By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"
In his book - really an extended essay - "Of Paradise and Power:
America and Europe in the New World Order" - Robert Kagan claims
that the political construct of the "West" was conjured up by the
United States and Western Europe during the Cold War as a response
to the threat posed by the nuclear-armed, hostile and expansionist
U.S.S.R.
The implosion of the Soviet Bloc rendered the "West" an obsolete,
meaningless, and cumbersome concept, on the path to perdition.
Cracks in the common front of the Western allies - the Euro-Atlantic
structures - widened into a full-fledged and unbridgeable rift in
the run-up to the war in Iraq (see the next chapter, "The Demise of
the West").
According to this U.S.-centric view, Europe missed an opportunity to
preserve the West as the organizing principle of post Cold War
geopolitics by refusing to decisively side with the United States
against the enemies of Western civilization, such as Iraq's Saddam
Hussein.
Such reluctance is considered by Americans to be both naive and
hazardous, proof of the lack of vitality and decadence of "Old
Europe". The foes of the West, steeped in conspiracy theories and
embittered by centuries of savage colonialism, will not find
credible the alleged disintegration of the Western alliance, say the
Americans. They will continue to strike, even as the constituents of
the erstwhile West drift apart and weaken.
Yet, this analysis misses the distinction between the West as a
civilization and the West as a fairly recent geopolitical construct.
Western civilization is millennia old - though it had become self- aware and exclusionary only during the Middle Ages or, at the
latest, the Reformation. Max Weber (1864-1920) attributed its
success to its ethical and, especially, religious foundations. At
the other extreme, biological determinists, such as Giambattista
Vico (1668-1744) and Oswald Spengler (1880-1936), predicted its
inevitable demise. Spengler authored the controversial "Decline of
the West" in 1918-22.
Arnold Toynbee (1889-1975) disagreed with Spengler in "A Study of
History" (1934-61). He believed in the possibility of cultural and
institutional regeneration. But, regardless of persuasion, no
historian or philosopher in the first half of the twentieth century
grasped the "West" in political or military terms. The polities
involved were often bitter enemies and with disparate civil systems.
In the second half of the past century, some historiographies -
notably "The Rise of the West" by W. H. McNeill (1963), "Unfinished
History of the World" (1971) by Hugh Thomas, "History of the World"
by J. M. Roberts (1976), and, more recently, "Millennium" by Felip
Fernandez-Armesto (1995) and "From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of
Western Cultural Life" by Jacques Barzun (2000) - ignored the
heterogeneous nature of the West in favor of an "evolutionary", Euro- centric idea of progress and, in the case of Fernandez-Armesto and
Barzun, decline.
Yet, these linear, developmental views of a single "Western" entity - whether a civilization or a political-military alliance - are very
misleading. The West as the fuzzy name given to a set of
interlocking alliances is a creature of the Cold War (1946-1989). It
is both missionary and pluralistic - and, thus, dynamic and ever- changing. Some members of the political West share certain common
values - liberal democracy, separation of church and state, respect
for human rights and private property, for instance. Others - think
Turkey or Israel - do not.
The "West", in other words, is a fluid, fuzzy and non-monolithic
concept. As William Anthony Hay notes in "Is There Still a West?"
(published in the September 2002 issue of "Watch on the West",
Volume 3, Number 8, by the Foreign Policy Research Institute): "If
Western civilization, along with particular national or regional
identities, is merely an imagined community or an intellectual
construct that serves the interest of dominant groups, then it can
be reconstructed to serve the needs of current agendas."
Though the idea of the West, as a convenient operational
abstraction, preceded the Cold War - it is not the natural extension
or the inescapable denouement of Western civilization. Rather, it is
merely the last phase and manifestation of the clash of titans
between Germany on the one hand and Russia on the other hand.
Europe spent the first half of the 19th century (following the 1815
Congress of Vienna) containing France. The trauma of the Napoleonic
wars was the last in a medley of conflicts with an increasingly
menacing France stretching back to the times of Louis XIV. The
Concert of Europe was specifically designed to reflect the interests
of the Big Powers, establish their borders of expansion in Europe,
and create a continental "balance of deterrence". For a few decades
it proved to be a success.
The rise of a unified, industrially mighty and narcissistic Germany
erased most of these achievements. By closely monitoring France
rather than a Germany on the ascendant, the Big Powers were still
fighting the Napoleonic wars - while ignoring, at their peril, the
nature and likely origin of future conflagrations. They failed to
notice that Germany was bent on transforming itself into the
economic and political leader of a united Europe, by force of arms,
if need be.
The German "September 1914 Plan", for instance, envisaged an
economic union imposed on the vanquished nations of Europe following
a military victory. It was self-described as a "(plan for
establishing) an economic organization ... through mutual customs
agreements ... including France, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Austria,
Poland, and perhaps Italy, Sweden, and Norway". It is eerily
reminiscent of the European Union.
The 1918 Brest-Litovsk armistice treaty between Germany and Russia
recognized the East-West divide. The implosion of the four empires -
the Ottoman, Habsburg, Hohenzollern and Romanov - following the
first world war, only brought to the fore the gargantuan tensions
between central Europe and its east.
But it was Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) who fathered the West as we know
it today.
Hitler sought to expand the German Lebensraum and to found a
giant "slave state" in the territories of the east, Russia, Poland,
and Ukraine included. He never regarded the polities of west Europe
or the United States as enemies. On the contrary, he believed that
Germany and these countries are natural allies faced with a mortal,
cunning and ruthless foe: the U.S.S.R. In this, as in many other
things, he proved prescient.
Ironically, Hitler's unmitigated thuggery and vile atrocities did
finally succeed to midwife the West - but as an anti-German
coalition. The reluctant allies first confronted Germany and
Stalinist Russia with which Berlin had a non-aggression pact. When
Hitler then proceeded to attack the U.S.S.R. in 1941, the West
hastened to its defense.
But - once the war was victoriously over - this unnatural liaison
between West and East disintegrated. A humbled and divided West
Germany reverted to its roots. It became a pivotal pillar of the
West - a member of the European Economic Community (later renamed
the European Union) and of NATO. Hitler's fervent wish and vision -
a Europe united around Germany against the Red Menace - was achieved
posthumously.
That it was Hitler who invented the West is no cruel historical joke.
Hitler and Nazism are often portrayed as an apocalyptic and seismic
break with European history. Yet the truth is that they were the
culmination and reification of European history in the 19th century.
Europe's annals of colonialism have prepared it for the range of
phenomena associated with the Nazi regime - from industrial murder
to racial theories, from slave labour to the forcible annexation of
territory.
Germany was a colonial power no different to murderous Belgium or
Britain. What set it apart is that it directed its colonial
attentions at the heartland of Europe - rather than at Africa or
Asia. Both World Wars were colonial wars fought on European soil.
Moreover, Nazi Germany innovated by applying to the white race
itself prevailing racial theories, usually reserved to non-whites.
It first targeted the Jews - a non-controversial proposition - but
then expanded its racial "science" to encompass "east European"
whites, such as the Poles and the Russians.
Germany was not alone in its malignant nationalism. The far right in
France was as pernicious. Nazism - and Fascism - were world
ideologies, adopted enthusiastically in places as diverse as Iraq,
Egypt, Norway, Latin America, and Britain. At the end of the 1930's,
liberal capitalism, communism, and fascism (and its mutations) were
locked in a mortal battle of ideologies.
Hitler's mistake was to delusionally believe in the affinity between
capitalism and Nazism - an affinity enhanced, to his mind, by
Germany's corporatism and by the existence of a common enemy: global
communism.
Nazism was a religion, replete with godheads and rituals. It meshed
seamlessly with the racist origins of the West, as expounded by the
likes of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). The proselytizing and
patronizing nature of the West is deep rooted. Colonialism - a
distinctly Western phenomenon - always had discernible religious
overtones and often collaborated with missionary religion. "The
White Man's burden" of civilizing the "savages" was widely perceived
as ordained by God. The church was the extension of the colonial
power's army and trading companies.
Thus, following two ineffably ruinous world wars, Europe finally
shifted its geopolitical sights from France to Germany. In an effort
to prevent a repeat of Hitler, the Big Powers of the West, led by
France, established an "ever closer" European Union. Germany was
(inadvertently) split, sandwiched between East and West and, thus,
restrained.
East Germany faced a military-economic union (the Warsaw Pact) cum
eastern empire (the late U.S.S.R.). West Germany was surrounded by a
military union (NATO) cum emerging Western economic supranational
structure (the EU). The Cold War was fought all over the world - but
in Europe it revolved around Germany.
The collapse of the eastern flank (the Soviet - "evil" - Empire) of
this implicit anti-German containment geo-strategy led to the re- emergence of a united Germany. Furthermore, Germany is in the
process of securing its hegemony over the EU by applying the
political weight commensurate with its economic and demographic
might.
Germany is a natural and historical leader of central Europe - the
EU's and NATO's future Lebensraum and the target of their
expansionary predilections ("integration"). Thus, virtually
overnight, Germany came to dominate the Western component of the
anti-German containment master plan, while the Eastern component -
the Soviet Bloc - has chaotically disintegrated.
The EU is reacting by trying to assume the role formerly played by
the U.S.S.R. EU integration is an attempt to assimilate former
Soviet satellites and dilute Germany's power by re-jigging rules of
voting and representation. If successful, this strategy will prevent
Germany from bidding yet again for a position of hegemony in Europe
by establishing a "German Union" separate from the EU. It is all
still the same tiresome and antiquated game of continental Big
Powers. Even Britain maintains its Victorian position of "splendid
isolation".
The exclusion of both Turkey and Russia from these re-alignments is
also a direct descendant of the politics of the last two centuries.
Both will probably gradually drift away from European (and Western)
structures and seek their fortunes in the geopolitical twilight
zones of the world.
The USA is unlikely to be of much help to Europe as it reasserts the
Monroe doctrine and attends to its growing Pacific and Asian
preoccupations. It may assist the EU to cope with Russian (and to a
lesser extent, Turkish) designs in the tremulously tectonic regions
of the Caucasus, oil-rich and China-bordering Central Asia, and the
Middle East. But it will not do so in Central Europe, in the Baltic,
and in the Balkan.
In the long-run, Muslims are the natural allies of the United States
in its role as a budding Asian power, largely supplanting the former
Soviet Union. Thus, the threat of militant Islam is unlikely to
revive the West. Rather, it may create a new geopolitical formation
comprising the USA and moderate Muslim countries, equally threatened
by virulent religious fundamentalism. Later, Russia, China and
India - all destabilized by growing and vociferous Muslim
minorities - may join in.
Ludwig Wittgenstein would have approved. He once wrote that the
spirit of "the vast stream of European and American civilization in
which we all stand ... (is) alien and uncongenial (to me)".
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AUTHOR BIO (must be included with the article)
Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Central Europe Review,
PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a United Press International
(UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and the editor of mental health
and Central East Europe categories in The Open Directory and
Suite101.
Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.
Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com