United States of the West

The United States of the West is a political union satirically advocated by French writer, philosopher, social commentator, and self-proclaimed mediologist, Régis Debray (born 1940), in his short essay entitled, "Empire 2.0: A Modest Proposal for a United States of the West by Xavier de C***."

Synopsis

Empire 2.0 is presented as a fictitious letter sent to Debray from an old acquaintance, a French expatriate named Xavier de C***, who is writing to him from America in October 2001, in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

The essay was first published in France in 2002, as L'Edit de caracalla.

In Empire 2.0, Debray's fictitious acquaintance, Xavier de C****, argues that the political enfranchisement of Europe by the United States of America and the official consolidation of the West into an enlarged United States of the West, is the best solution to confronting the current ideological threats and political challenges the West faces from radical Islam, international terrorism, competition for finite resources and responsible resource management, as well as population decline, and would be the only effective safeguard against any future claims to a "Confucian" or Asian empire, asserted by an ascendant, militarized, and aggressive China.

Brief Outline

Epilogue:

Debray begins the epilogue with the lines: "A man of quality went off to war, and never came home. From the other shore of America, he wrote to an old friend from university days, a mellowed Parisian with the perspective of distance."

The Letter:

The letter to Debray from Xavier, begins: "The past is over. You can guess which past I mean, since I'm no longer writing you in our common lingo."

Debray's Xavier de C***, formerly a French citizen, government official, political consultant, and international military advisor, then recounts to Debray how he swore his oath of allegiance in New York City and gained American citizenship in September 2001, immediately after the 9/11 attacks.

Xavier's Argument for A United States of the West:

Xavier discusses the current state of the world, world history, American and European styles of government, western culture, the intellectual traditions of France, the failures of the European Union, NATO and the United Nations to effectively address serious crisises, and his own conception of the Western cultural tradition and Western philosophy, as well as what the events of 9/11 and the inevitable American response which will shortly follow, portends for both men.

In his letter, de C**** states that currently, only the United States is in a position to take physical and moral responsibility for the stability of the political and economic order, as well as the preservation of the shared values and culture of Western nations, because the United States is the only Western political entity capable of effectively and decisively using force against the ideological enemies of the distinctly "Western" values and traditions which Europeans and Americans share, thus the United States is the only truly politically empowered nation in the Western world.

Xavier argues that there is essentially already an informal arrangement between many nations and the United States, and that if Europe, namely France, wants to play any serious role in her own domestic affairs, as well as a leading role in guiding or shaping international relations, then European citizens must gain many of the rights currently afforded solely to U.S. citizens in regards to the administration of the U.S. government.

Xavier believes that France and other nations could preserve their local and regional governments and cultural identities, and could refine the more base aspects and tendencies of inferior American culture, much as Greece contributed to Rome in the classical era.

While France and Europe would contribute to a larger whole by electing presidents and assuming roles in the U.S. government, instead of wasting time trying to counter U.S. hegemony economically but not militarily, through the European Union and other economic entities, which all ultimately fail to govern because they lack the "force" of law, they would sacrifice little in Xavier's eyes, and gain individual political rights, in tune with the Western democratic tradition.

Xavier argues that because Europeans and other "Occidental" or Westernized societies continue to deny the reality of their near complete military and economic dependency on the United States, as well as their commonality with American culture out of pretension, and fail to admit the gravity of the situation that the entire West at-large faces from distinctly intolerant, illiberal, and un-Western ideologies and cultures quickly spreading throughout the world, Europeans will face cultural extinction, a further disintegration of economic security, free trade, and free conscience, as well as political oppression within a few hundred years.

In de C***'s eyes, as American power wanes from lack of coherence, guidance, and grand strategy, which only European knowledge and insight can provide, Europeans will find themselves in a much more degraded state, and at the mercy of social and political ideologies and forces which are incompatible with Western virtues and conceptions of individuality; a decline that must be avoided and reversed by either a large influx of new citizens into the American structure or expanded national, civic and cultural awareness, among a broadened, cohesive citizenry.

Xavier advises Debray, and the French to lead the effort for this "official merger" between Europe and the United States, instead of persisting along the current path, because the current tendencies of European governments have led to a precarious situation and continuing along this trajectory only serves to preserve a kind of servile, political half-life among European nations and citizens, either as "junior partners" in U.S. led ventures, or conversely, as merely resentful, reluctant critics in ineffective organizations such as the United Nations and NATO or other naive, self-deluding social organizations.

Xavier states that France is in danger of losing individual rights, political freedoms, and even the ability to co-exist with other nations, because Totalitarian Islam continues to acquire influence as a legitimate reaction to Western economic and military practices, and Islamic culture in general, will soon have over 2 billion adherents. As Europe faces a serious depopulation crisis, and "the West" only constitutes about 1/4 of the world's current population, there is no reason to believe that any Western values will be transmitted down through any of the generations beyond the next 200 years.

Xavier asks rhetorically, if individual liberties, namely women's rights, religious freedom and tolerance, political stability and domestic order, would be better preserved if Europe were to accommodate totalitarian Islamists as France and England did with Hitler at Munich, or alternately whether Europe and the West would survive the ideological and political machinations of China, if China were allowed to become the world's only economic and military hyperpower, following U.S. military overstretch or economic depression resulting from this lack of Western cohesion, and the blowback effects of U.S. unilateralism operating without a moderating European influence.

He firmly believes that the United States should extend United States citizenship (through a modernized Edict of Caracalla) to all Canadians, Latinos, Europeans, Japanese, Koreans, New Zealanders and Australians, in order to formalize the political center of Western civilization, which in fact, already exists and is tacitly understood, thus formally extending democracy to people who are already governed by U.S. economic and security policies, as well as dominated by American cultural forms, yet have no vote or official representation in the U.S. government, and thus no real say in strategic or economic affairs.

Who is Xavier de C**** ?:

In his "Epitaph," following the end of the letter, Debray describes Xavier as a "man of letters against his will," a "man of action, always preferring to be 'on the ground,'" who specialized in classical studies, specifically the Roman Empire. He goes on to state that he was a "strategist, resolute and without illusions...(who) had intelligence, without the morose of self-indulgence that so often accompanies it."

Additional Analysis:

Satire ?:

While the essay was clearly intended to be a work of satire, since Debray has long been extremely derisive and critical of modern European governments, as well as an advocate of conscious, localized cultural and social development independent of "foreign," specifically American, influences, the arguments which Xavier asserts in his letter are nonetheless well-argued, well-reasoned, grounded in historical analysis, and moderated by an intimate understanding of cultural and ideological differences at work in the world.

Xavier's conclusions are a logical extension to many of the dominant political philosophies in American, European, and Westernized governments, such as neo-liberalism, neo-conservativism and others; that is, the dominant political and social philosophies which guide cooperative enterprises between the political, military, and economic leadership of both U.S. and Europe.

Xavier believes that not only have the individual nations of Europe, as well as Europe as a whole, lost their cultural autonomy due to American influence, but they have also lost their desire for political self-determination and their right to independence through their refusal of self-preservation, as the U.S. military remains the sole guarantor of European security and stability and protector of European political and economic interests throughout the post-colonial world.

Xavier is like many European leaders who advocate close cooperation with the United States (albeit just short of official citizenship) and he draws many of his conclusions from the belief that a drastic social and political shift was apparent in Europe after the end of the Cold War during the 1990s, when European nations were presented with their first opportunity to reclaim some degree of self-determination and regional autonomy through an exercise in collective security and value assertion, free from Soviet intervention, yet were incapable or unwilling to do so either collectively or individually, as the tragic results of the conflicts in Yugoslavia and the Balkans proved.

The failure of further political unification and concentration to occur under the European Union later demonstrated that there was no such thing as a European polity or consensus, fundamentally different from or opposed to, continued American military, political, and economic hegemony.

While free markets and monetary agreements have succeeded, Europe, as a whole, is unwilling to guarantee any policy through force, or the force of law, or to even share political responsibility which protecting or expanding individual liberties for all Europeans would require; they are neither inspired to strive for collective security nor uniform justice and legal rights for all European citizens, and are content to enjoy the physical protection and economic stability afforded them by an active American military deployed globally.

As many advocates of the European Union supposed that cooperative economics would be a unifying political or social force, cooperative economics have proven to be ultimately inconsequential in regards to effective political organization, administration, or socialization.

Ironically, the very assumption that market practices and market sources could lead to political cohesion, and thus a possible counterpart to American political dominance, an approach supported by Debray and others, is in fact the very same approach which socialist critics such as Debray, Naomi Klein, and others, constantly criticize as the false pretensions of neo-liberal economists, mainly American ideologues, who often cite free-market forces as necessary to liberate societies and establish democracy and social unity. While this is identified as a fault of American imperialism, it was encouraged by the same group of critics as the path towards European unity.

In the same breath that Debray bemoans the inability of Europe to coalesce around an economic, cultural, or political center, such as the European Union, he simultaneously demands the cultural autonomy and preservation of regional identity for France, and commonly refers to certain virtues and characteristics as being uniquely French.

Railing against racism or statements about cultural superiority, demanding larger political organizations and cooperation, he conversely laments the lack of individual autonomy, or clarity of social identity within any government, as individuals struggle under the weight of political bureaucracies or against their larger political schemes; schemes which Debray demands and proposes, yet despises from any corner other than his own, condemning them as "imperial," "conservative," or "liberal," all of which are intended pejoratively.

Debray's dream of intelligent, meaningful cultural production and transmission and his desire for global justice, combined with his contradictory, more pragmatic, earthly demands for an increased degree of intellectual and social libertarianism, attained through local empowerment and political organization, community autonomy, firm social identity and understanding of action, prove to be irreconcilable ideals.

The perpetuation of an emotional, nostalgic, unreasoned, masochistic, and unreasonable self-conflict within Debray's own intellect, has allowed him to isolate the more scientific, objective part of his brain and granted him the distance needed to write and ideological primer for an Empire; an Empire which he secretly wants to construct and govern, yet would publicly renounce and despise. The confusion and contradiction is inherent in the very existence of such a work of "satire," because if Debray truly despised the idea of a large "Western" social and political federation, rallied against external threats which he apparently does not perceive as harmful, he wouldn't have devoted so much time to articulating the "designs of the enemy," or proposing a plan of action, and time will probably show that he has provided advocates of an unconditional Euro-American alliance with nothing less than their most decisive manifesto.

Internal Links

Cullen Murphy in his book, Are We Rome? The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America, Tells of American Expansionists and their desire to bring America, primarily American culture, to the rest of the world, starting with Europe.

References

Debray, Regis (2004). Empire 2.0. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books. ISBN 1-55643-495-2 (paperback ed.)

See also

United States (disambiguation)

External links

• Lip Magazine review of the United States of the West
• North Atlantic Books article