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Separated by Civilization: Trans-Atlantic Impasse
大西洋到底有多宽?--论欧、美文明的同宗与异见
By Peter Schneider -秋叶 评注
The war in Iraq has made the Atlantic seem wider. But really it has had the
effect of a magnifying glass, bringing older and more fundamental differences
between Europe and the United States into focus.2
These growing divisions ?over war, peace, religion, sex, life and death
?amount to a philosophical dispute about the common origins of European and
American civilization. Both children of the Enlightenment, the United States and
Europe clearly differ about the nature of this inheritance and about who is its
better custodian.3
Start with religion. The United States is experiencing a revival of the
Christian faith in many areas of civic and political life, while in Europe the
process of secularization continues unabated.4 Today the United States is the
most religious-minded society of the Western democracies. In a 2003 Harris poll5
79 percent of Americans said they believed in God, and more than a third said
they attended a religious service once a month or more. Numerous polls have
shown that these figures are much lower in Western Europe. In the United States
a majority of respondents in recent years told pollsters that they believed in
angels, while in Europe the issue was apparently considered so preposterous6
that no one even asked the question.
Terms that President George W. Bush has used, like "crusade" and "axis of
evil," and Manichaean exclusions like his observation that anyone who is not on
our side is on the side of the terrorists, reveal the assumption of a religious
mantle by a secular power, which in Europe has become unthinkable.7 Was it not,
perhaps, this same sense of religious infallibility that seduced senior members
of the Bush administration into leading their country into a war with Iraq on
the basis of information that has turned out to be false?8
Another reason for Europe's alienation from the United States is harder to
define, but for want of a better term, I call it American narcissism9.
When American troops in Iraq mistakenly shoot an Arab journalist or reduce
half of a village to rubble in response to the explosion of a roadside bomb,
there will inevitably be a backlash10. Only a fool would maintain that an
occupying power could afford many such mistakes, even if it is under constant
threat of suicide attacks. The success of an occupation policy — however
temporary it is meant to be — depends on the occupier's ability to convince the
population, by means of symbolic and material gestures, that it is prepared to
admit to mistakes.
In its use of the language of power the Bush administration has created the
opposite impression, and not just in Iraq. The United States apparently cannot
be wrong about anything, nor does it have to apologize to anybody. In many parts
of the world people have come to believe, fairly or not, that Americans regard
the life of their countrymen as infinitely more valuable than the lives of any
other of the earth's inhabitants.
Of course, even in Europe only a pacifist minority denies the existence of
necessary, unavoidable, justified wars.11 The interventions in Bosnia, Kosovo
and Afghanistan12 were supported by many European nations, even if some took a
long time to make up their minds. European soldiers took part in those wars and
continue to play a part in the peacekeeping aftermath13.
What arouses European suspicion, though, is the doctrine of just,
preemptive wars Bush has outlined. Anyone who claims to be waging a preventive
war in the cause of justice is confusing either a particular or a partisan
interest with the interests of humanity. A president who makes such a claim
would be arrogating the right to be the ultimate arbiter of war and peace and to
stand in judgment over the world.14 From there it is but a short step to
dismissing a basic insight of the Enlightenment, namely that human judgment and
decisions are fallible by their very nature. This fallibility cannot be annulled
or ameliorated by any political, legal or religious authority. The same argument
goes for the death penalty.15
Animosity16 isn't the only feature of the trans-Atlantic relationship.
Europe is rightly envious of America's multicultural society. There can be no
doubt that the United States has produced the World's most varied and
integrative culture, and it is no accident that it is the only one to have a
worldwide appeal.
But the American multicultural model also generates an illusion. Since
Americans really have come from all over the world, in the United States it is
easy to believe that you can know and understand the world without ever leaving
the country. Those who were born and brought up in America forget that these
people "from all over the world" first had to become Americans ?a condition that
new immigrants generally accept with enthusiasm ?before they could celebrate
their cultural otherness.17
The impressive integrative power of American society seems to generate a
kind of obliviousness to the world, a multicultural unilateralism.18 The result
is a paradox: a fantastically tolerant and flexible society that has absorbed
the whole world, yet has difficulty comprehending the world beyond its
borders.
These differences and irritations add up to a substantial disagreement on
the joint origins of American and European civilization. Europeans think that
Americans are on their way to betraying some of the elementary tenets of the
Enlightenment, establishing a new principle in which they are "first among
unequals."19
And Washington accuses Europe of shirking its international
responsibilities, and thus its own human rights inheritance.
Unfortunately, we cannot expect the news media in the United States or
Europe to present a nuanced20 views of this dispute. In 20 years of traveling
back and forth between Germany and America I have become convinced that news
broadcasts usually confirm their audiences' views: in Europe, about America, the
"cowboy nation," and in the United States, about Europe, the "axis of
weasels21."
These disagreements will be influenced but cannot be resolved by the
American presidential election in November. The divisions are too deep, and
Europe cannot meet the United States halfway on too many issues ?the separation
between church and state, the separation of powers, respect for international
law, the abolition of the death penalty —without surrendering its version of its
Enlightenment inheritance22.
On other contentious issues the United States feels as strongly: the
universality of human rights and the need to intervene — if the United Nations
is unable to act — when there is genocide or ethnic cleansing, or when states
are failing.23
So are we standing on the threshold of a new understanding or a new
historic divide, comparable to the evolutionary split that occurred when a group
of pioneer hominids thousands of years ago turned their backs forever on their
African homeland?24
So far it has usually been the Americans who have had to remind the
Europeans of these common origins, which the Europeans, in turn, have so often
betrayed. Maybe this time it is up to the Europeans to remind the Americans of
the promises of the Enlightenment that the Unite States seems to have
forgotten.-
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发表于 2016-7-10 11:34:37