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.
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.
Michel Foucault’s language spreads like wildfire through international-relations theory. This particular celebration of the French master comes from Norway, where, as the authors tell it, a group of young scholars revolted in 1998 when their government resurrected the practice of paying scholars with research grants for participating in a national conversation about power in Scandinavian states, this was to be a conversation whose mandate, funding, and orchestration would be provided by the state.
Two distinguished academics have each written a new book on the future of world politics. Each book is a work of deep and mature reflection. Each author is greatly respected among his peers. Both have a great deal to say. But despite their shared focus on the future of world order, neither touches much on the actual subject matter of the other. Professor Ikenberry is preoccupied with the future of America’s global hegemony. Professor Cerny is concerned with the general effects of ‘globalisation’ on ‘governance’ in the world system. Cerny does not often mention the United States; Ikenberry only on occasion mentions any other country, and then usually in relation to the United States. The one thing the two books do have in common is that neither pays much attention to the European Union.
Neo-liberal doctrines have been fashionable among economists but are not much help for understanding the rapidity and violence of the current economic breakdown. It is not easy to see ourselves acting as homo economicus, possessed of perfect information, unerringly guided by rational choices and exalting in the absence of regulation.