A dark cloud appears to have settled over the northern Atlantic. With regard to fostering international security, consensus-based cooperation between Europe and the United States seems overshadowed by tension, divisiveness, and uncertainty. This must dismay anyone who believes that even-handed cooperation would yield more peaceful prosperity than uncoordinated, competitive efforts.

Robert Kagan's article and book on the future of transatlantic relations have gained much prominence in the debate on the reasons for and impact of the transatlantic rift on the war against Iraq. However, and regrettably, Kagan's work confirms rather than challenges the prejudices and stereotypes of both sides. After putting Kagan's approach in a political perspective, I intend to show that the antinomies used by Kagan and other participants in the debate, such as might and right, unilateralism and multilateralism, prevention and repression, hegemony and sovereign equality, democratic imperialism and pluralism, constitute useful analytical tools, but do not in any way capture the divergence of values and interests between the United States and Europe. However, the result of such an analysis does not lead to the adoption of one or the other extreme, but to the realization that international law occupies the space between them, allowing for the permanent re-negotiation of the place of “Mars” and “Venus” in international affairs.

Robert Kagan's essay Power and Weakness is a masterful articulation of the neo-conservative vision. That said, it is surely the essay's fabulous timing, rather than its content, that has set the international law community abuzz. The vision itself is not new–it has been circulating for at least a decade.

Americans usually start a presentation with a joke, Germans usually with an apology, Russians with a complaint, and Middle Easterners often with a conspiracy theory. There are many reasons why Middle Easterners have been more prone to conspiracies than others. The psychology of conspiracy is complex, and merits a separate treatment. But part of the answer must lie in the fact that for much of its modern history the Middle East has been at the mercy of external forces whose decisions were not only beyond the control of indigenous populations and elites, but moreover appeared unfathomable to those unfamiliar with the way political and strategic decisions are made in the West.

Critiques of Robert Kagan's recent, inflamatory work on the nature and state of transatlanticisim seem to come in three forms: material, analytical and emotional. By “material” I mean critiques of the fundamental and more or less obvious facts and structures out of which he has spun his claims. These facts amount to little more than the less than revelatory reminder that the U.S. devotes considerably more resources to security and defense spending than do Europeans. Critiques of Kagan's work at this level are pointless. At least on this much, Kagan has it right: we are now all too familiar with the staggering statistic that reveals that American security and defense spending is equal to the total of the expenditures of the next twenty countries.

This spring, Florence was cluttered with peace flags, hanging out from private apartments, churches, official buildings, and businesses. One day in the middle of March, I counted as many as 50 bandiere de la pace in a single street crossing in the Oltrarno area, south of the river Arno. On 9 June 31 of them were still hanging there. At the time of my first count, it was obvious that the flags all meant “no” to the military action that was to begin in Iraq. What did they mean two months after the fall of Baghdad?

In recent years it has become a truism that after the Cold War Europe no longer plays the important role it used to play. The focus of US foreign policy seemed to shift away from Europe towards other regions like the Middle East or Asia. This process is even accelerated by the recent disagreement of European politicians with respect to the U.S. led military action against Iraq. The climax of this development was Chancellor Schröder's strict and explicit rejection of a German role in any form of military action against Iraq, be it sanctioned by a UN Security Council resolution or not. German Federal Minister of Justice Herta Däubler-Gmelin was axed in the wake of the tensions and replaced by Brigitte Zypries after she compared Bush's war against terrorism with Hitler's strategy to concentrate on foreign policy in order to distract attention from domestic problems (thereby, as the Economist put it, giving a fine example of “the pot calling the kettle black.”).

In response to the violence of the international system, “realist” approaches are flourishing. In the aftermath of “9/11”, gulf war No. 3, the challenge to the achievements of international law and the unchallengeable dominance of the US military-industrial complex, this is particularly noticeable. Theories which affirm an anarchical world without any international regulation, in which only the application of military power guarantees freedom and security are gaining credibility. This everyday understanding is also employed in Robert Kagan's essay. While “the Americans” exercise power in an anarchical international system, “the Europeans” aim for a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity. The fuss about Kagan's essay can hardly be explained by a rich analysis of the current international situation, for it does not supply this. It is even more surprising that the superficial pattern of interpretation considers that the essay expresses a “fundamental truth of the international system,” which is only articulated once in ten years. But we want to argue that it is not about “truth,” but about the production and propagation of a hegemonic discourse. Accordingly Kagan must be perceived as what he is: the co-founder of the reactionary think tank “Project for a New American Century”; an intellectual belonging to the neo-conservative leadership structure, a group that pressed the ideological case for the war against Iraq.

Robert Kagan's Of Paradise and Power is the latest attempt, following Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and Samuel Huntington's The Clash of Civilizations, to provide us with “The Answer,” an analysis of the way the world works to take away some of the pain of the uncertainties which have dogged us since the end of the Cold War. The pattern has been the same: first an article in a journal, striking a chord with a wider than usual readership and then the press in general, aided by an arresting sound-bite –(the titles in the case of Fukuyama and Huntington, the tag from the first page of Kagan's Policy Review article: “the Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.”). It is through such caricature, given just enough resonance to contemporary anxieties and provoking just enough outrage, that a viewpoint can gain currency among the journalists and policy wonks who set the parameters of the policy debate surrounding governments and legislators. To reinforce academic respectability, the articles were then expanded into books, to reveal, or create, the philosophical and historical underpinnings of the original argument. The timing of these publications creating a stir is everything: those moments when the worrying complexity of international relations cry out for the simplicity which a caricature can offer, when there is a demand to make the hard-to-calibrate risks in world affairs comprehensible through their replacement by goals achieved or threats cut and dried.