Clash of Civilizations : In the battle between America and Europe, we better hope that they prevail.

George W. Bush may believe he has the mandate of heaven for what, as I write, is still the looming war in Iraq, but he's not doing very well on earth. Indeed, he's all but unified the planet in opposition to the notion of a U.S.-led preemptive war.
Governments that support the war do so at their own risk. In Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair is in danger of losing the support of his own party. In Spain, the Popular Party of Prime Minister José María Aznar has fallen behind the opposition Socialists for the first time in seven years. In Eastern Europe -- a particularly pro-American part of the world where most governments back the U.S. position on Iraq -- huge majorities nonetheless reject the war: 75 percent of Poles, 82 percent of Hungarians, 76 percent of Czechs.

These numbers directly reflect the failure of the administration to convince the world that Iraq poses the kind of imminent threat that justifies a preventive war. But plainly they also reflect a more fundamental rift than that, as the answers to an international Gallup Poll taken in January make clear. When respondents were asked whether American foreign policy had a positive or negative effect on their countries, what was stunning was the uniformity of their answers: In Spain, the margin was 57 percent negative to 9 percent positive; in Russia, the margin was 55 percent to 11 percent; in Argentina, 58 percent to 13 percent; in Pakistan, 46 percent to 8 percent.

This global rejection is breathtaking, but not all that surprising. Under Bush, America has become a hegemon with a chip on its shoulder, at once belligerent and xenophobic. The United States has been seceding from a new world order of interdependence that, until recently, it had helped construct. At the very moment when the world's peoples have recognized the need to build global institutions to deal with a global economy and environment, with globalized crime and weapons proliferation and stateless terrorism, the United States has arrogated to itself the right to ignore and undermine those parts of the emerging global architecture that fail to please its eye. In Bush's Washington, the World Trade Organization (WTO) is good so long as U.S. investors don't have profits diminished by onerous labor and environmental standards; the Kyoto Protocol on global warming posed such a threat and was rejected; the International Criminal Court was fine for deterring other nations' war crimes but not our own; the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty threatened a new Pentagon program and had to be scrapped. The United Nations -- well, we'll just have to see about that.

And then there's the European Union, which is well on its way to becoming a supranational entity -- more than a federation but not quite a state -- that would be something new in the world. At first glance this convergence of America's longtime allies might not seem threatening to the United States. But of all the entities aborning at the dawn of the 21st century, a unified Europe poses the greatest threat to the unholy alliance of neoconservatives and xenophobes who dominate the Bush administration. For them the 21st century has already been stamped as American property. The one obstacle in their path is Europe -- an emerging power bloc committed to a different kind of capitalism than ours and the primary champion of the very global institutions that impede the construction of an American-dominated order.

On the whole this is an assessment with which Europe -- masses and elites alike -- concurs. As Michael Emerson of the Centre for European Policy Studies has written, "Europe understands that the future governance of this world has to be some system of cosmopolitan democracy." And, he might have added, Europeans understand that such a system will never win the blessing of the Bush White House. (Indeed, it's hard to say which of those notions troubles the administration more -- a democratic world order or a cosmopolitan one.)

And so, at the outset of the 21st century, the battle between Europe and America for the power to shape the century, and on behalf of different models of social organization, is already joined. And may I gently suggest that the best possible outcome for the American democratic republic -- for the America of Jefferson, Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt -- would be an American (or more precisely, Bushian) defeat. But not an unconditional one.

II. Europe v. America
I doubt that many, if any, European leaders at the time the Berlin Wall fell envisioned this clash. Though many took umbrage when Francis Fukuyama proclaimed history's end, the idea that Europe would be so fundamentally opposed to the United States within a scant 14 years would have taken them by surprise. The European left, after all, had long since acclimated itself to capitalism; the socialists, social democrats and British Laborites were all heirs of Eduard Bernstein, the fin de siècle meliorative socialist for whom the very idea of a final conflict was anathema.

In his new book Of Paradise and Power: America and Europe in the New World Order, which Stephen Holmes reviews elsewhere in this issue [see "Why We Need Europe," page 47], Robert Kagan adduces some of the reasons for the rift that has opened up within the erstwhile Atlantic alliance. Kagan depicts a Europe enmeshed in unification (and the worlds of diplomacy and social harmonization that attend such a project) and an America that has chosen instead to be the lone sentinel guarding against external threats and disorder. He omits, however, any discussion of the diverging economic visions and realities that increasingly separate the two great continental democracies. He especially omits any thought that the European model might be the more compelling.