SAMOS, Greece -- A note of frustrated anger is now audible in European criticism
of the Bush administration's foreign and economic policies. American defiance
of what Washington likes to call "the rest of the world" was the subject
most discussed in this year's weeklong Papandreou Foundation seminar in Greece,
bringing European government and international institution officials together
with U.S. academics and observers.
Idealistic European internationalism and legalism were argued against the market
fundamentalism, aggressive nationalism and exceptionalist convictions of the current
government in Washington.
European objections to the administration's repudiation of arms treaties and
the new international war crimes tribunal, as well as criticisms of the implausibility
and contradictions in U.S. Middle East policy, were expressed with feeling.
Former President Bill Clinton, present for part of the meeting, offered his
own story on what went wrong in the Middle East, while suggesting that nothing
went wrong with America's international economic policy on his watch, except for
the odd mistake.
The most effective critic of that policy, Joseph Stiglitz, the Nobel laureate
and former economic adviser to Clinton, had a great deal to say about the economic
constraints imposed on countries like Argentina, today on the verge of collapse
thanks to the implacable demands of the International Monetary Fund for deflationary
reform in an economy needing growth.
He said the European Union should itself have intervened in the Argentine crisis,
reminding Washington that in the globalized economy, the Monroe Doctrine no longer
applies. The EU could have supplied credits allowing Argentina to shift to expansionary
policies and begin again to create jobs and restore growth.
To do so, however, would have meant policy confrontation with Washington, and
while the Europeans are generous with criticism, their governments consider themselves
powerless to challenge the United States.
There is an irony in this, since many Americans currently accuse the West Europeans
of defeatism or appeasement. This supposed defeatism concerns terrorists and rogue
states, which only Washington is supposed to have the courage to confront.
The U.S. critics resist the notion that Europeans generally discount the terrorist
threat. The Europeans' defeatism actually lies in their unwillingness to say as
much to the United States.
The Bush administration's case against the International Criminal Court, for
example, is merely the Republican elite's rerun of the populist right's old fantasy
of UN troops landing from black helicopters to impose a sinister New World Order
on the United States.
As such, it is nonsense, but nonsense from which American politicians are unlikely
to retreat, given the Pentagon's determination to be free from international legal
and political constraints.
The Europeans nonetheless gave the United States the yearlong exemption from
the court's jurisdiction that it demanded, notwithstanding pressures in Europe
that "this time" Europe stick to its convictions and call the self-defeating
U.S. bluff to veto future UN peacekeeping missions.
In trade matters, Europe displays its strength. The European Commission consistently
challenges the United States on trade and competition issues, and often wins.
In response to recent Bush administration sanctions on steel imports, it went
so far as to threaten to target reprisals against U.S. exports from Florida and
other states crucial to the Republican congressional campaign this autumn.
At another level, however, a political and intellectual cringe still marks
European policy. European officials sometimes seem to think that criticisms of
U.S. policy are valid only when they come with the endorsement of an American
dissenter.
Thus, Joseph Stiglitz has provoked enormous interest with his attack on the
Washington economic consensus, dominant in American academic economics, as well
as in the policy of the government and the U.S.-dominated international lending
institutions, since the Reagan years.
His new book, "Globalization and Its Discontents," has had front-page
treatment in Britain and on the Continent. Stiglitz was chief economist of the
World Bank and entered into dissidence, so to speak, after witnessing the application
in poor countries of ideologically motivated IMF policies that frequently left
them even poorer.
Argentina was the IMF's star protégé for seven years, accepting deflationary
measures that tied it to an unrealistic exchange rate, producing severe unemployment,
poverty, and social and political crisis.
Stiglitz thinks that the Europeans could make a difference if they offered
independent European initiatives that provided alternatives to American unilateralism.
In that way, it would be within their power to restore a measure of multilateralism
to an international scene rather in need of it.
Copyright © 2002 the International Herald Tribune
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