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1. The European-American relations "business" has for decades been predictably dull, marked by periodic conferences, articles and speeches about "shared values", a "special transatlantic relationship" and "partnerships in leadership". Over and over, we have earnestly reaffirmed our affinity for one another, and sung the praises of this essential alliance on many different levels.
2. All that seems to have been to little avail, however, in preventing the fallout of last year between the US on the one hand and France and Germany on the other over the war in Iraq.1 To professional relationship watchers, the intensity and depth of this latest dispute and bad feeling is truly worrying. While we have weathered many disagreements in the past - the Suez Crisis, Olympic boycotts, Pershing missiles, various trade disputes - this one seems, finally, to be tearing "the West" apart. What exactly is going on here?
3. Robert Kagan created quite a stir in early 2003 with his proposed answer to this question. In his seminal essay Of Paradise and Power, he draws a fairly convincing picture of a growing postwar ideological gap between a rule-bound, multilateralist and "Kantian" Europe and a power-driven, unilateralist "Hobbesian" America. Viewed through his philosophical template, the recent disagreements over Iraq are most properly viewed as only one particularly visible illustration of two societies growing irreversibly apart. Because our philosophical foundations (and frameworks) are fundamentally different, that gap can only grow with time.
The fundamental argument
4. According to Kagan, the "new" fundamentally peaceful Europe has made a clean break from its pre-WWII past. Finally learning from centuries of bloody internal warfare and external failed colonialism, the nations of the European Union have now wholeheartedly embraced an international rule of law, and look to an empowered United Nations to enforce that rule and to provide a defensible normative foundation under the international society of nations. The old balance-of-power mechanisms of the Peace of Westphalia have been transcended, and the new Europe is now well advanced in its project of an unprecedented peaceful "postmodern" economic union. It is indeed a society built on reason and on humanity: a true Kantian "Kingdom of Ends".2
5. In contrast, the newly confident (if also traumatized) United States of America, formerly the great hope of the...