Les États-Unis Ont-Ils Besoin D'Alllés?: Les États-Unis et leurs alliés Européens de la guerre froide à L'Irak

Abstract

LES ETATS-UNIS ONT-ILS BESOIN D'ALLIES? Les Etats-Unis et leurs allies Europeens de la guerre froide a l'Irak Jean-Yves Haine Paris: Payot, 2004. 379pp, euro21.00 paper (ISBN 2-228-89809-0)Judging from the frenetic pace of the Bush administration's transatlantic diplomacy during the early months of 2005, we might be tempted to conclude that Washington has answered in the affirmative the question JeanYves Haine poses in his ambitious study of US foreign policy: America does need allies, especially if they happen to be located in Europe. How Washington should have come to this judgement (if that is indeed what it has done) provides the theoretical and historical storyline of this book.This is a very impressive work, but also an unusual one. The two qualities are related. Haine demonstrates a mastery of the theoretical and historical writing on America and NATO that is little short of breathtaking. All manner of international relations and foreign policy theory are on display here, from the most structuralist assessments of alliance dynamics associated with Kenneth Waltz to micro-level theorists exploring every nook and cranny of the cognitive mechanisms of sentient (or otherwise) decisionmakers. Although the book is primarily about alliance choices in American foreign policy, anyone in need of being brought quickly up to speed on the major currents of international relations theory, past or present, would be well-advised to keep this va de mecum close to hand. This is a tour d'horizon that also manages to be a tour de force.I use the French accolade advisedly, for this gets us to what is so unusual about Maine's work. It is rare to encounter, in French, a work so wellsteeped as is Haine's in the major elements of transatlantic theoretical and cultural discourse-at least in European French circles, for Quebeckers who write in that language are quite at home in the kind of debates one encounters in a transatlantic epistemic community whose major geographic points of reference are Britain, Germany, the Scandinavian countries, the United States, and Canada. By contrast, with some very few (but notable) exceptions, works on American foreign policy that get published in France tend to be either descriptive or judgemental, usually both-and so powerful is the urge to decry whatever it is that Washington is found to be up to that the descriptive merits tend to get lost in the passion and rhetoric of denunciation. It was not always thusly when French scholars wrote about American foreign policy and international relations, as anyone familiar with the work of the great Raymond Aron will know. And it is with Aron in mind (indeed, as mentor) that Haine sets out to show why America has made the kind of alliance choices it has since the founding of NATO after the Second World War.Just as with Aron, it is hard to pigeon-hole Haine, as at times he evinces the sort of prudential wisdom that could easily lead to his being regarded a classical realist, yet at other times he can appear to be an out-and-out social constructivist. By and large, he takes guidance, as did Aron, from Max Weber, and for Weberians the epistemological challenge is to try to get inside the heads of decision-makers and understand, from their point of view, the menu of choice that confronted them.So why did Washington decide, after the second World War, to take the unprecedented step of forging a permanent, multilateral, and entangling alliance with Europeans, of all people? And why did Washington work so assiduously, once the Soviet threat (and Union) had vanished, to keep in existence an organization that many, including many so-called realists, expected to wither and die, deprived as it was of its enemy? For Haine, it has a lot to do with America's identity as a liberal democratic country whose security and defence choices would necessarily be coloured by its self-conceptualization. …