The New York Times

April 27, 2003

How the West Can Be One

By TIMOTHY GARTON ASH

Dear American Friends: We must put the West together again. Our 60-year-old community of Europe and the United States, which we have called in shorthand ''the West,'' has been grotesquely split over Iraq. In recent months, a new Eurasian axis of France, Germany and Russia has squared up against a Euratlantic alliance of the United States, Britain and Spain. Now, after the victory in Iraq, the future of the West will be decided in the Middle East. If we care about the West, we need to work out together what to do about the Middle East.

For where the threatening Soviet East once united us, the Middle East divides us. Yes, I know we had some spectacular trans-Atlantic rows about how to deal with the Soviet bloc, but ultimately the Red Army always concentrated our minds on the need for Western unity. I recently heard a former British foreign secretary sigh, ''If only we had Brezhnev back!'' But there is no more Brezhnev to pull Europe and the United States together again.

We are now repeating, on a larger scale, the mistake we made in the Balkans for most of the 1990's: Western states that don't have fundamentally different interests in a region nonetheless pursue different policies there. Or can you explain to me how the vital interests of France, Germany or Britain in the Middle East differ from those of the United States? I mean vital interests, not the habitual incidentals of competition for oil, contracts and influence. Remember that several of the Al Qaeda terrorists who struck on Sept. 11 started out in Hamburg. The Arab and Muslim world is where the ''war against terrorism'' will be won or lost.

Americans and Europeans have an overwhelming common interest in seeing democracy, peace and prosperity spread through the Middle East -- not least, so that Israel is one day physically connected to the West by a patchwork of Islamic or post-Islamic democracies. This means handing back Iraq as soon as possible to the Iraqis and supporting their federal or confederal democracy. Then, and urgently, it means trying to make progress toward secure, viable states of both Israel and Palestine. One unintended consequence of the war on Iraq is that this can no longer wait. The Palestinian question is now, for the Arab and Muslim world -- and for many Europeans -- the litmus test of whether the Bush administration means what it says about liberating and democratizing the Middle East rather than occupying and colonizing it.

A genuine project of democratization also involves helping to make Iraq's neighbor Turkey worthy of membership in the European Union -- itself an international community with demanding standards of respect for human and minority rights. In countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia, it means supporting reform, and perhaps ultimately what I have called refolution, that is, the mixture of reform from above and people's power from below that triumphed in Poland and Hungary in 1989. In all these places, we need to listen to the people in the countries concerned, as we did in Central and Eastern Europe during the cold war. Now those Poles, Hungarians and Czechs that we helped to liberate are themselves fully part of the West and ready to join us in doing for and with the oppressed of the Middle East what was once done for and with them.

This should not, by the way, be a division of labor where the United States does the hard war-fighting and Europe picks up the burden of peaceful reconstruction afterwards: ''America does the cooking; Europe does the washing up.'' That is unhealthy for any modern relationship, even if we accept (which I don't) that Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. Europe needs to do more of the cooking; America, more of the washing up.

At the moment, Europeans and Americans don't even see the threat the same way. During the cold war, Berlin always felt itself to be more directly threatened than New York; now it's the other way round. I have no doubt that the collapse of the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001, was the true beginning of the 21st century. The combination of weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, whether by rogue states or rogue groups, is one of the greatest new dangers to all free countries. Americans have woken up -- been woken up -- to this in a way that most Europeans have not. Europe has not yet had its 9/11. There is both hypocrisy and an ostrichlike head-in-the-sand quality about much European discussion, or nondiscussion, of these issues. Tony Blair is the exception who proves the rule. Criticizing America, Europeans sometimes are, as Kipling famously put it, ''makin' mock o' uniforms that guard you while you sleep.''

However, it is not simply that Europeans feel less threatened by Islamic extremism; in other ways, we feel more so. There are now at least 10 million Muslim immigrants living in the European Union, not to mention the more than 5 million who have lived elsewhere in Europe for centuries in places like Bosnia, Albania and Kosovo. European fears that this Muslim population could be radicalized by events in the Middle East are neither unfounded nor ignoble. Over the next decade, Europe will probably take in another 10 million Muslims, plus at least another 60 million if the E.U. delivers on its promise to include Turkey, which the United States has been urging us to do. As the native European population ages, we could soon find that 1 in every 10 Europeans is a Muslim. It is our elemental concern that peaceful, law-abiding Muslims should feel at home in Europe, and in the West more broadly.

Please remember that the democratic politics of Europe have been rocked over the last few years by populist parties that won a large share of the vote essentially on one issue: hostility to immigration. In Europe today that means, especially, Muslim immigration: Moroccans in Spain, Algerians in France, Turks in Germany, Pakistanis in Britain. (I have just bought my newspaper from a Muslim news agent, picked up my cleaning from a Muslim cleaner and collected my prescription from a Muslim pharmacist, all in leafy North Oxford.)

America is much better than Europe at making immigrants of all creeds and colors feel at home. Obviously, it helps that almost everyone in the U.S. is an immigrant or the descendant of immigrants. America also has a capacious, civic national identity, whereas Europe has a patchwork of exclusive, ethnic national identities. Have you ever met anyone who identified himself or herself as a ''Muslim European''? It actually seems easier for religious Muslims to integrate into a religious but pluralist society like the United States than it is for them to integrate into the very secular societies of Europe. So here we can learn from you.

Yet the American-led war on Iraq has not helped to make Muslims, especially Arab Muslims, feel welcome in the West. I don't need to remind you that the U.S. has some six million Muslims of its own, with more to come. Sensitivity to the wider impact of what will be seen as an Anglo-American neocolonial occupation of an Arab land is not cowardice; it is a necessary weapon in the long-term war against terrorism.

Europeans also tend to have a different analysis of the threat, one that pays more attention to the political causes of Islamist terror and, in particular, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Palestine is the great symbolic cause of the Arab-Muslim world, repeatedly embraced by Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, the whole Arab League and the ''Arab street'' -- hypocritically, perhaps, but nonetheless effectively. Many Europeans feel that giving the Palestinians a viable state could be a bigger contribution to winning the war against terrorism than deposing Saddam Hussein. In this respect, Tony Blair is very much a European. He has extracted from Washington a commitment to revive the ''road map'' for the peace process between Israel and Palestine. I was deeply depressed the other day to hear from a well-placed American political insider, a Democrat, that no real progress on the issue can be expected until after the November 2004 presidential elections. The Bush administration now has to prove him wrong. Perhaps if Bush had not started the war against Iraq, Palestine might just have waited that long; but he did, and so it can't.

At this point, I should mention a charge made by some conservative commentators in the United States. This is that European support for a viable Palestinian state reflects hostility to a viable Israeli state, which in turn reflects Europe's ancestral, almost genetic anti-Semitism. Vicious attacks on synagogues and individual Jews in European cities are rolled into one poisonous European ball with reasoned criticism of both the Sharon government and the Bush administration's outspoken support for it. For a European to criticize Sharon is for him or her to be an anti-Semite. ''What we are seeing,'' wrote Charles Krauthammer in The Washington Post last April, ''is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release -- with Israel as the trigger -- of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history.'' He continued, ''What so offends Europeans is the armed Jew, the Jew who refuses to sustain seven suicide bombings in the seven days of Passover and strikes back.'' It's ''those people'' again, the Europeans.

I have no doubt that there is still anti-Semitism in Europe today. Broadly speaking, it's of three kinds. There's the virulent anti-Semitism of some Arabs living in Europe, a minority within that minority; there's the very nasty anti-Semitism of the old and new far right in some European countries; and there's the residual, mainly verbal anti-Semitism of parts of the wider population. Yet there are also many, many Europeans who are pro-Palestinian without being anti-Israeli, let alone anti-Semitic. Some of them take a grimly realistic view of Yasir Arafat and his weak, corrupt Palestinian Authority.

To tar such reasoned European critics of the policies of Ariel Sharon with blanket charges of anti-Semitism is offensive -- especially to those of us, Jewish or not, for whom the Holocaust remains central to our whole understanding of liberal politics. In particular, many of us understand the whole European project embodied in the European Union as being, at its deepest core, about the post-Holocaust ''never again.''

We, for our part, are worried by a tendency among conservative Republicans to celebrate and to exaggerate American power. In particular, they exaggerate the United States' capacity to deploy that power effectively outside existing alliances and international institutions. This hyperpower unilateralism seems to us a real departure from the post-1945 tradition of American foreign policy. It's yielding to the temptation that flows from finding yourself -- absent Brezhnev -- as the sole superpower after the end of the cold war.

The new American hubris combines an overestimation of the military dimension of power (to the neglect of the other two dimensions, economic and ''soft'' power) with an overestimation of what the United States can do on its own or in small ''coalitions of the willing.'' I recently asked a senior political figure in Washington how he imagined that the ''war against terrorism'' would end. ''With the elimination of the terrorists,'' he replied. His answer shocked me. Does he really believe that you can win the war against terrorism by military and police means alone? You can win the war against an established state like Saddam Hussein's Iraq, but you can't win the peace this way. We've been seeing that on the streets of Baghdad since Saddam's fall. As Talleyrand once said, you can do anything with bayonets except sit on them. To emerge ultimately victorious in the broader ''war against terrorism,'' it is the peace we have to win, first in Iraq, then in the wider Middle East.

To win the peace, we have to get the symbolism right. That unforgettable scene when an American soldier draped the Stars and Stripes over the head of the giant statue of Saddam Hussein, then hastily took it off, has fatally marred the ''fall of the Berlin Wall'' moment at the end of this war. The Pentagon seriously proposed that a former head of the C.I.A. should become information minister in the new occupation administration. (A satirical novelist like Evelyn Waugh would have blanched at such a crude comic device.) It also seems to me that it would be a crass mistake not to try the Saddamite mass murderers under international law. You couldn't find a better way to make ordinary Iraqis reject this as ''victors' justice.'' For heaven's sake, ask the U.N. to establish a special tribunal for Iraq, as it did for Yugoslavia. Then send Saddam's recently captured two half-brothers and Saddam himself in the unlikely event that we catch him alive, to sit in the Hague, up the corridor from Slobodan Milosevic.

Even the United States, now the most powerful country in the history of the world, cannot manage this process on its own. Militarily, yes, but not politically. I'm as ready as the next man to wallow in neo-Churchillian sentiment about our renewed Anglo-American comradeship in arms -- for approximately five minutes. Two Anglo-Saxon powers are not enough; adding Australia just makes it three WASPs in a desert. Ah, you may say, but that's not all: Washington claimed support in the Iraq war from 45 countries. Who needs France when you have stout Micronesia at your side? As for Europe, we are told that the United States can manage just fine with a combination of Blair's Britain, Jose Maria Aznar's Spain, Silvio Berlusconi's Italy and what Donald Rumsfeld calls ''new Europe'' -- that is, the new democracies of Central and Eastern Europe that will shortly be joining the European Union. Now this is a serious point for the future of the West, seriously wrong.

My old friends in the post-dissident political elites of Central and Eastern Europe today are generally more pro-American than their French or German counterparts. They are grateful to the United States for its support in their struggle for freedom; some are still worried about Russia; they believe in the trans-Atlantic community of values, about which Vaclav Havel has spoken so well. Their publics and some of their political successors are already less sure. As these countries are integrated into the European Union, they will probably identify more with Europe. Above all, though, their message to Washington, on the one side, and to Paris and Berlin on the other, is ''Please don't ask us to choose between you!'' They are right. Let me say this as emphatically as I can: the West will include France and Germany, or the West will no longer exist.

Believe me, I hold no brief for Gerhard Schroder and Jacques Chirac. Every Western leader has miscalculated over Iraq, including Bush and Blair, but these two behaved especially badly. Schroder has opportunistically stoked the flames of pacifist opinion in Germany in order to remain in power. Chirac has been grandstanding in pursuit of a neo-Gaullist dream of France leading a rassemblement of the non-American world. His commitment to veto a second U.N. Security Council resolution, whatever its terms might be, was outrageous. His crude and arrogant criticism of East European support for the United States was as crass as anything Donald Rumsfeld has said about ''old Europe.''

Yet the French-bashing in Washington has gone too far. (A French-American friend points out wryly that while the French fries on the menu on Capitol Hill have been renamed Freedom fries, the menu is still called menu.) It's odd that this should need restating, but France is one of the classic lands of Western liberty, or as the French once put it themselves, libertÈ, egalitÈ and fraternitÈ. France remains the second most important military power in Europe, after Britain. No serious European policy can be made without it. During the disastrous diplomatic prelude to the Iraq war, some Americans may have wished that Churchill had never succeeded in persuading Roosevelt to give France a permanent seat on the U.N. Security Council. But Churchill was right: the Europe we want cannot be built without France. So Washington should not indulge in the old imperial pastime of divide et impera, divide and rule. A divided Europe is not in our interest or yours.

A more united Europe and a less arrogant United States should work together with all the peoples of the Middle East to do for them what we did with and for the peoples of Middle Europe during the cold war. This can be our trans-Atlantic project for the next generation. Here's how we put the West together again.

Shall we talk about it?

Timothy Garton Ash is director of the European Studies Center at St. Antony's College at Oxford and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. He is working on a book about relations between the United States and Europe.


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