Why Obama's Giving Europe the Cold Shoulder
N. Witney and J. Shapiro, The Australian | December 9, 2009
As Obama recognizes that we are moving into a post-America world he is bypassing Europe in favour of a multi-partner strategy with powers such as China and Russia. ++ Europe's infantile attention seeking and complacency is placing it as increasingly irrelevant. ++ The problems can be “addressed only when Europeans take stock of the way the world is changing [and] decide that allowing others to determine the future order is less than optimal.” ++ Either Europe acts with more unity or “reconcile themselves to American indifference.”
Tags: | US-EU relations |
Obama |
Tue, Jan 5th 2010, 15:59
Member deleted
This becomes evident in the language and tone employed here. The differences in the world are barely much different. It is helpful to use certain sociological parameters in the determination of a few things. If one takes the analogy of Daniel Bell's classification of states and societies into the broad spectrum of pre-industrialized, industrializing, industrial and the post-industrial, the recognition would seem to be more aptly about and over the recognition that European Union presents the post-industrial societies at play, while the United States is merely an industrial society. The emergence of other industrializing societies into the industrial societies - China, Russia, etc. - makes it easier for the United States to find a certain similarity of worldview. Just like what industrializing and pre-industrial societies too demonstrate - in the enjoyment of a sense of bandwagoning that does come from the recognition of similarities as well as helps assuage the hurt from comparison with more developed societies. The language of brute power increases in the pre-industrial and industrializing societies, while it diminishes as one moves into the realm of more developed societies. In societies that are mature (well-developed) the semantics of peace gets ingrained via culture (as cultivation). The worldviews and comprehensions then naturally do tend to be different as do the concerns. It somehow seems inevitable. Perhaps, Witney and Shapiro merely signify that recognition amidst the US commentators/elites. Including the often common mistake of equating the idea of the billiard-ball state (a realist imagination within US academia) with realities of a rather 'organic' confederation of states that the EU marks - as a sui generis entity.