The Perils of Wishful Thinking: On Europe and the Middle East
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Forecasting political events is always risky because chance plays such a decisive role in what becomes history. Given its inherent weaknesses, the breakdown of the Soviet Union, for instance, may have been inevitable. But if instead of Mikhail Gorbachev, appointed as General Secretary of the Communist Party as a sort of accident in 1985, a hard-liner had been chosen by the Politburo and if he and like-minded comrades had managed to hold onto power for another twenty years, what would we have witnessed? As the price of oil went up exponentially (from two dollars a barrel to as much as one hundred and fifty), the Soviet economy would have prospered, the empire would not have fallen apart, and the wisdom of the Communist Party and its leaders who brought about these gigantic achievements would have been praised.
However, if there are no certainties in world politics, there remain probabilities that can be ignored only at great peril. In the case of the troubled European Union and the darkening Arab Spring, it is highly probable that, from the beginning, the optimism of even expert journalists, academics, and diplomats was misplaced, and that the odds against European progress toward a united and prosperous continent, and Arab progress toward liberty, peace, and democracy, were very heavy indeed. Why were these heavy odds ignored?
Among European unity’s outspoken and influential proponents was Jeremy Rifkin, author of the 2004 book The European Dream, which stressed that the European vision was not based on the accumulation of wealth but on respect for human rights and the social market economy, social justice, and the welfare state. Such a model, based on the respect for law, would be far more attractive in the twenty-first century than the American way of life. It would make for greater happiness than the radical individualism at the heart of the American model (which would mean, to give one euphoric example, a more civilized and humanitarian society with less crime, no capital punishment, and so forth).
There was some evidence for this enthusiastic vision of the European future. Europe was becoming an economic powerhouse. True, it had ignored the military dimension, but soft power, which it did cultivate, was what would matter in the new century. Stanley Hoffmann, a prominent reviewer in Foreign Affairs, welcomed the Rifkin book as an excellent riposte to Robert Kagan’s vision of America as Mars and Europe as Venus. In Hoffmann’s view, so much the better for Europe.
An even more extreme case of praising the European model was provided by Mark Leonard, an expert prominently involved in a variety of British and European think tanks who argued that the European model was not only preferable to the American on the level of ideas, but on the level of practical politics. Its advantage there, Leonard argues in his 2005 bookWhy Europe Will Run the 21st Century, gave it a leg up on the future—not as a dominant economic superpower necessarily and certainly not in the military arena, but simply because the evolving “European way” was uniquely relevant to the era of globalization. It showed a way to overcome the limitations of the nation-state, to collaborate on issues of paramount importance. Europe was performing a revolution in international relations as it was showing the whole world that relying on international law was more decisive than relying on military intervention and the balance of power. In Leonard’s view, the European century would come about not as a result of imperial power but simply because the European way of doing things in terms of social arrangements would become the world’s way of doing things.