For most of modern history, Europe has been America’s “Significant Other.” For the past half century an alliance between the two has dominated world politics. How long can this alliance be expected to last, and in what form? How well does it fit the world likely to evolve in the 21st century?
The Cold War, with its heavy-handed Soviet threat, kept the United States and most of Western Europe in a tight geopolitical and military alliance for 40 years. Even so, economic relations among Western capitalist countries, and especially monetary relations, were frequently tense and conflicted. The disputes among governments often mirrored academic disagreements among their economists.
America’s diplomacy towards Europe has passed through two broad historic phases. A first, isolationist phase, determined in part by America’s need to maintain its domestic multinational consensus, was replaced, after World War II and under the Soviet threat, by a policy of hegemonic engagement. The Soviet collapse opened a new era forcing a reinterpretation of America’s role in Europe and the world. Four different narratives have emerged: triumphalist, declinist, chaotic or pluralist. If a unipolar American role seems unlikely to persist, American decline is all too possible. A new hegemonic replacement seems unlikely, which makes the pluralist narrative plausible and desirable. This multipolar world will require an adaptation of the Western alliance and a new way of thinking about interstate relations. Confederal Europe, for its experience in bargaining and conciliation, might have much to offer to the new plural world order.
I started off this past summer hoping to write an essay on the global financial crisis and how it was affecting Europe’s evolving federal system. I was not surprised to learn that European leaders were handling things with rather more political skill than we were giving them credit for. What did surprise me, however, was, first of all, the large number and vehemence of Europeans apparently opposed to the Euro, and, by extension, opposed to the European Union itself. But, secondly, I grew impressed with the determination of most European states and the apparatus of the EU to defend the Euro. What I eventually came to realize was that the financial crisis was pointing toward basic geopolitical issues between the European and American federal systems, and among the European states themselves.
Tn economics, as in politics, bad times often inspire good books. Capitalism’s distress in the interwar years aroused the creative powers of a brilliant galaxy of economists pushed by troubled times into examining the historical and philosophical foundations of their discipline.
The election of Barack Obama notwithstanding, Calleo sees the political imagination of America’s elites still deeply attracted to a unipolar view of world politics. In this way of looking at the world, peace and prosperity in the global system require a reigning superpower. Great Britain is imagined to have played this role in the nineteenth century and the United States to have inherited it in the twentieth. America’s interest and duty are thought to lie in fulfilling this fate that history has thrust upon the US. The unipolar vision persists tenaciously but is more and more false. In reality, today’s disposition of international power and wealth is increasingly plural. America’s unipolar vision grows progressively dysfunctional as much of the world fears and resists it.
The course is taught with Dr. Christopher Chivvis and is a Johns Hopkins SAIS history core exam. It provides an historical and global geopolitical framework for understanding how the modern global system has evolved. It focuses on three broad motifs: (1) the dialectical nature of the European State System, (2) the relationship of Europe to the rest of the world, and (3) the progressive rise of non-European Powers and the growing challenge these have posed to Europe’s dominant position in the world assilating between hegemony and the balance of power. It concludes with reflections on the contemporary international system and its principal actors, with an eye to defining prospects in the 21st century.