WASHINGTON, Aug. 24 (UPI) -- The Euro-American culture and values gap, real or imaginary, has become a staple of geopolitical commentary, particularly since September 11th and its subsequent developments. Some of it, of course, is real. There is a genuine political consensus in Continental Western Europe to accept a comfortable and relatively static prosperity for the majority of the population at the expense of dynamism, opportunity, and risk.
Many in Eastern Europe would be happy to accept this deal as well, but their politicians have not been able to make the formula work. They have foregone dynamism but have not gotten either the prosperity or the insulation from risk they perceive in Western Europe. Many still hope, probably in vain, that European Union membership, when it finally arrives, will make the formula work for them.
Beyond this basic genuine difference, many of the further supposed differences do not reflect a deep values gap between ordinary Europeans and Americans. Rather, it reflects the fact that a relatively narrow political-intellectual class has come to hold power in many of the industrialized democracies outside of the United States, devoted to an ideology dubbed "transnational progressivism" by Hudson Institute researcher John Fonte.
This ideology recognizes that much of the class-based agenda of the classic Left has been rendered obviously unworkable by economic developments, and that popular electorates have been rejecting it at the ballot box whenever they have had the choice. They substitute a new agenda of medicalized misbehaviors: the state must prevail over the individual not to mprotect one individual from specifi acts of wrongdoing by another individual, but because the individual must be exorcised of the demons of sexism, racism, homophobia, etc. etc. Since nobody can ever be demonstrated to be completely cured from such ills, this is a recipe for eternal control.
Because this agenda actually has relatively little appeal to the general electorate, they therefore concentrate on controlling institutions that are insulated from popular control, preferably creating new ones that escape existing constitutional constraints. Such institutions include the judiciary and appointed bureaucracies of the various national governments, of course, but these are still occasionally called to account by voters. Thus transnational institutions, such as the United Nations and the European Union are far more suitable for their purposes.
The truly desirable mechanisms are, by these criteria, transnational pseudo-judicial institutions with direct jurisdiction over individuals. Once codified into a transnational law of jurisdiction over persons (unlike traditional international law, which existed to mediate disputes between nations) , the values of transnational progressivism can be applied to demon-possessed individuals without effective appeal, and the program of the transnational progressive elite can gradually be imposed on nations that will not vote for it willingly.
In pursuit of this agenda, the transnational progressives have had the advantages of controlling the governments, major political parties, and academic-media institutions of most of Western Continental Europe. This has permitted them to use the institutions of European unification, almost entirely unaccountable to electorates, to create a model of transnational progressivism to hold up as an example elsewhere.
Similarly, they have controlled much (but not all) of such institutions in the Anglosphere nations other than the United States. Unlike Continental Western Europe, they failed to establish full control over the media, and usually only controlled one wing of the principal parties of the Right. America, of course, is their biggest failure, where they do not fully control either political party, or even all of academia.
During the Nineties, the transnational progressives were in power or strongly influential throughout most of the industrialized world. Using their power bases in the United Nations and the European Union, they promoted a series of transnational institutions and agreements, mostly for unarguably beneficial ends, that were endorsed almost universally. The United States, whose foreign-policy apparatus included many transnational progressives , assented to most such measures, at least to the point of signing them.
It was the advent of George W. Bush in 2001 that signaled an end to the seeming global unanimity on the progress of the transnational progressive agenda. By withdrawing from or refusing to ratify a number of highly visible international structures, including the Kyoto Agreement, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, and the International Criminal "Court", the Bush administration presented the first substantial threat to the transnational progressive agenda.
As a result, the transnational progressive academic-media sectors have piled on Bush and America in general (for they are quite aware that Bush's stance on transnational governance is popular) by attacking American "unilateralism." They enjoy painting America as the lone holdout against an otherwise-unanimous consensus of democracies.
This ignores the fact that this supposed consensus is actually quite thin. In fact, public opinion in most of the rest of the Anglosphere tends to track American opinion closely on most of the issues that supposedly reflect a values gap between America and the world. It's only the fact that the transnational progressives have been more securely entrenched in the institutions of other Anglosphere nations that has allowed them to be ranked seemingly against the U.S.
Now cracks are beginning to appear in the wall. Australia is the only other principal Anglosphere nation beside the U.S. in which a party is in power which is not controlled by transnational progressives. Thus, Australia joined the U.S. in a principled rejection of the Kyoto agreement, and has recently rejected international interference in its handling of asylum applicants.
Even one other significant industrial democracy rejecting the agenda of transnational; progressivism is significant. Once the crack in the wall begins, it will spread, because the underlying support for the agenda is very thin, and it depends on the illusion of world consensus.
Canada, for example, has appeared to support the transnational progressive agenda. However, this support is primarily a bone thrown to the left wing of the ruling Liberal party. Canada's foreign policy, with the sole exception of its relations with the United States, is essentially irrelevant to Canadian life, and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs is, as Canadian columnist Mark Steyn observed, viewed as a training ground for really important jobs such as Minister for Multiculturalism.
Similarly, transnational progressivism is a popular ideology in the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office, but it no longer reflects an all-party consensus of opinion, and is a debated, rather than settled issue, in the press. Although the British conservatives still seem a long way from power at this moment, sooner or later they will return, and when they do almost any potential leader will be much less likely to support the full transnational progressive agenda than his predecessor.
Other potential cracks in the facade are likely. Many Eastern European states remain uneasy about the full transnational progressive agenda; having only recently reestablished their independence from one transnational Union, they are not entirely happy at the prospect of surrendering it again to another one, no matter how democratic it proclaims itself.
Other defectors may be surprises. France is at heart divided in its support for the transnational progressive agenda. On the one hand, it has always hoped to use transnational institutions to balance and contain the threat to its internal arrangements from globalization and the "hyperpower." On the other hand, it alone of Continental Western Europe still has ambitions to be in the nation-state business, ambitions which will eventually be constrained by the transnational progressive agenda. If enough other nations drop out, France too could begin to demur.
Only a few years ago, the transnational progressive agenda appeared to be implementing itself by stealth and inertia. The construction of a transnational legal and institutional regime is now no longer a foregone conclusion, particularly now that more than one crack has appeared in the wall of seeming consensus.
