In all the acres of coverage devoted to Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress, and its impact on the Israeli election, one question went unasked. Why did he choose to make the speech in America, which is beyond the reach of the Iranian missiles against which he was warning, rather than in Europe, whose cities might be vulnerable?
You might think this a ridiculous question. Surely it’s obvious, you might say. Americans take terrorism and nuclear proliferation and Islamism seriously, whereas Europeans are led by a bunch of pantywaists. Americans, as Robert Kagan was pointing out 12 years ago, are prepared to deploy proportionate force in pursuit of liberty; Europeans, by and large, are not.
And anyway, you might go on, Americans have a natural sympathy with Israel, seeing it as country like their own: a market-based common-law democracy, where contracts are respected and property is secure, where courts are open to individuals rather than being instruments of government control, and where politicians are servants, not rulers; a state founded in war, which often elects former soldiers as its leaders; a state driven by a sense of mission. Many Europeans, by contrast, see a swarm of immigrants who forced their way into a region with settled identities; an incursion of the same globalized McDonalds culture that they resent in Europe; and, not least, a challenge to the EU’s ruling ideal, namely that the nation-state is redundant and patriotism dangerous.
Okay, so Americans are Martian and Europeans are Venusian. But why have we come we take this difference for granted? Weren’t the early Americans keen to get away from Europe’s chronic wars? Didn’t they glory in their geographical isolation, “kindly separated by nature and a wide ocean from the exterminating havoc of one quarter of the globe,” as Thomas Jefferson put it at his inauguration?
Well, yes, but this didn’t stop Jefferson attacking the Barbary pirates, the first deployment of the US Navy, and the forerunner to every subsequent anti-terrorist campaign. Deeper than geography pulsed the belief in mission, in providence, that had pulled the first Puritans across the Atlantic and that, even now, actuates their heirs. Puritanism is no longer the dominating ethic in America; nor, arguably, is Christianity itself; but the sense of having been raised above the run of nations remains.
All states, all unions, develop according to the DNA encoded at their conception. The United States was founded, as P.J. O’Rourke once put it, “by religious nuts with guns.” It was, moreover, designed to forestall the abuses through which the Founders had lived: the concentration of power, the sidelining of the public opinion, the tendency of legislators to forget that they are supposed to represent their constituents, not the government. Such a state will have a natural inclination towards freedom and democracy on other continents. Not always; but usually.
The European Union, alas, is also a child of its time. Its patriarchs had come through the horror of the Second World War, and their convictions were very different from those of the American Founders. They disliked the whole concept of nationhood, seeing it as intrinsically unstable and militarist. They were lukewarm about democracy, which they associated with the demagoguery of the 1930s. They wanted public opinion to be moderated and tempered by impartial experts. That’s why they designed a system where power was concentrated in the hands of European Commissioners who don’t have to worry about getting elected. It’s why, to this day, they are so ready to strike down referendum results when they go the “wrong” way.
This foundational difference contextualizes almost every global dispute where Washington and Brussels are on opposite sides. It explains why the EU refused to engage with dissidents in Cuba, and complained more loudly about the Helms-Burton legislation than about Castro’s repression. It explains why the EU is the main sponsor of Palestine, going to extraordinary lengths to fund Hamas through intermediaries so as to get around its own ban on paying terrorist organizations. It explains why the EU has declared its readiness to sell arms to Beijing. It explains why Brussels is incredulous at American proposals to arm Ukraine. It explains why Europeans are so much readier than Americans to accept the jurisdiction of supranational courts and global technocracies. It explains why my fellow MEPs are often more vocal about protecting data from U.S. security agencies than protecting European civilians from bombers.
When critics accuse the EU of being hypocritical on the global stage, they are missing the point. When a European official does business with, say, a Chinese Communist, he recognizes someone not so different from himself: a bureaucrat who owes his place to ideological conviction, coupled with success in exams, rather than to public support. He doesn’t want more democracy in Europe, so its absence in China doesn’t bother him either.
Europeans, in short, favor stability over democracy; Americans the reverse. It’s why the Israel-is-the-only-democracy-in-the-region shtick counts for little in Brussels, and why Eurocrats have been so ready to engage with the mullahs in Teheran.
America’s democratic sympathies can lead it into error, as during the second war against Saddam; but these are errors of exuberance. Europeans, by contrast, have spent the better part of two decades trying to jolly the ayatollahs out of their nuclear ambitions through “constructive engagement.” Israeli voters can see where that approach has ended up. They, at any rate, understand the limits of appeasement.
Dan Hannan is a British Conservative member of the European Parliament.
