Product Description

European leaders, increasingly disturbed by U.S. policy and actions abroad, feel they are headed for a moment of truth. After years of mutual resentment and tension, there is a sudden recognition that the real interests of America and its allies are diverging sharply and that the trans-atlantic relationship itself has changed, possibly irreversibly. Europe sees the United States as high-handed, unilateralist, and unnecessarily belligerent; the United States sees Europe as spent, unserious, and weak. The anger and mistrust on both sides are hardening into incomprehension. Tracing the widely differing histories of Europe and America since the end of World War II, Kagan makes clear how for one the need to escape a bloody past has led to a new set of transnational beliefs about power and threat, while the other has perforce evolved into the guarantor of that "postmodern paradise" by dint of its might and global reach.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63777 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-11
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 112 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
From the beginning of George W Bush's presidency there has been a profound unease in relations between Europe and the United States. Robert Kagan's Paradise & Power: America and Europe in the New World Order offers a diagnosis and prognosis of the current malaise, which recent events such as Bush's "axis of evil" speech and UN divisions over Iraq have made even worse. Kagan argues that the 20th century has seen an inversion of history, whereby the once great, imperial, war-mongering powers of the 19th century (Britain, France and Germany) have become doves and multi-lateralists and the precocious and defenceless small power of the earlier era (America) has become a military and economic giant, hawkish and resolute in its defence of global security.

Europe (or more specifically France and Germany), Kagan argues, have learned that nation-states must live together or die, while America has come to rely on the blunt diplomacy of the pre-emptive strike. Europeans resent America for its bully-boy tactics; Americans get fed up with whining Europeans who would not enjoy their freedom to moan but for the post-1945 umbrella of NATO security. Kagan is wise and perceptive throughout his long essay and pleads reasonably that the US and the EU must develop a common policy that recognises their historical and strategic differences. He is a realist and there is little of the triumphalism to be found in similar recent works by American foreign policy experts such as Francis Fukuyama. Kagan is good on the military and diplomatic aspects of the question, but brushes over the resentments fuelled by America's MacDonaldisation of European culture. --Miles Taylor

Francis Fukuyama
‘Brilliant’

Dr. Henry Kissinger
'One of those seminal treatises ... which will shape discussion of European-American relations for years to come'

Customer Reviews

"Americans are from Mars, Euopeans are from Venus"
Kagan’s treatise is already being hailed as being on a par with the works of Huntingdon and Fukuyama for its ability to interpret the evidence in a fresh way, challenge existing assumptions and provoke a good deal of debate into the bargain. That being said Kagan’s basic argument seems fairly straightforward. He argues against Huntingdon’s “Clash of Civilisations” yet his analysis is largely committed to the transatlantic West rather than to the wider global scene. However regardless of the rise of Huntigdon’s challenger civilisations in the wider world America’s current pre-eminence, its Hyperpower status, seems, at least for now, unassailable. America’s sphere of influence is growing and, in purely military terms, America requires no assistance from anybody. These are diplomatic facts no one can be naive about.
This is also the starting point for Kagan’s argument as he explores not so much why Europe’s assistance doesn’t matter but why it is so ineffectual and token even when it is offered. European insistence on the primacy of international is simply the politics of the weak but why is Europe weak? With a total GDP the same size as America the EU could be a comparable military power if it simply possessed the political will. But it palpably doesn’t. Europe, in Kagan’s analysis, has eschewed power and seeks to find something more sophisticated with which to replace it, the post modern or post historical 'paradise' of the title.
The arguments here are not difficult to follow. Europe possessed power to a truly obscene degree but it ended up using that power to destroy itself in two cataclysmic world wars. And so since its phoenix like re emergence has been decidedly more cautious. Kagan extends the argument beyond that though into analysing where Europe’s real strategic concerns are. During the Cold War the main threat was clearly the Soviet Union but as America provided the bulwark against that threat Europeans could knuckle down to the problems of social welfare and then integration. In a post Cold War world where the EU is to weak to pose any kind of threat to anyone Europeans could be forgiven for viewing the world as a safer place then their all powerful transatlantic cousins do. Europe is on nobody's hit list.
In fact aren’t the greatest dangers from within? If European integration should falter and a nasty nationalism reassert itself on the continent this would surely pose a greater threat then any number of distant regimes in the Arab World or East Asia, however evil. As a world power with its fingers in every pie even distant events can pose a threat to America's national interests, even national security.
Kagan’s analysis is sharp but largely serves to explain attitudes and actions rather than offer prognostics. The book does not however give a great deal more than the simple arguments stated above. I got little more out of this as a whole than out of the one page review I read in the Times. Still as an exercise in raising transatlantic awareness it is a worthy edition to the field. It certainly made me question what sort of Europe I wanted to live in and made me a little more understanding of America’s often bullish behaviour.
It did not tell me anything I did not already know but put recent events in a slightly different light. The language is often playful and this is a very easy book to read and digest but Kagan does demonstrate his awareness of the philosophical pedigree of the various positions he describes especially in America’s view of itself as a crusader in a Hobbesian jungle. This is window dressing however. This is a work that will make you think but it is also surprising slight, an expanded newspaper editorial in many ways, albeit a refreshingly different one. Deserves the hype just because it is a different take but it is not earth shattering in its impact. Its greatest achievement is simply in making Americans and Europeans more intelligible to each other. Which is no small achievement.

Time for a 'decent respect for the opinion of mankind'?
Power makes its own morality.

That, in essence, is the message of this book. It's an old theme. As Walther von der Vogelweide (c. 1160 - 1230) once said, "Might is right." Kagan justifies the unilateral use of power with the argument of the schoolyard bully, "He did it first."

The book is a brief, eloquent and brilliant exposition of the arrogance of American machtpolitik that infuriates Europe and much of the rest of humanity. Kagan explains, East Europeans who lived under dictators understand the imposition of American power; those who were force-fed democracy by the Americans and British after World War II, such as Germany and France, oppose the new American unilateralism.

Kagan skillfully outlines how, during the Cold War, Europe relied on American power to safeguard their freedom. When nations entrust others to defend their freedom, which is basically the meaning of the American nuclear deterrent, it's hardly surprising that one country becomes all-powerful and others atrophy into paper weasels.

The book is clearly relevant to the current war in Iraq, and Kagan asserts, "Had Al Gore been elected, and had there been no terrorist attacks on September 11, these programs -- aimed squarely at Bush's 'axis of evil' -- would still be underway."

Great Britain is now the only European nation with a lion's heart, as the Falklands' war showed. France, under De Gaulle, built a "force de frappe" merely to bolster their self-esteem ("frappe" translates as "milkshake"). Kagan makes the point, "The American nuclear guarantee deprived Europeans of the incentive to spend the kind of money that would have been necessary to restore them to military great-power status."

It wasn't risk-free. Rather than retreat to a Fortress America, Kagan says, "It was American military strategy to risk nuclear attack upon its otherwise unthreatened homeland in order to deter both nuclear and conventional attacks on European and Asian allies."

Americans expect gratitude and support for taking such risks. Now, and this is especially true after Sept. 11, 2001, America views the world as threatened by an immoral Hobbesian chaos which must be tamed by decisive military force. Kagan says Europeans have an "emphasis on negotiation, diplomacy, and commercial ties, on international law over the use of force, on seduction over coercion, on multilateralism over unilateralism.

"Who knows better than Europeans the dangers that arise from unbridled power politics, from an excessive reliance on military force, from policies produced by nationbal egoism and ambition, even from balance of power and raison d'etat?" Kagan asks.

Kagan bases his views on practical experience, including four years in the State Department under President Ronald Reagan. He is now director of the 'U.S. Leadership Project' at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

In contrast to the current policies, which are more blunt but otherwise quite similar to Clinton policies, he thinks America should remember some words from the Declaration of Independence and show a "decent respect for the opinion of mankind."

"But, after all, it is more than a cliché that the United States and Europe share a set of common Western beliefs. Their aspirations for humanity are much the same, even if their vast disparity of power has now put them in very different places. Perhaps it is not too naively optimistic to believe that a little common understanding could still go a long way," he concludes.

Ten years ago, Francis Fukuyama declared history was over. This book shows history is a phoenix arising from the ashes of such irrational exuberance.

This book opens up a hornets' nest of ideas. Kagan succinctly describes the growing rift between America and Europe, but leaves the reader to decide who is wrong and what might be done to correct the imbalance. Do we really want a Europe powerful enough to challenge America? Do we really want a continuing imbalance of power? Can gentle words tame an opportunistic dictator? Is the status quo acceptable? How can nations limit the powerful?

Kagan deftly outlines the problem. He's very unAmerican in not offering a unilateral solution. He leaves it to readers who like to think to consider the alternatives.

The point may not be the one the author wants to make
This book is well worth reading. It sets out two of the approaches to International Relations in a clear and concise manner, and for that it deserves plaudit as not all the writing on these subjects is even remotely approachable by the general reader. It is well written. It favours the "Realist" belief that the only way to bring order to the anarchy of the international society is for the hegemon to behave as police/enforcer of international co-operation through the application of its power in the logic of its own self interest. What it doesn't really do is address the $5 trillion debt-consequence of current US foreign and economic policy, nor the impact of a rationalist approach in ameliorating such consequences as have to be borne by everyone else. Essentially it proposes that someone's gotta do it and the least of all evils is the good ol Liberal US of A. Well if you live in it, rather than in the shadow of it, I suspect that that the view makes different sense. That does not make it good or bad, but it ignores the fact that, maybe, the rationalist approach of Europe is actually looking beyond the present (fuelled by hindsight) to the passing of the current hegemon, which its own history suggests gets increasingly violent (Monet and Schuman during the birth of the EU looked to a future where another Franco-German war was a material impossiblility - it makes the most sense given the shared brutalities). Cliché it may be but "He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword", but in every age the cost of that to humaity gets heavier and heavier.