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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Robert Kagan + The Kantian paradox « Previous | |Next »
December 31, 2009

The central claim in Robert Kagan's Power and Weakness’ essay in the foreign policy journal Policy Review, later expanded as a book in 2003 was that Europeans and Americans no longer share a common view of the world and, moreover, that in essential ways they can be understood as occupying different worlds. It is an articulation of the neo-conservative view of international relations.

For Kagan, both strength and power are based on military capability, and nothing else. Kagan asserts that strength, and therefore power, is something that America has, and that Europe lacks. It is this lack of military capability that Kagan calls “weakness.” Europe is turning away from power, or to put it a little differently, it is moving beyond power into a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. And while Europe has withdrawn into a mirage of Kantian ‘perpetual peace’, the US has no choice but to act in a Hobbesian world of perpetual war. This state of affairs, for Kagan, is not the result of the strategic choices of a single administration, but a persistent divide and the reflection of fundamentally different perspectives on the world and the role of Europe and the US within it.

The fact that Europeans are able to stepp out of the Hobbesian world of anarchy into the Kantian world of perpetual peace’’ was made possible only by American power which assured the Cold War peace. In his article Kagan adresses an issue he calls the “Kantian paradox”:

The United States, in short, solved the Kantian paradox for the Europeans. Kant had argued that the only solution to the immoral horrors of the Hobbesian world was the creation of a world government. But he also feared that the “state of universal peace” made possible by world government would be an even greater threat to human freedom than the Hobbesian international order, inasmuch as such a government, with its monopoly of power, would become the most horrible despotism. How nations could achieve perpetual peace without destroying human freedom was a problem Kant could not solve. But for Europe the problem was solved by the United States. By providing security from outside, the United States has rendered it unnecessary for Europe’s supranational government to provide it. Europeans did not need power to achieve peace and they do not need power to preserve it.

The US is thus invoked into a number of positions: as global leader (faced with Europe’s fail-ings/withdrawal), but also the only state able, due to its power-position, to perceive threats clearly; the only one with a God’s eye view of international affairs. It is thus, at once, the world’s geo-politican and its geo-police; the only state with the ‘knowledge’ but also the capability to intervene.

These ideas prepared the ground, and legitimate US unilateralism and its doctrine of pre-emptive action.The US is Leviathan. The single superpower is the world's policeman, which is not bound by the rules which it enforces. It has no choice but to pursue “law and order” policies. The United States unilaterally assumes the role of international sheriff enforcing peace and justice through the muzzle of a gun. Such a vision is a flat rejection of the rule of law. A self-appointed sheriff is a vigilante.

The rest of the world benefits by either living in a protected paradise (Europe) or in a lawless anarchy which longs for the order made by the superpower (Third World). In Kagan's world, it is by and large power that drives the actors and determines their respective positions in the international system.

It is true that the rest of the world, and Europe in particular, depends on a United States that is willing to employ its huge military and economical capabilities for issues of global concern and the implementation of international law. Without the power of the hegemon, international law remains a dead letter. In the absence of a world Statewith a world police force the enforcement of international rules and principles simply cannot do without “coalitions of the willing”acting with the support of the single superpower.

As Andreas Paulus argues in Antinomies of Power and Law: A Comment on Robert Kagan in the German Law Review Issue 4 no 9 2003:

Power without international recognition and legitimacy will not be viable. Legality without power will remain a dead letter. The compromise between law and power has to be negotiated and re-negotiated. The global institutions where this permanent negotiation takes place may be slow, bureaucratic, burdensome, cynical. But ifthey did not exist, we would have to invent them.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 2:24 PM |