On the surface of it, President Bush’s inauguration on Thursday changes nothing. The Republicans will remain in power for another four years and the world will continue to wait hopefully for America to return to the multilateral fold. In fact, it changes everything. It is the end of illusion for those who still believe we are dealing with the America of Roosevelt and Kennedy and time for Britain to adjust its policy accordingly.
The Atlantic alliance was founded on a belief in the indivisibility of Western democratic values. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s justification for tying himself so closely to Bush’s war on terror paid explicit homage to that belief: “The basic values of America are our values too ... Democracy, freedom, tolerance, justice.” At a sufficient level of abstraction, this is self-evidently true. All advanced democracies adhere to concepts of representative government, equality, human rights and the rule of law that find their origins in the European tradition of liberal thought. There is every reason to want Europe and America to work closely together to defend what they hold in common.
But that cannot be the end of the matter, for beneath these broad value headings there is now clear disagreement about what their application involves in practice. Atlanticism was the product of a unique moment in history when American and European thinking on the big political and economic issues had converged. The memory of the 1930s Depression and the need to contain Soviet power produced a postwar consensus in favor of welfare capitalism and multilateral diplomacy. This consensus foundered, first on the monetary unilateralism of Nixon, and more recently on the diplomatic and military unilateralism of Bush.
In many ways this long retreat from New Deal liberalism has returned America to the default setting of its founding values, characterized by hostility to government and a reverence for laissez-faire. It is important, therefore, to understand that when President Bush today talks about freedom (a term he prefers to democracy), he is talking primarily about free markets. We can see this clearly in the occupation policies America has imposed on Iraq where the economy was liberalized first and elections were added almost as an afterthought. Whatever else it involves, freedom does not include the right to choose “unfreedom” in the form of an economic policy that departs from American norms.
There is no meeting point between this vision and the one preferred on our side of the Atlantic. Europeans regard capitalism after the manner of Churchill’s famous remark about democracy: It is the worst possible system except for all the others. Its necessity is regretted and efforts are made to cushion society from its most harmful consequences. The new European constitution reflects this outlook by endorsing the concept of the social market economy. In doing so, it declares for a distinctive set of values that sets Europe apart from America, where capitalism is widely celebrated as a morally purifying force.
These differences are not transitory. They are deeply embedded in historical experience. It would be an exaggeration to say that America was created on a level playing field, but the abundance of space and natural resources gave meaning to the idea that it was the land of opportunity for all. In Europe, the struggle for equality took place against an established pattern of property ownership that foreclosed the possibility of social advance for the majority. That is why the question of wealth redistribution has always loomed larger in the European debate.
Of course, with the passage of time, wealth has become as entrenched in America as anywhere else and social mobility, on some measures, is now lower than in the welfare democracies of northern Europe. But the myth of the American dream is less important for our purposes than the fact that Americans continue to believe in it. According to one survey, a staggering 19 percent of Americans think they belong to the richest one percent and another 20 percent think they will get there in their lifetime.
There is nothing new in American exceptionalism. The novel element has been added by the fact that it is now allied to an extraordinary preponderance of global power with all the assumptions of superiority that flow from it.
This finds expression in the neoconservative assertion that the American model is both the product of an exceptional culture and universally exportable. The contradiction between these propositions can be resolved only in a project that is nakedly imperial and involves an element of coercion. This applies as much to social Europe as to Baathist Iraq.
The question for us is where Britain fits in. The notion of an “English-speaking world” united by a common culture has long been favored by conservatives who wish to trump the geopolitical logic of Britain’s commitment to Europe with an appeal to values. But attempts to substantiate it fail to get beyond the banal observation that we share a common language and a lot of waffle about the Magna Carta.
Contemporary opinion surveys tell a very different story: That, in terms of values, Britain is a mainstream European country. The Pew survey, to take one example, shows that 62 percent of British people believe that government has a responsibility to ensure that no one is in need, compared with 57 percent in Germany and 62 percent in France. The figure for America is 34 percent. Similar trends can be discerned on military intervention, the UN, religion and morality.
Given this, it is a wonder that the myth of Britain’s trans-Atlantic affinity has persisted for so long. One reason is that it is shared by many on the left who ought to know better. They can be found in the corridors of Whitehall and some of the trendier leftish thinktanks: The West Wing wannabes with their preppy styles and New England attitudes. It is this section of our political elite that has harbored the most damaging illusions about the modern world of which it now needs to be disabused. There is no “Emerging Democratic Majority”. America is not a “50-50” nation. President Bartlet is not in power. There is an America beyond Massachusetts, and it is firmly in control.
We now have perfect symmetry between right—and left-wing visions of the special relationship: The former posits a Britain that doesn’t exist, the latter an America that doesn’t exist. The question is how much longer our national policy can be allowed to rest on fantasy. As they say in America, it’s time wake up and smell the coffee.
— David Clark is a former Labour government adviser
