Mars and Venus. School of Fontainebleau, 16th century.

Mars and Venus, 10 years on

Americans believe in the god of war, while Europeans are inspired by the goddess of love, wrote American thinker Robert Kagan in 2002. But after Iraq, Afghanistan and the European crisis, this controversial thesis reveals a surprising reversal of perspectives.

Published on 11 April 2012 at 14:32
Mars and Venus. School of Fontainebleau, 16th century.

It is time to acknowledge that we are different, Robert Kagan wrote ten years ago, provoking a considerable controversy. In his article (“Power and Weakness”, Policy Review 113/2002), Kagan wrote that Americans are from Mars (the God of War), while Europeans are from Venus (the Goddess of Love).

Americans, Kagan continued, live in a Hobbesian world ruled by force, while Europeans live (or pretend to) in a Kantian world, governed by law and institutions. Thus, while Europeans do everything possible to disburse themselves of their own power and might, Americans wield both instruments to shape the world in their own image.

With the end of the Cold War, said Kagan, Europeans were ready to live in a happy world. September 11, 2001, though, showed that the world had not changed in the way the Europeans wanted it to. Rather than face that reality, however, Europeans are determined to deny it.

New liberal interventionism

Kagan’s article led to a book by the same name – and to rivers of ink and criticism. Today, ten years on, the magazine that originally published the article (Policy Review) has published an interesting retrospective, led by the same author, Robert Kagan (“A Comment on Context”, Policy Review 172/2012) and followed by a highly interesting article (“Hubris and False Hopes”) by Robert Cooper, one of the intellectual architects of European foreign policy.

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Kagan tells us several things we did not know and that help us better understand his article. First, the text was conceived of before 9/11 and, of course, before the war in Iraq, and so in no way was intended as a justification for that war or for Bush’s policies. The differences between Europe and the US, Kagan argues, are structural, and could already be seen in the Clinton era. The Bush administration would go on to exacerbate these differences, but in no way did it create them, says Kagan.

Kagan also tells us that his biggest influence when writing the article came in fact from a European, Robert Cooper, the British diplomat who for a decade advised Javier Solana at the European Union [High Representative for Common Foreign and Security Policy from 1999 to 2009] and who also authored a controversial text entitled “The Postmodern State” (2002), which advocated a “new liberal interventionism”. European democracies, Cooper argued, had to overcome their fears of intervening militarily abroad to defend the values of liberal democracy. The world out there, Cooper said, not only had post-modern entities like the EU, but also modern states and failed states, which are governed by classical parameters such as strength and power.

Humility on both sides

That Kagan’s critique of European attitudes towards the use of force was shared within Europe itself is extremely interesting, because it challenges his argument about the enduring and even irreconcilable character of these alleged differences between Europeans and Americans.

More interesting is the conclusion that Cooper himself presents a decade later on the outcome of this “clash” between Mars and Venus. After the mistakes of Afghanistan and Iraq, the US has fallen victim to the “weakness of power”: America’s immense military power has done it very little good, and it has been taught a hard lesson in humility.

America has learned that it needs to focus on policies, legitimacy, state building, and the rule of law – and not just on strength. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the post-modern Kantian world that the Europeans believe in has also stalled. Humility on both sides. A scoreless tie between Venus and Mars, against a background of a booming China?

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