Old friends: how dramatic is the rift between Europe and America?

• Author: Walker, Martin
• Position: Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West - Book Review

Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West By Timothy Garton Ash Random House, $24.95

The metaphor that portrays hyper-power America as a modern version of the Roman Empire has become exhausted through overuse. And it was always a stretch to cast a republic with an elected and temporary chief magistrate and a traditional distaste for direct rule over foreigners as heir to the imperial purple of the Caesars. But there are other classical models to guide our thinking about the current nature--and the frustrations--of America's overwhelming raw power. Ancient Athens would seem the most congenial, as a freethinking and free-trading democracy of extraordinary cultural vigor and depth, while the official duty-honor-country virtues of warrior Sparta find a distinct resonance in the martial wing of the American character.

The Athenian inspiration can, however, be deceptive. Timothy Garton Ash, in Free World: America, Europe and the Surprising Future of the West, an idiosyncratic exploration of where the world is going wrong and how to fix it, quotes the celebrated Melian dialogue from The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides. Mighty Athens, scorning to issue any plausible justification for their assault on little Melia, says bluntly: "You know, and we know, as practical men, that the question of justice arises only between parres equal in strength, and the strong do what they can, and the weak submit."

The Melians reply in tones that find their echo in the case against the Iraq War made at the U.N. Security Council by French and German diplomats. "As you ignore justice and have made self-interest the basis of discussion, we must take the same ground, and we say that in our opinion it is in your interest to maintain a principle which is for the good of all--that anyone in danger should have just and equitable treatment and any advantage, even if not strictly his due, which he can secure by persuasion."

Garton Ash comes to this point, which questions the way the United States wants to relate to its friends and foes in this doubtless finite period of American ascendancy, at the end of a wide-ranging but essentially schizoid book. The first 170 pages analyze what he calls "The Crisis of the West," the erosion of that free world alliance that prevailed in the Cold War and has spread peace, democracy, and prosperity throughout most of the rich white world. This is a tour de force. It contains a pungent although hardly original assessment of the potential and limits of American power, noting, "How long can a country with a $500 billion budget deficit and a wade deficit of about the same size, sustain a $400 billion annual defense budget and meet a growing demand for social spending?"

He also considers the constraints upon European ambition. The argument in Europe, he suggests, will be about how to respond to America, with a choice between a new form of Gaullism that seeks to build an independent European superpower and a renewed effort to restore a modified form of the traditional Cold War Atlanticism. The argument in the United States, he writes, will be about America's own role in the world; to simplify, "it is the debate between multilateralism and unilateralism."

That argument will unfold, Garton Ash maintains, in the light of "[t]he American creed," which "has two gods; one is called Freedom, the other is called God. In the scattershot of early 21st-century capitalist democracies, religion is more than ever at the heart of American exceptionalism. America's muscular Christianity feeds into a moralistic rhetoric of freedom which many Europeans dismiss as humbug" Indeed, Garton Ash goes on to say that modern Germans believe that today's imperial Americans "say Democracy and mean Oil" Ash suggests that such European mockery is misplaced, that President Bush "clearly saw the war on terror as part of a Christian's good fight against evil" and that Europeans are mistaken to...