An anniversary
and a plea...
This year marks fifty years since Henry Kissinger’s infamous ‘Year of Europe’ speechas well as the man’s own centenary. For numerologists, at least, it may be an auspicious time.
The speech is infamous because in it Dr Kissinger stated that ‘the United States has global interests and responsibilities. Our European allies have regional interests’. Decolonisation by then was an historical fact; but the salt poured on the wound was not subtle.
Today perhaps the wound has healed but the wounded are doing their best to prescribe the Doctor’s medicine. Some Europeans, notably Emmanuel Macron, now insist that European and American interests in Asia (and elsewhere) are neither identical nor consistent. That is, let Europe be Europe, but with America’s armaments, its money, and its blessing.
Some Americans (and therefore, NATO) are promoting something else called the ‘global West’. They want European and transatlantic unity to balance the geopolitical scale against China and its new client-state, Russia. They say to Europeans, consider your values and not just your short-term interests. Remember the West and all that it did to bring Europe and the world together.
Well, some of the global West aren’t having it. But that misses the point. Most of the rest of the world aren’t having it, either. Around three-quarters of the world’s population in its largest countries are not simply disinterested in a grand contest between reified geopolitical abstractions; they are uninterested in it as well. Leave us to make up our own minds about our interests and values, they say.
Actually, they say something more important than that. They say, Dr Kissinger was right except for one thing: his formulation was upside down. Global responsibilities mostly derive from, rather than dictate, regional interests.
In truth, European regional and American global interests make for a distinction without a difference. Worse, in its substitution of a regional logic for a global one, it’s doubly arrogant. It says, the West is the chosen region and Westerners are the chosen people. Our problems are your problems, whether you like it or not. Your solutions must be our solutions. Our parochial, ‘regional’ mind must be yours as well. Our universalism is universal.
Since the beginning of the modern (European) era, Europeans and their American progeny have conflated globalism with universalism in such a way. The rest of the world’s tolerance for that conceit has reached its sell-by date, including the assertion that there exists a ‘Rest’ alongside ‘the West’.
The sooner that the global West (whatever it may be) buries its neuroses, starting with ‘two, three, many de Gaulles’, the better off it and ‘the Rest’ will be.