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Still Paradise and Power? The United States and Europe.

 

By Richard Lange

More than twenty years ago, in 2002, the American foreign policy expert Robert Kagan published his essay – later turned into a book – Of Paradise and Power, in which he argued that it was “time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world.” (Kagan 2002). It was not only the vast material power gap between the United States and Europe – so his argument – but differing, even contradictory perceptions of power and resulting strategic cultures, that were dividing the traditional partners. Kagan brought his hypothesis of a strong America, which, in contrast to Europe, was ready to exercise power to provide for security and sustain a liberal world order, to the catchy and powerful phrase that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans from Venus.” (Kagan 2002: 3)

In the heated times of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Kagan’s book became a bestseller and sparked a public and academic debate on the alleged transatlantic drift. (Lindberg 2005) His work was said to rank with Fukuyama’s The End of History and Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations. (Guttenplan 2005: 30) One observer even compared Kagans Of Paradise and Power to George Kennan’s famous 1947 X Article, in which he warned against Soviet expansion. (Pryce-Jones 2003: 62f.) Others criticized Kagan’s book for being historically simplistic and too narrow in its conceptualization of power and weakness. For them, it was merely a rhetorically appealing extension of the late 1990s neo-conservative foreign policy agenda and a justification of George W. Bush’s war in Iraq, or, as Gilles Andréani put it: “imperial loose talk.” (Andréani 2005: 67; cf. Costigliola 2003, Preble 2012)” However polarizing, his work became a touchstone for troubles in the transatlantic partnership and his name a cipher for the real and perceived power gap between the U.S. and Europe.

In this essay, I explore Kagan’s original argument, arguing that, despite all criticism, it remains an academically and politically relevant work. He provides not only a still fruitful model to understand differences between the United States and Europe but even more a revealing analysis of underlying developments that shaped these differences. And in any case, it is a stimulating and entertaining read.

Kantian Europe and Hobbesian America

Kagan’s thesis was successful for at least two reasons: Firstly, its timing. The original essay was published in the summer of 2002, the book in 2003. This was a time when the United States and its war on terror were challenged, not by its supposed enemies, but by Germany and France, two of its Cold War allies, and America was confronted with unprecedented criticism from Europe. Without going into specifics, nor explicitly aiming at 9/11, Iraq, or George W. Bush, Kagan provided a fundamental and comprehensive explanation for the transatlantic disagreement: “They [Americans and Europeans] agree on little and understand one another less and less. And this state of affairs is not transitory – the product of one American election or one catastrophic event. The reasons for the transatlantic divide are deep, long in development, and likely to endure.” (Kagan 2002: 3f.) Secondly, Kagan operates with instructive terms and engages in an instinctively understandable dialectic: Americans and Europeans, Power and Paradise, Mars and Venus, Hobbes and Kant:

On the all-important question of power – the efficacy of power, the morality of power, the desirability of power – American and European perspectives are diverging. Europe is turning away from power, or to put it differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity, the realization of Kant’s ‘Perpetual Peace.’ The United States, meanwhile, remains mired in history, exercising power in the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security and the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might.

Kagan 2002: 3f.

By doing this, Kagan combines the structural contingency of America’s global role based on power asymmetries vis-à-vis Europe with variations in political cultures based on different historical experiences of power. He retraces the growing power gap between the U.S. and Europe from the end of World War II and the consequent decline of European nation states, losing first their colonial empires and then, with the end of the Cold War, their strategic centrality. During the 1990s, the power asymmetry between the U.S. and Europe was, according to Kagan, disguised by ongoing debates on the post-Cold War order and the wars in Kosovo and Bosnia. But with the Europeans not being able to provide sufficient fighting forces in the conflicts on the Balkans, their role was to be limited to peacekeeping, while the U.S. remained globally engaged in military operations during the 1990s. A division of labour emerged, consisting of “the United States ‘making the dinner’ and the Europeans ’doing the dishes.’” (ibid.: 8) Summing up this realist line of argumentation, Kagan states that the transatlantic problem of his days was not a George Bush problem, but a power problem: “American military strength has produced a propensity to use strength. Europe’s military weakness has produced a perfectly understandable aversion to the exercise of military power.” (ibid.: 10) And with regard to the elephant in the room, U.S. unilateralism at the beginning of the 21st century, he concludes that “given a weak Europe that has moved beyond power […] the United States has no choice but to act unilaterally.” (Kagan 2002: 27)

Robert Kagan, photo by Mariusz Kubik

The European Miracle and Criticism of Europe

There is a second – and as I argue, even more important – line of argumentation in Kagan’s Paradise and Power, concentrating in a more constructivist manner on differing American and European historical experiences of power in the 20th century: “Despite what many Europeans and some Americans believe, these differences in strategic culture do not spring from the national character of Americans and Europeans.” (ibid.: 5) He refers to the European origins of machtpolitik and the use of force in Europe up until the world wars, while the United States in the first decade after the Revolution was more restrained in its use of power and preferred, as Europeans do today, trade and international law over the use of force.

Kagan attributes the change of positions and the resulting strategic cultures not only to relative power relationships, but also to a specific European experience, namely European integration:

“For along with these natural consequences of the transatlantic power gap, there has also opened a broad ideological gap. Europe, because of its unique historical experience of the past half century – culminating in the past decade with the creation of the European Union – has developed a set of ideals and principles regarding the utility and the morality of power different from the ideals of Americans, who have not shared that experience.” (ibid.: 6)

Thus, he signifies the post-World War II European rejection of machtpolitik, and in particularthe reconciliation of France and Germany, as a “miracle of world historical importance.” (ibid.: 17) This miracle was made possible by an integration of Europe based not on a balance of power, but by the rejection of power in international affairs. Instead, European politics were based on “diplomacy, negotiations, patience, the forging of economic ties, political engagement, […] the taking of small steps” (ibid.). Through the positive experience of the European integration process, these principles became more and more internalized and thereby form the core qualities of European foreign policy.

While benevolently acknowledging the success of European integration, Kagan raises several criticisms of this European miracle. He points out, that European integration was only possible because the U.S. through NATO guaranteed for the security of Europe and continues to do so: “Europe’s rejection of power politics, its devaluing of military force as a tool of international relations, have depended on the presence of American military forces on European soil.” (ibid.: 24) Also, the rejection of power in European politics came at the price of reducing the military capacities of Europe. This globally weakened Europe lacked capabilities and therefore concentrated more on intra-European affairs rather than supporting its American ally in world politics. (ibid.: 19f.) Thereby, and that is the core of his criticism and explanation for the transatlantic divide of his time, Kagan argues that Europeans in the early 21st century have developed a sense of mission comparable to and in conflict with that of the United States: “The transmission of the European miracle to the rest of the world has become Europe’s new mission civilatrice. […] America’s power, and its willingness to exercise power – unilaterally if necessary – represents a threat to Europe’s new sense of mission. Perhaps the greatest threat.” (2002: 18). The problem in transatlantic relations, according to Kagan, is not American unilateralism, it is European idealism.

Paradise and Power Twenty Years Later

The existence of such criticisms of Europe comes as no surprise to the observer of contemporary American politics or to those remembering the early 2000s. Then, in the run-up to the Iraq War, a wave of anti-Europeanism swept through the United States, ranging from the renaming of French fries into freedom fries and Jonah Goldberg’s infamous “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (Goldberg 2002) to Donald Rumsfeld’s differentiation of old Europe and new Europe. (Garton 2005) Within this discourse, Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power represents not only one of the most influential and more sophisticated contributions; it is still instructive because he provides an analytic framework for further academic engagement with the 2002/3 transatlantic crisis and the analysis of American anti-Europeanism and criticism of Europe more generally in at least two ways: First, the book emphasizes that one can reduce the causes of transatlantic discontent neither to a single event or president, nor to a lapse into appealing but simplistic national character or longue durée explanations. Instead, one should take the long decade from the end of the Cold War up to 9/11 as the formative decade. As Kagan stated in a 2012 comment on his original article: “The essay, and the book that followed, have been viewed as part of the Bush era, a response to or justification of the transatlantic split that opened over Iraq […]. In fact, however, the essay was really a product of the 1990s. The world I was reflecting on was not the world of Bush and de Villepin. It was the world of Clinton and Védrine.” (Kagan 2012: 119f) Second, Kagan’s book shows the role of European integration, its perception and criticism in the U.S. and takes it seriously. Reading Kagan, then and today, is to look at the transatlantic relationship not only as the sum of the United States’ bilateral relations, but through the lens of American engagement with and perceptions of the European integration project and the EU.

These phenomena are by no means just historical or limited to the period around the Iraq War. Donald Trump’s threat to withdraw from NATO if its European members did not increase their military spending shook the Atlantic Alliance to its core during his first term in office. And just recently, he said that he would encourage Russia to attack NATO partners which do not meet their obligations within the Alliance. (Hayden 2024) Thereby, Donald Trump is not only blaming the insufficient contribution of European NATO members to European and transatlantic security, but is also skeptical, if not hostile, of the EU itself, referring to it as a foe of the United States in trade and claiming that “the European Union was formed in order to take advantage of the United States.“ (Trump 2020)

Although Of Paradise and Power provides a framework fitting for contemporary criticisms of Europe at least to some degree, it would be wrong to equate it with views Donald Trump and other MAGA Republicans hold today. Most of the so-called neoconservatives, who, like Kagan, have advocated American interventionism in the early 2000s and criticized Europeans for opposing it, are in opposition of Donald Trump today. They especially dislike his advocacy of what we could call illiberal democracy as well as his anti-interventionist stances. Former neoconservatives like Bill Kristol or the above-mentioned Jonah Goldberg form the core of the small but vocal “never Trumpers” faction within the Republican party. (Gladden 2020) A neoconservative, Irving Kristol once famously said, is “a liberal who has been mugged by reality.” (Murray 2009) But what’s a neocon who has been mugged by Donald Trump? Just a realist? A hawk, cherishing the memory of American hyperpower? Or a liberal, again? Robert Kagan, once a neoconservative thought leader, went further than others. In 2016 he called himself a “former Republican”, warning against Donald Trump for bringing fascism to America, and endorsed Hillary Clinton’s campaign. (Kagan 2016) In 2021, he referred to the Trump years as a “stress test for the American world order,” and appealed to Americans to “accept the role that fate and their own power have thrust upon them.” (Kagan 2021)

And Europe? With Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, war was once again on part of the European ‘paradise.’ Combined with the pending threat of the United States withdrawing from Europe, this led to a significant increase of military expenditure. In 2024, European NATO members for the first time fulfilled the alliance’s 2% spending target. (North Atlantic Treaty Organization 2024) But whether Europe’s Zeitenwende succeeds depends, in Kaganian terms, not only on increasing defense budgets but also on developing a strategic culture of power, that can meet these challenges. Robert Kagan may not have been right in all points when writing Of Paradise and Power, but in a time when Europe’s paradise is endangered and America’s power threatened from within, it provides an important impulse and a powerful interpretation of the challenges the transatlantic partnership faces.


About the author

Richard Lange is a Doctoral Researcher at the DFG-Graduiertenkolleg „Authority and Trust” at the Heidelberg Center for American Studies (HCA) and a PhD student at the Curt-Engelhorn Chair in American History at Heidelberg University. Richard studied History and Political Science at Heidelberg and Durham (UK). He holds an M.A. in Modern and Contemporary History from Heidelberg University as well as an M.A. in International Relations from Leiden University.

Contact: rlange@hca.uni-heidelberg.de | Richard Lange (uni-heidelberg.de)



References

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Images:

Header Image: USA EU Flag, flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/142872259@N05/41926165734 (04.07.2024).

Portrait: Robert Kagan, April 17, 2008, taken by: Mariusz Kubik, Wikimedia Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Robert_Kagan#/media/File:Robert_Kagan_Fot_Mariusz_Kubik_03.jpg (04.07.2024).


OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Richard Lange (July 10, 2024). Still Paradise and Power? The United States and Europe. HCA Graduate Blog. Retrieved February 9, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.58079/11zl2


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