NORTH COAST TIMES E A G L E , APRIL/MA Y 2003
PAGE 3
THE EVIL OF THE EMPIRE
EL ROTO
“AFTER IRAQ, WE’LL LIBERATE IRAN, SYRIA, KOREA, FRANCE, MERCURY, JUPITER AND PLUTO!”
The United States is clear about it; right now it is the only empire. The powerful fascinates,
but it also frightens and provokes aversion, above all when it sees itself as a savior. The latter
sentiments perplex Americans, they don’t understand why they dislike it so. Recent books analyze
this paradox, the problem of U.S. power, Americanism and anti-Americanism. Josep Ramoneda is
a writer for the Spanish newspaper ‘El Pais’, from which this article is reprinted.
BY JOSEP RAMONEDA
“For most people America is more of a mental image
than a real place," writes journalist Mark Hertsgaard in The
Eagle’s Shadow, a book that aims to dissect the different
perceptions of the United States held throughout the world.
As Hertsgaard has noted in his exhaustive research, most
people will never have enough money to travel to the United
States nor the opportunity to do so. And yet, almost everybody
has something to say about the American giant, opinions or
simple thoughts that often blend a certain admiration with a lot
of rejection. “It’s a very wealthy place where there are a lot of
shootings,” heard Hertsgaard during his global research tour.
And as simplistic as this stereotype might be, it contains two
of the defining elements of the image the United States portrays
to the outside world: Money and weapons.
The United States as a land of opportunity and the
United States as a threat. This widespread split conscience
becomes more neurotic as globalization continues to uproot
tastes, habits and beliefs. "Today, when a traveler returns
home he has nothing to say to his friends. Because wherever
he goes people dress and behave no differently from those in
his own country,” writes Hestergaard quoting Italian semiologist
Umberto Eco. Globalization is perceived as the spread of U.S.
ideas, even if all cultures and beliefs are part of the globalization
process. The United States, however, is repudiated for trampling
over everything else. Some identities feel threatened because
the powerful inspires fascination and fear at the same time.
“Why is there so much hatred toward us?” asks U.S. media
aloud. Hertsgaard lets Anatole Kaletsky, columnist for The
Times, reply to this question: “The biggest danger lies in the
arrogance of U.S. power."
Arrogance is a much repeated word when people refer
to the United States. People feel they are hiding something.
Arrogance is considered responsible for draining the flood of
sympathy that poured over the Bush administration after Sept
ember 11. Arrogance hinders U.S. efforts to obtain the kind of
recognition from the world they think they deserve And there
is nothing more dangerous than a savior who vainly pines for
recognition from those he has redeemed. Through the poised
literature of the methodical analyst, in The Paradox of American
Power, Joseph S. Nye emphasizes how many foreigners view
the United States as arrogantly watching after its own interests
at the expense of the rest of the world
Nye wonders about the future of U.S. hegemony and
presents a three-dimensional world: Unipolar in the military
sphere where U.S. superiority is unquestionable; multipolar in
the economic sphere, with Europe and Japan, to be joined in the
near future by China, playing prominent roles; and fragmented
through the multiple forms of transnational power that eschew
state control. The latter include phenomena such as terrorism,
drug trafficking and the internet. Soft-power, says Nye, will
be the key to the U.S. hegemonic future. Only its capacity to
appeal to others and conquer the world through its values and
way of life will prevent Washington from stumbling over its own
imperial arrogance And perhaps it will also keep Americans from
stumbling on their own ideas. When Donald Rumsfeld dismisses
the ‘old Europe’ as useless; when Robert Kagan describes
Europeans as children of Venus naively enjoying a holiday
retreat; and when Richard Perle decrees European impotence
and sentences the United Nations to death, they are efficiently
nourishing European antipathy toward the United States.
PUBUC DEMONSTRATIONS
Spanish citizens have a right to publicly demonstrate,
as is recognized under the heading of Rights & Liberties in
the Constitution. Like all rights, this has its limits, which are
the alteration of public order, and the endangering of people
and property. At a time when a serious international crisis has
begun with a military invasion of Iraq without the authorization
of the UN Security Council, obviously many citizens wish and
will go on wishing to exercise this right. This is happening
throughout Europe, and is registered by the opinion surveys
of the Spanish government agency itself, which confirm the
existence of a real gulf between Spanish public opinion — with
91% surveyed against the war — and the government's active
participation in its political preparation, and now its execution,
with the sending of a military contingent of logistic and health
support.
In view of this right, and of the probability of more
demonstrations against the war, the public powers have only
one constitutional path of action: to guarantee citizens’ right
to demonstrate, and to prevent the action of rioters, common
criminals or even extremists and provocateurs interested in
turning peaceful demonstrations into violent ones. There are
many images and accounts that clearly show excessive beha
vior of police forces, precisely with the aim of criminalizing the
demonstrators or even of blaming the excesses on the opposi
tion parties that support the demonstrations.
Violent acts are the responsibility only of those who
commit them. Not of those who convoke the demonstration
nor of the political forces that support it, as claimed by the
government — which is directly responsible for the unaccept
able actions, however isolated and individual they may be, of
the police force entrusted, precisely, with ensuing the peaceful
development of the demonstrations.
For the interior minister Angel Acebes, everything is
“impeccable," be it beating a peaceful demonstrator or shoot
ing rubber bullets at seated demonstrators. The distance this
government is creating between words and deeds is on the
order of serious psychological disturbance. The prime minis
ter’s excuses are not enough, concerning what he describes
as isolated excesses. Citizens' rights are at stake, and also
the reputation and democratic prestige of the forces of public
order, earned during 25 years of democracy and now in
danger, thanks to the government's determination to put the
blame on a demonized opposition Or did Aznar think that he
could take this country into a war with 91% of the population
opposed, without anyone making any noise?
~EL PAIS EDITORIAL, MARCH 29, 2003
Jean Francois Revel is right when he describes anti-
American sentiment in Europe as a smokescreen. “Europe in
general, and the Left in particular, forgive themselves fortheir
own moral faults and their grotesque intellectual mistakes
directing them toward the grand scapegoat of America," he
writes in L'Obsession Anti-Americaine With the backing of
various opinion polls he rightly concludes that everyday anti-
American sentiment in Europe is more elitist than social. And
yet in his book, Revel's critical experiment appears more as
an avenging endeavor. One that turns into a dogmatic kind
of American-Leninism as uncritical and stereotypical as the
anti-Americanism he criticizes. In this way Revel places the
United States, the motherland of creativity and innovation,
in the antipodes of Europe, the motherland of all totalitarian
ideologies.
The United States has lost its capacity to instill enthus
iasm in others and the U.S. model is even being called into
question at home This partly explains why the United States
is having trouble trying to transform its hegemonic aspirations
into outside appreciation. In Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam
documents the collapse of community spirit in the United States
and calls for the recovery of that forfeited social capital. After
social involvement in the public sphere peaked in the post
World War 2 period, the myth of individualism rose above
any idea of community in the last decades of the 20th century.
“People have become less civilized," say Americans of them
selves. As Putnam explains, trust fuels social life and strong
social ties foster conversation and trust, which is sorely lacking
in U.S. society today.
This triumph of individualism is the backdrop to Robert
Kaplan’s harsh depiction of the real America in An Empire
Wildnerness: Travels into America’s Future Urban segregation;
social fractures; the rejection of urban centers and the city as a
shared space; technological development as the only prospect
for the future; and escalating social inequalities are all engraved
into the physical and cultural landscape Kaplan depicts.
In Après ¡'Empire Emmanuel Todd, meanwhile, foresees
the decline of the American empire. Economic dependence,
Washington’s failure to secure alliances, the emergence of new
actors on the international scene and the waning universality of
the American ideological message are all contributing factors to
the empire’s collapse.
At a time when war is fact, Todd says his conscience
is split. One the one hand, as an historian and demographer,
he has the satisfaction of seeing all his forecasts about what he
terms America’s ‘theatrical universalism' fulfilled, and of seeing
France, Germany and Russia regaining some very necessary
prominence in the international sphere. “I’m certain," he says,
“that a new force will emerge from this crisis to balance U.S.
power." On the other hand, however, Todd says the absurdity
of it all fills him with disquiet. The bombing of an underdevel
oped and impotent people concerns him. “There’s something
profoundly obscene about American militarism," he says.
“As long as America insists on demonstrating its
omnipotence to the world, all it will do is reveal its impotence."
With this sentence Todd concludes his book Après /'Empire,
in which he charts the decline of the American empire step by
step. It is a logical progression from his 1976 work, La Chute
Finale, in which he foresaw the collapse of the Soviet empire.
At the time, the book received little attention because at that
stage the cultural preconditions for the crumbling of Soviet-style
regimes were not in place, and indeed were almost unthinkable.
Todd used demographic modeling to predict the future of the
USSR His present assessment on the decay of the United
States relies partly on the same kind of analytical tools.
Jacques Derrida's Voyous also focuses on the lack
of global stability, describing democracy as something to be
attained and charging the United States with backing rogue
states. Defying cosmopolitan reasoning Washington has
assumed the power to rule exceptions. It alone has the right
to decide which states are rogue states, which can be seen
as allies and which should be expelled from the international
community. It considers itself in possession of the final say and
has deprived all others from an opinion in the matter. This is
the principle of arrogance that so many authors define as the
American evil.
Why has fear overcome admiration? Why has the
United States, which should be the solution for the world,
become a problem? Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club:
A Review of the History of American Thought, provides some
key concepts in an attempt to answer these questions. During
the Cold War the reputation of the founding fathers of American
ideology began to fade “Tolerance is the fundamental value
in Holmes, James, Pierce and Dewey’s thought." Educational
philosophy, a pluralist vision of culture and the defense of
freedom of speech was the American translation of Europe's
individualistic, Protestant ethics into secular and social terms.
“The pragmatists envisaged a social structure that allowed more
margin for diversity, more space for social error, because they
believed this would open up more chances for better results."
Tolerance justified the actions of American ideology, but the
only alternative to it is the use of force. The neo-conservative
believers currently ruling the United States have chosen force.
The United States has given up its fundamental philosophy,
pragmatism, engineered to prevent people from employing
the use of force in defense of their own beliefs. America's neo
conservatives are gnawing at the soul of the United States, the
soul that created an American dream for people everywhere in
the world
Thanks to John Nelson of Astoria, lifelong Merchant
Mariner and Union Man, for bringing home from his latest
sojourn in Spain a few issues of the English edition of El Pais,
which is distributed with the International Herald Tribune
El Roto is El Pais' editorial cartoonist