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Sovereignty Changing

HB: Currently, the transatlantic relationship is going through its worst phase ever – on the level of high politics. But some of the answers to why it is so might be found at a lower, more basic level, that of political culture, the different conceptions of politics that can be found on the two sides of the Atlantic. Kagan’s analysis, if not wholly new or original, contains some good points about where and how these differences in conceptions developed.

CC: I agree. On the current situation, yesterday I had lunch with a high-ranking German official who explained why Germany, France and Belgium were blocking the NATO supply of Patriot missiles to Turkey. He said that they wanted to avoid “anything that would suggest a logic of war”. So there are very different perceptions: we think it is a war. They don’t. If you don’t think it is a war, then all of the European positions make perfect ethical sense. We, the Americans, are looking for a French pay-off in terms of Iraqi oil in the same way the French are looking for a Halliburton-style American pay-off. But really I think both sides are acting ethically according to their understanding of the situation.

HB: Among the recent European opinion polls, an English one put the USA first ahead of both North Korea and Iraq on a list of countries deemed most a threat to world peace? In Europe, many people conceive of this as a classic security dilemma: that hawkish tough-talk will only make a situation worse by raising the stakes?

CC: The American side of that problem is to say: “Look, Saddam Hussein is cooperating with International Authorities only due to the threat of force from the United States, and by diminishing that threat of force or making it less credible, you make war more likely. Right now, the UN regime has worked to the extent is has because Saddam really believes that it will be war if he does not let it work. The moment the Western alliance cracks to the point where he thinks war is unlikely, then he will begin to cheat on the UN sanctions.

A lot of your questions seem to point to a possible reordering of the world. The people who understand the stakes of this best, I think, are those in the misnamed anti-globalization movement who DO want a set of rules that will apply to all countries. The United States is beginning to think that too: there is an attempt to create a world order that would obey some kind of constitutional principles. This is very confusing, to me certainly, but I wrote a column in the Financial Times last week comparing Davos and Porto Alegre. They’re both talking about the same things now…

HB: …about global governance, not a personalized government?

CC: Yes, they’re talking about regulation. One distinction that was made for me - when I did a couple of articles on Hubert Védrine a few years ago, by the people around him – was between régulation and réglementation. This is a distinction we do not have in English, and I think that our lack of one might be the source of a great deal of blindness. The French ability to distinguish between the two is the reason why they won’t have a Newt Gingrich, why they won’t have a real liberal party. They won’t think, as the Americans do, that the only way to get efficiency is to destroy government. But the United States has in the last 17 months discovered the benefits of regulation.

HB: But on which level is this shift to be found – one thing is the toast speeches in Davos, but on which concrete levels do you think this change has been expressed?

CC: Oh, I think it is expressed in the war on Iraq. If you wanted to be blunt, you could say that the American casus belli is that the US doesn’t want anyone in the Arab world to have a nuclear weapon. That’s not the United States’s “business” in any traditional understanding of sovereignty. I myself have seen my attitudes toward sovereignty change radically in the last two years. For instance, I really opposed the Kosovo war and the trial of Pinochet in Europe. The trial of Pinochet I would still oppose but for practical more than philosophical reasons. Practical reasons because the Pinochet precedent makes it less likely that you can arrange a Saddam exile situation. But philosophically, I had misgivings about it on sovereignty grounds. And so, The United States is making a move now that takes it away from the traditional ideals of sovereignty that it has always espoused: it is acting in the name of a global community. There’s a paradox here, an irony: at the very moment of this Transatlantic rift, The United States is actually accepting some of the founding principles of the European Union. And you could even say it is the United States’ acceptance of those principles that is causing that rift: There is a post-national community of values, which has variable geometries.

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