Europe's leaders should copy Bush
By Janet Daley
11/06/2007
The Telegraph
I heard a radio report from the G8 summit last week in which the correspondent said something like: "Of course, Mr Bush is constantly looking over his shoulder to the audience at home."
It was delivered with that mildly sardonic air that the BBC habitually applies to American political leaders it disdains.
What struck me, as a vestigial American, was how anyone could find this either surprising or objectionable. To what other audience should the elected president of the United States be expected to be accountable?
To the worldly - in every sense of the word - European eye, the constant, unapologetic banging on about the "interests of the American people" sounds like self-serving parochialism, especially coming from the mouth of an inarticulate Texan.
In truth, any American president, however much cleverer and more competent than George Bush, would see his first (and possibly last) responsibility as being to defend the interests of his own countrymen.
This is not simply, as the political classes of Europe and almost all of its broadcasting media seem to believe, because the United States is so rich and powerful that it can pursue its own advantage without giving a damn about the opinion of the rest of the world.
If that is what you think, then you will consistently misunderstand the American global position; but perhaps even more important, you will fail to see the insidious change that has taken place in the European idea of democracy.
The president of the United States, whoever he may be, does not regard the principal function of his election as promoting him into membership of the club of world leaders who are free to deal with one another while holding their own populations in mild contempt.
The idea of conspiring against popular opinion in your own country, as EU leaders are now preparing to do over the European Treaty (otherwise known as the Resurrected Constitution), would be an act worthy of impeachment - in the unlikely event that any president even considered doing such a thing.
Unlike the elite political class of Europe, whose own electorates are mere springboards to the transnational stage, providing a ticket to the top table where the real decisions are made, America's chief executive is bound by the Constitution (which he actually takes seriously) into a solemn social contract with his own people.
The US, in other words, still retains an 18th-century political culture, with all the optimism about the perfectibility of man and government which that implies: it accepts utterly and fervently - and drums into the heads of every generation of schoolchildren - the principle that political power is granted only by the consent of the governed.
Its people and its leaders see themselves as bonded together in a mutual endeavour to ensure that, as Abraham Lincoln put it, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth".
You may regard this belief in the sacred nature of that reciprocal bond, and the redemptive power of freedom to unlock human potential, as disastrously naive or magnificently inspirational, but you must accept that it is genuine if you are to have any hope of grasping the logic of American global politics.
Where European leaders seek out the local big boys, the tribal warlords or factional spokesmen, when they attempt to deal with international crises, the Americans awkwardly insist on trying to establish constitutional democratic governments, however tenuous or unstable, with which to relate.
To do otherwise would be to betray the trust on which their own system rests: the democratic process must always be the ultimate desirable end.
Similarly, the US sees the national interest as something that should never be bargained away in any unaccountable international forum.
The concept of the nation state as the proper embodiment of the will of its own people has not been discredited in the US as it has been in Europe, where two world wars have left it looking disreputable and dangerous.
So the US has managed, for better or worse, to sustain this 18th-century Enlightenment view of government, in which the people accept the rule of law in return for democratic governance, while the countries that gave it birth teeter into cynicism and informal oligarchy.
Some of the reasons for this may be inherent in the nature of the American population itself. The great strength and the great weakness of the social contract concept is that contracts must be entered into willingly.
Almost every American either is himself, or is descended from, someone who made a conscious choice to emigrate to the US. (Significantly, the group that has generally fared least well in the American system is the one descended from people who were taken there against their will - the African slaves.)
You enter the country on a certain understanding - you knowingly accept the contract. Wherever you came from, whatever your previous history, you can reinvent yourself as an American by signing up to the deal.
Needless to say, Europe could not start from scratch. The peoples who were here with their ancient hatreds and unforgettable past could never say with one voice, "This is where we begin anew", with a mutually agreed settlement between the governing and the governed.
The 19th-century Romantic despair over failed revolution had already cast doubt on the democratic ideal, and then the infamous events of the last century brought shame to the idea of the popular will.
At that point, just after the Second World War, when the new Europe was born, its political class had a terrible epiphany: it decided that the crimes of the 20th century were directly traceable to the democratic movements of the 18th century.
The people could too easily become a murderous mob. So Europe pretty much gave up on democracy, while the US, which had played an honourable role in those great wars, saw no reason to recant.
Now, Britain must decide whether it is with the Atlanticist optimists or the European defeatists. I do not believe that the American experience - 200 years of Enlightenment idealism - can simply be bolted on to the world-weary, rather depressive British political culture.
But nor do I think that the British (or perhaps I should say ENGLISH) electorate could ever accept rule by unelected continental bureaucracy and ministerial fiat, which is alien to their history.
There are, as Direct Democracy authors are currently arguing in The Daily Telegraph, American mechanisms of localism that could serve as an antidote to the European cabal. Even more useful might be the American notion that it is not venal to listen to your own electorate.
telegraph.co.uk
By Janet Daley
11/06/2007
The Telegraph
I heard a radio report from the G8 summit last week in which the correspondent said something like: "Of course, Mr Bush is constantly looking over his shoulder to the audience at home."
It was delivered with that mildly sardonic air that the BBC habitually applies to American political leaders it disdains.
What struck me, as a vestigial American, was how anyone could find this either surprising or objectionable. To what other audience should the elected president of the United States be expected to be accountable?
To the worldly - in every sense of the word - European eye, the constant, unapologetic banging on about the "interests of the American people" sounds like self-serving parochialism, especially coming from the mouth of an inarticulate Texan.
In truth, any American president, however much cleverer and more competent than George Bush, would see his first (and possibly last) responsibility as being to defend the interests of his own countrymen.
This is not simply, as the political classes of Europe and almost all of its broadcasting media seem to believe, because the United States is so rich and powerful that it can pursue its own advantage without giving a damn about the opinion of the rest of the world.
If that is what you think, then you will consistently misunderstand the American global position; but perhaps even more important, you will fail to see the insidious change that has taken place in the European idea of democracy.
The president of the United States, whoever he may be, does not regard the principal function of his election as promoting him into membership of the club of world leaders who are free to deal with one another while holding their own populations in mild contempt.
The idea of conspiring against popular opinion in your own country, as EU leaders are now preparing to do over the European Treaty (otherwise known as the Resurrected Constitution), would be an act worthy of impeachment - in the unlikely event that any president even considered doing such a thing.
Unlike the elite political class of Europe, whose own electorates are mere springboards to the transnational stage, providing a ticket to the top table where the real decisions are made, America's chief executive is bound by the Constitution (which he actually takes seriously) into a solemn social contract with his own people.
The US, in other words, still retains an 18th-century political culture, with all the optimism about the perfectibility of man and government which that implies: it accepts utterly and fervently - and drums into the heads of every generation of schoolchildren - the principle that political power is granted only by the consent of the governed.
Its people and its leaders see themselves as bonded together in a mutual endeavour to ensure that, as Abraham Lincoln put it, "government of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth".
You may regard this belief in the sacred nature of that reciprocal bond, and the redemptive power of freedom to unlock human potential, as disastrously naive or magnificently inspirational, but you must accept that it is genuine if you are to have any hope of grasping the logic of American global politics.
Where European leaders seek out the local big boys, the tribal warlords or factional spokesmen, when they attempt to deal with international crises, the Americans awkwardly insist on trying to establish constitutional democratic governments, however tenuous or unstable, with which to relate.
To do otherwise would be to betray the trust on which their own system rests: the democratic process must always be the ultimate desirable end.
Similarly, the US sees the national interest as something that should never be bargained away in any unaccountable international forum.
The concept of the nation state as the proper embodiment of the will of its own people has not been discredited in the US as it has been in Europe, where two world wars have left it looking disreputable and dangerous.
So the US has managed, for better or worse, to sustain this 18th-century Enlightenment view of government, in which the people accept the rule of law in return for democratic governance, while the countries that gave it birth teeter into cynicism and informal oligarchy.
Some of the reasons for this may be inherent in the nature of the American population itself. The great strength and the great weakness of the social contract concept is that contracts must be entered into willingly.
Almost every American either is himself, or is descended from, someone who made a conscious choice to emigrate to the US. (Significantly, the group that has generally fared least well in the American system is the one descended from people who were taken there against their will - the African slaves.)
You enter the country on a certain understanding - you knowingly accept the contract. Wherever you came from, whatever your previous history, you can reinvent yourself as an American by signing up to the deal.
Needless to say, Europe could not start from scratch. The peoples who were here with their ancient hatreds and unforgettable past could never say with one voice, "This is where we begin anew", with a mutually agreed settlement between the governing and the governed.
The 19th-century Romantic despair over failed revolution had already cast doubt on the democratic ideal, and then the infamous events of the last century brought shame to the idea of the popular will.
At that point, just after the Second World War, when the new Europe was born, its political class had a terrible epiphany: it decided that the crimes of the 20th century were directly traceable to the democratic movements of the 18th century.
The people could too easily become a murderous mob. So Europe pretty much gave up on democracy, while the US, which had played an honourable role in those great wars, saw no reason to recant.
Now, Britain must decide whether it is with the Atlanticist optimists or the European defeatists. I do not believe that the American experience - 200 years of Enlightenment idealism - can simply be bolted on to the world-weary, rather depressive British political culture.
But nor do I think that the British (or perhaps I should say ENGLISH) electorate could ever accept rule by unelected continental bureaucracy and ministerial fiat, which is alien to their history.
There are, as Direct Democracy authors are currently arguing in The Daily Telegraph, American mechanisms of localism that could serve as an antidote to the European cabal. Even more useful might be the American notion that it is not venal to listen to your own electorate.
telegraph.co.uk