EUROPEAN SOPHISTICATION VS. AMERICAN NAIVETE

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• Publication Date: November 2, 1984
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European "Sophistication" vs. American "Naivete" by Owen Harries
FROM: EXTENSION
Herbert E. Meyer
NO.
NIC #06267-84
Vice Chairman, NIC
DATE
2 Nov 84
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STAT
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NIC #06267-84
THE DIRECTOR OF
CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE
National Intelligence Council
NOTE FOR THE DIRECTOR
FROM: Herbert E. Meyer
Vice Chairman, NIC
I commend to your attention this article
entitled European "Sophistication" vs. American
"Naivete". Its awthor is Owen Harries
Harries was Australian Ambassador-to
UNESCO, Senior Advisor to Prime Minister
Fraser, and head of Policy Planning in the
Australian Department of Foreign Affairs.
Attachment: a/s
STAT
STAT
STAT
STAT
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European "Sophistication" vs.
American "Naivete"
Owen Harries
The Europeans have a better understanding of
the complexities of the present world difficulties
than the United States.
-James Callaghan, London Times,
February 19, 1982
One dreams also of a real American foreign pol-
icy which takes realities into account... .
-Couve de Murville,.London Times,
February 18, 1982
"It is recordable fact that the Reaganites hold
alarming simplistic beliefs that divide the world
into goodies and baddies," a conservative British
editor said the other day. It seen s hard to be a
sophisticated European and also an admirer of
Ronald Reagan.
-Robert G. Kaiser, International
Herald Tribune, July 6, 1983
T HE great transatlantic debate over de-
ploying the Pershing-2 and cruise mis-
siles in Western Europe has once again raised the
question of how America's European allies see
themselves, the United States, and international
politics generally. Since the acute difference over
Poland and the gas pipeline last year, the atten-
tion given to this question has diminished. Insofar
as it has been addressed at all, it has been the atti-
tudes of the Greens, the organized "peace move-
ment," and the committed anti-Americans which
have been most discussed. But those groups are
not the most important elements in the situation.
They are the outsiders of European politics. Their
activities may make effective television, but-pace
the Vietnam experience-the politics of the street
in which they engage is the politics of the weak, of
those without access to institutional power and
decision-making. They will only have influence in
circumstances in which those who have such access
are themselves indecisive, doubt-ridden, or danger-
ously complacent.
What, then, are the prevailing assumptions and
OWEN HARRIES is John M. Olin Fellow at the Heritage
Foundation. Formerly he was Australian Ambassador to
UNESCO (1982.83), senior adviser to Prime Minister Mal-
colm Fraser, and head of policy planning in the Australian
Department of Foreign Affairs.
perceptions concerning themselves and the United
States of those who influence and make decisions
in Europe? UNESCO is not the first place that
comes to mind as a source of insight into this ques-
tion, but one must find one's epiphanies where one
can. The occasion I have in mind was the last day
of the UNESCO conference on Education for Inter-
national Understanding, Cooperation, and Peace
in April of this year, a gathering which displayed
all the characteristics one would expect of a con-
junction of that sponsor and that topic.* In its
closing stages the United States delegation (headed
by Reagan-appointed Ambassador Jean Gerard
and including a number of conservative advisers)
had fought hard to resist a "compromise" under
which the U.S. would have to surrender the one
resolution that robustly asserted liberal, demo-
cratic (and supposedly UNESCO) values in return
for the dropping of two of the many resolutions
submitted by Communist countries. Finally, under
intense pressure to "save the conference," berated
by its European friends for its stubbornness, and
having received instructions from the State Depart-
ment to accept the compromise, the U.S. delega-
tion unhappily gave way. But having done so, it
used the final plenary session to vent its feelings
and complained bitterly about UNESCO's betray-
al of the values it claimed to uphold and about
the failings of the conference generally.
Immediately afterward-and this is the point of
the episode-a number of West European delegates
gathered in the lobby to discuss what had hap-
pened. After: a while, one of them summed up the
general feeling with an exasperated question:
"Isn't it a pity that the United States can't learn
to lose gracefully?"
It is a remark that stays in the mind. The more
one considers it, the clearer it becomes that losing
gracefully is by now the essence of West European
foreign policy. The willingness to do so is the
main component of the superior "sophistication"
and "realism" which are so insistently claimed,
? For a discussion of this meeting, we "How to Lose the
War of Ideas," by Chester E. Finn, Jr. in the August issue
Of COMMENTARY.
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EUROPEAN "SOPHISTICATION" VS. AMERICAN "NAIVETE"/47
sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly, for the
Europeans. The claimed superiority is, of course,
to the United States. In my experience, acceptance
of a model of the Western alliance as being com-
posed of wise, worldly Europeans who understand,
and can play, the game of international politics in
all its complexity, and a naive, ham-fisted America
which does not and cannot, is a basic part of the
mental make-up of a disturbing proportion of the
people who shape, implement, and interpret Euro-
pean foreign policies. This is at least as true of
conservatives as it is of social democrats and lib-
erals. Belief in the model was strongly reinforced
by the election of Ronald Reagan. The stereotypes
of the B-grade Hollywood actor, the cowboy,
the unreconstructed cold warrior were made to
measure to confirm and justify the European sense
of superiority. But that sense did not originate
with his election and it will not end when he
goes.
When one is exposed to this claim of superior
realism and sophistication, one's first inclination is
to ask where exactly is the evidence for it. If one
considers some of the salient episodes in the history
of Europe in this century-the events leading up
to 1914, the Versailles peace conference, Munich,
the extent of the effort Europe has been prepared
to make to secure its own defense since 1948, and
the current attitude toward the defense of its vital
interests in the Persian gulf-one is not irresistibly
led to concede European superiority. One might
also be inclined to ask who, precisely, among Euro-
peans has been more "sophisticated" than, say,
Truman, Acheson, Nixon, and Kissinger, four men
who among them ran American foreign policy for
a good slice of the last forty years? These are
legitimate, and in some circumstances necessary,
questions. But insofar as the object is not to win
an argument but to help the alliance function a
little better, perhaps it is more profitable to try to
understand the content of the claim than to con-
test it.
LET it be conceded at once that there are
~uropeans who are superbly equipped
to comprehend the complexity of international
politics and who are well grounded in the realist
tradition which focuses attention on interests and
power. At their best they are very good indeed.
That having been said, however, two things must
be added: first, increasingly they are not at their
best; and second, most of the people who have to
do with the making of foreign policy in Europe
have only a casual and superficial acquaintance
with the position and tradition they claim to
represent.
As for the good people not performing at their
best-which is the more interesting aspect-this,
I believe, is largely explicable in terms of recent
European history and the current state of the
sociopolitical milieu in which they function. The
recent history of Europe is essentially a history of
losing: losing control over the division of Europe
after World War II; losing the military dominance
Europeans had previously enjoyed; losing political
control over the key strategic issues in their own
continent and over their own security; and losing
virtually all of the vast imperial possessions (and
the trade networks that went with them) which
had previously made them the managers of a very
significant portion of the world's affairs. At the
same time, domestically, governments and other
key institutions have suffered a serious erosion of
legitimacy and authority.
Moreover, while some of these losses were the
unavoidable consequences of historical events, in-
creasingly they have flowed from an inability to
mobilize the will and the power necessary (and
objectively available) to protect interests in a more
effective and assertive way, and from declining
commitment to the values professed by West Euro-
peans. All this has been a very recent and very
compressed experience, and its effect on the con-
fidence of decision-makers, on their assumptions as
to what is possible, their determination to shape
events, has been profound.
What happens to realists in such circumstances?
One of the things that happens is that the deter-
ministic-even fatalistic-strain that is inherent
in realism comes to predominate. An episode in
the long career of the English historian E.H. Carr
makes the point. At the end of the 1930's-an-
other decade of loss and of a crisis of faith for
West European democracies-Carr wrote his classic
realist analysis of international politics, The
Twenty Years' Crisis. In its first chapter he ob-
served of realism:
In the field of thought, it places its emphasis on
the acceptance of facts and on the analysis of
their causes and consequences. It tends to depre-
ciate the role of purpose and to maintain, expli-
citly or implicitly, that the function of thinking
is to study a sequence of events which it is power-
less to influence or alter. In the field of ac-
tion realism tends to emphasize the irresistible
strength of existing forces and the inevitable
character of existing tendencies, and to insist
that the highest wisdom lies in accepting, and
adapting oneself to, these forces and these ten-
dencies.
Carr then went on to illustrate his point by writ-
ing what another English historian, A.J.P. Taylor,
was later to describe as "a brilliant argument in
favor of appeasement."
Lest it should be thought that Carr was in
any way eccentric and untypical, it should be
pointed out that in the 1930's the link between
appeasement and realism was widely recognized.
When Harold Nicolson, a prominent anti-appeaser
at the time, was attacked in the House of Com-
mons by Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's
supporters; h, response was: "I know that in these
IF
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days of realism, principles are considered as rather
eccentric and ideas are identified with hysteria."
And a standard work on the subject, The Ap-
peasers, by Martin Gilbert and Richard Gott, ob-
serves:
For the appeasers it was the height of "realism"
to criticize the Versailles Treaty, and to show that
all Germany's grievances in the 1930's sprang
from the injustices of this Treaty. It was "prac-
tical politics" to advocate Treaty revision in Ger-
many's favor.
Some went beyond this and exhibited a still
more unattractive side of realism when it is associ-
ated with weakness-the positive appeal which
power has for it. When the historian A.L. Rowse
suggested that the London Times would do better
to pay less attention to Italy and more to the
stronger Germany, the pro-appeasement editor of
that paper, Geoffrey Dawson, replied: "To take
your argument on its own evaluation-mind you,
I'm not saying that I agree with it-but if the Ger-
mans are as powerful as you say, oughtn't we to
go in with them?"
I T is difficult to resist the conclusion that
thinking analogous to that illustrated
by these examples is widespread in Europe today.
The impulse to accommodate, and to adjust to,
"the facts" is strong. So is the inclination to rule
out one's own will and resolve as, potentially, one
of the most significant of these "facts"-or to take
the unbending of the springs of action in oneself
as something one is as helpless to change as one
is to move the stars from their courses.
All this is apparent in the plaintive appeals for
an understanding of the allegedly unique difficul-
ties which make effective action impossible or even
prevent the keeping of promises made. The head
of one German think tank once put it to me, with
the air of one advancing an unanswerable argu-
ment, that it was completely unreasonable to ex-
pect the Federal Republic to give up a substantial
proportion of the 5 percent of its trade that was
conducted with the Soviet Union just to make a
political polar another justified the failure to
meet the promised 3-percent increase in defense
spending on the grounds that for a country in the
Federal Republic's circumstances, social security
was more important than military security.
The same tendency is apparent, too, in the evi-
dent belief that attempting to improve one's posi-
tion in significant ways-usually caricatured as a
commitment to "winning" regardless of risk-is
not only dangerous but simplistic and intellectual-
ly vulgar, clear evidence that one does not appreci-
ate the "complexity" of things.
At the root of much of the European impatience
and exasperation with the United States lies a
resentment of the refusal by Americans to share
this fatalistic attitude toward the facts of power
and to surrender control over their own destiny-
to substitute, as someone has put it, the passive
question, "What will become of us?" for the polit-
ical question, "What is to be done?" Sometimes
the words "impatience" and "exasperation" are
utterly inadequate to describe the response. Feel-
ing breaks all bounds and causes cultivated and
normally fair men to say absurd and unforgivable
things. Thus Michael Howard, the Oxford his-
torian, writing in Harper's (February 1983), says
that "in many American minds [he is speaking not
of the kooks but of those he describes as friends]
the flames of war seem already to have taken a
very firm hold," and he goes on to speak of "the
brutal paranoia of the Committee on the Present
Danger." The persistent stress on complexity (as
distinct from accepting it as obvious) is itself a
clear indication of the European predicament.
The world is always unmanageably complex to
those who lack a coherent position and whose re-
solve is faltering.
IF FATALISM is one side of the coin, com-
placency is the other. It is the combi-
nation of fatalism and complacency which is par-
ticularly characteristic of contemporary Europe.
The claim that Soviet power is irresistible, or at
least too dangerous to resist, goes along with the
confident assertion that Europeans "understand"
the Soviet Union in a special way and that, given
the chance (i.e., freedom from American pressure),
they can "handle" relations with the Soviets suc-
cessfully. Particularly in West Germany, stress on
Soviet power is accompanied by stress on the "con-
fused," "insecure," and "humbling" nature of the
Soviet leadership. It is only a short step-readily
taken-from this to the assertion that it is in the
Western interest to help the Soviets solve their
problems and manage their crises. To fail to do so
is said to be provocative and dangerous.
Along with this goes the belief, again particu-
larly evident in the Federal Republic of Germany,
that in any long-term interaction between them-
selves and the Soviet Union, they will be the gain-
ers. In terms of Lenin's question "who, whom?"
many Europeans are complacently confident that
the outcome of such an interaction will be a
process of osmosis which will gradually normalize
the Soviet Union.
This complacent adherence to a best-case view
of things sits strangely with the profound under-
lying fatalism, and the combination can certainly
make for some confused polemics. But if the two
are logically in conflict, psychologically they are
compatible and complementary-a balancing and
disguising of strategic pessimism by tactical opti-
mism. A retreat to a fatalistic surrender of control
over one's own destiny (particularly when such a
-'surrender is not required by objective circum-
stance) is only likely to be bearable if one can con-
vince oneself that the consequences of the sur-
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EUROPEAN "SOPHISTICATION- VS. AMERICAN "NAIVETE"/49
render will not be too bad, that fate is appeasable.
It becomes functionally necessary to believe that
the Soviet Union is not too formidable and ruth-
less an enemy, that American demands and asser-
tiveness are crude and mistaken, and that Euro-
pean sophistication and experience can somehow
do the trick and outwit the logic of power. The
application of this sophistication is, after all, the
only remaining available game, and one's self-
respect, as well as one's credibility in the eyes of
others, requires that one have some game.
THE preferred term for the policy that
results from this combination of atti-
tudes is "damage-limitation." It is a reassuring
term, having a vaguely technical ring about it and
free from both the disastrous historical associations
of "appeasement" and the frivolity of "losing
gracefully," though it amounts to much the same
thing. Damage-limitation is now the operative
principle in a great deal of European diplomacy,
with respect both to the Soviet Union and to the
Third World.
There are, of course, circumstances in which
preventing one's position from deteriorating too
quickly or drastically is about all that one can
reasonably expect to do. But when the adoption
of such an approach becomes generalized, when
the instinctive reflex across the board is to think
in these terms, the result must be enfeebling. It
means that the initiative will always be yielded to
others, that .they will set the agenda. It means that
one's own policies will always be reactive and
that one's own interests and values will never be
asserted at their strongest, but in the form of modi-
fication on the claims of others. I have sat through
weeks of discussion among Western diplomats in
which there was no Western paper before the par-
ticipants and the whole time was spent trying to
decide how to respond to documents fundamental-
ly hostile to Western positions.
This is an approach which contains a built-in
danger of "buying the same horse twice": first in
formulating one's initial negotiating position in a
way which-with "sophistication" and "realism"-
takes account Of the interests of the other side, and
secondly in actually negotiating on the basis of
that already compromised position. A strategy of
damage-limitation is one which regularly leads its
practitioners to proclaim a 20-percent modification
of a thoroughly objectionable proposal as a re-
sounding victory-not only publicly but in cables
to their own governments.
In multilateral forums, where the one-country-
one-vote system and bloc-voting prevail, this dam-
age-limitation approach is rationalized on the
grounds that, as the vote is certain to go against
the West in any case, the only sensible thing to do
is to try to improve resolutions-however basically
hostile to Western values and interests they may
be-before they are voted on. But this practicality
ignores the importance of the symbolic and ideo-
logical dimensions of the activities of such forums,
which are perhaps their only important ones-or,
if it does not ignore them, it belittles them with
such phrases as "mere rhetoric" or "hot air," a
strange response from people who have had recent
and bitter experiences of the role of symbols and
ideology in politics. It also ignores the demoraliz-
ing long-term consequences for the West itself of
tolerating and even conniving in systematic
attacks on its own values, institutions, and inter-
ests.
Any suggestion of a stronger course-the cur-
tailment of funds on a selective basis, for example,
or even withdrawal from a particular organization
(say, from UNESCO, the most anti-Western and
inefficient of the UN special agencies)-is likely
to be dismissed as extreme and crude, with the
familiar argument that the West must stay in
there to try to "manage" things and prevent them
from getting even worse. But this is a weak argu-
ment in two respects. It ignores the fact that the
West has proved itself singularly incapable of such
management. More fundamentally, it fails to see
that the presence of the West (even more than its
money) is a necessary condition for the continua-
tion of the games played in multilateral forums.
Without the Western presence, these games would
lose point and flavor.
The root error now, as in the 1930's, is a failure
to recognize imperialism where it exists. Hans J.
A forgenthau once defined appeasement as a policy
of compromise, perfectly sensible when dealing
with an adversary fundamentally committed to
the status quo, but misapplied in a situation in
which one is confronted with an imperialist pow-
er. That is, appeasement and imperialism are
logically connected: it is the latter that trans-
forms compromise into appeasement.
It may well be that a certain kind of practical
realism, concentrating as it does on power and
interests narrowly defined and being dismissive of
more intangible factors, is naturally prone to this
kind of error. In particular, this brand of realism
tends to minimize the importance of ideology, the
driving force of modern imperialism, seeing it as
little more than "window dressing" or "rhetoric";
and it has a durable conviction that there are
always deals to be struck if one can only show
enough patience and ingenuity to find the right
formula.
S UCH attitudes as these are, I believe,
widely prevalent in Western Europe,
and prevalent in influential circles. Clearly, even
among those who hold them there are differ-
ences in the strength, consistency, and explicitness
Ali which they are held and -expressed. And some
do not hold them at all. Margaret Thatcher, to
take an obvious example, is not known as a good
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50/COMMENTARY DECEMBER 1983
loser. But even she is influenced by people whose
instincts and convictions push in that direction,
and sometimes their influence prevails: witness the
decision taken to support Robert Mugabe's acces-
sion to power in Zimbabwe in 1979, which,
whatever one might think of its tnerits, certainly
represented a retreat, accepted reluctantly under
extreme pressure from her advisers and colleagues,
on Mrs. Thatcher's part; witness, too, her reaction
to American policy over the gas pipeline, when a
major question of East-West policy was reduced to
a matter of contracts; and witness most of all her
extremely hostile reaction to the American mili-
tary intervention in Grenada.
The decision of the West Europeans to proceed
with the deployment of Pershing-2 and cruise mis-
siles may appear to contradict the above argument,
but I do not think that it does. Acceptance of de-
ployment is not for the most part based on the
conviction that the case for doing so is sound and
strong, but has been reluctantly arrived at on the
grounds that, having gone so far, West Europeans
are stuck with it, and that American resentment
would be too difficult to handle if they were to
retreat. To the extent that this is the case, it is
another manifestation of fatalism, of acquiescence
in a decision imposed on Europe by the will of
others rather than freely arrived at.
A last and obvious point. If the European view
I have described is not universally held in Europe,
it is equally true that it is not restricted to Europe.
In the sense described, there are many "Europeans"
in the United States, in and out of government-
people who take as axiomatic the fact of Anteri-
ca's naivete, the superior sophistication of its
allies, the wisdom of surrendering to complexity,
and the efficacy of damage-limitation. The differ-
ence is that in the United States they are sur-
rounded by a people which is still not quite recon-
ciled to losing gracefully.
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