EUROPEAN/AMERICAN RELATIONS : WHO LEADS?
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where the accused are sure
to
consist largely of American politicians and
military.
The EU's dismantling of the nation state, with its democratic safe–
guards, is already provoking the expected nationalist backlash. Jean–
Marie Le Pen, Silvio Berlusconi, Jorg Haider, the unfortunate Pim
Fortuyn-and who knows what persuasive populists lurk over the hori–
zon-are engendering the very uncertainty, and maybe violence, that the
whole experiment is designed
to
eliminate. That is a grim enough
prospect, but there is worse. Erecting another system of rule not based
on the freely given consent of the people, the EU is institutionalizing the
continent's moral, cultural, and political failure in the Age of the Dicta–
tors, and it is deliberately defining itself against the United States .
It
may
still take some time to perceive it, but the fragmentation of the democ–
ratic world is as consequential as the break-up of the Roman Empire
once was.
Peter Wood:
Next, it's my pleasure
to
introduce Professor Liah Green–
feld, a Professor of Sociology and University Professor at Boston Uni–
versity. She is best known for her work on nationalism, and is one of the
world's leading experts in this field. Her most recent book,
The Spirit of
Capitalism,
follows her earlier book,
Nationalism .
Professor Greenfeld.
Liah Greenfeld:
I was going to talk on "The Parochialism of 'Globaliza–
tion.'" Had I stuck
to
it, I would speak of the lack of empirical evidence
behind this fashionable idea and connect its propagation
to
a particular
-American-interest. I would attempt to prove that this is not a new
ideology-whose central claim is that the disappearance of national bor–
ders is in fact a form assumed by American economic nationalism, which
is advanced, paradoxically, by a group of Americans with the least com–
mitment
to
national interests. However, I decided to tackle instead the
stance of American intellectuals vis-a-vis the country, within the specific
context of this panel: "European IAmerican Relations: Who Leads?"
This question is based on several misleading presuppositions. To start
with, it assumes a uniformity of relationships between any two com–
munities:
If
one is dominant economically, it must be dominant cultur–
ally; if dominant in one area of culture, it must be so in all.
If
a
community is militarily dependent on another, it must be a cultural
periphery of that same center. This is obviously wrong. Intersocietal cen–
ters rarely overlap: the military being also the economic, the religious,
the ideological, the literary, the scientific, the musical, and so on.
Instead, multiple centers coexist. And centers do not choose (or create)
