As even a first-time reader of this blog can discern, I don't admire President Bush. I suspect that I disagree with all of his domestic policies. It's hard to tell, though, since his administration is almost always dishonest about the ends that its various domestic initiatives are intended to pursue. Consequently, it's sometimes difficult to decide exactly what the Bushies are trying to achieve here at home. Overall, though, I regard their domestic policies as greatly detrimental to the public good.
Many people have expressed great concern over the growing estrangement from our European allies that we have witnessed since 9/11, and that is said to be a direct consequence of Bush's foreign policy. I have to admit that I haven't been too terribly bothered by these developments, since I've usually had a hard time believing that most Europeans actually cared all that much for us. Anti-Americanism has grown too rapidly around the world for me to think that there was ever much sincere good will towards us out there in the first place. Therefore, if the price of our interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the our other foreign policy measures, turns out to be the loosening of ties with many former allies, as seems to be the case, then so be it.
The chief problem with Bush's approach to foreign policy, if you ask me, is that his foreign policy has been insufficiently unilateral. That is, he has never even tried to match adequate means to his ambitious ends. If you're going to go it alone, more or less, then you'd better make sure that you have enough of what you need to get the job done.
For example, despite all the rhetoric of the war on terror let's leave aside the question of how accurate it is to speak of a war on terror; this is what the Bush administration calls its foreign policy Bush hasn't taken steps to increase the size of the military. At the moment plans are underway to increase our forces in Iraq to 150,000 troops, in order to provide more security for the scheduled elections. Even such a relatively small though extended commitment is straining the military to the breaking point. Because Bush doesn't want to imperil his tax cuts, we won't see spending increases devoted to expanding the number of troops available for military operations around the world. It's clear that Bush intends to fight the war on terror on the cheap.
Anyway, the previous four paragraphs are meant as prelude to my blogging a new article by Niall Ferguson "The Widening Atlantic" that attempts to explain our estrangement from our allies without simply ascribing it to their distaste for President Bush.
According to Ferguson, there are three reasons for thinking that rapprochement is not possible:
First, we must not forget the primary reason for the formation of the transatlantic alliance, in the 1940s and 1950s: to keep the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain. We should not deceive ourselves that the French and the Germans or, for that matter, the British were passionately pro-American during the Cold War. But as long as a Russian empire was menacing Western Europe with missiles, troops, and spooks, there was an overwhelming practical argument for the unity of the West.
That is, some sort of drifting apart from our European allies was inevitable after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Second, says Ferguson, the U.S. and Europe are acting on the basis of different threat assessments:
The second reason the West is unlikely to come back together is the difference in the ways Europe and the United States assess the risk of Islamic extremism. To Americans, Islamism has effectively replaced Soviet communism as a mortal danger. To Europeans, the threat of Islamic terrorists today is simply not comparable to that posed by the Red Army twenty years ago not great enough, in other words, to require transatlantic solidarity under U.S. leadership. Indeed, ever since the Spanish elections early last year, many Europeans have behaved as if the optimal response to the growing threat of Islamist terrorism is to distance Europe from the United States.
Why? The answer is not far to seek. As a result of rising immigration from the south and the east, there are now at least 15 million Muslims within the European Union, and some say more than 20 million: that is, anything between three and five percent of the population. And these proportions seem certain to increase as the European population ages and immigration continues. It is still too soon to speak, as the Egyptian-born scholar Bat Ye'or does, of "Eurabia." Nevertheless, profound demographic forces are shifting the balance of Europe in an Islamic direction.
[. . .]
Unless demographic projections are wrong, the only way to avert a gradual Islamicization of Europe over the next few generations is to throw out Turkey's application for EU membership and stop further immigration from Islamic countries. Signs of support for such measures periodically manifest themselves, to be sure, but only at the level of national as opposed to European politics. Meanwhile, radical Islamists and their allies know that in a climate of appeasement intimidation is the best tactic; witness the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose recent work examined how women are treated under Islam. Criticizing Islam is at once politically incorrect and life-threatening.
I can't think of any reason to dispute these two points. They embody the differences between two self-interested parties that find themselves in different situations. It's hardly surprising, then, that the U.S. and Europe don't see eye to eye in foreign policy matters.
The following paragraph ends the discussion of his second reason, but also leads into the discussion of his third reason:
So Europe is not only demographically vulnerable to Islamic penetration; it is also politically vulnerable. And perhaps even more important, Europe is religiously vulnerable too.
Now for the third reason:
Here we come to the third reason why transatlantic rapprochement is so unlikely: the precipitous decline of European Christianity over the past three decades.
This headlong secularization is as big a story, in its way, as Europe's demographic decline. According to the Gallup International Millennium Survey of religious observance (conducted in 1999), 48 percent of people living in Western Europe almost never go to church; the figure for Eastern Europe is just a little lower, at 44 percent. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark fewer than 15 percent now attend church at least once a month. Only in Catholic Italy and Ireland do more than a third of the people worship monthly or more often.
European faith, too, as distinct from churchgoing, has waned quite dramatically in recent years. According to Gallup, 49 percent of Danes, 52 percent of Norwegians, and 55 percent of Swedes regard God as irrelevant to their lives. The proportion of Czechs who take this view is even higher. For whatever reason, Western Europeans living under Christian democracy or social democracy appear to have moved away from Christianity almost as rapidly as Eastern Europeans who used to live under "real existing socialism." In the words of the new Spanish prime minister, José Luís Rodríguez Zapatero, even traditionally Catholic Spaniards want "more sports, less religion."
What makes the de-Christianization of Europe so intriguing is that it cannot be explained by rising living standards; that theory collapses in the face of the contemporaneous vigor of Christianity in the United States. American religious observance is significantly higher than European; so is American religious faith. More than twice as big a percentage of Americans as Europeans attend religious services once a week or more. Some 62 percent of Americans believe in a personal God; little more than a third of Europeans do. Scarcely any Americans compared with 15 percent of Europeans can be characterized as atheists. Try to imagine George W. Bush calling for "more sports, less religion."
It is not so much, then, that militaristic Americans are from Mars and pacifistic Europeans from Venus. It would be more accurate to say that from an evangelical point of view, Americans are bound for heaven and Europeans for hell. At the very least, the rapid decline of European Christianity helps to explain why European conservatism has so little in common with the conservatism of the American right.
All this helps to explain, in turn, why in so many recent surveys Europeans have expressed a desire for a foreign policy less dependent on the United States. In the absence of the Soviet Union, in the presence of increasing numbers of Muslims, and in light of their own secularization, European societies feel more detached from the United States than at any other time since the 1930s.
In a recent Gallup poll 61 percent of Europeans said they thought the EU plays a positive role with regard to "peace in the world" (while just eight percent said its role was negative). But a remarkable 50 percent took the view that the United States now plays a negative role. Compare that with American attitudes: 59 percent of Americans regard the United States as making a positive contribution to world peace, and just 15 percent think the EU plays a negative role.
In the face of this kind of asymmetry it is well nigh impossible to turn back the clock to those halcyon days when there was just one West, indivisible. John Kerry would have tried, but he would have failed. George W. Bush has lower expectations of transatlantic relations. But he should not be blamed for their deterioration. His much exaggerated "unilateralism" is not why the Atlantic seems a little wider every day. It is Europe, not America, that is drifting away.
That final sentence puzzles me, since it seems to put the blame on Europe. Maybe I'm wrong to read it that way. Certainly, though, Ferguson is right to argue that religion is a source of genuine difference between Europe and the United States.
But nothing in the discussion of Ferguson's third reason explains why Europeans are more "religiously vulnerable" to Islamic penetration. In fact, he doesn't even explain what that phrase means. What he means by political vulnerability is clear the growing Muslim immigrant population will wield increasing political power as the European-born population in Europe declines.
Does he mean that the decline of European Christianity makes Europeans open to conversion to Islam, and thus less likely to oppose Islamic terrorism than the U.S.? If Europeans are simply more secular, for whatever reason, than Americans, then they won't be any more likely to become Muslims than they are to remain Christians. But I don't think that he means this. Thus I have to conclude that I don't follow Ferguson's notion of religious vulnerability, since it is supposed to be something over and above political vulnerability.
In an earlier post "Ronald J. Sider on the Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience" I blogged an article about recent survey results that show, in short, that those Americans who declare themselves most fervently religious don't act any better than anyone else in America.
Let's grant Ferguson all of his figures. Therefore, I won't deny that the percentage of the European population that identifies itself as secular is larger than the percentage of the of the U.S. population that identifies itself as secular. But self-identification is often a vehicle for self-deception.
Perhaps Europeans are just tired of American self-righteousness. After all, the religious right routinely refuses to apply the "What would Jesus do?" test to the Bush administration:
Which suspected terrorists would Jesus allow to be tortured?
Which lies would Jesus tell about a decorated war hero?
Which falsehoods would Jesus tell about Social Security?
And so on nearly endlessly.
If Sider's article is right, then we know why Bush gets away with this.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Europeans aren't terrible impressed by claims about Americans religiosity. In fact, Europeans might even argue that it's better to turn away from a faith that they no longer believe than to drift into hypocrisy.