Abstract
The long-standing close relationship between the democracies of Europe and North America has been based on shared values. However, the central value we share is not democracy in the abstract. Rather, it is the spirit of individual liberty and the conviction, deeply rooted in our culture, that governments must be bound by the rule of law that preserves the rights of individuals and of minorities, plus a willingness to make sacrifices to defend these values. The will to protect and defend these values have been eroding on both sides of the Atlantic. But the process of erosion is clearly further advanced in Europe, where the institutions of the welfare state matter enormously and large portions of the populace have become dependent on state aid. These developments have brought both Americans and Europeans to a crossroads. On the one hand, Americans must resist the seductive urge to shrug off global responsibilities and retreat into isolation and, on the other, Europeans must beware of pushing their North American allies away. To preserve the transatlantic partnership we must grasp that what increasingly divides us is not policy disputes or political styles but the crumbling commitment of Western culture to the values that made it special and without which no will to defend it can possibly exist.
More than trading partners
Any discussion of the transatlantic relationship must avoid getting trapped in the techno-managerial jargon of competitiveness or climate change policy or around the common values that unite both sides of the Atlantic rim. All of these discussions beg the question as to whether these common values exist outside of pretty rhetoric. I believe that they do but that these values are not self-evident, nor easily described or understood. They certainly are not eternal verities, but are fragile human achievements that must be nurtured and protected; they are not unchangeable facts about the world.
When we talk about the transatlantic relationship as one worth preserving and nurturing, we clearly mean something more than that we can and should trade with one another. After all, the language of trade agreements is one that can and does apply to our relationships with China and the other BRIC countries, for example, at least as much as it does to our relationship with each other. I would even argue that the imperative to trade with fast-growing developing countries is perhaps greater than the imperative to trade with mature, developed democracies. There is little difference in talking about open skies between Brussels and Boston or between Brussels and Beijing. We have the same interest in maintaining the stability and safety of global financial institutions based in China as we do for such institutions based in London or New York or Frankfurt. So this is not what the transatlantic relationship is really about, or else that relationship is in deep trouble.
We have often heard that this relationship is about freedom and democracy, but surely while this is closer to the truth, it does not get us the whole way there. Hugo Chavez was democratically elected. The Castros think they have ‘freed’ Cubans from American domination. The Iranian revolution served to ‘free’ Iranians to live according to God's law as revealed to Muhammad and as interpreted by a theocracy. These people all have the mere form of democracy; they do not have its precious essence.
We believe in a special kind of democracy, where even the will of the majority is bound by laws and rules. We believe, in other words, that even majorities may be wrong and there are certain things majorities ought not to be allowed to do, such as oppress minorities. This means that constitutionalism and the rule of law are integral parts of the values that should unite us.
We believe in the supremacy of the individual, so that collective freedoms, such as freedom from Yankee domination or capitalist exploitation or want or sin, cannot replace or substitute for freedom of conscience, association, thought and action. We believe in freedom, not just for its own sake, but because freedom alone allows the fully human life, in which we make choices for ourselves based on our own beliefs, experiences and priorities, not on those of dictators, mullahs, caudillos or even benevolent bureaucrats. Freedom is the essential means to the full flowering of the individual, to living a life of dignity and worth, and that is the highest good to which society can aim. Note, in passing, that this view holds that freedom is more valuable than prosperity. It is not that we are opposed to prosperity, and indeed we have an empirically well-grounded claim for thinking that in the long run freedom better promotes prosperity than do less free societies. But we do not believe that freedom and prosperity are denominated in a common currency and therefore that an increase in prosperity compensates for a loss of freedom. A loss of freedom leaves one less free, full stop.
Freedom and responsibility
Now that we are slipping into a discussion about the moral value of freedom and the various definitions that can be given to that term, we can see that there is not perfect accord or congruence between the two sides of the Atlantic. For example, the idea of freedom I have laid out here presupposes not just a large degree of freedom of thought and action but also of responsibility for the choices one makes. You are free, you make choices and you accept the consequences. Traditionally America, Canada and Britain have seen this connection clearly. More recently, they have been joined by a number of countries of Eastern Europe. Europe, on the other hand, or at least the old Western Europe, the part which escaped Soviet domination, has been more ambivalent. These are not absolutes but rather shades of grey, differences of degree and not of kind.
Still, it is clear that many European voters and governments are very reluctant to follow through on people accepting the consequences of their choices. The result has been the growth of a welfare state in which governments try to ensure that nothing bad happens to people as a result of their personal choices. This started as a policy where people were compensated, through the dole, or unemployment benefit or state pensions, for their failure to make responsible provision for themselves. It quickly evolved, however, into an approach where governments assume more and more responsibility to protect people from their own poor judgment, and this desire to prevent bad things from happening to people cannot help but begin a long, slow encroachment on individual freedom premised on individual responsibility.
Now there is clearly a continuum of policies, as I have already suggested, that are compatible with freedom, democracy, the rule of law and personal responsibility. A good part of Europe favours an approach more weighted towards collective provision. But I feel bound to point out something that we are often all too reluctant to recognise, namely that governments and their relationship with their voters also have a powerful formative influence on the character of their people, and the character of our respective peoples is one of the key factors determining the compatibility of our politics and institutions on both sides of the Atlantic.
What I mean is this: I would argue that the greater the responsibility the state takes for the success or failure of individual lives, the less the responsibility individuals feel falls to them. Instead of being seen as the protector of individual liberty, through the rule of law, limited government and constitutional democracy, government comes slowly to be seen as the principal driver of individual success or failure in life. And then something interesting happens. Because your responsibility for yourself is now replaced by the state's responsibility for you, the character of a large part of the population changes from one of responsibility for self to one of dependence on the state. And the continued political success of governments depends on a continuing effort to confer more benefits on voters.
When this happens, it undermines the final value which we once shared, a value which is essential if we are to form a moral community, a value to which we now turn. That is the value of self-sacrifice, the belief that because individual liberty and responsibility for self are the highest goods, because limited government and constitutional democracy and the rule of law are the essential means to those ends, that we are all prepared to make sacrifices in order to preserve and protect those goods and those institutions.
Thus it was that when Europe was engulfed by Nazism and Fascism, the entire democratic world—Britain, America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and others—rose up and, at great cost to itself, rescued Europe. Thus it was that when the Soviet Union threatened all the values I have described that link the two sides of the Atlantic, politicians like trade union leader Ernest Bevin in the UK convinced his members that they needed to sacrifice, through higher defence spending and a nuclear deterrent and membership in NATO.
Canada and America put military bases in Germany for the sole purpose of guaranteeing that if Soviet tanks rolled into Western Europe, they could not advance without attacking our two countries as well. We put ourselves intentionally in harm's way as a sacrifice to protect shared values. Thus it was that European leaders, decades later, made big political sacrifices in order to support American policy in Europe designed to turn up the heat on the USSR, policies that ultimately resulted in the failure of that society and a vast expansion of human freedom.
Now, more than 20 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall and as the ‘peace dividend’ has been ploughed in many parts of Europe into an expansion of the welfare state, people on the other side of the Atlantic have genuine worries about whether Europe still has the will to defend these essential values, to sacrifice to protect them, or whether it will be too reluctant to expect such sacrifices from its own population. On the answer to this question much depends.
Moral society, moral economy
I hasten to point out that the value of a willingness to sacrifice in pursuit of high moral values and ideals is not limited to defence and national security issues. Its value is equally relevant in economic policy, for example. Canada's deep economic and fiscal problems became solvable only when we stopped thinking about public finances as a technical or technocratic issue. After all, talk of whether the deficit should be 2 or 3 or 4% of GDP will appear to most people as a debate among mediaeval schoolmen about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin: entertaining for the cognoscenti but abstract and pointless for the uninitiated. It was only when we were able (by dint of a decade-long effort by think tanks, editorialists, politicians and others) to turn the debate into one over moral values that progress became possible.
Once it became an issue of the morality of the present generation passing along the costs of its choices to future generations, we were able to convince Canadians to sacrifice in order to stop a practice they had come to regard as wrong and shameful. We were so successful that not only did we reduce state spending by 12% of GDP over a decade, while cutting our debt-to-GDP ratio in half, but even our social democrats now campaign on which taxes to cut, and no party wants to own the recent deficits that are the outcome of the stimulus programme provoked by the recent recession. And I might add that not only did this usher in a long period of tremendous economic success for Canada, but it was also a huge social policy success. While we cut welfare spending significantly, the share of the Canadian population living on low incomes declined. It declined because Canada became a job creation machine, creating huge opportunities and improved incentives for the less well-off to improve their lot through work rather than dependence on benefits.
My view is that strong societies can call on their populations to make sacrifices for values they believe in. We are faced, elsewhere in the world, with regimes and peoples who are in absolutely no doubt about the values they embrace, and who demonstrate a willingness to make great sacrifices to preserve and promote those values at home and to project those values abroad. There are several tests of strength going on all the time between our transatlantic world and the Russians over energy supplies; with our own Muslim populations over social integration, equality rights, freedom for women or Middle East policy; with the Iranians and the North Koreans over nuclear proliferation; among international terrorist groups over our ability to live free from attack; with the Chinese over currency manipulation, or dominance in Asian seas or control over natural resources around the world. As America's relative power declines, all of us who believe in these values have fervently to hope that enough nations will be left with the will to defend the values I have described, for no one will be able to do it alone. That is the real question we face.
Free trade and open skies and sound banking regimes, desirable as they are, we can have with anyone. Precisely for that reason, however, they cannot form the core of the transatlantic relationship. In any case, they are issues of prosperity and, as I said earlier, there is no trade-off between prosperity and freedom. So what makes the transatlantic alliance worthwhile is the extent to which it represents people willing to sacrifice for important moral values such as freedom, personal responsibility and genuine democracy, even in the face of political opposition at home. Americans today worry that engagement with the world weakens America at home, and so they are tempted by isolationism and protectionism. Much of Europe's governing class fears the reaction of a population too dependent on the state's benevolence to answer any call to sacrifice on freedom's behalf.
When we act together we, the Atlantic nations, are the world's hope for freedom and progress. When we go our separate ways those who do not share our values can more easily tempt us with offers of increased prosperity in exchange for compromise on foundational moral issues. It used to be that the governing class in its entirety saw this with great clarity on both sides of the Atlantic, but that certainty has been frayed in recent years.
If we truly believe in a moral community of democracies devoted to the fullest flowering of the individual, and if we also believe that the world is full of people and regimes who do not wish that project success, then every one of us has a heavy burden of responsibility to ensure that the transatlantic moral project does not fail because we were not up to the task of explaining and defending it.