Public Opinion, Transatlantic Relations and the Use of Force

P. Everts, P. Isernia

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137315755
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política comparada

This book explores the intersection of the study of transatlantic relationships and the study of public support for the use of force in foreign policy. It contributes to two important debates: one about the nature of transatlantic partnership, and another about the determinants of support for the use of military force in a comparative perspective.

Part I

The Transatlantic Order, Public Opinion and the Use of Military Force

1

Introduction

Introduction

This book lies at the intersection of two strands of research that only tangentially have crossed one another so far: the study of transatlantic relationships, their nature, sources and consequences on the one hand and the study of public support for the use of force in foreign policy on the other.¹ These two strands of research are more closely related than is usually assumed, and we claim in this book that it is impossible to understand the one without considering the other. In this chapter, we briefly present our argument about why these two issues – the state and nature of transatlantic relations and attitudes toward the use of force – stay together – and why the perspective we adopt to study them – that of public opinion – matters. By combining these two issues, we intend to contribute to two important theoretical and political debates.

The first concerns the nature of the transatlantic order, and in particular the question of the necessity of maintaining a close transatlantic relationship and what this implies in terms of willingness to compromise.² This discussion was lively during the administration of President George W. Bush, provoked by the Iraq war and the acrimonious debates that preceded and followed its outbreak. However, the discussion was abruptly interrupted and quickly swept under the carpet by the change in the US Administration in 2008. Today, some years after Bush’s departure, not only can we frame the scope and extent of this crisis into a wider time perspective, but we are also in a better position to see what is structural in the differences between Europeans and Americans and what turns out to have been merely transitory. This is crucial, we argue, also in helping us understand whether, in the future, similar crises may occur, why and how.

Second, this book offers a comparative contribution to the scholarly discussion about the determinants of support for the use of military force. A spate of new theoretical approaches and empirical results has recently rekindled the debate on this issue.³ However, this discussion is still very narrowly focused on the United States. Again, our explicitly transatlantic focus will allow us to assess similarities and differences between Europeans and Americans on this important bone of transatlantic contention.

In this book, we focus our attention on public opinion, a neglected dimension in the recent flush of studies and reports on transatlantic relations. As far as the public is concerned, interpretations of the nature and sources of transatlantic relations evoke different dimensions of opinion. Situational views, focusing on Bush, anti-Americanism, or both, look at the emotional, sentimental component of public attitudes toward transatlantic relations. The degree of sympathy toward the United States and the perceived ability of the US president to wisely handle foreign policy and intra-allied affairs are seen as crucial elements in the transatlantic drift. Structural views point to the values and fundamental beliefs of Americans and Europeans as the cause of the problem. They argue that Americans and Europeans have different belief systems or different beliefs and values, so to speak.

And finally, those who point to threat perceptions as the main source of rift stress the cognitive and perceptual dimension of attitudes in locating the cause of the problem.

We contend, on the contrary, that the same factors shape attitudes toward the use of force among European and American citizens. This finding itself is a strong piece of evidence in support of the claim that Europeans and Americans are (still) part of the same security community. However, we also find that Europeans and Americans diverge in the way the different components of a common belief structure are ‘assembled’, and it is this divergence that affects, in crucial ways, how people react to the issue of military force. In other words, it is not so much the widely reported gap in support for the use of force as such that makes it easy or difficult to collaborate among Europeans and Americans when it comes to military operations. Rather, it is the different ways that foreign policy beliefs as well as ideological predispositions, the bread and butter of domestic politics, interact among Europeans and Americans in determining whether people contemplate the use of force as an appropriate response.

The transatlantic dimension

A transatlantic gap?

In the last decade, the assessment of the state of Euro–American relations has been influenced by the view that Europeans and Americans no longer share a similar view of the world and that this has created a true and troublesome gap between both sides of the Atlantic and across the board, covering all areas of foreign policy. It has indeed almost become conventional wisdom that there is indeed a gap, that it is widening and also that it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage and perhaps impossible to bridge. To the extent that a transatlantic dialogue is still taking place, it seems to be a dialogue of the deaf only. The debate rages across almost the whole range of foreign policy issues: from environmental to arms control issues, from trade to the problems of the Middle East. A solution for these differences is not in sight, although the American President who assumed office in 2009 appeared to acknowledge the need to repair the Atlantic relationship and put it on a more equal and better footing. This will in all probability only have a chance of success if a new consensus is re-established within the US and with the European partners as well. In recent years much has happened to make this a tough endeavor.

Whether this assessment of the state of transatlantic relations holds water or leaks crucially depends on the way the nature and sources of transatlantic relationships are defined and, consequentially, on the question of how different the present situation is from the past. Transatlantic relations have been plagued by crisis and rift since their beginning. US Ambassador to NATO, Robert Hunter (1984: 1) suggested in one of the periodic assessments of the (un)healthy state of transatlantic relations: ‘The words NATO and crisis have been paired almost from the moment the ink was dry on the North Atlantic Treaty in 1949’. Indeed, many argue that differences of opinion and heated debates have been part and parcel of the transatlantic relationship over sixty years, and that the recent tensions are hardly a new phenomenon. Some even wonder whether, in the post-World War Two world system, Europeans and Americans ever shared a common worldview. One other careful observer (and shaper) of transatlantic relations, Henry Kissinger, more than four decades ago, referred to the structural ‘strains on Atlantic relationships’: Europeans and Americans, he said, have a different ‘historical perspective’; the Americans are convinced that ‘any problem will yield if subjected to a sufficient dose of expertise’, while the Europeans sit on ‘a continent covered with ruins testifying to the fallibility of human foresight.’ (Kissinger, 1966: 23).

In more recent years, transatlantic relationships have witnessed a new round of fierce debates and remarkable differences in US–European relations. And now, as then, the questions are how much the last crisis differs from past turbulences and what are its possible sources. Not surprisingly, vastly different answers to both questions have been offered and they have generated a lively, but often also confusing debate over the nature and causes of such differences (see e.g., Anderson, Ikenberry and Risse, 2008; Lindberg, 2005; and Mowle, 2004).

Some point to structural factors (e.g., Walt 1998/99; Layne, 2008), while others emphasize the situational and idiosyncratic aspects. Among the latter it is more recently and most frequently argued that such differences are largely attributable to either the policies of the Bush Administration, anti-Americanism or a combination of both. Bush has clearly been ‘a Divider, not a Uniter’ (Jacobson, 2008) not only domestically, but also internationally. However, US popularity was already low well before the Iraq war (Isernia and Fabbrini, 2007), and Bush’s clumsy and unilateral management of both the pre- and post-Iraq war situation only made things worse. Anti-Americanism, especially after Afghanistan and Iraq, was seen as spreading all over the world and Iraq only contributed to rekindle knee-jerk Anti-American reactions well-rooted in European culture for decades (e.g., Markovits, 2007; Pells, 1997; Sweig, 2006).

Others argue, rather, that the advent of the Bush Administration was not a major factor and that the problem is structural rather than conjectural because the perspectives of the two sides have become increasingly incompatible as a result of the growing asymmetry in power across the Atlantic and the impotence of the European Union in trying to speak with one voice on matters of foreign and security policy. In these interpretations, power and ideas combine, in claiming that structural asymmetries in cultural strength and military power between Europe and the United States generate different values and preferences vis-à-vis the nature of international relations in general, and the use of force in particular, among the two publics (e.g., Kagan, 2003). Yet another, intermediate, view argues that current differences are essentially rooted in widely differing threat perceptions in the US and Europe after 9/11. Throughout the Cold War, it was evident that Europeans and Americans sometimes had different perceptions of the Soviet threat and with the end of the Cold War, they looked at threats in different ways or, rather, they gave different priorities to the same threats.

This variety of interpretations and theories about the nature and characteristics of transatlantic relations, and the consequent differences in prognosis about the evolution of the crisis reflects different theoretical views of the nature and essential elements of the transatlantic order. Not surprisingly, the scope and gravity of the transatlantic crisis depends on which theoretical elements are deemed essential in defining the nature and fundamental characteristics of transatlantic relations. Like beauty, it is largely in the mind of the beholder.

Why the gap?

Just as controversial as the existence (and nature) of a gap, is the issue of what has caused it – to the extent that it exists at all. The often quoted and best-known proponent of the Transatlantic Gap thesis, Robert Kagan (2003), opened up his book on this theme stating upfront that ‘It is time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world ... Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.’ (Kagan, 2003: 4) He then added ‘When it comes to setting national priorities, determining threats, defining challenges, and fashioning and implementing foreign and defense policies, the United States and Europe have parted ways.’ Kagan offered an easy explanation: the United States is a military super power and Europe is not and both have adopted views of the world and the fundamental facts of international politics that legitimize their own perspectives.

The British sociologist Martin Shaw has expressed the situation somewhat differently and has coined the phrase ‘post military’ to describe the phenomenon of west European societies which have become essentially pacifist while maintaining small, if still sometimes quite lethal, professional armed forces, while the US clings to traditional concepts of power politics and warfare (Shaw, 1991).

A quite different view on the alleged differences between Europeans and Americans is given by Tony Judt (2008). Due to much smaller losses in earlier 20th century wars compared to other countries, he argues,

The United States today is the only advanced democracy where public figures glorify and exalt the military, a sentiment familiar in Europe before 1945 but quite unknown today [ ... ] I believe it is this contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand – in contrast to naïve Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies – seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance [ ... ] For many American commentators and policymakers the message of the twentieth century is that war works. Hence the widespread enthusiasm for our war in Iraq in 2003 (despite strong opposition to it in most other countries). For Washington, war remains an option – on that occasion the first option. For the rest of the developed world it has become a last resort. (Judt, 2008: 18)

A comparable view is taken by James Sheehan (2008). He describes how military power is no longer the most important raison d’être of European states who had a long history of having to be prepared to fight wars with one another. European nations defined themselves by their willingness and ability to fight each other. Following the horrors of two world wars, however, the European sentiment of what it means to be a citizen has fundamentally changed. Having lost their former imperial roles and their colonies and having survived the Cold War under the protection of the American umbrella, European countries have become ‘civilian countries’. Those who continue to be willing to shed blood are no longer seen as ‘idealists, heroes or saviours’, but as ‘criminals, fanatics and maniacs’. Where Americans continue to see war as an acceptable cure to political problems, Europeans are more likely to choose ‘civilian options’. European states, he says, ‘have retained the capacity to make war but lost all interest in doing so’. This appears the case in particular with regard to the ‘war on terror’, which is seen in Washington as a job for soldiers, while Europeans tend to see it as a matter for the police and justice officials, not because they are principled pacifists, but simply because they no longer believe in the efficacy of military power (Sheehan, 2008).

These claims, like so many others on the same theme, need to be backed up, however, by more solid evidence than can be supplied in an essay. This book aims to contribute to that very goal.

The use of military force

The transatlantic debate concerns many specific issues but in most of these issues the role of power, military power in general, and the question of what can be achieved by it, takes a central position. Pundits of assorted beliefs claim that the ‘smoking gun’ evidence of a widening transatlantic drift is to be found in the differential willingness to use force (Finnemore, 2006). Americans, it is argued, are ready, should the need arise, to turn to the threat and use of force, while the Europeans are wary of even contemplating it. Remarkably, until a few years ago rather the opposite seemed true when Americans, still suffering from the ‘Vietnam syndrome’, were seen as shy to actually employ their military power compared to the Europeans (e.g., Luttwak, 1994, Everts, 2002: 158–181). Whatever the case, the September 11, 2001 attack surely seems to have awakened the US public to the (military) requirements of world power. Europeans are now said, on the contrary, to still indulge in a Kantian view of the world around them. Different beliefs concerning the question of what military force can and cannot do and the appropriateness of its use have been at the core of the transatlantic debate since 2001 (Kagan, 2003). The debate on the necessity of a war against Iraq, as well as its legitimacy, and the likelihood of a successful and effective result of such a conflict, is only the most recent example of the apparently fundamental differences of opinion on the use of force.

The central place taken in current debates by the questions concerning the appropriateness and desirability of using military force rather than other instruments of influence constitutes the main reason why this book focuses on two main themes. It looks in detail into the nature of public attitudes on the threat or actual use of military force and their conditions and determinants, and it does so in the context of the transatlantic relationship, examining the breadth and depth of existing differences, their causes and possible remedies.

The debate is, however, not merely a transatlantic one, but also one creating and maintaining divisions among Europeans as well as within the United States.

A large part of the recent studies on the nature of the alleged Transatlantic Gap has focused on the governmental and elite level and aims to trace, among other things, whether the gap can and should be mended. This book takes a different perspective and focuses on the question of what can be said about the gap thesis from the level of public opinion at the mass level. In doing so, it seeks to complement rather than contrast the available policy level studies.

In summary form, our argument is that understanding how people structure their view of transatlantic relations, and whether Americans and Europeans do so in different ways, can contribute to a better understanding of why transatlantic relations are sometimes characterized by crises and tensions and at other times by unity of purpose and action. These arguments could in principle be extended to different issue areas, but in this book we focus only on security and military relations, with particular reference to so-called out-of-area operations in the post-Cold War period.⁴

Before outlining what this book aims to accomplish with respect to the conditions shaping public attitudes toward the use of military force, it is useful to frame our argument in the wider context of the current debates about the role of public opinion in f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  The Transatlantic Order, Public Opinion and the Use of Military Force
• Part II  Beliefs, Situations and Time in |War
• Part III  The Future of the Transatlantic |Relationship
• Notes
• References
• Index