Europeans Are from Venus and Americans Are from Mars: A Decade Later

Ten years ago, when Robert Kagan said the time had come to recognize that we are different, it caused a huge controversy. Americans, wrote Kagan in his 2002 article “Power and Weakness,” are from Mars (the God of war) while Europeans are from Venus (the Goddess of love). Americans, continued Kagan, live in a rigid, Hobbesian world where the use of force is supreme, while Europeans live, or at least pretend to live, in a Kantian world, governed by law and institutions. So, while Europeans are doing everything to get rid of power and strength, Americans utilize both instruments to model the world according to their image and likeness. Once the Cold War ended, said Kagan, Europeans were free to live in a happy world. September 11th, however, showed that the world had not changed in the way the Europeans hoped for. But they, rather than face reality, persist in denying it.

Kagan’s article gave way to a book of the same name, “Power and Weakness,” published in 2003 with much publicity and critique. Today, ten years later, Policy Review, the magazine in which the article was originally published, presents an interesting retrospective from the same author, followed by a very interesting article from Robert Cooper, one of the intellectual architects of European foreign policy, entitled “Hubris and False Hopes.”

Kagan tells us many things that we did not know that help us better understand his article. First, the text was written before 9/11 and, of course, before the Iraq war, so in no way was meant as a justification for that war or of Bush’s policies. The differences between Europe and the United States, argues Kagan, are structural, and were already visible in the Clinton era. The Bush administration would aggravate these differences, but by no means generated them, says Kagan.

Kagan also tells us that, in reality, his main influence at the time of writing the article came from a European, Robert Cooper. Cooper, a British diplomat who advised Javier Solana in the European Union for a decade, also authored a similarly controversial text, “The Postmodern State.” In the article, Cooper advocated a “new liberal interventionism.” The European democracies, argued Cooper, had to overcome their mistrust of foreign military intervention to defend the values of liberal democracy. The outside world, said Cooper, did not only have postmodern entities like the EU, but also modern states and failed states governed by classic parameters such as force or power.

That Kagan’s critique of the European attitudes towards the use of force was shared within Europe is highly interesting since it questions his argument over the permanent and irreconcilable character of these supposed differences between Europeans and Americans.

More interesting is the conclusion that Cooper himself raises, a decade later, over the result of this “confrontation” between Venus and Mars. After the mistakes of Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States is victim of “weakness of power”: its immense military power has served little use, and has taught a hard lesson in humility. The United States has learned that it needs to look at politics, legitimacy, the construction of States, not only force. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, that Kantian postmodern world that the Europeans believed in no longer has the same pull either. There is humility on both sides. Tie between Venus and Mars against a background of Chinese boom?