In its grand design, Europe has decided to renounce power. That choice stems from universalist or globalist political concepts that go so far as to question the State itself. So it is worth taking a look at two major political options that underlie these trends of thought: first, the dream of a universal democracy, and, second, distrust of unregulated human activity since it tends towards power. These two political options appear nevertheless to be ill-suited to the nature of Man, and political regimes founded on them head for failure. There is good reason to think that European Man and his City are no exception to the rule.
Power and European Man
In his essay ‘Power and Weakness’, the neo-conservative American academic Robert Kagan studies the reasons that divide Europeans and Americans in their perception of current international problems. At the end of the chapter ‘Psychology of power and weakness’ he writes a phrase that deserves our attention: ‘. . . to the extent that Americans believe in power, they believe it must be a means of advancing the principles of a liberal civilisation and a liberal world order’. Which implies that Europeans no longer believe this. Pierre Manent, a moderate intellectual if ever there was one, similarly denounces the renunciation of power, and compares European nations to ‘quasi-molluscs’ with a shell ‘. . . ever thinner and more porous, but with administrative instruments so disproportionate and so detached from their soft flesh that that they have lost the greater part of their ability to move . . . they are locked into a punctilious determination to enjoy their ever more precarious rights’.(1) In an article on Raymond Aron, (Le Monde, 13 March 2006), Nicolas Baverez states, regretfully, that modern Europe ‘has renounced power’ and decries its urge to ‘leave History behind’.
In Europe today there is indeed serious debate on the adaptation of power to contemporary challenges. The bitter setback to American policy in Iraq may provide it with a clear answer. This is what Bertrand Badie wrote in his recent book, L’impuissance de la puissance (The impotence of power): ‘In a complex world, collective power loses its meaning . . . the State will never more be the sole guarantee of security and will never more be condemned in perpetuity to confrontation . . . thus society takes its revenge on the State, violence becomes the characteristic of an incredibly unregulated market place. To think of the world as descendents of Hobbes, Metternich, Clausewitz, Carl Schmidt and Kissinger is to deny access to the complexity of the international game as it is played today’. This debate does not, therefore, overlook the near-univocal corollary of the power that the State represents. Henceforth, moreover, it sets states and nations in opposition, and indirectly challenges the notion of ‘the common good’, appropriate to a unified nation that calls the State into being in order that it should be responsible for the common good. As to Europe, it would appear that it is building itself on the basis of the disappearance of power, and hence on the weakening of the State. Its rhetoric on ‘soft power’ barely conceals a doctrinal rejection of power.
But the perceptions that underlie the construction of a European entity are closely linked to the globalisation school of thought, itself fundamentally anti-establishment where the State and its power are concerned. Arguments to justify the death of the model of international relations centred on the State are not wanting. They are based on a number of pertinent observations of the changing world, and they merit closer examination. But in a more fundamental way it is worthwhile considering the two major political options which underlie the globalisation philosophy: the dream of a worldwide democracy, and suspicion of any unregulated human activity, which invariably leads to power.
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