SPIEGEL ONLINE January 20, 2006, 07:06 PM URL: http://www.spiegel.de/international/0,1518,394894,00.html
The Ocean Politic Atlantic Currents Bind America and Europe By Anjana Shrivastava Like the ocean that spawned them more than 400 years ago, trans-Atlantic relations have been marked by both the calms of commerce and the storms of war. But despite persistent conflicts, few societies have ever been as deeply connected as those of Europe and the United States. The end of the Cold War has made the Atlantic seem wider and the trans-Atlantic relationship less obvious. National instincts in the old Atlantic republics seem more vital. But nationalist posturings often seem both arbitrary and inadequate, whether they be Jacques Chirac's superfluous declarations of his nuclear options from the atomic submarine base on the Breton coast or George W. Bush's "flight suit" appearance on the "USS Abraham Lincoln" to declare "mission accomplished" in Iraq in 2003. Those who claim that the Atlantic community has more or less broken up after the Cold War risk ignoring the much longer history before the World Wars. The Atlantic is the classical arena of constitutional democracy; the great debates of today's western world, ones over new continental constitutions in Europe, over natural rights and the public force to protect them from Guantanamo to Srebrenica, over domestic spying during a war on terror, or even over climate change -- all are derived from political questions asked more than two centuries ago. But what community other than this one will even try to set a constitutional agenda in a globalized world? The Atlantic world hasn't always marched through history in lockstep; ambivalence was always part of the design. Long before today's political controversies, the Atlantic community was divided by the Atlantic Ocean. And it, after all, had been the greatest barrier for the movement of people and goods in the history of the world. In the 16th and 17th centuries, one really had to have compelling or radical reasons to cross this sea. But even in our day, the Atlantic has to be navigated with respect. In 1940 the Royal Navy, ill prepared for the Battle of the Atlantic , exchanged some new world naval bases for 50 veteran US destroyers. These versatile "flush decker" ships escorted convoys, protecting them from Nazi U-boats. But as the picture of the "HMS Leamington" after a January gale in 1943 shows, the ships were no match for the North Atlantic ice. Fishermen lost in the fog where the Gulf Stream hits the Labrador Current have been known to survive by rowing to shore with their hands frozen to their oars. In 1991 modern fisherman in modern boats were caught between an Arctic cold front and a hurricane-strength storm, stripped of their communications by the wind, and drowned by 100-foot waves, as Sebastian Junger chronicles in A Perfect Storm. Into our day, the sea in its worst moments sends us back into primitive states, with waves that could bury something like Plato's mythical island superpower "Atlantis." A savage ocean that fosters experimentation But it was nonetheless this same ocean which made room for unprecedented experiments in self-government in the New World, even as European-led commerce and colonization was beginning the process we call globalization. American naturalist and radical patriot Henry David Thoreau saw this dual nature of the Atlantic, the wide sea of biblical storms and the shrinking sea of global commerce. In the 1850s at Cape Cod, he walked the outermost eastern shore and wrote, "The sea was exceedingly dark and stormy ... the waves broke on the bars, 10-12 feet high, like a thousand waterfalls rolling in foam to the sand. There was nothing but that savage ocean between us and Europe." In fact with the onset of the French Revolution, it was equally the Old World which was being transformed by the New. The Atlantic was ultimately a wrecker of kingship; there was no monarchy which could wield arbitrary authority across it. Often it was naval mutinies that brought an end to old ways. The Mutiny at Spithead in 1797 demanded humane treatment for sailors inside the Royal Navy's "Wooden Walls." Prussia even lost its crown in 1918 as a result of the German High Seas Fleet's mutinous refusal of a suicide mission against the Royal Navy. Politics in the era of "Atlantic Revolution" were ones of high risk and complex contracts, of commerce and slavery, utopias and revolutions. But the New World and its constitutions produced no utopias -- without constant vigilance, that liberty could be easily lost. Today both Europe and the United States are again undergoing rapid change -- not least because of Asia's globalization -- and old myths of national identity as well as old constitutional modalities are threatened in the process. Old World traditions demand a regulated society, the legacy of those old monarchies and their dreams of harmonic states. But today's world markets challenge these European notions fundamentally. The American tradition, on the other hand, has always favored self-regulation in the framework of constitutional law. But the old confidence in a self-regulated universe doesn't even begin to address problems like global warming or mass immigration. As Atlantic republics age in a world of new economic powers, their institutional faults have become increasingly visible. America's institutional minimalism, or indeed weakness, has led to concentrations of wealth and political power that have little precedence. Senior members of both American parties are undertaking increasingly bipartisan efforts to assure the separation of powers between the White House, the Supreme Court and Congress. In Europe, on the other hand, the old penchant for minute regulation of social affairs can be immobilizing, a Lilliputian nightmare for what otherwise might be a respectable Gulliver. On both sides of the Atlantic divide ideological politics have been used in recent years to create a false sense of national tradition and stability, often at the cost of trans-Atlantic identity. Europe and America have been divided over legal issues like capital punishment, security questions about preemptive strikes versus multilateral negotiations and the role of religion in providing social cohesion. Going back to our roots Far from having reached the end of the road, the Atlantic community has gone back to its complex and revolutionary roots. Old concerns about the "separation of powers" in government or the guarantee of the "natural rights" of individuals have emerged as central in our own times as in the 18th century. As individuals, we are concerned with the privacy of digital communications in the way American founding fathers sought to keep British soldiers or their American successors from entering the doors of private houses. European politicians are struggling to save a constitutional process in the EU which in its ambitions mirrors that of North America 200 years ago. But such a new constitution also inspires fears among European citizens of a return to aloof and bureaucratic rule. Today's debates about torture underscore the central place of the human body in the liberal world order. It remains the sovereign territory of the individual even when some use this sovereign space to launch suicide attacks against human targets. Finally, there are the emerging constitutional questions in regard to climate. In the 18th century, Montesquieu wrote of the fundamental influence of climate on human institutions. What would he have predicted for the effects of man-made global warming? American mayors and governors have organized to question the right of their government along with other major polluters to claim arbitrary power over pollution levels. Arctic Inuits, a trans-Atlantic nation, are claiming before international courts their "human right" to be cold. If recent history seems like one of dissolution, Atlantic history has always been one of creative dissolution of the old followed by reformation. The Cold War may be over, but the "Atlantic Revolution" in human affairs is ongoing. Forum available here: http://forum-international.spiegel.de/showthread.php?p=72642#post72642 #33#
