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"Democratic optimism" and "cultural fatalism" causing transatlantic rift: The United States and democracy are mutually identified. Americans have some difficulty imagining another form of government and another end of history. Is America's democratic passion compatible with the European spirit? (Guy Sorman, Le Figaro)

The United States and the rest of the world diverge, each on its own trajectory, without any prospect of convergence on the foreseeable horizon. A divergence that can be reduced neither to just the choices of the leaders nor to their personalities nor to their diplomatic efforts, whether these smack of appeasement, posturing, or conflict. The separation between the Old and the New World has become a rift deepened by the significant 11th of September. But the United States' new strategy - preventative war and remodelling of the global map - reflects a democratic tradition essential to the Americans and distinct from the Old World. Without claiming to exhaust the subject, I shall isolate two aspects here which Europeans in their approach to the United States tend to be unaware of or to underestimate: fear and democratic passion. [...]

While the majority of Europeans don't believe for an instant that the Arabs are capable of democracy, Americans are persuaded to the contrary. The fact that certain people in the White House exploit this popular belief does not annul the conviction that it's real. When Americans claim to install a liberal democracy in Afghanistan or in Iraq, tomorrow in Saudi Arabia and in Iran, they are probably sincere; they judge that this is the natural destiny of all peoples, the condition for their economic prosperity and for the end of terrorism. That terrorism, nationalism, or religious passion may exist on their own, as alternative ideologies to liberal democracies, doesn't shake the democratic passion. So, the emblematic philosopher of conservatism, Francis Fukuyama who announced liberal democracy as the "end of history" already in 1989, believes that the national and religious uprisings since then do not invalidate his theory; there may be accidents along the way, but this theory remains in his eyes, and for a great many Americans, in particular for the conservatives now in power, the ultimate justification for their acts.

I'm not going to decide here between these two theories, democratic optimism vs. cultural fatalism; let us simply establish that they seriously divide the Western world. And that, as for the search for weapons of mass destruction, to reduce the American strategy to cynicism and imperialism amounts to a failure to recognize the depth of the transatlantic rift. Or to a projection on America of our history which is not theirs and our passions which they do not share.

It is equally impossible to claim that one is right and the other wrong; the one thing for certain is that the one commands power in the service of its ideology and the other doesnt. But beyond this disparity of power between the United States and their critics, two visions of history, and not mere temporary interests, conflict.

It's unclear why these two visions--democratic optimism and cultural fatalism--are incompatible. Mr. Fukuyama's point is not necessarily that liberal democracy is the inevitable fate of everyone, or at least not in the near term. Rather it is that history has judged liberal democracy to be the best way we've so far found to organize a society. If the Islamic Arab world isn't capable of democratizing then it is going to keep on failing. We can defeat it militarily or just leave it to rot, but it's doomed either way. On the other hand, there seems no intrinsic reason that Arabs or Muslims should be so different from other peoples that they'll choose to live in failed societies indefinitely. Sooner or later one would think they'll demand the requisite changes that will enable their culture to succeed and thrive. Those changes will require moving in the direction of liberal democracy. What's the contradiction? Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2003 7:06 PM