the story of large human social experiments in building up institutions compatible with and supportive of human liberty. Liberty is the main interpretive thread of human history.
One implication of this sense of history is that one needs a theory of the development of doctrine, a way to measure what is true progress in understanding fundamental ideas and categories, and what is a distortion. Today’s Muslims are urgently searching for some such systematic method for determining what is permanently valid from the Koran, and what belongs properly to one period but perhaps not to later periods. Not only Jews and Christians, but all serious secular philosophers have also had to wrestle with a theory of how to discern authentic progress from distortion and betrayal.
These four categories of thought, in a word, are a few of the ‘common values’ of Europe and America. All in fact had a religious origin. Yet they are each susceptible of quite rational secular articulation. One does not have to be Christian or Jewish to cherish them, or to make them one’s own.
Common convictions about natural rights, religious liberty, a regulative idea of truth, and historical consciousness –these are four of the distinguishing marks of the civilization of Europe and North America, which set it off from every other civilization in history, whether religious or secular.
These are the marks that most deeply unify Europe and America.
When one looks ahead for the next fifty years, or even for a century, there seems no other alliance so deeply or so well grounded, so capable both of authentic progress on the path of liberty, and of authentic re-appropriations of forgotten truths from our own past. It would be unforgivable if America and Europe, because of current pettiness and manufactured rivalries, did not go forward together, for the good of the human race as a whole, and for the good both of Europe and America. Despite their particular origin, furthermore, our common values have important meaning for all cultures universally, as many in other cultures have long been testifying. Others may not accept these common values wholesale, or in the same way that we do, but nothing in these common values belongs solely to us. Like all things human, they both have a particular historical origin, and also they are part of the common heritage of humankind.
Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar at AEI.
Divergent Paths and Common Values in Old Europe and the United States
Posted: Tuesday, August 5, 2003
SPEECHES
Hayek Foundation, Bratislava (Slovakia)
Publication Date: July 3, 2003
To speak of Europe is not to speak of geography, but of a civilization.
It is to speak of a centuries-long argument about the deepest meaning of such terms as God, truth, freedom, justice, and community. At the same time, to speak of Europe is also to speak of the extension of its noble and distinctive civilization (and its passionate arguments) far beyond the geography of Europe itself. It is to speak of the civilization of the North Atlantic, so as to include those far-off children of Europe: Canada and the United States.
It was to protect that whole civilization, the civilization of the North Atlantic, that NATO was formed, the Alliance that forced the peaceful capitulation of the Soviet Union in 1989, and that has so changed the perspective of formerly divided nation states within Europe, that for the first time in a thousand years there is very little prospect of war among them.
Because of that extension westward and the stunning Alliance to which it gave birth, the North Atlantic Community is a grander concept than the European Community. The great oak springing from the roots of Jerusalem, Athens, and Rome spreads far outwards over the Atlantic. Its religious vitalities have flourished generation after generation in America, while they have seemed to wither in Europe. The American people are confident and vigorous, while Europe in its secularism seems (from America) to have become complacent, risk-averse, devoted to economic security, its population no longer reproducing itself even to replacement levels.
Forgive me for not being more diplomatic. This is a moment in which anti-American propaganda, most of it false, is so powerful in Europe that it is stirring in America the need to be more frank with our European friends. "The American street" is out of patience with France, in particular, and anti-American journalism in general. A few on the American left--Bill Clinton was one--do see European social democracy as morally advanced. Observing Europe, however, most Americans see few signs of European moral superiority. On the contrary, they see moral decline.
Before addressing the divergences between Old Europe and America, however, let me first count up the strengths of NATO, and then its weaknesses.
1. The Greatest Alliance
NATO is the most successful Alliance in history. For more than fifty years, it protected its member nations from violent attack by the most powerful external military force ever assembled in history, the armies and intelligence forces of the Soviet Union. It also carried through an internal harmonization of its own command structures, communications, and (most impressive of all) military industrial production. These are great achievements.
Let me underline the importance of having attained internally harmonious command structures. Whatever the particular national make-up of its leadership and component units at any one time, a NATO unit can in principle work with others under unified command. Furthermore, all units are well practiced in certain basic systems of communication.
It is also a great achievement of NATO to have harmonized the specifications of its military equipment, so that nearly all of it is usable by all troops, no matter where it has been manufactured. To have brought about such technical harmony has required very close unity of purpose. To have done so on a Continent whose various peoples have long prided themselves on their stubborn independence and the charming disparity of their ways verges on the amazing. One might say, in a way, that the experience of blending together such a vast and potent military force as NATO prepared the way for the political and civil unification of a European Community. NATO has been a formidable military force, not only in its superior technology, but also in its moral determination to defend liberty at all costs, and with all possible attention to the humble detail of squad-level coordination.
Yet NATO itself faces a crisis springing from its own success. Less than a decade ago, many scholars were predicting at least the relative "decline" of the United States, as the Japanese economic model blossomed, and as the European Community was nearing its formal debut. Europe, it was said, had a much larger internal market than the United States--380 million v. 280 million--and a newfound determination to surpass the United States in economic power.
But in the decade since 1990, Japan has fallen into a twelve-year recession and the European economic model has sputtered in fitful stops and starts. Germany and France in particular show woefully high unemployment and forbidding costs for domestic production. (To produce an automobile in Germany, for example, costs nearly nine times more than in Slovakia). Between 1990 and 2000, the European Monetary Union nonetheless managed to add to its gross domestic product an increase of just over 20 percent [from 6.6 trillion dollars to 8 trillion dollars in chained 1995 U.S. dollars], an increase of 1.4 trillion dollars. By contrast, the United States has added to its GDP an increase approaching 40 percent [from 6.5 trillion dollars to 9 trillion dollars], an increase of 2.5 trillion dollars. Similarly, the per capita GDP in the U.S. (in chained 1995 U.S. dollars) spurted from $26,141 to $31,996--an increase of 22%.1
U.S. firms have also benefitted by a fresh burst of inventions and discoveries during this decade, particularly in communications, precision instruments, lasers, "stealth" metallic surfaces and other militarily useful technologies.
For instance, the weaponry and communications used by American forces in the Gulf War of 1991 were already so advanced that most allies could not operate on a par with American forces. By 2003, no military units, except perhaps the British, could operate at the same level. Through the use of communications drones over target areas and all-weather detection instruments, the American forces were at most times able to see the enemy out in front of them, even when they could not be seen by the enemy. Because of the interconnectedness of all U.S. forces--air, sea, and ground--by means of television images, voice, and instantaneous e-mail communications, American commanders in command centers hundreds or even thousands of miles away were privy to the same intelligence and communications as their front line forces, and in real time. Never in history had a war been fought under such conditions of instantaneous intelligence, universal communication, and informed command.
Because of these advances, the American forces launched barely twenty-percent of the bombs--the iron, so to speak--expended in 1991. They did not have to use most of their projected supplies of precision rockets and other weapons. Their intelligence concerning where to place their explosives, and the precision guidance systems that allowed them to target a specific aperture (window or chimney) through which to place them, and a specific room within which to explode them, allowed them to use far less ordinance, while achieving far superior results.
During World War II, bombs were so imprecise that the quantity of explosives packed into each bomb had to be in the thousands of pounds. In those days, to strike within a half-mile of a factory, say, was considered damaging. This may be why, as the Second Iraq war impended, Europeans mindful of World War II imagined Dresden, while the Americans were imagining something many magnitudes less damaging. In 2003, the bombing of Baghdad left virtually all civilian buildings untouched, even when a military targets in an adjoining building had been destroyed. Moreover, in the buildings selected as military targets, the explosives nearly always went off in particular rooms or sections of the building--and with the amount of force chosen in advance. Those choosing targets wanted to save file rooms, for instance.
In terms of "re-building" Baghdad, therefore, remarkably little needs to be done, except for the thirty years of neglect that Saddam Hussein visited upon basic infrastructure. Few buildings of a civilian nature were struck by American bombs. The exact targets selected were Saddam’s palaces, and military, secret police, and particular government buildings.
Although the United States has cut its military spending in half since 1989, from about six percent of gdp per annum to three percent, its gross national product has grown so large since the economic reforms of the Reagan Presidency, which began in 1981, that this small three percent still yields a powerful sum of dollars. Even this is far more than any European nation spends, and more than all of them together. Furthermore, a great deal of military spending by European nations tends to go into non-military categories, whereas US spending, while also diffuse, is far more concentrated on military purposes. In addition, the US military is greatly aided by technological research on the part of civilian firms.
For these reasons, the military forces of the European Community are falling ever further behind the war-fighting capacity of the American forces. So much so that this internal disparity is creating a crisis for NATO. I mentioned before the instantaneous intelligence-and-communications capacities of the American forces, all of whom are equipped with a highly secret new cyber-system that allows them to stay in complete and instantaneous contact with one another. In the Second Iraq War, NATO allies in the Coalition understandably wanted access to this system, but the Americans were unable to separate the parts of it they could freely share from the parts that involve secrets too valuable to permit sharing at this time.
On the front edge of the skills proper to warriors, the Americans are now very nearly alone. In more traditional peace-keeping and policing roles, by contrast, all NATO nations are used to working cooperatively and that work keeps increasing in range and numbers. NATO has many crucial assignments to its south (in the Balkans and in Africa) and east (in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere).
2. Growing Divergences
Behind this separation in military capabilities, however, there also lie profound cultural and moral divides. It is true that all of us together, Europe and America, share many common "values," as is often said, or as I prefer to say, "many common arguments." We are part of one same civilization, with the same roots, roots quite different from those of other civilizations.
All of us on this one small blue-green planet spinning in the void, as we have come to see it in photos sent back from space, all of us share one common humanity. "Humanity," however, is differentiated by time and space, and also by culture and civilization. Western civilization, and in particular the civilization of the North Atlantic, is one of the most dynamic of these civilizations, that have ever appeared on earth.
Civilization, Thomas Aquinas once wrote, is constituted by conversation; that is, by argument. Civilized people, treating each other as reasonable, argue with one another. Barbarians club one another, as if values are mere "preferences," and reason has nothing to do with them. For barbarians, nothing matters but power.
Well, between the United States and Europe, real arguments have emerged with ever greater strength during the past fifteen years, especially after the threat from the Soviet Union was finally removed.
In centuries past, European reason was shaped by feudalism and the emphasis it placed on birth and class. European reason was also shaped by tribalism, collectivism and statism of various types. This was especially true in the twentieth-century, from communism through national socialism to socialism, and social democracy. By contrast, as Tocqueville remarked, America was marked from the beginning by a passion for equality, but equality understood in a non-European way: not a leveling, but an equal chance to compete; an acceptance of unequal outcomes, if fair, rather than envy of the successful. America was also marked by a revulsion against European forms of collectivism. Americans are more communitarian than individualistic. The Los Angeles Olympics, for example, were financed and staffed far more by private funds and associations than by government, federal or state, that is, by individual volunteers organizing themselves. In this sense, Americans are more likely than other peoples to pitch in and help in mutual projects large and small, to put up one another’s houses, to work together smoothly in associations, and to enjoy flawless teamwork. But it is also true that they prefer to stand on their own two feet as individuals, with fewer governmental benefits, rather than to endure European forms of collectivism, even the social democratic ones. I admit that the taste for government handouts is growing, even in America, abetted by the American left; but it is the large-scale resistance that in America is so striking, and almost unique. Europe has few equivalents to the Republican Party. (Here candor compels the author to confess to being a lifelong registered Democrat, although in philosophy rather a whig and a liberal, as defined below, than a welfare statist.)
These days, then, NATO suffers from the growing divergence between America and Europe on such points as these. The European political class has been boasting for years that the European economic model--the social welfare state, the "humane capitalism" of the Rhine Valley, the social market economy--is morally far superior to American democratic capitalism, to which they rather refer (against all evidence) as "savage capitalism." There is only one problem. European welfare states have already pledged such high benefits to future retirees and other beneficiaries that in the next fifteen years they will not be able to pay for them, on account of the demographic squeeze caused by lower birth rates.
Welfare states are predicated on three conditions that no longer apply: an average age at mortality of 65 (when Bismarck promised his generals a guaranteed pension after age 65, he knew that few would actually live longer than that); an ever larger proportion of young workers to the elderly, so that young workers could easily pay the pensions of the old ; and complete monetary and fiscal control by individual welfare states over their own territory. These days, none of these conditions are met in "Old Europe" (Germany, France, Belgium). The numbers of newborn have fallen to unprecedented lows, the average age of those over 65 advances steadily higher year by year, and both capital and labor are subject to international pressures beyond the control of the nation state. In these circumstances, the European welfare states are in an ever worsening budgetary bind.
One consequence is that the national budgets of welfare states have no money for new military needs. Strapped down by shortages, NATO suffers. European elected leaders must starve the military, because their first priority is to keep feeding the clamoring clients of insatiable welfare states.
These reflections prompt us to examine on a deeper level the diverging paths of the American experiment and the European experiment.
2. Complementary--or Competitive?
As a general principle, competition between two divergent points of view is quite good. The motto of the American Enterprise Institute, for example, is that "The competition of ideas is essential to a free society." To be confronted with a sharp competitor is a very great gift, for a gifted person faced with no competition has no way to test how deep his gift goes, or to push himself to his limits. A stiff competition is likely to make both competitors better than they would otherwise be. From experience with such lessons, Americans love competition. For them, competition is a moral term. Even in business, they regard competition as a form of checks and balances, not so much Darwinian--"dog eat dog"--as Madisonian (after James Madison, the Father of the American Constitution; see Federalist #10).
In a competition to understand more accurately the nature of political and economic reality, however, if one competitor is more in touch with reality, the loser is partly living on illusions. In that case, competition has fateful consequences. If the loser is not willing to change his ways, his predicament can only grow worse. If he accepts the competition as a valuable wake-up call to change, on the other hand, the competition was a great blessing. Faced with superior competition from the Japanese during 1970-1980, American business was shocked into dramatic self-reform and restructuring, which led to an immense wave of new technological breakthroughs in fiber optics, computers, the internet, cell phones, genetic medicines, telecommunications, satellites, etc.
Europeans are constantly preaching how much more moral they are than Americans, at least in terms of their economic model. The American model is "savage," they say. Further, the fact that about half the states in the United States continue to exercise the death penalty is taken as a confirmation by European elites of their own higher level of humanity. The Europeans, they say, embrace the Kyoto Accords, while the Americans will not ratify them (the U.S. Senate rejected Kyoto by about 99-0, as I recall). In actual fact, of course, the Europeans sign the formal documents while actually doing little to meet the requirements, whereas the United States goes a long way to meeting the requirements, but refuses to sign a protocol that it knows will never be observed.
Not to be less than candid, Americans deeply hold that their own experiment in liberty is morally superior to the ways of the Old World. They have their own views about European perfidies. They think that today’s Europeans are shirkers, who do not work enough hours per day, or week, or year; take too many holidays off; and constantly want something for nothing. Traveling in Europe is frequently a disappointment to Americans, when some form of transport or other is rendered unusable by hostile and arrogant strikers, normally protecting some ancient privilege of their own, and utterly heedless of the common good. Europeans seem to Americans always to be defending their "rights" (i.e., privileges), in a fundamentally self-centered spirit, each protecting his own self-interest, while carrying signboards on which appear professionally painted slogans about high principle. To Americans, Europeans seem risk-averse, slow to experiment with the new, usually quicker with dozens of reasons why something cannot be done than with an obvious and open willingness to give a new idea a try. Europeans seem obsessed with the familiar, the comfortable, and the secure.
So much for cultural divergences on what constitutes moral superiority. There is not much point in shouting recriminations across the Atlantic. But it does seem necessary for an American in Europe, who hears so many negatives hurled at the United States on television and reads many others in the journals, to remind Europeans that Americans have their opinions about Europe, too. One should not, I think, encourage isolationism in America, nor in Europe. To maintain a strong alliance, it is not necessary to be blind to each other’s faults or to disguise our own pronounced preferences for our own ways. It is quite enough to have common interests and, on a deeper level, common roots and values--which are under quite hostile worldwide threat, as was shown on September 11. This threat is not aimed solely at America, but at "crusader" Europe, too.
3. What Is Causing the Recent Cleavages?
In recent years, nonetheless, several sources of new cleavages have opened up. I am not certain I understand these, but let me offer three or four hypotheses.
First, Europeans today have a far weaker belief in the nation state, and have begun to idealize large collective entities, such as the United Nations and the European Community. They are willing to cede sovereignty from one to the other, and in the process to give up a great many safeguards of local democracy. To Americans, in fact, it seems that Europeans revere bureaucrats, in the larger collective, the more so. They certainly pay lavish salaries to countless ranks of them. In addition, the Europeans seem not to be preoccupied with checks and balances, the division of all powers, and other auxiliary precautions, in the protection of liberty from its customary and traditional sources of abuse. Europeans seem relatively passive before their political elites. Europeans even seem to cry out to their elites: "Abuse us!" In other words, to American eyes, Europeans, after all their bad experiences, still seem innocent about concentrations of power. Europeans seem not to believe in original sin, or in the pervasiveness of evil in the hearts of men, for against these they arrange so few protections.
Second, on a planetary scale, Europeans seem to hold that the world is populated by Kantians, eager to accept resolutions after hearing speeches in the UN. The UN Security Council passed seventeen such resolutions for Saddam Hussein, as if they actually expected him to be swayed by patient argument, and then they were miffed not to be able to make it eighteen.
By contrast, Americans do not have much faith in Kantian reason or the rationality of collectives and tyrants. The schoolmaster of the Americans is not Kant but St. Augustine, the teacher both of Aquinas and of eighteenth-century Protestant divines in America. Augustine was more keen to detect the ways in which humans abuse power, even twist reason itself. Robert Kagan has mistakenly asserted in Of Paradise and Power2 that Thomas Hobbes is the teacher of the Americans, but Hobbes was far too cynical, and a lover of illiberal Leviathan. The American master is Augustine, whom Kagan ignores. Augustine urges Americans on toward the City of God, the "shining City on the Hill," while simultaneously warning them against their own inveterate inclinations to sin. Hobbes depresses the spirit; Augustine inspires and arms it. From St. Augustine, the Americans get both their realism and their optimism.
There may be a third reason for the screeching anti-Americanism in Europe, although I sense myself walking on shakier ground. Could it be that some Europeans hate America for not accepting the rationality of the European view of the world? By designating terrorism as "evil," and by designating three states that support terrorism [Iraq, Iran, and North Korea] as "the axis of evil," President Bush flew directly against the worldview of the Europeans. They want rationality, he pointed to the irrational components in Iraq, Iran and North Korea. They want peace at the lowest possible cost, while he was not willing to wait until the terrorists again struck New York or Washington. They want collective security, he had observed what happened in Rwanda, and in the French unilateral intervention into the Ivory Coast, and in the Russian into Chechnya. European elites use the language of bureaucracy and collective negotiation, Bush used the language of Christianity. That language deeply offends secular Europeans. There seems to be great resistance to Bush precisely because he is visibly religious. (Bill Clinton used religious language at least as often as Bush; but perhaps that didn’t worry Europeans because they didn’t think he meant it. Meanwhile, Bush’s religious language may worry Europeans precisely because he does believe it.)
In any case, America is far more religious than Europe, both more Christian and more Jewish. In America, a great number of political and intellectual leaders--yes, and journalists--are serious about their Judaism or their Christianity. As Americans, they feel quite comfortable in expressing that seriousness. In America, from the beginning religion has normally been on the side of liberty, and liberty on the side of religion. We never faced the ancien regime that led so many European lovers of liberty to reject religion outright. We did not experience on our own soil the rise of aggressive atheism under Nazis and Communists.
In short, as Niall Ferguson has suggested,3 it may be American religious seriousness that still leads us to work so hard and with such discipline (Max Weber), and to have high morale, and a deep conviction about the rightness of supporting liberty around the world (Tocqueville). For certain, it is our sense that each woman and each man is made in the image of the Creator that leads us so to emphasize creativity, invention, and enterprise in each sphere of life. As Judaism and then Christianity have taught us, it is the vocation of every woman and man to create–to add to this world before our deaths what was not here at our births. Each American should be creative.
It is one of the ironies of our times that nearly all of the values that America holds most dear derive from Europe, even though today’s Europeans no longer hold them. For instance, all those lessons about Judaism and Christianity mentioned above Americans did not find here in America waiting for us. Just the opposite, they came with the Bibles that were carried in our grandparents’ steamship trunks, and in the lessons they carried in their heads and their hearts from Europe to America.
The public buildings of the United States reflect Greece and Rome. The influence of the Enlightenment--the English, not the French or the German Enlightenment--is reflected in our terse classic speech, such as that of our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, and other basic documents such as The Federalist. But the deepest impress on America’s soul is biblical realism--a sense of the glories possible to man, chastened by a sense of the pervasiveness in all circumstances of human wickedness and weakness. In our youth, we thought we learned these lessons from Europe. In our maturity, we are surprised that Europe has "outgrown" them. We think these lessons would be useful for Europe to relearn.
We had also thought we learned our "whiggism" and our "liberalism" from Europe, from Scotland to be precise--from moral sense philosophers such as Francis Hutchison and Adam Smith. By the whig tendency, we mean the love for civil and political liberties, along with respect for tradition, experience, the local, the unspoken, the tacit, and the religious dimension of life. By the liberal tendency, we mean the commitment to economic liberty as well as political and civil liberties. In combination, the whig and the liberal tendencies see liberty as the bright red thread which furnishes to human history its central line of institutional progress.
Liberty in this sense is not given, it must be earned. Indeed, it must be learned through hard practice, repetition, trial and error; it must be learned through suffering, failure, and even death. Liberty in this sense means self-government, that is, the conquest of the self. Self-government, in turn, has both a personal, private dimension and a public, institutional dimension. To extend true liberty in both dimensions exacts a high price in vigilance and sacrifice. Liberty is in its own way the way of the cross. It is not won by wishing, but by wagering on it all that one has, by dying or being willing to die. "I regret," said Nathan Hale at his death early in the War of Independence, "that I have but one life to lose for my country." Through such men, the rest of us enjoy today our institutional liberties.
In this sense, Americans do not fear death. We are still, though much besieged, a culture of life. The critic may reply scornfully, But what then about your practice of abortion, the least restrictive on earth, or your tolerance in half your States of the death penalty? Well, to the best of my knowledge, the American people have never voted for abortion in any jurisdiction. Every time the issue comes to a popular vote, abortion loses. It is the American Supreme Court that (illegally, many of us think) has imposed the abortion regime on the people. As for the death penalty, circumstances in America are not the same as in Europe, and what seems reasonable in one continent may to many seem otherwise in another. The laws under which people live are properly their own choice. (It may be that on many issues, such as the death penalty, popular opinion in Europe is much the same as popular opinion in the U.S., despite the fact that in Europe the laws are far more closely controlled by the political elite than is possible in the U.S.)
To resume, I believe it descriptively accurate to state that Americans stand out among our allies as noticeably optimistic, active, vigorous, and not afraid to take chances. Failure does not affright us. Many great ventures succeed only after the learning that takes place through multiple failures.
In all these ways, George Bush after September 11 has been an exemplary American, not at all afraid to trust in liberty and to roll the dice of history for very high stakes. There were a huge number of ways in which the war in Iraq might have gone wrong. A sudden, swift victory was by no means assured. Oil wells might have been sabotaged, pipelines emptying unchecked into the Persian Gulf. Israel and Kuwait might have been bombed. Resistance might have been universal and fierce beyond all previous experience. The small American force--much lighter and smaller than twelve years earlier, and moving without the long weeks of preparatory bombing that marked 1991--might have been surrounded and captured. Bush risked not only his Presidency but the credit of the United States military forces for many decades to come.
Can it be that, precisely for his daring and vigor, he is hated by a different stripe of men?
I hasten to point out that Bush is by choice a man of the American West, and that nearly all American Presidents of the last fifty years have been from that part of America, the most religious, biblical part, the Bible Belt of the South and the West. Let me count them off: Lyndon Johnson from Texas; Richard Nixon from California; Gerald Ford--the exception--from Michigan, in the oval office not by being elected but by succession as Vice-President; Jimmy Carter from Georgia; Ronald Reagan from California; George Bush the First from Texas; Bill Clinton from Arkansas; and George Bush the Second from Texas. The center of gravity in American politics has moved to the part of America that is least like Europe, the vigorous American West, and wise Europeans will want to take that into account.
4. The "Values" We Have in Common
When we look out through the next hundred years, no other potential alliance in the world rivals the European and North Atlantic civilization, not in cultural power, nor in economic power, nor in military power. The only thing that can defeat us is our own disunity. What drive us together in the first place are our own interests and, even more deeply, our ‘common values.’ Statesmen are fond of stressing these ‘common values’ at the end of their speeches. But over the years our ability to state these values has grown weaker and weaker. The reason for this vagueness is that our civilization is distinctive primarily because of its Jewish and Christian roots. But both in America and in Europe, especially in Europe, our elites no longer feel comfortable expressing reality in religious language. Thus, on many important points--noticeably so, under threat from Muslim antagonists--they fall silent, or try too obviously to change the subject.
Specifically, we in the North Atlantic civilization draw four thought-categories, or frameworks, or paradigms, from our Jewish and Christian roots. These four are the rights endowed in all humans by their Creator; liberty of conscience; a regulative idea of truth; and historical consciousness. These are horizon-shaping concepts, which frame the way we look at reality. Each of these boundary concepts may be articulated in secular terms. It is not necessary to be a believing Jew or Christian in order to hold them in mind or, more exactly, to be held in their grip.
As a wise and experienced rabbi once explained to me, it is important in establishing a new synagogue to pay special attention to ‘flying buttresses,’ that is, to those people who support the synagogue from outside, without ever going through the door. In the same way, it is important to find words to express the common values of the West whose origins may be religious, in terms that are graspable by those who no longer go through the doors of churches or synagogues. It is necessary to express these originally religious concepts in non-religious ways.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, no orthodox believer himself, wrote that one of the truths we hold is that "All men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights." Even those who do not hold that there is a Creator of all things may understand by this locution that each human being, by the very fact of being human, shares in certain inalienable natural rights. Such persons may grasp the essential point, moreover, that these rights are not given to us by the State, nor may they be taken away by States. They are rooted in our own innate capacity to reflect and to choose. They are rooted in our capacity to be self-governing agents, such that each of us is responsible, alone, for choosing our individual destiny.
Again, our commitment to religious liberty, or liberty of conscience, also has a specifically Jewish and Christian historical origin. But it, too, is also understandable in secular terms. After immense suffering from religious warfare, in which human beings seemed to be discrediting religion by the very act of killing one another to vindicate it, certain thinkers began to notice accusatory characteristics of "the Divine Author of our religion" (as Jefferson put it). For instance, the God of Israel wanted to be worshiped "in spirit and in truth," not solely by external motions, and not on false pretences, but with honesty of heart and singleness of mind. In addition, He addressed his word to each individual in solitude (as well as to all together, as a community), in such fashion that each is obliged to reply to him in a way that neither mother nor father nor sister not brother can do in his stead. In that sense, personal responsibility is inalienable. That responsibility belongs to the self alone. And no one can legitimately interfere in the arena in which the soul stands alone and inalienably before God. In brief, States must respect the religious liberty of each person.
Obviously, it is not necessary to be a Christian or Jewish believer to grasp the secular point of that religious discovery. Conscience is inviolable. It is beyond the reach of States. God Himself may have commissioned some few to speak in his name, but in the end even their words may be rejected, or on the contrary accepted, as the conscience of each among the people directs. In religious terms, the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus wants only the worship of free women and free men, not of slaves. In secular terms, every human person is bound to follow his or her own conscience, and to do so conscientiously. This is not to say that all consciences are equal, or that there is no such thing as truth. But it is to insist that in the search for truth, due attention should be paid to evidence. Thus, civilized peoples argue about serious matters in the light of evidence. They respect each other as reasonable creatures, and they hold each other to conducting themselves reasonably. Thus the discovery of the principle of religious liberty leads to discoveries about the nature of truth.
For, in this same spirit, reasonable people recognize the importance to civilized living of a regulative principle of truth. By truth, they mean that which may be affirmed and held in the light of evidence. Without a rule of looking to evidence that may be able to sway reasonable persons, a people would have no rational method for resolving differences. The alternative is a brute appeal to superior power. Indeed, the acceptance or non-acceptance of the regulative idea of truth separates civilized peoples from barbarians. Civilized people argue with one another in the light of evidence. Barbarians club one another.
Finally, one of the great gifts that Judaism conveyed to Christianity, and thence to the civilization of Europe and the North Atlantic, is the sense that, because there is a Creator and a Messiah, history is not a cycle of continuous and eternal return to its starting point, in as it were a circle. Rather, history is an uneven line whose course is determined by human freedom, a line which has a beginning, a middle, and an end--a narrative line, so to speak, whose axial point, whose bright red interpretive thread, is liberty. History is the story of the slow appropriation by the human race of the full meaning of human liberty--that is, the liberty that is constituted by deliberate self-government. It is, therefore, the story of countless personal appropriations of liberty. It is also the story of large human social experiments in building up institutions compatible with and supportive of human liberty. Liberty is the main interpretive thread of human history.
One implication of this sense of history is that one needs a theory of the development of doctrine, a way to measure what is true progress in understanding fundamental ideas and categories, and what is a distortion. Today’s Muslims are urgently searching for some such systematic method for determining what is permanently valid from the Koran, and what belongs properly to one period but perhaps not to later periods. Not only Jews and Christians, but all serious secular philosophers have also had to wrestle with a theory of how to discern authentic progress from distortion and betrayal.
These four categories of thought, in a word, are a few of the ‘common values’ of Europe and America. All in fact had a religious origin. Yet they are each susceptible of quite rational secular articulation. One does not have to be Christian or Jewish to cherish them, or to make them one’s own.
Common convictions about natural rights, religious liberty, a regulative idea of truth, and historical consciousness –these are four of the distinguishing marks of the civilization of Europe and North America, which set it off from every other civilization in history, whether religious or secular.
These are the marks that most deeply unify Europe and America.
When one looks ahead for the next fifty years, or even for a century, there seems no other alliance so deeply or so well grounded, so capable both of authentic progress on the path of liberty, and of authentic re-appropriations of forgotten truths from our own past. It would be unforgivable if America and Europe, because of current pettiness and manufactured rivalries, did not go forward together, for the good of the human race as a whole, and for the good both of Europe and America. Despite their particular origin, furthermore, our common values have important meaning for all cultures universally, as many in other cultures have long been testifying. Others may not accept these common values wholesale, or in the same way that we do, but nothing in these common values belongs solely to us. Like all things human, they both have a particular historical origin, and also they are part of the common heritage of humankind.
Michael Novak is the George Frederick Jewett Scholar at AEI.
A comment from Maureen Dowd on the attack on Powell - Armitage :
Neocon Coup at the Department d'État
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Let others fight over whether the war in Iraq was a neocon vigilante action disrupting diplomacy. The neocons have moved on to a vigilante action to occupy diplomacy.
The audacious ones have saddled up their pre-emptive steeds and headed off to force a regime change at Foggy Bottom.
President Bush staged a Texan tableau vivant last night, playing host at his ranch to the secretary of state, his wife, Alma, and his deputy, Richard Armitage. Mr. Bush wanted to show solidarity after a Washington Post story on Monday that said that Colin Powell, under pressure from his wife, said he would not be part of a second Bush term, nor would Mr. Armitage.
Mr. Bush might be trying to signal his respect for Mr. Powell, but the president is not always privy to the start of a grandiose neocon scheme.
The scene was reminiscent of last August in Crawford, when Mr. Bush dismissed press "churning" that the administration was on the verge of striking Iraq, saying, "When I say I'm a patient man, I mean I'm a patient man and that we will look at all options and we will consider all technologies available to us, and diplomacy and intelligence."
We all know how that turned out.
When the neocons want something done, they'll get it done, no matter what Mr. Bush thinks. And they think Mr. Powell has downgraded the top cabinet post into a human resources job, making nicey-nice with the U.N. and assorted bad guys instead of pursuing the neocon blueprint for world domination through what James Woolsey calls World War IV (World War III being the cold war.)
Countering the Post story, Mr. Powell's posse claimed that neither the secretary of state nor his deputy had ever said they intended to step down, and charged that the neocons were leaking a canard to turn the two men they consider lame doves into lame ducks.
"This is the revenge of the neocons for two months of bad news, looking like they're falling all over themselves in Iraq," said a Powell confidant, noting that Alma Powell was furious she had been dragged in.
In The Post, nearly all of the names of those who could move up if Mr. Powell moves out are Iraq hawks: Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Newt Gingrich were mentioned as candidates for secretary of state; Wolfie, Cheney Chief of Staff Scooter Libby and Condi deputy Steve Hadley, who may be radioactive after the uranium mistake, were mentioned for national security chief.
Mr. Wolfowitz has been tacitly campaigning for the jobs. He told Charlie Rose about his vice-regal trip to Iraq, where he said at last grateful Iraqis were thronging. "As we would drive by, little kids would run up to the road and give us a thumbs up sign," he said. (At least he thought it was the thumb.)
The move against the popular Powell had all the earmarks of the neocons' pre-emptive strike on Iraq.
1.) Demonize. Reiterating his speech trashing Foggy Bottom last April for propping up dictators and coddling the corrupt, Mr. Gingrich — a Rummy ally who serves on the Defense Policy Board — called for "top-to-bottom reform and culture shock" at State in an article in the July Foreign Policy magazine.
2.) Sex-up the intelligence. The leakers spread word that Mr. Armitage told Condi that he and Mr. Powell would leave on Jan. 21, 2005, the day after the next presidential inauguration. "Nonsense," said Mr. Powell. "Nonsense," said Mr. Armitage.
3.) Create a false rationale. Everyone knew the pair might not stay for a second term. But the neocons were impatient to give them a push, blaming poor Alma Powell for henpecking her husband when they were.
4.) Bring about regime change.
5.) Fail to prepare for the aftermath. "Newt as secretary of state?" sneered one Powell pal. "Hel-lo?"
6.) Make sure it's good for Ariel Sharon. Just as the neocons made their move on Mr. Powell, pro-Israel hawks scorned the secretary for not being on their team in the peace process. Israel's supporters scoffed at the new threat to cut loan guarantees as a State Department policy, not a White House policy.
7.) Ignore the real threat. While the neocons are preoccupying the country with Iraq and a coup at the department d'état, Al Qaeda may have blown up a Marriott in Indonesia and are plotting attacks here.
8.) Change the subject. Next stop, North Korea.
Neocon Coup at the Department d'État
By MAUREEN DOWD
WASHINGTON
Let others fight over whether the war in Iraq was a neocon vigilante action disrupting diplomacy. The neocons have moved on to a vigilante action to occupy diplomacy.
The audacious ones have saddled up their pre-emptive steeds and headed off to force a regime change at Foggy Bottom.
President Bush staged a Texan tableau vivant last night, playing host at his ranch to the secretary of state, his wife, Alma, and his deputy, Richard Armitage. Mr. Bush wanted to show solidarity after a Washington Post story on Monday that said that Colin Powell, under pressure from his wife, said he would not be part of a second Bush term, nor would Mr. Armitage.
Mr. Bush might be trying to signal his respect for Mr. Powell, but the president is not always privy to the start of a grandiose neocon scheme.
The scene was reminiscent of last August in Crawford, when Mr. Bush dismissed press "churning" that the administration was on the verge of striking Iraq, saying, "When I say I'm a patient man, I mean I'm a patient man and that we will look at all options and we will consider all technologies available to us, and diplomacy and intelligence."
We all know how that turned out.
When the neocons want something done, they'll get it done, no matter what Mr. Bush thinks. And they think Mr. Powell has downgraded the top cabinet post into a human resources job, making nicey-nice with the U.N. and assorted bad guys instead of pursuing the neocon blueprint for world domination through what James Woolsey calls World War IV (World War III being the cold war.)
Countering the Post story, Mr. Powell's posse claimed that neither the secretary of state nor his deputy had ever said they intended to step down, and charged that the neocons were leaking a canard to turn the two men they consider lame doves into lame ducks.
"This is the revenge of the neocons for two months of bad news, looking like they're falling all over themselves in Iraq," said a Powell confidant, noting that Alma Powell was furious she had been dragged in.
In The Post, nearly all of the names of those who could move up if Mr. Powell moves out are Iraq hawks: Condi Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Newt Gingrich were mentioned as candidates for secretary of state; Wolfie, Cheney Chief of Staff Scooter Libby and Condi deputy Steve Hadley, who may be radioactive after the uranium mistake, were mentioned for national security chief.
Mr. Wolfowitz has been tacitly campaigning for the jobs. He told Charlie Rose about his vice-regal trip to Iraq, where he said at last grateful Iraqis were thronging. "As we would drive by, little kids would run up to the road and give us a thumbs up sign," he said. (At least he thought it was the thumb.)
The move against the popular Powell had all the earmarks of the neocons' pre-emptive strike on Iraq.
1.) Demonize. Reiterating his speech trashing Foggy Bottom last April for propping up dictators and coddling the corrupt, Mr. Gingrich — a Rummy ally who serves on the Defense Policy Board — called for "top-to-bottom reform and culture shock" at State in an article in the July Foreign Policy magazine.
2.) Sex-up the intelligence. The leakers spread word that Mr. Armitage told Condi that he and Mr. Powell would leave on Jan. 21, 2005, the day after the next presidential inauguration. "Nonsense," said Mr. Powell. "Nonsense," said Mr. Armitage.
3.) Create a false rationale. Everyone knew the pair might not stay for a second term. But the neocons were impatient to give them a push, blaming poor Alma Powell for henpecking her husband when they were.
4.) Bring about regime change.
5.) Fail to prepare for the aftermath. "Newt as secretary of state?" sneered one Powell pal. "Hel-lo?"
6.) Make sure it's good for Ariel Sharon. Just as the neocons made their move on Mr. Powell, pro-Israel hawks scorned the secretary for not being on their team in the peace process. Israel's supporters scoffed at the new threat to cut loan guarantees as a State Department policy, not a White House policy.
7.) Ignore the real threat. While the neocons are preoccupying the country with Iraq and a coup at the department d'état, Al Qaeda may have blown up a Marriott in Indonesia and are plotting attacks here.
8.) Change the subject. Next stop, North Korea.
The "revolutionary side " of American power has shocked the world and is apparently the hardest part of America for foreigners to understand. The world readily accepts the use of US power to protect the status quo, but is ready to react pretty violently when it is used to make changes. What we ae experiencing is the rise of a revolutionary super-power in a world of reactionary nations..... never would they have thought that, after the demise of communism, the revolutionary torch would have been picked up by the US!
Shaking Up the Neighbors
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
AMMAN, Jordan — Shortly after the 25-member Governing Council was appointed in Iraq, the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, questioned the U.S.-appointed Council's legitimacy. "If this Council was elected," complained Mr. Moussa, "it would have gained much power and credibility."
I love that quote. I love it, first of all, for its bold, gutsy, shameless, world-class hypocrisy. Mr. Moussa presides over an Arab League in which not one of the 22 member states has a leader elected in a free and fair election. On top of it, before the war, Mr. Moussa did all he could to shield Saddam Hussein from attack, although Saddam had never held a real election in his life. Yet, there was Mr. Moussa questioning the new U.S.-appointed Iraqi Council, which, even in its infant form, is already the most representative government Iraq has ever had.
But I also love Mr. Moussa's comment for its unintended revolutionary message: "power and credibility" come from governments that are freely "elected." If only that were the motto of the Arab League. Alas, it is not, but it might be one day, and that brings me to the core question of this column: What has been the Arab reaction to Iraq?
The short answer is: Shock, denial, fear and some stirrings of change. The shock comes from how easily the U.S.-British force smashed Saddam's regime. The denial is manifest in the absence of virtually any public discussion among Arab elites as to why Baghdad fell so easily and why such a terrible regime was indulged by the Arab world for so long.
"The most striking thing," one Arab diplomat remarked to me, "is that there are no debates going on [in the Arab world.] There is no W.M.D. debate. There is no debate about the atrocities and the mass graves. Even inside Iraq there doesn't seem to be much soul-searching, like there was in Germany after World War II. That is worrisome to me. People have to learn from the mistakes that were made, and there is no attempt at doing that."
The denial is closely related to the fears. Many Arab leaders and intellectuals seem to be torn between two fears about Iraq: fear that the U.S. will succeed in transforming Iraq into a constitutional, democratizing society, which would put pressure on every other Arab regime to change, and fear that the U.S. will fail and Iraq will collapse into ethnic violence that will suck in all the neighbors and look like Lebanon's civil war on steroids.
For now, though, a few governments are getting ahead of the curve, while most are still hiding behind it. Jordan's King Abdullah has been the most pro-active, pushing his conservative population down the path of economic reform, and is likely to begin experimenting soon with political reform as well.
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah recently convened an unusual dialogue between Sunni and Shiite clerics in Saudi Arabia to head off tensions that could flow from Iraq's being ruled by its Shiite majority for the first time in its history. Fears that a democratically elected Shiite-led government in Iraq could stir downtrodden Shiite minorities around the Arab world to demand more power are rife among the dominant Sunni Muslims. Many Sunni Muslims look down on the Shiites as inferior. Think how Southern whites would feel if a black had been elected governor of Mississippi in 1920, and you'll have a taste of how uneasy the Sunnis are about a Shiite-led government in Iraq.
While Saudi Arabia is introducing more reforms at home than generally thought, too often it is one step forward, one step back. Just the other day another moderate Saudi columnist, Hussein Shobokshi, was sacked under government pressure. According to The A.P., Mr. Shobokshi had recently written a column imagining a Saudi Arabia where his daughter could drive and he could vote. Egypt remains totally gridlocked on reform, while the Syrian regime is going totally the wrong way, tightening its grip at home and pushing out all the freethinkers in Lebanon's cabinet.
As long as it is not clear how Iraq is going to come out, Arab regimes can practice denial. But if there is a decent government elected in Baghdad in two years, it will be as easy to ignore as a 10.0 earthquake. I think Abdul Rahman al-Rashid, the editor of London's Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, got it right when he remarked to me of the U.S. invasion of Iraq: "It is a mix between Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the 1967 war. There is the shock of defeat like '67 and the introduction of new thinking in the region like Napoleon. I can't predict how it will all come out, but for some reason I think it will be positive."
Shaking Up the Neighbors
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
AMMAN, Jordan — Shortly after the 25-member Governing Council was appointed in Iraq, the head of the Arab League, Amr Moussa, questioned the U.S.-appointed Council's legitimacy. "If this Council was elected," complained Mr. Moussa, "it would have gained much power and credibility."
I love that quote. I love it, first of all, for its bold, gutsy, shameless, world-class hypocrisy. Mr. Moussa presides over an Arab League in which not one of the 22 member states has a leader elected in a free and fair election. On top of it, before the war, Mr. Moussa did all he could to shield Saddam Hussein from attack, although Saddam had never held a real election in his life. Yet, there was Mr. Moussa questioning the new U.S.-appointed Iraqi Council, which, even in its infant form, is already the most representative government Iraq has ever had.
But I also love Mr. Moussa's comment for its unintended revolutionary message: "power and credibility" come from governments that are freely "elected." If only that were the motto of the Arab League. Alas, it is not, but it might be one day, and that brings me to the core question of this column: What has been the Arab reaction to Iraq?
The short answer is: Shock, denial, fear and some stirrings of change. The shock comes from how easily the U.S.-British force smashed Saddam's regime. The denial is manifest in the absence of virtually any public discussion among Arab elites as to why Baghdad fell so easily and why such a terrible regime was indulged by the Arab world for so long.
"The most striking thing," one Arab diplomat remarked to me, "is that there are no debates going on [in the Arab world.] There is no W.M.D. debate. There is no debate about the atrocities and the mass graves. Even inside Iraq there doesn't seem to be much soul-searching, like there was in Germany after World War II. That is worrisome to me. People have to learn from the mistakes that were made, and there is no attempt at doing that."
The denial is closely related to the fears. Many Arab leaders and intellectuals seem to be torn between two fears about Iraq: fear that the U.S. will succeed in transforming Iraq into a constitutional, democratizing society, which would put pressure on every other Arab regime to change, and fear that the U.S. will fail and Iraq will collapse into ethnic violence that will suck in all the neighbors and look like Lebanon's civil war on steroids.
For now, though, a few governments are getting ahead of the curve, while most are still hiding behind it. Jordan's King Abdullah has been the most pro-active, pushing his conservative population down the path of economic reform, and is likely to begin experimenting soon with political reform as well.
Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince Abdullah recently convened an unusual dialogue between Sunni and Shiite clerics in Saudi Arabia to head off tensions that could flow from Iraq's being ruled by its Shiite majority for the first time in its history. Fears that a democratically elected Shiite-led government in Iraq could stir downtrodden Shiite minorities around the Arab world to demand more power are rife among the dominant Sunni Muslims. Many Sunni Muslims look down on the Shiites as inferior. Think how Southern whites would feel if a black had been elected governor of Mississippi in 1920, and you'll have a taste of how uneasy the Sunnis are about a Shiite-led government in Iraq.
While Saudi Arabia is introducing more reforms at home than generally thought, too often it is one step forward, one step back. Just the other day another moderate Saudi columnist, Hussein Shobokshi, was sacked under government pressure. According to The A.P., Mr. Shobokshi had recently written a column imagining a Saudi Arabia where his daughter could drive and he could vote. Egypt remains totally gridlocked on reform, while the Syrian regime is going totally the wrong way, tightening its grip at home and pushing out all the freethinkers in Lebanon's cabinet.
As long as it is not clear how Iraq is going to come out, Arab regimes can practice denial. But if there is a decent government elected in Baghdad in two years, it will be as easy to ignore as a 10.0 earthquake. I think Abdul Rahman al-Rashid, the editor of London's Asharq al-Awsat newspaper, got it right when he remarked to me of the U.S. invasion of Iraq: "It is a mix between Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and the 1967 war. There is the shock of defeat like '67 and the introduction of new thinking in the region like Napoleon. I can't predict how it will all come out, but for some reason I think it will be positive."
Tuesday, August 05, 2003
Leaks and counter-leaks, attacks and resistance. Washington today has become an inter-agency battle field. DOD Vs. State is the name of the game.... ad guess who's winning?
Clear Ideas Versus Foggy Bottom
The State Department is jealous of all the sound thinking going on at the Pentagon.
BY MELANIE KIRKPATRICKTuesday, August 5, 2003 12:01 a.m.
The ripest political target in Washington these days is a man who rarely gets his picture in the paper.
Douglas Feith's sin is being Donald Rumsfeld's ideas man and one of the brains behind some of the most significant foreign policy and national security advances of the Bush administration. As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Mr. Feith has transformed a once relatively obscure corner of the Pentagon into the world's most effective think tank. The fact that the president has adopted many of the ideas brewed there infuriates those who see Defense usurping a role that rightly belongs to the State Department.
"Without a doubt, the policy division has the most significant intellectual capabilities in the government," says former Defense Department official Richard Perle, who hired Mr. Feith for the Reagan Pentagon and now sits on the Defense Policy Board. "It's a creative shop that produces a lot of good ideas," says Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser and one of the policy group's main customers. "They are prepared to think differently."
The urgency of the need to think differently became evident on Sept. 11, 2001, six weeks after Mr. Feith started on the job and the war on terrorism began. "Soon after the war got started," Mr. Feith says, "I had a talk with the secretary about how we could support him. He said, 'I need a few ideas every day lobbed in front of me.' "
Since then Mr. Feith has lobbed ideas with the ferocity of Andre Agassi. He and his team of 450 spend a great deal of time on Iraq and Afghanistan--they conceived the offensive strategy in the global war on terrorism--but their strategic focus extends to virtually every corner of the world.
In Russia, they thought through the implications of the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and helped negotiate the Moscow Treaty, dramatically reducing nuclear warheads. They urged a rapid expansion of NATO and the development of a strategic relationship with India, moves that paid off in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Mideast, they pushed for U.S. support of the creation of a Palestinian state in return for Palestinian reform--the position announced by the president in his June 24, 2002 speech.
The idea that fighting the war on terrorism requires a new military "footprint" world-wide was worked by Mr. Feith's policy staff. It led to decisions to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Germany and South Korea and negotiate basing rights in more places world-wide (Central Asia, for example), closer to where they might be needed. The new basing strategy will affect the way the military fights and the way we do diplomacy for decades.
The policy organization represents Defense in the inter-agency process, where its proposals are thrashed out along with those from State, CIA, the National Security Council and others. "There is not a lot of pride of authorship, says the NSC's Mr. Hadley. "They are prepared to launch an idea and then let others modify and improve it."
In the Pentagon, Mr. Feith was instrumental in forging a more collaborative relationship with the Joint Staff, which has its own independent policy organization. He and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, co-chair a daily meeting in Mr. Feith's office to share ideas and hash out differences of opinion before they reach Mr. Rumsfeld's desk. The Campaign Planning Committee--"CapCom," in Pentagonspeak--"has become an invaluable tool to work through complicated issues and provide the secretary with a coordinated product," says Gen. Pace.
Success breeds enemies, and the influence of Mr. Feith's policy shop doesn't go down well in certain quarters of Foggy Bottom, which seem to resent that good ideas that don't originate in State can sometimes prevail over their own. Nor does it win friends at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which don't always welcome the competition in intelligence analysis. The result has been a nasty, mostly anonymous, campaign in the media to discredit Mr. Feith and his policy team.
The first wave focused on the small Special Plans Office, set up last fall to prepare for possible war in Iraq. This "cabal" (the New Yorker), "highly secretive group" (Knight-Ridder), or "shadowy Pentagon committee" (Agence France Press) was the subject of so much false reporting that Mr. Feith and fellow cabalist William Luti took the rare step of calling a press conference in June to set the record straight.
The latest attacks hold Mr. Feith's office responsible for "flawed" postwar planning in Iraq. A story in yesterday's Financial Times is typical: The Pentagon planning was "hurried" and "ignored the extensive work done by the State Department."
The criticism is preposterous if only for the fact that Defense's proposals for a provisional government, de-Baathification, and free Iraqi forces to help with security were initially shot down. They have now all been adopted by the Coalition Provisional Authority--albeit after costly delay. In any event, the postwar plans went through a rigorous inter-agency process. Anyone looking to assign blame needs to cast a wider net.
Mr. Feith's office is also accused of deep-sixing State's Future of Iraq project. A more accurate way of putting it is that State's ideas didn't make the grade--that is, they didn't survive the inter-agency process. One consumer of the Future of Iraq's output calls it "nothing more than a seminar series that produced concept papers that would have gone nowhere. There were no action plans."
The campaign to discredit Mr. Feith is unlikely to have any effect on the one man who matters. Mr. Rumsfeld went out of his way at a news conference recently to say his policy chief was doing a "very fine job." But it would be nice to think that in the competition of ideas for winning the war on terrorism, the nation's policy wonks were all pulling together.
Ms. Kirkpatrick is associate editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
Clear Ideas Versus Foggy Bottom
The State Department is jealous of all the sound thinking going on at the Pentagon.
BY MELANIE KIRKPATRICKTuesday, August 5, 2003 12:01 a.m.
The ripest political target in Washington these days is a man who rarely gets his picture in the paper.
Douglas Feith's sin is being Donald Rumsfeld's ideas man and one of the brains behind some of the most significant foreign policy and national security advances of the Bush administration. As Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, Mr. Feith has transformed a once relatively obscure corner of the Pentagon into the world's most effective think tank. The fact that the president has adopted many of the ideas brewed there infuriates those who see Defense usurping a role that rightly belongs to the State Department.
"Without a doubt, the policy division has the most significant intellectual capabilities in the government," says former Defense Department official Richard Perle, who hired Mr. Feith for the Reagan Pentagon and now sits on the Defense Policy Board. "It's a creative shop that produces a lot of good ideas," says Stephen Hadley, deputy national security adviser and one of the policy group's main customers. "They are prepared to think differently."
The urgency of the need to think differently became evident on Sept. 11, 2001, six weeks after Mr. Feith started on the job and the war on terrorism began. "Soon after the war got started," Mr. Feith says, "I had a talk with the secretary about how we could support him. He said, 'I need a few ideas every day lobbed in front of me.' "
Since then Mr. Feith has lobbed ideas with the ferocity of Andre Agassi. He and his team of 450 spend a great deal of time on Iraq and Afghanistan--they conceived the offensive strategy in the global war on terrorism--but their strategic focus extends to virtually every corner of the world.
In Russia, they thought through the implications of the U.S. withdrawal from the ABM Treaty and helped negotiate the Moscow Treaty, dramatically reducing nuclear warheads. They urged a rapid expansion of NATO and the development of a strategic relationship with India, moves that paid off in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the Mideast, they pushed for U.S. support of the creation of a Palestinian state in return for Palestinian reform--the position announced by the president in his June 24, 2002 speech.
The idea that fighting the war on terrorism requires a new military "footprint" world-wide was worked by Mr. Feith's policy staff. It led to decisions to reduce the number of U.S. troops in Germany and South Korea and negotiate basing rights in more places world-wide (Central Asia, for example), closer to where they might be needed. The new basing strategy will affect the way the military fights and the way we do diplomacy for decades.
The policy organization represents Defense in the inter-agency process, where its proposals are thrashed out along with those from State, CIA, the National Security Council and others. "There is not a lot of pride of authorship, says the NSC's Mr. Hadley. "They are prepared to launch an idea and then let others modify and improve it."
In the Pentagon, Mr. Feith was instrumental in forging a more collaborative relationship with the Joint Staff, which has its own independent policy organization. He and the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Peter Pace, co-chair a daily meeting in Mr. Feith's office to share ideas and hash out differences of opinion before they reach Mr. Rumsfeld's desk. The Campaign Planning Committee--"CapCom," in Pentagonspeak--"has become an invaluable tool to work through complicated issues and provide the secretary with a coordinated product," says Gen. Pace.
Success breeds enemies, and the influence of Mr. Feith's policy shop doesn't go down well in certain quarters of Foggy Bottom, which seem to resent that good ideas that don't originate in State can sometimes prevail over their own. Nor does it win friends at the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency, which don't always welcome the competition in intelligence analysis. The result has been a nasty, mostly anonymous, campaign in the media to discredit Mr. Feith and his policy team.
The first wave focused on the small Special Plans Office, set up last fall to prepare for possible war in Iraq. This "cabal" (the New Yorker), "highly secretive group" (Knight-Ridder), or "shadowy Pentagon committee" (Agence France Press) was the subject of so much false reporting that Mr. Feith and fellow cabalist William Luti took the rare step of calling a press conference in June to set the record straight.
The latest attacks hold Mr. Feith's office responsible for "flawed" postwar planning in Iraq. A story in yesterday's Financial Times is typical: The Pentagon planning was "hurried" and "ignored the extensive work done by the State Department."
The criticism is preposterous if only for the fact that Defense's proposals for a provisional government, de-Baathification, and free Iraqi forces to help with security were initially shot down. They have now all been adopted by the Coalition Provisional Authority--albeit after costly delay. In any event, the postwar plans went through a rigorous inter-agency process. Anyone looking to assign blame needs to cast a wider net.
Mr. Feith's office is also accused of deep-sixing State's Future of Iraq project. A more accurate way of putting it is that State's ideas didn't make the grade--that is, they didn't survive the inter-agency process. One consumer of the Future of Iraq's output calls it "nothing more than a seminar series that produced concept papers that would have gone nowhere. There were no action plans."
The campaign to discredit Mr. Feith is unlikely to have any effect on the one man who matters. Mr. Rumsfeld went out of his way at a news conference recently to say his policy chief was doing a "very fine job." But it would be nice to think that in the competition of ideas for winning the war on terrorism, the nation's policy wonks were all pulling together.
Ms. Kirkpatrick is associate editor of The Wall Street Journal's editorial page.
