The big idea in the study of the transatlantic region for the past five decades has been that of a “security community.” First articulated by Karl Deutsch in the 1950s (Deutsch et al. Reference Deutsch, Burrell, Kann, Lee, Lichterman, Lindgren, Loewenheim and van Wagenen1957), elaborated upon by a subsequent generation of scholars, and then updated and revised by Emanuel Adler and Michael Barnett in 1998 and Adler in 2005, a security community can be said to exist when a group of people believe that social problems can be resolved through “peaceful change.” Above all, war is unthinkable. People within a security community are bound by “common values,” “trust,” “mutual sympathy,” and a “we-feeling,” all terms normally associated with domestic nation building rather than international politics. Deutsch was ahead of his time, however, and believed that the same dynamics at work within states should also be operating among them. Separate states can attain a sense of community through “integration” based on intensive interaction and shared interests and values. The crowning achievement for Deutsch and subsequent scholars of international relations was NATO and the entire institutional edifice of the Atlantic order.
It is now difficult to recall the scholarly excitement that this idea generated in the 1950s and 1960s. Of course, not all scholars shared Deutsch's view of the Atlantic “community,” and Deutsch himself remained uncertain that the conditions for genuine integration were being met. Even so, the idea of an unshakable peace between the United States and Europe, based not only on American power but on the idea that in some important sense we had become (or at least were becoming) more alike than not, was new. It was widely recognized as a phenomenon that deserved to be studied. After all, for the previous century and a half, Europeans and Americans had come to the opposite conclusion—that they were essentially different—and either celebrated or, less frequently, lamented this fact. The new notion of a security community combined with Cold War politics to spawn a generation of scholarship on transatlantic relations and an even larger industry of interpretation by journalists and public intellectuals.Footnote 1 The vast majority of public writing on the Atlantic community sought both to study the relationship and, perhaps just as important, to cement and even enact it. Americans and Europeans not only needed to be friends but also wanted to be friends.
And so it went, not without ups and downs, but basically smoothly until spring 2003 in the run-up to the war in Iraq, when the United States and its major allies on the European continent, France and Germany, disagreed loudly and openly, for months, culminating in a shocking dust-up on the floor of the United Nations Security Council, a conflict that has been documented blow by blow by scholars, policy intellectuals, and journalists.Footnote 2 Americans were portrayed in the European press as out of control and French and German leaders found themselves on the cover of U.S. newspapers with rodent heads photo-shopped in place of their well coiffed human heads—charter members of the new “Axis of Weasels.” Did this argument reflect some deeper divergence in interests and values between the United States and Europe that had been identified even before 2003 (Kagan Reference Kagan2003; Kupchan Reference Kupchan2002)? Did it threaten the very foundation of the security community, or perhaps did it signal its demise? (Cox Reference Cox2005, Reference Cox2006; Pouliot Reference Pouliot2006; Risse Reference Risse, Held and Kosnig-Archbugi2004). Did it mean the end of the “West”? These questions raise further ones. Assuming that a security community actually exists between the United States and Europe, what would have to transpire for it to end, and how would we know if it did? (See Kopstein and Steinmo Reference Kopstein and Steinmo2007 and Mueller Reference Mueller2006.)
One sensible place to start is with the question of how much the members of the Atlantic alliance like or dislike one another and whether the people inhabiting these countries see one another as fundamentally the same or different. It would be trying, after all, to sustain a community with a people one dislikes or with whom one feels little sense of affinity. Any American who has traveled in Europe (or virtually anywhere abroad) in the recent past, unless kept in some sort of pro-American bubble, has noticed an increase in anti-Americanism. But how pervasive is it and does it actually amount to anything? What sort of affective ties are sufficient for building and sustaining a security community? Is it not enough to recognize that we share a certain fate? Two of the books under review here, Andrei Markovits's Uncouth Nation and Peter Katzenstein and Robert Keohane's edited volume Anti-Americanisms in World Politics, address the question of anti-Americanism in the wake of the Iraq War, both in Europe and elsewhere, and speak directly to this question. Both find plenty of evidence for the phenomenon but disagree about how prevalent and pernicious it is. The third book, The End of the West? edited by Jeffrey Anderson, G. John Ikenberry, and Thomas Risse, provides a fairly pessimistic reading of the future of the transatlantic security community, though on its telling, anti-Americanism is not the main factor driving the two sides apart.
The differences among these books can be partly attributed to their scholarly genres. Well documented and passionately written, Markovits's study straddles the line that separates public intellectual inquiry, comparative politics, and cultural sociology. It focuses on one segment of European society, certain intellectual and political elites, and their project of decoupling Europe from the United States, of deconstructing, as it were, the foundation of the security community. It does not claim to be representative of the full range of European views of the United States. Anti-Americanisms, by contrast, is conventional social-scientific comparative politics, highly balanced, and packed full of data, in-depth country studies, and fine conceptual distinctions—shining a light so bright that the world inevitably looks more complex and less clear than in Markovits's startling portrait. On the other hand, The End of the West? lies firmly within the field of international relations and is bound by the questions posed by realists, liberals, and constructivists. It is the only volume of the three that directly addresses the future of the transatlantic security community, but its insights can be usefully supplemented by the findings of the other two.
Markovits on Anti-Americanism
What is anti-Americanism? One can disapprove of the United States for what it is or for what it does. The former is anti-Americanism but the latter is not. In practice, however, the line is not so easy to draw. Some people find fault with the Unites States no matter what it does. It is bad for intervening militarily to stop genocide in Kosovo but equally bad for failing to intervene to stop genocide in Rwanda. It was wrong to promote free trade and globalization in the 1990s but equally wrong for raising tariffs to protect its industries, as it did in the first years of the Bush administration. It is this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't approach of European critics of the United States that so bothers Andrei Markovits. Such a definition may lack nuance, but it gets Markovits started and proves useful when he turns to his empirical materials.
Having spent a career writing books and articles documenting and praising Europe's social model, Markovits has grown weary of what he perceives to be the anti-Americanism of Europe's intellectual and political elites. Anti-Americanism, he writes, “is unifying West Europeans more than any other political emotion—with the exception of hostility to Israel. In today's Western Europe, these two closely related antipathies and resentments are now considered proper etiquette. They are present in polite company and acceptable in the discourse of the political classes” (p. 1). I think it is safe to say that Markovits is either going to lose some of his European friends with this book or they will simply ignore it.
The book should not be ignored, however, even if one disagrees with it. Markovits does not claim that all or even a majority of Europeans are anti-American, but, he maintains, a significant minority are and their influence is disproportionate to their size. George W. Bush and the war in Iraq fueled anti-Americanism among Europe's masses, but the object of Markovits's attention is Europe's elites. He draws on a wealth of scholarship documenting anti-Americanism among Europe's elites going back to the settlement of the New World. It is an ironic antipathy because the Unites States was a European creation. Even so, a long line of European cranks—from the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc (better known as the Comte de Buffon), who took the sparse body hair of the U.S. native population as proof of its sexual degeneracy, to the German pulp adventure novelist Karl May, who wrote book after book about the relationship of the “red men” to the “white man” without ever visiting North America—attempted to fashion an image of America and Americans as unhealthy and corrupt.
More respectable European intellectuals played their part, too. G. W. F. Hegel himself viewed the U.S. political order as “immature” and “chaotic.” Heinrich Heine lamented that “there are no princes or nobles there; all men are equal—equal dolts.” Sigmund Freud considered the United States to be hopelessly materialist, a place with “no time for libido” and “a gigantic mistake.” According to Markovits, “a strong negative assessment of things American has far outweighed any positive views of the United States on the part of German intellectuals and their elites” (p. 56).
The fun does not stop with the German speakers. Britain's Frances Trollope reproached the United States, in her 1832 best-seller Domestic Manners of the Americans, for its vulgar materialism, its food culture (Americans eat, they do not dine), and its obsession with efficiency. Charles Dickens, upset at the rampant and unremunerated black market sales of his books, bemoaned in his 1842 American Notes the heterogeneity of the country: too many immigrants, too dirty, too corrupt, too individualistic, and too brutal. Renowned nineteenth-century journalist Frédéric Gaillardet educated the French Republic on American women who “dominated their husbands” and ran the country.
The list goes on. A broad array of Spaniards, Italians, Russians, and even Norwegians (including Nobel Prize–winning novelist and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun) have found the United States distasteful not for anything it did but for what it is and what it stands for.
What about the present? In a fascinating twist, Markovits highlights the gradual transformation of European anti-Americanism after World War II from an ideology of the discredited Right to one of the anti-imperialist Left. As magnanimous as the Americans were in Europe after the war, cultural dependence on the United States elicited a deep and abiding resentment.Footnote 3 The United States became the source of all of modernity's evils. Longer working hours, “publish or perish” at French universities, the dramatic increase in lawsuits and the prestige of L.A. Law lawyers in Great Britain, reality TV (which, in fact, originated in Europe), and even the dominance of black over brown squirrels in German parks are seen as evidence of a pernicious “Americanization.” In fact, some of the best and most original parts of the book are those where Markovits finds anti-Americanism in the most unusual places. Chapter 3, on sports, is a gem. European sports commentators just cannot imagine American soccer fans appreciating the beautiful game. If Americans fail to watch, they do not get the sport, but when 60,000 watched Saudi Arabia versus Morocco in New York on a weekday afternoon during the World Cup—two teams that had little chance of advancing to the finals—they were portrayed by the European press as undiscriminating morons.
Then there is the anti-Semitism. In what is definitely the most controversial part of the book, Markovits draws the connection between European anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. He maintains that the old and discredited anti-Semitism of the European Right has migrated to a new anti-Semitism of the Left. In some ways, of course, this should not surprise anyone. Many early socialists—most famously Karl Marx—shared the romantic Right's prejudice of Jews as embodying everything that was bad about capitalist modernity.
Markovits, however, is saying something different and far more volatile: The issue is not capitalism but ethnic identity. The Left accepts Jews, but only on the condition that they shed their Jewishness. In a moment at once self-revelatory and accusatory, he writes, “Indeed, the Left always reserved its universalism for the Jews while applying the legitimacy of its identity politics to all other nationalities” (p. 187). Anti-Zionism and the demonization of Israel have become vehicles for the reintroduction of anti-Semitism into respectable European conversation, especially since the Six Day War in 1967.Footnote 4
What does this have to do with the United States and anti-Americanism? The syllogisms are simple enough: Israel commits atrocities. Why? Because the United States lets it. Why? Because guess who controls the United States? You got it: the Jews. What is disturbing for Markovits is that this is not simply the extreme Left but his old buddies, the Social Democrats and the Greens. He notes (pp. 164–65) that
all the historical ingredients used to demonize the Jews are simply transferred to the state of Israel, which—in the standard diction of anti-Semitism—behaves Jew-like by grasping for global power, and by exhibiting Old Testament-like (pre-Christian) vengefulness. It bamboozles the world, as cunning Jews are wont to do, extorts money from hapless victims who have been fooled into seeing the Jews as victims, exhibits capitalist greed and, of course, indulges in constant brutality toward the weak. Israel thus becomes a sort of new Jew, a collective Jew among the world's nations.
Strong stuff, to be sure. What about the evidence? This is not a typical scholarly book. It is polemical and is stronger on hypothesis generation than on hypothesis testing. Even so, the book offers some convincing evidence for these assertions, much of it based on content analysis of the European press, some of it based on a review of survey research, but most of it drawn from Markovits's deep familiarity with Western Europe's left-wing scene. Whether it is Jews being beaten up at antiwar demonstrations in Paris in 2003 or respectable left-wing publications in Europe deploying Nazi-like imagery of Israeli leaders with spindly legs and hooked noses, or the repeated superimposition of the swastika on the Star of David (itself now a European symbol for “Israeli aggression”), example after example, from the profound to the trivial, makes for painful reading. Indeed, the steady and increasingly negative views of Jews on the European continent (to be sure, still a minority view) have been documented in the Pew time series since 2004, with a surprising 25% of Germans and 46% of Spaniards reporting negative views of Jews in 2008.Footnote 5
Markovits is on to something, but he admits that his study does not cover the full spectrum of European opinion of America. For that, we must turn to the team assembled by Katzenstein and Keohane.
Polyvalent Anti-Americanisms
In the introductory essay to their edited volume Anti-Americanism in World Politics, Katzenstein and Keohane also maintain that anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism share an elective affinity, and this assertion is supported by surveys they cite and evidence in John Bowen's contributing chapter on France and Indonesia. Rather than a polemic, however, their book is a highly balanced, social-scientific treatment of anti-Americanism not only in Europe but in Asia and the Middle East as well. It contains chapters on anti-Americanisms in the present and also on America in the European historical imagination (by David Kennedy), as well as on the waxing and waning of anti-Americanism in Europe during the Cold War (by Pierangelo Isernia). The book is packed with survey research and in-depth regional case studies. The editors and contributors use to good effect cross-national responses to the American relief efforts following the Asian tsunami in December 2004 as a quasi-experiment.
The key threshold for Katzenstein and Keohane in determining whether someone is anti-American is whether his or her views can be changed with “evidence.” If attitudes can change with new evidence, then what we are dealing with is some form of distrust or even simple situational disapproval of a particular policy or action; a person, on the other hand, whose attitudes are closed to disconfirming evidence is biased. This is a sensible formulation, a formal statement of the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't phenomenon. They propose a fourfold typology of anti-Americanism. Liberal anti-Americanism admires American ideals but criticizes the United States for not living up to them. Social Anti-Americanism, by contrast, finds fault with the Americans not in its hypocritical failure to live up to its own standards but in the very ideals themselves, which are seen to stress the market over social solidarity, retributive justice over rehabilitation (as in the death penalty), and privilege unilateralism over the sanctity of international organizations and treaties. Sovereign-nationalist anti-Americanism disapproves of the United States for working against the national goals and sovereignty of other states (China is the exemplar here). Finally, radical anti-Americanism “is built around the belief that America's identity, as reflected in the economic and political power relations and institutional practices of the United States, ensures that its actions will be hostile to the furtherance of good values, practices, and institutions elsewhere in the world. For progress toward a better world to take place, the U.S. economy and society will have to be transformed, either from within or without” (p. 33).
This last form of anti-Americanism is the scary one and is the one most Americans worry about. It is characteristic not only of Marxist-Leninist and fascist regimes but also extreme versions of “Occidentalism,” which concludes that “the West and especially the United States are so destructive of non-material ideals and are so incorrigibly bad that they must be destroyed” (p. 33).Footnote 6 According to the authors, radical anti-Americanism is today widespread only in the Middle East.
The book is exceptionally strong on empirical evidence, but the closer one studies something as broad and amorphous as anti-Americanism, the harder it is to pin down. Isernia's chapter on Europeans' attitudes toward the United States during the Cold War shows these attitudes to be multidimensional (respondents like or dislike different features and actions of the United States; they rarely dislike everything about America) and driven primarily by events, that is, by what the United States does rather than what it is, even if the interpretation of events were largely filtered through attitudes toward the Soviet Union. Isernia's inclusion of country dummies also demonstrates strong differences among European nations during the Cold War. France was more anti-American than Italy and Germany, which were less so than Great Britain.
Jumping toward the present, using data from the Pew Global Attitudes survey from 2002, Giacomo Chiozza's insightful chapter finds highly differentiated views of the United States. Majorities in many countries hold favorable views of the United States. Even where people do not like what the United States does, they still admire its democracy and culture. Like Isernia, Chiozza also finds that the United States means many different things, and this polyvalence mutes a great deal of the diffuse anti-American sentiment out there. Everybody can usually find something to like about America. The big exception is the Muslim Middle East. Even before the Iraq War, large portions of the population disapproved of the United States not only for what it does (its support of Israel, for example) but also for what it is and what it exports to the rest of the world (its culture and political values): “This finding, therefore, points to a qualitative difference in the popular standing of the United States in the Middle East. It shows that America's ‘polyvalence’ was not serving as an asset for the popularity of the United States in the Middle East” (p. 107). Drawing on more recent Pew data, Chiozzo shows that attitudes toward the United States plunged dramatically in the Middle East in 2003 and 2004 before recovering to their prewar levels in 2005, but the disapproval of all aspects of America—including its culture and political order—has hardened.
Sophie Meunier's lucid chapter on French anti-Americanism provides a compact explanation for the phenomenon and can be usefully read as complementing, while disagreeing with, Markovits. Anti-Americanism has become a part of the French intellectual repertoire over the past two centuries; virtually every sort of anti-Americanism listed in Katzenstein and Keohane's typology (and a few more types listed by Meunier—four types cannot capture the range of French anti-Americanism!) can be found in France; and French politicians pay virtually no cost for using anti-Americanism to their political benefit. One might add that German politicians have probably learned the same lesson after the election of 2002, when Gerhard Schröder pulled victory out of the jaws of defeat with a virtuoso anti-American performance. As Meunier notes, there is something special (if not terribly pernicious and, for me at least, sometimes even entertaining) about French anti-Americanism: “French anti-Americanism stands out because over the years intellectuals and politicians have developed a common corpus of biases against the United States, which have become embedded in the national policy discourse and have been exploited politically” (p. 156). Judging from the evidence, the dominant strand in contemporary French anti-American discourse is heavily weighted to a critique of globalization and the perceived impact of American capitalism. In the end, however, Meunier considers French anti-Americanism to be more about distrust than bias, and to the extent that bias exists, it does not really affect the behavior of French citizens.
Meunier's conclusion raises the question of whether anti-Americanism really matters. Does it influence events in world politics? One would expect it to. America's soft power, after all, is a product of admiration for the United States, admiration both for what it does and what it stands for. It simply makes things easier for American policymakers if they get the benefit of the doubt. Marc Lynch notes, however, in his overview of anti-Americanism in the Arab world, that “it is fair to say that in virtually no cases does the United States get the benefit of the doubt, nor is there ever a presumption in its favor. This anti-American disposition has become increasingly entrenched and more widely distributed in the last five years. It is increasingly embedded within Arab identity, constantly reinforced in the narratives that dominate the Arab media” (p. 204).
Even with so much clear evidence of anti-Americanism, Katzenstein and Keohane maintain in one of their concluding chapters that although it may one day lead to action against the United States, they find few direct effects of anti-Americanism, and any effects are extraordinarily difficult to document empirically. Angry people do not automatically turn into terrorists. Many intermediate steps are necessary for that to happen. Anti-Americanism does not seem to have affected diplomacy on a large range of issues, such as cooperation on antiterrorism between the United States and its democratic allies; it has not affected the governance of international institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund; America continued to cooperate on the economic reconstruction of Iraq with countries where anti-Americanism spiked after 2003; even tourism has been unaffected. People still travel to the United States in very large numbers, no matter how unpleasant the Department of Homeland Security has made the whole experience. The authors are surprised at this conclusion and cannot help but wonder whether there will be some long-term impact: “That sentiments of anti-Americanism as expressed to pollsters do not correlate strongly with policy does not preclude the possibility that American soft power is being undermined through a gradual process of erosion” (p. 295). However, it does lead them to question the logical inference that anti-Americanism diminishes America's soft power.
The editors explain their findings by pointing to a disconnect between attitudes and actions. Simply because you believe something or do not like someone or some country does not mean that you plan on doing anything about it. Just as people can chew gum and tie their shoelaces at the same time, they may dislike the United States and still do many things in support of it. How many of us have observed participants show up to anti-American demonstrations wearing jeans and carrying cans of Diet Coke? The conclusion seems to be that anti-Americanism may be widespread but it is just not that salient. The “separatist” project of some of Europe's anti-Atlanticist elites discussed in Markovits's book does not seem to have gained much traction.
What about the long run? Katzenstein and Keohane sensibly hedge their bets. Anti-Americanism could lead to important policy changes; it just has not yet, and the burden of proof is therefore on those who say that it does or will.
The Decline of the West?
One area where scholars and policymakers worry that anti-Americanism could potentially lead to momentous changes is the transatlantic relationship. It is one thing to giggle at “freedom fries” or laugh at silly jokes about how many Frenchmen it takes to defend Paris, but very few us have thought about what a real split might mean. Historically, there have been several “Wests”—the Greek West, the Christian West, and the non-Communist West of the Cold War, to name the more prominent ones. How long will the current one last? Today when we think about the West, what we really mean is the transatlantic partnership and community of ideals and interests between North America and Europe. Americans and Europeans are allies, but will it always be that way? What holds this community together and what will happen if the glue dissolves? Do we really like each other or is it a marriage of convenience? These questions, as noted at the outset of this essay, spawned an industry of interpretation over the past five decades and generated a great deal of new scholarship attempting to explain the rift between the United States and its democratic European allies over the war in Iraq in 2003 and its potential long-term consequences.
This is the intellectual backdrop to the edited volume The End of the West? Given the results of the Katzenstein and Keohane volume, perhaps we should not be surprised that European anti-Americanism and American anti-Europeanism hardly make an appearance in any of the essays. Both may have accompanied the transatlantic dustup in 2003, but the evidence in this book indicates that they did not cause it. Instead, Anderson, Ikenberry, and Risse have embedded their volume in international relations theory and the paradigmatic divides among realists, liberals, and constructivists. In his introductory essay to the volume, Ikenberry notes that the Atlantic order is built on two bargains between the United States and Europe, one realist and the other liberal, which date from the 1940s. The realist bargain is that the United States supplies Europe with security and access to U.S. markets, technology, and supplies. In return, the Europeans promised to be reliable partners to the United States. The liberal bargain is that the European and Asian partners of the United States accept U.S. leadership within a liberal institutional order in which America binds itself to a set of agreed-upon institutions. To this one might add, however, an epistemic, constructivist bargain, in which both sides agreed to find a common language for thinking about the relationship and to marginalize “separatist” any discourses within the scholarly and diplomatic communties.Footnote 7
How deep is the divide now entering its sixth year? In his contribution to the book, Henry Nau maintains that the crisis is really not a crisis at all but more of a strategic debate about the nature of the threat after September 11, 2001. Different parties within countries see the threat differently, and it follows that transatlantic relations will ebb and flow with the changing constellation of parties in power. “In fact,” Nau maintains, “fundamental values are more convergent today than ever before. What widened in the first term of George W. Bush was the partisan gap between a conservative Republican government in Washington and social democratic governments in Europe” (p. 100). We can therefore expect to see a vast improvement in transatlantic relations with a change in the White House and Congress.
Charles Kupchan, by contrast, argues that the Iraq debate reflects a broader demise of the Cold War alliance and community. The divide is less driven by particular governments or personalities than by the changing strategic priorities of the United States and Europe, priorities that began to diverge well before September 11 and the run-up to the war in Iraq. These events and the Bush presidency magnified the geopolitical impact of the Cold War's end, but they did not change the generalized erosion in liberal internationalism that had already set in among foreign policy elites in Washington during the 1990s.Footnote 8 “In important respects,” Kupchan writes, “the evolving relationship between the United States and Europe has begun to resemble that of the interwar period more than that of the cold war” (p. 123).
William Hitchcock, an historian, stakes out ground halfway between these views, writing that “the Iraq crisis is a deep, sustained rupture, probably the worst in the history of the Western alliance,” but he maintains a measure of “optimism from past crises, which show that the alliance has survived for the simple reason that the ties that bind it together remain stronger than the forces pulling it apart” (p. 53). Taken together, these chapters make for sobering reading for Atlanticists. Transatlantic amity can no longer be assumed but will depend upon the identification of common interests and, alas, the consumption of many tons of smoked salmon and barrels of punishing white wine by scholars and diplomats at conferences and summits as they search for common ground.
What about trade? Will the movement of goods and people across the Atlantic cement the alliance even when the partners disagree on when to go to war? A great deal of scholarship suggests that intensive economic exchange reduces political conflict.Footnote 9 Jens van Scherpenberg and Kathleen McNamara, in their respective chapters, both doubt whether it really does. Scherpenberg does not dispute that deep transatlantic integration exists in the huge volume of “low business” through study, tourism, and youth exchange and the like, but he maintains that on strategic economic issues, competition remains the rule, and on important areas where cooperation is needed, little evidence of cooperation is to be found.
The real test, Scherpenberg notes in a fascinating chapter written well before autumn 2008, will come during a crisis, especially a financial crisis: “Would Europeans be willing, as they were in the mid-1980s, to come forward and share the economic and financial burden of U.S. foreign policy?” (pp. 154–55). Under such conditions, transatlantic economic relations may be as much a source of conflict as stabilization. McNamara could not agree more. In compact and convincing case studies of the high diplomacy of the pre–World War I period and the Suez crisis, she finds little evidence that private-sector interests influenced the decision making of foreign policy elites. The economy, she maintains, is more likely to be viewed “as a tool of statecraft and national interest rather than vice versa” (p. 158).
Where does that leave the West? If common interests, geopolitical and economic, are no longer enough to ensure the existence of a community, what about shared values? If the West means anything, it must mean a set of ideals held onto even when interests diverge. Dieter Fuchs and Hans-Dieter Klingemann, in their contribution, find that the partners share a commitment to the democratic form of government but generally diverge on important questions of the state's role in the economy and the role of religion in society. Although this volume takes domestic politics seriously, the Fuchs and Klingemann chapter directly engages the literature of comparative politics and suggests limits to a purely IR approach to these questions. How long can a security community be maintained between continents with diverging views not only about the proper role for organized religion in public life but also about the kinds of societies they want to build? Neil Nevitte and his collaborators, for example, have shown that socially and economically conservative values are increasingly bundled in the United States, but are decreasingly so in Europe. In the United States, it is easier to predict whether a person will vote Republican or Democratic on the basis of church attendance than on income.Footnote 10 The continued and increasing disparity on matters of immigration and integration, basic models of domestic political economy, and even the role of the media between the United States and much of Europe suggests that the ideological basis of the security community has become thinner than ever before.
John Hall maintains in his essay that for America and Europe, there is a broad range of possibilities between “pure love” and “divorce.” The specifics are perceptively discussed by Thomas Risse in his concluding chapter. Risse does not doubt the continued existence of “collectively shared common values” across the Atlantic but worries that “this collective identity has enduring fissures that can be easily cracked open and can lead to confrontation through some triggering event” (p. 289). Although war (the true test of a security community) remains unthinkable, he predicts some sort of adaptation or transformation both in norms and in the institutional expression of these norms—especially NATO. Adaptation would mean, at a minimum, requiring the North Atlantic Council to discuss conflicts before national governments take decisions. Transformation would mean something deeper, a reworked relationship between NATO and the European Union, with perhaps the creation of a “two pillar” NATO, with both a North American and European pillar, and perhaps an EU caucus inside of the organization. Any such “transformation” would bifurcate the old alliance and take us into a new world.
Conclusion
Do these books give us clear answers to the questions of how much we should worry about the end of the West, the role of European anti-Americanism (or American anti-Europeanism) in bringing it about, and what all of this means for the future of the North Atlantic security community? Not entirely. Markovits outlines an alarming project of separatism but admits that we are still dealing with a minority. Katzenstein and Keohane's volume shows widespread anti-Americanism, even in Europe, but the image of the United States is complex. Most Europeans find something to like about the global hegemon. Even when anti-Americanism swells, they find scant evidence that it actually affects policies or diminishes the soft power of the United States. The authors of Anderson, Ikenberry, and Risse's book all worry about the divided West but do not agree about whether we are dealing with a deep crisis or simply a difference of elected governments.
While these books do not provide unequivocal answers to the future of the Euro-Atlantic security community, they do point us toward useful ways of studying it and thinking about the conditions under which it could decay. Where should we look and what kinds of questions should we ask? Students of security communities have long studied the conditions under which they arise but have largely ignored the fact that communities also collapse. As Harald Mueller notes (Reference Mueller2006), there is a “eufunctional bias” to the security communities literature that is only now being addressed by a new generation of scholars (see also Bjola and Kornprobst Reference Bjola and Kornprobst2004; Bially Mattern Reference Bially Mattern2004). The new literature mostly follows the constructivist turn in international relations that viewed the “we-feeling” of the transatlantic security community as an intersubjective phenomenon that could not be studied by counting transactions the way Deutsch proposed (Adler and Barnett Reference Adler and Barnett1998). Even so, the rise and demise of communities can still be measured and explained.
One place to start is to return to Risse's thought that the transatlantic security community contains “fissures that can easily be cracked open.” If it is “easy” to “crack open” the bond tying America and Europe, this does raise the question of the broader project of community deconstruction.Footnote 11 Presumably the fragility of the community is not merely the result of a few neocons telling the world for a couple of years that the United States can make do without Europe. Something deeper must be at work. Just as building the security community required many years of nurturing, its deconstruction represents an equally audacious project of what we might call “countercommunities.” These countercommunities might at the present time be marginal but under the right circumstances could move to center stage.
The study of the decline of security communities should focus not merely upon the circumstances that bring them into question but also on the concrete ways in which these broader forces are instantiated in particular countercommunities. Markovits's Uncouth Nation is a study of this process in one such countercommunity. For the most part, he maintains, European anti-Americanism has been an elite phenomenon. George W. Bush, however, made it possible to close the gap between a “separatist” European elite that wants to break away from the tutelage of the United States and the broad masses who still see themselves as part of the “West.” Jürgen Habermas's and Jacques Derrida's characterization of the antiwar demonstrations that took place on February 15, 2003, in London, Rome, Paris, Helsinki, and Athens as the “birthday” of a united Europe that defines itself in opposition to the United States may have been premature, but it made clear the contours of the broader project. Although these same intellectuals hailed the now five-decade-old project of European integration as a “postnational” exercise, the temptation to use the traditional tools of nation building in the service of a new, pan-European nationalism—including demonizing the other—has been irresistible.
The connection between anti-Americanism and the demise of the transatlantic security community may seem to be an unlikely combination at this point, especially when a new president in the United States and decidedly Atlanticist governments in Europe are trying to restore trust and confidence in each other, but it does not mean that this low-probability but high-impact possibility should not be studied. There is an important methodological issue at stake here. Inevitably, political scientists who focus on countercommunal projects will be studying what others frequently view as marginal or even quirky phenomena. It is of course easy to say that political scientists should focus on important questions, but they can often do so only by studying what is easy to ignore. In 1910, for example, Lenin was in Paris heading up a Bolshevik party with no money and no resources; meanwhile, Hitler was barely making a living selling postcards in Vienna's cafes. If, in fact, one were to study political regimes and ideas in 1910 and focus only on the important ones, then these men would be ignored, which of course would lead one to ignore the ideas that shaped a good part of the twentieth century. The point here is not to focus research solely on marginal or crackpot thinkers or countercommunal elites but, rather, to realize that any nonbiased sample of politicians, thinkers, or countercommunal projects will always consist primarily of those destined to remain marginal (Hanson and Kopstein Reference Hanson and Kopstein2005).
Political scientists must therefore carefully avoid any effort to pick cases for reasons of relevance to contemporary political life. It may well be a dangerous career move to study a marginal movement, set of policies, or countercommunal project, but such considerations tell us more about the sociology of knowledge than about the logic of scholarly inquiry. So long as a case, no matter how seemingly marginal, can be convincingly tied to a large and important question, it is worth subjecting to a serious analysis.
Of course, the combination of anti-Americanism and the future of the Atlantic alliance is of such obvious relevance that the case hardly needs to be made. Its importance nevertheless is probably best appreciated by considering what the world would be like in its absence. If America and Europe truly go their separate ways, as James Goldgeier has speculated in a recent forum, it is difficult to see how core international institutions, including the World Trade Organization, the UN, the Group of 8 (and of course NATO) could continue to function.Footnote 12 Without America and Europe working together, it is also hard to imagine how any new institutional initiative would get off the ground. What then might take the place of an Atlantic order? Much would depend on whether the United States were facing a united and strong or a divided and weak Europe. But the new order would most likely entail some form of competitive economic bilateralism, in which America and Europe would compete with each other for favor among a handful of developing nations.
As the books reviewed here clearly show, there are strains in the current Atlantic order. Two of the books demonstrate a certain “rage against the machine” that could hasten, and would undoubtedly accompany, its demise. The United States nevertheless remains the “operating system” of the global order, the “Windows,” as it were, of international politics, and like that dominant product, its presence is felt everywhere and often resented. America, in this respect, is an easy mark.Footnote 13 Outright rejection of the existing operating system in Europe and mass acceptance of a new one may occur at some point, but it would be a costly rejection and would most likely happen only after a long-term process of delegitimation and the arrival on the scene of an attractive alternative. The future of the transatlantic security community will depend in part on whether anti-Americanism remains a minority and low-salience phenomenon in Europe or becomes one that moves to the mainstream.
