This is an excerpt from an article which can be found at
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1072326001961
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In his reading, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. Perhaps a better opposition is that of the shareholder and the stakeholder. America is a shareholder society. Some 50% of Americans actually own stock in publicly traded companies, either directly or via mutual funds. More broadly, Americans favor individual rights and individual initiative over communal rights and collective entitlements. Pay to Play is a quintessentially American slogan: so are “put up or shut up,” “show me the money,” and “lead, follow, or get out of the way.”
The term “stakeholder” is a European buzzword: It refers to those people whose lives are fundamentally affected by some enterprise, even if they don’t have actual “ownership” in that enterprise. For example: the woman who lives downstream from the tannery; or the assembly line worker whose job is threatened by low-cost labor overseas. Neither is likely to be represented at the annual shareholders’ meeting. Yet both, according to one theory of justice, deserve to have their voices heard.
These differences have deep philosophical roots – Locke on the one side, Rousseau on the other. Economically, it’s a case of free markets versus “social markets,” of efficiency versus consensus. Politically as well as diplomatically, it’s the difference between being results-oriented and being process-oriented.
At the most fundamental level, however, the difference is this: In today’s world, Americans are the actors, and Europeans – indeed, everyone else – are the acted-upon. In 2003, the truly serious question Europe raised was whether the former should, by dint of their overwhelming power, have the effective right to dictate to the latter the kind of world in which they all must live. In other words, the question wasn’t a substantive or moral one, as in, “who’s right?” but a procedural and democratic one, as in “who decides?”
Being and nothingness
“The world is what it is,” wrote VS Naipaul. “Men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”
In a year when Europe was obsessed with the question of legitimacy, America was obsessed with a quest for survival. Terrorists, Bush has said consistently since the attacks of September 11, would not hesitate to detonate a nuclear bomb in Manhattan or Los Angeles if they had one. Preventing exactly that is what his presidency is about.
Thus America’s quintessentially Lockean retort to Europe: Self-preservation is a nation’s first and most inescapable priority. If this requires flouting the polite norms of international practice, so be it. “At some point we may be the only ones left,” said Bush on the eve of war, as the so-called Coalition of the Willing whittled down to two. “That’s okay with me. We are America.”
But beyond the assertion of sovereign prerogative, there was also a thinly veiled message of contempt. America has not achieved world mastery without foresight and sacrifice; it is not a Saudi Arabia, which owes its wealth to the happy accident of its location. Similarly, the countries of Europe had not joined the ranks of the “acted upon” because they were the blameless victims of other people’s devices. Rather, they had lost their place through their indulgence of reckless ideologies, their economic mismanagement, their willingness to let Washington bear the burdens of their defense.
In 2003, Europeans woke up to the unpleasant fact that opposition to Washington, far from creating “multipolarity,” consigned them to geopolitical irrelevance. To this rude awakening, the Bush administration has not been particularly solicitous; it capped the year by excluding Germany and France from business opportunities in Iraq. “You no play’a da game, you no make’a da rules,” said Earl Butts, Richard Nixon’s secretary of agriculture, in reference to some papal pronouncement on birth control. It perfectly captures Bush’s view of Europe.
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