Westlessness: Europe and the Post-American World
Europeans are not looking to the US to lead during the pandemic emergency, as they might have done in the past.
The Covid-19 crisis has harshly illuminated fault lines and failings in “the West” as a cohesive geopolitical configuration and as a compelling myth of transnational identities. Transatlantic relations, a symbolic linchpin of the Western-led global order, are in a parlous state, reflecting both internal crises in the US and in many European nations and a loss of faith in broader visions of supranational alliances. The pandemic emergency has not triggered a reinvestment in multilateral actions, rather it has rigidified ideologies of political elites and revealed the unpreparedness of Western states for crisis management.
It has also underlined the frailty of the “European project” and deepened anxiety about its future.
Westlessness
The fault lines were visible at the Munich Security Conference in February, an annual gathering of international policymakers and a barometer of transatlantic relations. The last few conferences have been tense affairs, reflecting growing schisms on a range of issues. At this year’s conference the gloves were off, with European speakers expressing the growing sense that Europe needs to “go its own way,” while American speakers scolded Europeans about their failure to understand the security threats posed by China.
The hosts chose “Westlessness” as the conference theme, defining it as “a widespread feeling of uneasiness and restlessness in the face of increasing uncertainty about the enduring purpose of the West.” This seemed to signal an introspective focus but was also intended to challenge assumptions about the purpose of the West and by implication of transatlantic relations, and force acknowledgement of an emerging world order in which the West is less dominant.
Leading European speakers were blunt about the new realities and overtly critical of the Trump administration’s “America First” approach to foreign affairs. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, in his speech opening the conference, remarked that the US administration “rejects the very concept of the international community,” while the EU’s foreign policy chief Josep Borrell called for the EU to “develop an appetite for power.”
That appetite remains reigned in however, with Germany and France unable to reach an accord on how it should be enacted. French President Emmanuel Macron was bullish in his speech, warning that on security issues Europe “cannot always go through the United States, no, we have to think in a European way,” a strategic dialogue on defence that would include a European nuclear deterrent. With Germany remaining sceptical though and hindered by a deracinated leadership the forging of a grand bargain remained moot.
The US had a strong presence at the conference, led by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and US Defence Secretary Mark Esper and over 40 congressmen and women from both parties, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. They were somewhat taken aback by the theme of the conference and the tone of some of the European speakers.
Pompeo, pushing back against Steinmeier’s speech, asserted “I’m happy to report that the death of the transatlantic alliance is grossly overexaggerated. The West is winning, and we’re winning together.” He also repeated in order to rebut some of Steinmeier’s comments about the Trump administration’s unilateralism, saying “I’m here to tell you the facts…Those statements do not reflect reality…Let’s be straight up: The U.S. is out there fighting for sovereignty and our friends.”
The predominant message from the Americans to the Europeans was to get into line on security issues and especially on the threat posed by Huawei, with many expressing anger or incomprehension at Europe’s decision to give the Chinese company access to 5G networks. Esper stated that “Huawei and 5G is a textbook example of the China’s strategy to destabilise and to dominate.” Pelosi concurred, warning that working with Huawei was like “choosing autocracy over democracy on the information highway.” Yet, in response to a question after his speech, Esper acknowledged that the US did not have an obvious alternative.
And so, the Europeans and Americans talked past each other, unable or unwilling to find common ground and barely able to raise the fig leaf of “common values” to signify their bond as pillars of the West.
Pity America
Writing in the Irish Times in mid-April, Fintan O’Toole was forthright in his view that “Donald Trump has destroyed the country he has promised to make great again”:
“it is hard not to feel sorry for Americans. Most of them did not vote for Donald Trump in 2016. Yet they are locked down with a malignant narcissist who, instead of protecting his people from Covid-19, has amplified its lethality. The country Trump promised to make great again has never in its history seemed so pitiful…the idea of the US as the world’s leading nation – an idea that has shaped the past century – has all but evaporated…who is now looking to the US as the exemplar of anything other than what not to do? How many people in Düsseldorf or Dublin are wishing they lived in Detroit or Dallas?”
This unsparing judgement by one of Europe’s leading journalists would likely not have been made even five years ago but is now resonant of op eds across Europe. The growing consensus is that Europe’s American dream is busted, American exceptionalism is a discredited myth, and there is no expectation or even the vaguest hope that the US will demonstrate moral leadership or promote liberal values.
To be sure, transatlantic tensions are not new and European disavowals of American power and hubris have a long history, both as intellectual dissent and popular protest. There have been waves of anti-American sentiment across the continent in the past in response to US militarism – in Vietnam and post-9-11 in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, testing as these were they invariably protested particulars of US foreign policy rather than the idea of America.
In recent years Europeans have watched the US pull out of the Paris climate accords and withdraw from multilateral commitments globally. They have listened to Trump call NATO “obsolete” and to his many aggressive statements about Europe. In early February, a week before the Munich conference, the American president told a gathering of US governors: “Europe has been treating us very badly. European Union. It was really formed so they could treat us badly.”
As the pandemic emergency grew Europeans have observed the Trump administration impose a 30-day ban on travel from Europe to the US, without consultation with European leaders, and read media reports on how Trump offered $1 billion to a German pharmaceutical company to secure monopoly rights to a potential Covid-19 vaccine. While the much-reported story was denied by the Trump administration, many in Europe were prepared to believe it.
European policymakers and intellectuals are now regularly detailing Trump’s failed leadership during the pandemic crisis and speculating on the future of American leadership. The New York Times in a recent article rounded up some examples. Dominique Moisi, a political scientist at the Institut Montaigne in Paris, opined: “Europe’s social democratic systems are not only more human, they leave us better prepared and fit to deal with a crisis like this than the more brutal capitalistic system in the United States.” Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European history at Oxford University in the UK, remarked on the inevitability of American decline: “You accumulate problems, and because you’re such a strong player, you can carry these dysfunctionalities for a long time…Until something happens and you can’t anymore.”
As with O’Toole’s demystification of American exceptionalism these views offered by leading European commentators are highly critical in their dismissal of American leadership and judgements on American decline. While merited such views have a whiff of schadenfreude about them, especially as there is also widespread apprehension in Europe that the EU is failing the stress test caused by the pandemic.
In Italy in particular there has been deep resentment at what is perceived to be the lacklustre response of the EU in providing efficient help at an early stage of the pandemic. More broadly, old fault lines between Northern and Southern Europe have emerged in the rancorous and now stalled discussions about calls for collective debt issuance to deal with the post-pandemic recovery. The EU has struggled to keep internal borders open and keep alive the principles of the single market and free movement. The governor of the Veneto region in Italy has stated that “Schengen no longer exists…It will be remembered only in the history books.” Meanwhile, Poland and Hungary slide further towards autocracy.
The European loss of confidence in American leadership is coincident with a consuming crisis in the European project. In a rare public comment on the EU in late March, former president of the European Commission Jacques Delors warned that lack of solidarity posed “a mortal danger to the European Union.”
Post-America
The Covid-19 pandemic has quickened the emergence of a new world order, which is likely to be a new era of great power competition. The “post-American world” that is taking shape is not one of American defeat or irrelevance, rather it is one of relative American (and Western) decline and the “rise of the rest,” most notably of China.
A divided Europe will need to develop “an appetite for power” amid the realisation that it can no longer count solely on the US for its security nor on an imaginary West as the bastion of liberalism. If a post-American Europe is to collectively rise to the challenges of the new geopolitical realities it will need to be unified by something stronger than its current distaste for the American president.
(A short version of this article was published in The Conversation.)