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WD_303/ 2007
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Works on paper: Drawings 4 | | Medium: | oilstick on paper | | Size (inches): | 25.6 x 17.7 | | Size (mm): | 650 x 450 | | Catalog #: | WD_0303 | | Description: | Signed, date and copyright in pencil on the reverse.
"I am again reminded how America is part of everyone's imaginative life, whether they grow up in Bilbao, Beijing or Bombay, through movies, music, television and the web. Everyone has a New York in their heads, even if they have never been there - which is why the destruction of the twin towers had such an impact." - Timothy Garton Ash, 2002.
-www.buzzle.com/editorials/4-4-2002-15936.asp
Timothy Garton Ash: US and the hyperpower -
America is wonderful but there's just one problem: it has too much power. For most of the 20th century, the defining political question was: what do you think of Russia?
For most of the 20th century, the defining political question was: what do you think of Russia? At the beginning of the 21st century, it is: what do you think of America? Tell me your America and I will tell you who you are.
Sitting in sun-dried Stanford, California, I have been trying to work out exactly what I think. Several writers in this newspaper, and probably quite a few readers, regard America as a dangerous, selfish giant, blundering around the world doing ill. And, at home, as an anthology of all that is wrong with capitalism - by contrast with our morally superior European versions.
Well, for starters I don't think either of those things. One reason I don't is that America is just so large, so diverse, such a cornucopia of combinations and contradictions, that it can't be reduced in this way. Here in Stanford there is the post-September 11 "United we stand" poster on the Japanese-American sushi bar, but also the bookshop that declares itself a "Hate-free zone", with a notice deploring recent attacks on Arab-Americans.
There's the "Proud to be an American" sign on the clubhouse door, but also a teenage girl of my acquaintance who declared herself a Muslim after September 11 - because she had been told at school how wonderful Islamic culture is. There's the gung-ho unilateralism of Fox TV, but also the patient multilateralism of elder statesmen interviewed on CNN. As Walt Whitman wrote: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes."
So any simple generalisation will be wrong. My own, more complicated conclusion is this: I love the place and I'm worried about its current role in the world. I use the word "love" loosely, of course, as we do in our increasingly Americanised English. I love the energy, the openness, the everyday cheerfulness of people in shop and street, the sense of freedom you get driving for hours down a Californian highway under those king-size skies, and the feeling that everyone - whoever they are, wherever they come from - has a chance to shape their own life. "Tell that," you may snort, "to a poor black child in an innercity ghetto." And of course you're right; but, coming from complicated, snobbish old Britain will you honestly claim that you have never felt this new world sense of opportunity?
Then I love the accuracy of the New York Times, the vigour of television's Crossfire, the probing seriousness of the best universities in the world, and, yes, the fast food that never tastes quite the same back in Europe. And the American activists I've worked with in eastern Europe and the Balkans who really do want other people to have the freedoms they enjoy.
Your list will be different, but I bet you have one. Reading the latest Granta, in which writers from across the world reflect on America, I am again reminded how America is part of everyone's imaginative life, whether they grow up in Bilbao, Beijing or Bombay, through movies, music, television and the web. Everyone has a New York in their heads, even if they have never been there - which is why the destruction of the twin towers had such an impact. This fascination exerted by American culture, in the broadest sense of that term, is part of what Harvard's Joseph Nye calls America's "soft power".
So why I am worried about this wonderful country's current role in the world? Well, partly because I have been watching CNN's footage from Yasser Arafat's compound in Ramallah and President George Bush's reaction from his Texas ranch. I fear that if the United States were to go to war against Iraq while supporting Sharon's actions against Arafat - both as part of the proclaimed "war against terrorism" - this could unite the Islamic world against the west while dividing Europe from America, with disastrous consequences for years to come.
But my concern goes deeper than simply a worry about the current Middle Eastern policy of a particular administration. The fundamental problem is that America today just has too much power for anyone's good, including its own. It has that matchless, global "soft power" in all of our heads. In economic power its only rival is Europe. In military power it has no rival. Its military expenditure is greater than that of the next eight largest military powers combined. "Not since Rome," they say, has a single power enjoyed such superiority - but the Roman colossus only loomed over part of the world. Stripped of its anti-American overtones, the French foreign minister Hubert Védrine's term "hyperpower" is apt.
The main problem with American power is not that it is American. Many readers will disagree. But put your hand on your heart and tell me: would you really rather such predominant power were wielded by the Russians, Chinese, Japanese, or, for that matter, the French or British? Really?
No, the main problem with American power is the power itself. It would be dangerous even for an archangel to wield so much power. The writers of the American constitution wisely determined that no single locus of power, however benign, should predominate; for even the best could be led into temptation. Every power should therefore be checked by at least one other. So also in world politics.
Of course it is good that such power should be exercised by rulers under the scrutiny of a developed and critical democracy. But democracy in a hyperpower brings its own temptations. The temptation, for example, to impose unjustified tariffs on steel imports, threatening the world framework of free trade in order to win some votes in steel-producing states.
Moreover, when you are as powerful as this, what you don't do is as fateful as what you do. Thus, the Bush administration came to power determined not to get dragged into detailed mediation between Israelis and Palestinians, as Bill Clinton had been. The horrors of the suicide bombings of innocent Israelis and the siege of Ramallah are at least in part a result of this policy, which might be called partisan disengagement. Critical Europeans generally see the US as messing things up by intervening, and there have certainly been examples of that, from Cambodia to Nicaragua. But as often, the problem is that the hyperpower does not intervene - witness the agony of Bosnia.
Who, then, should check and complement American power? International organisations, starting with the United Nations, of course, and transnational non-governmental ones. But that's not enough. My answer is: Europe. Europe as an economic equal to the United States and Europe as a close-knit group of states with long diplomatic and military experience. Not Europe seeing itself as a rival superpower to the US but Europe as America's most important partner in a world community of liberal democracies.
The difficulty, of course, is to disentangle this idea from its sticky, anti-American integument, and to make it happen. But that is what we must do. If we succeed, there will be plenty of Americans to welcome it. "Healthy cooperation with Europe," writes Samuel Huntington, one of the most influential political analysts in America today, "is the prime antidote for the loneliness of US superpowerdom." That's an invitation - and the case is urgent.
By Guardian Unlimited © Copyright Guardian Newspapers 2006.
Published: 4/4/2002
-www.buzzle.com/editorials/4-4-2002-15936.asp
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