USA vs France: Ideology expanding.

[Sirotnikov]

The article is not lacking in flaws. Infact it has quite a bit. But makes for an interesting point.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...651479,00.html

If we ruled the world: a tale of two revolutions
Ian Buruma

When even New Yorkers refuse to drink French wine, or patronise French restaurants, you realise things are bad between the two nations that presume to have invented liberty. The war against Iraq was never especially popular in this city. And xenophobia is not really a New York thing. But even New Yorkers were furious about France’s attempts to thwart US aspirations.
The two countries have never been the easiest of allies, but now it is almost as if they were at war. Yet France and America are curiously alike, and perhaps that is part of the problem. The most important common factor is the revolutionary birth of their democracies.

In the 18th century the French and the Americans were still full of mutual admiration. The French were inspired by the American Declaration of Independence, and Benjamin Franklin was happy to have his infant son blessed by Voltaire in the name of liberty.

The differences between revolutionary France and revolutionary America soon became apparent. Whereas the US founding fathers sought to guard individual liberties by limiting the powers of the State, the French State took on huge powers as an expression of the will of the people: the difference between Rousseau and Jefferson. Nonetheless, both were convinced that they represented universal values, and it was their manifest destiny to spread them across the world.

The French mission ended in the bloody fields of Waterloo. But the old missionary zeal survives in its now forlorn attempts to run the European Union, its not always honourable interventions in Francophone Africa, and above all, in its constant poking in the eyes of Anglo-Saxons.

If the French mission to shape the world is more or less over, the American one is still blasting with both barrels. In many ways, we Europeans should be grateful. Without America, we might well have ended up living in a fascist empire. The world of international institutions that Europeans now rely on owes everything to Woodrow Wilson's dreams. American idealism (as well as enlightened self-interest) was also responsible for the Marshall Plan, the restoration of democracy in Germany and Japan and, probably, the collapse of the Soviet empire.

But it was also the driving force behind less successful ventures, such as the war in Vietnam, another task once shared by the French. Unless one believes, like Noam Chomsky, that the war was fought for the sake of corporate interests, that too was at least partly the result of American idealism. Presidents Kennedy and Johnson thought they were protecting Asian dominoes from falling to communist tyranny. Remember that the Quiet American was not a heartless monster, but a missionary for American democracy. Like many US political missionaries, he was a kind of democratic Trotskyite, who caused mayhem without realising why.

Vietnam put a big dent in American self-confidence. Realism marked the 1970s and 1980s. In a way, Henry Kissinger’s hardnosed realpolitik matched the desire of liberals to rein in America's ambitions to change the world. But this began to change under Ronald Reagan, when neo-conservative intellectuals, many of whom had been Trotskyites, demanded a revolutionary programme to combat evil empires.

This was a departure for Republicans, who had rarely been interested in saving the world. That was always more of a Democratic project. Republicans wanted stability, and to be left alone to take care of their economic interests. The world outside was a place to do business in, not to change through democratic revolutions. But the New Right was gradually injecting the zeal and rhetoric of the Old Left into Republican politics.

The true nature of this enterprise was spotted by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the “Danny the Red” of May 1968. In a recent meeting with Richard Perle, he said that Perle reminded him of his own student days in Paris. Perle, he exclaimed, was a Bolshevik. All his life, Cohn-Bendit had been fighting Bolsheviks on his left. Now they were on his right.

The neo-cons’ most zealous ambitions never became mainstream, however, even under Reagan; and Bush the Elder, a typical country-club Republican, was quite cautious, despite his talk of a new world order. When his son ran for election, he too promised to be careful, to have a “humble” foreign policy. This humility changed after September 11. Finally, the revolutionaries hovering around the Pentagon, writing for such journals as The Weekly Standard, and holding forth at such forums as the American Enterprise Institute, got what they wanted: a revolutionary war.

And this is largely why we fought in Iraq. A peculiar coalition of evangelical Christians, neo-conservative intellectuals, and former leftists, have revived America’s idea of its manifest destiny to change the world. Paul Berman, a former leftist who jumped on Bush’s bandwagon, thinks the war against Saddam was like Lincoln’s campaign to free the slaves of the South. In his new book, Terror and Liberalism, he claims that European democracy is cynical, soft and bloodless, because Europeans don’t share America's ambition to revolutionise the world.

It does explain why the French are the most vehement opponents of the US. For France is the only European nation that still thinks it represents universal values. And the French no longer believe they share them with the US. When you have competing views of universalism, fireworks are inevitable.

The Franco-American rift is ominous for the future of our democracies, for it has split the West. The damage will not be easy to repair, but the French, and especially the Americans, would do well to heed the words of a great statesman, Talleyrand: “Toujours pas trop de zèle” (Above all, not too much zeal).


Ian Buruma is author of Voltaire’s Coconuts: or Anglomania in Europe

[Az]

Personally, I think that this is a load of ****.

[Bereta_Eder]

France

[Ted Striker]

Turkey

[Maniac]

Burkina Faso

[red_jon]

The Shetland Islands

[Bereta_Eder]

Liberation Fighter Osama

[red_jon]

My Grandparent's House in Yorkshire

[ThePantaloonDog]

Central African Republic

Yap

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by paiktis22
Liberation Fighter Osama

Man of the People Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

[August Borms]

France
USA
UK

[Az]

<---------------

[Ted Striker]

West Germany

Deutschland

[red_jon]

Hand smileys

[Ted Striker]

red_jon

gay_jon

[Paul Hanson]

Mohammed Saaed al-Sahaf

[Drake Tungsten]

I thought it was generally insightful, although the comparisons between communists and neocons was pretty dumb. The point about the French and American belief in the universality of their values is spot on, however. After decades of French democratic values holding a dominant position in the world, American values are making a comeback, which certainly must piss the French off. Thank god for that; French values are a gross perversion of the values that came out of the American Revolution and we'll all be better off when they are left on the ash-heap of history.

edit: Well didn't this thread become stupid while I wrote my response...

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Paul Hanson
Mohammed Saaed al-Sahaf

[red_jon]

Originally posted by Ted Striker
red_jon

gay_jon

Are you suggesting I get my name legally changed?

[Bereta_Eder]

WTC

[Bereta_Eder]

Flanders

[Ted Striker]

Are you suggesting I get my name legally changed?

I say do it!

[Ted Striker]

Goat cheese

[red_jon]

Is Gayfern an acceptable name though?

[VetLegion]

here I ll add one

Number of Albanians in Greece

[Lord Merciless]

Constantinople

Instanbul

[VetLegion]

And the article is crap.

USA fought Iraq for one reason only - because it could not get UN permission to do it. The point of the whole thing is to demonstrate (unwillingly, yeah my ass. It is so by design) that USA can and will go against the world. Don't mess with the big dog.

[VetLegion]

Chadguay (from the axis of countries that end with 'guay', refused by Bush for filing 'invalid application')

[Menlas]

Originally posted by Drake Tungsten
I thought it was generally insightful, although the comparisons between communists and neocons was pretty dumb.

I agree. Maybe not dumb, but at least it would deserve more arguments.

Thank god for that; French values are a gross perversion of the values that came out of the American Revolution and we'll all be better off when they are left on the ash-heap of history.

edit: Well didn't this thread become stupid while I wrote my response...

Well in fact, this kind of comment doesn't really decrease the average stupidity of the thread .

[Lancer]