{"id":68462,"date":"2007-01-29T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-29T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2007\/01\/29\/beyond-hegemony-une-perspective-tragique\/"},"modified":"2007-01-29T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-01-29T00:00:00","slug":"beyond-hegemony-une-perspective-tragique","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/2007\/01\/29\/beyond-hegemony-une-perspective-tragique\/","title":{"rendered":" \u201cBeyond Hegemony\u201d, une perspective tragique<\/em><\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

Beyond Hegemony<\/em>, une perspective tragique<\/h2>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\t29 janvier 2007 William Pfaff publie dans le num\u00e9ro de The New York Review of Books<\/em> dat\u00e9 du 15 f\u00e9vrier 2007<\/a> une longue \u00e9tude sur la politique \u00e9trang\u00e8re des USA. Cet essai s’inscrit dans le diagnostic g\u00e9n\u00e9ral en train d’\u00eatre pos\u00e9 sur l’orientation de cette puissance, notamment la r\u00e9flexion Beyond Hegemony<\/a> \u00e0 un moment o\u00f9 les indices s’accumulent d’une puissante crise int\u00e9rieure li\u00e9e \u00e0 la crise ext\u00e9rieure sous la conduite de GW Bush. Il a d’ores et d\u00e9j\u00e0 soulev\u00e9 un r\u00e9el int\u00e9r\u00eat dans les cercles acad\u00e9miques et intellectuels \u00e0 Washington.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tC’est \u00e9videmment un travail d’historien, et de la meilleure sorte car c’est bien le cas de William Pfaff, un homme qui se d\u00e9crit lui-m\u00eame comme un gaulliste de conception. L’histoire de la politique ext\u00e9rieure des Etats-Unis \u00e0 partir de ses fondements et de ses racines, est magistralement expos\u00e9e. Elle nous montre combien le processus actuel s’inscrit dans une impitoyable logique et elle fait bon march\u00e9 de la th\u00e8se accidentaliste selon laquelle les \u00e9v\u00e9nements actuels seraient li\u00e9s au seul G.W. Bush. Comme il faut s’y attendre avec un historien de la qualit\u00e9 de Pfaff, c’est bien entendu une appr\u00e9ciation critique dont on d\u00e9couvre le d\u00e9veloppement, surtout pour la p\u00e9riode de la Guerre froide jusqu’\u00e0 aujourd’hui qui est le nud du drame conduisant vers la trag\u00e9die. Pfaff montre brillamment qu’une politique alternative aurait \u00e9t\u00e9 possible, notamment en s’appuyant sur les conceptions d’une \u00e9cole r\u00e9aliste et historique, selon pr\u00e9cis\u00e9ment l’approche d’un George Keenan, que lui-m\u00eame (Pfaff), en collaboration avec Edmund Stillman, proposa \u00e0 la fin des ann\u00e9es 1950.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tCi-dessous nous pr\u00e9sentons ce passage o\u00f9 Pfaff \u00e9voque cette alternative policy<\/em> (des notes pr\u00e9cisant les citations figurent dans le texte original du New York Review of Books<\/em>). Nous le compl\u00e9tons des quelques paragraphes de conclusion o\u00f9 William Pfaff pr\u00e9sente les perspectives qu’il envisage pour son pays.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00abIs there an alternative policy? At the time of George Kennan’s death in 2005, much was made of the cold war policy of containment, of which he was the author, and its vindication by the collapse of the Soviet Union from inner decay, as he had foreseen. Not much was written about Kennan’s general view of the nature of relations between states, which was in radical contrast with the policies and assumptions of the present US government and most of those concerned with foreign policy in Washington. Kennan’s volume of autobiographical reflections, Around the Cragged Hill’, published in 1993 when he was eighty-nine, contained his mature reflections on this subject, as well as his thoughts on American foreign policy.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbHe did not think that democracy along North American and Western European lines can prevail internationally. To have real self-government, a people must understand what that means, want it, and be willing to sacrifice for it. Many nondemocratic systems are inherently unstable. But so what? he asked. We are not their keepers. We never will be. (He did not say that we might one day try to be.) He suggested that nondemocratic societies should be left to be governed or misgoverned as habit and tradition may dictate, asking of their governing cliques only that they observe, in their bilateral relations with us and with the remainder of the world community, the minimum standards of civilized diplomatic intercourse.[8]<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbWith the cold war over, Kennan saw no need for the continuing presence of American troops in Europe, and little need for them in Asia, subject to the security interests of Japan, allied to the United States by treaty. He deplored economic and military programs that existed in so great a profusion and complexity that they escape the normal possibilities for official, not to mention private oversight. He asked why the United States was [in 1992] giving military assistance to forty-three African countries and twenty-two (of twenty-four) countries in Latin America. Against whom are these weapons conceivably to be employed?… [Presumably] their neighbors or, in civil conflict, against themselves. Is it our business to prepare them for that?<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbIn the late 1950s, a colleague, the late Edmund Stillman, and I circulated an argument that eventually became a magazine article and book, suggesting that the American obsession with Soviet Communist power was turning the United States toward an American version of Marxist historicism and ideological messianism. We said that Washington had fallen under the influence of the ideological politics of the Thirties and moral fervor of the second world war in assuming that we and Soviet Russia were struggling, so to speak, for the soul of the world.[9]<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbWe argued that quite the opposite was true. We said that common sense about the nature of Russia’s and China’s real interests suggested that time was not on their sides, and that Kennan’s policy of containing the major Communist powers, until what Marx would have called their internal contradictions undermined them, was the correct one. The interest of China was mainly to weaken Soviet supremacy among the Communists. Russia itself was in material decline, its messianism faded. Western Europe, Japan, and other Asian nations were increasingly dynamic, and could be expected to reclaim their pre-war influence. The 1950s, we concluded, were already a time of plural power centers and multiple interests, a system in which international power and ambitions were increasingly expressed by independent state actors, a system in which the United States could flourish, but the Soviet Union, in the long term, could not. We ended by recommending patience.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbThis went against much thinking of the period. In retrospect, it is the loser’s tale, describing a road not taken. It might seem of little interest now, if the direction actually followed had not proven so disastrous. It seems scarcely imaginable that the present administration could shift course away from the interventionist military and political policies of recent decades, let alone its own highly aggressive version of them since 2001, unless it were forced to do so by (eminently possible) disaster in the Middle East. Whether a new administration in two years’ time might change direction seems the relevant question.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbYet little sign exists of a challenge in American foreign policy debates to the principles and assumptions of an international interventionism motivated by belief in a special national mission. The country might find itself with a new administration in 2009 which provides a less abrasive and more courteous version of the American pursuit of world hegemony, but one still condemned by the inherent impossibility of success.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbThe intellectual and material commitments made during the past half-century of American military, bureaucratic, and intellectual investment in global interventionism will be hard to reverse. The Washington political class remains largely convinced that the United States supplies the essential structure of international security, and that a withdrawal of American forces from their expanding network of overseas military bases, or disengagement from present American interventions into the affairs of many dozens of countries, would destabilize the international system and produce unacceptable consequences for American security. Why this should be so is rarely explained. What is the threat that America keeps at bay? Neither China nor Russia directly threatens Western security interests, at least in the opinion of most governments other than the one in Washington. Obviously all the major nations have energy and resource needs and interests that intersect and conflict, but there is little reason to think that these and other foreseeable problems are not negotiable. Warmongering speculation of the kind one sometimes hears when American conservatives discuss China or Russia not to speak of Iranis a product of world-hegemonic thinking, and a disservice to true American interests.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tVoici maintenant les quelques paragraphes que Pfaff pr\u00e9sente en conclusion de son essai.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00abHistory does not offer nations permanent security, and when it seems to offer hegemonic domination this usually is only to take it away again, often in unpleasant ways. The United States was fortunate to enjoy relative isolation for as long as it did. The conviction of Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the country was exempt from the common fate has been succeeded in the twenty-first century by an American determination to fight (to victory, as the President insists) against the conditions of existence history now actually does offer. It sets against them the consoling illusion that power will always prevail, despite the evidence that this is not true.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bb[Joseph] Schumpeter remarked in 1919 that imperialism necessarily carries the implication of an aggressiveness, the true reasons for which do not lie in the aims which are temporarily being pursued…an aggressiveness for its own sake, as reflected in such terms as hegemony, world dominion, and so forth…expansion for the sake of expanding…<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbThis determination, he continues, cannot be explained by any of the pretexts that bring it into action, by any of the aims for which it seems to be struggling at the time…. Such expansion is in a sense its own object.[12]<\/em><\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\t\u00bbPerhaps this has come to apply in the American case, and we have gone beyond the belief in national exception to make an ideology of progress and universal leadership into our moral justification for a policy of simple power expansion. In that case we have entered into a logic of history that in the past has invariably ended in tragedy.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n

Logique de l’Histoire, psychologie et trag\u00e9die<\/h3>\n<\/p>\n

\tLe titre de l’essai de Pfaff est : \u00abManifest Destiny: A New Direction for America.<\/em>\u00bb Au regard des d\u00e9veloppements que nous connaissons, c’est un titre ambigu, et peut-\u00eatre l’est-il d\u00e9lib\u00e9r\u00e9ment. Il renvoie aussi bien \u00e0 cette conception de la destin\u00e9e manifeste de l’Am\u00e9rique apparue dans les ann\u00e9es 1840 qu’au climat qui a pr\u00e9valu dans les milieux de l’administration GW Bush et de ses inspirateurs. Cette ambigu\u00eft\u00e9 est aussi bien la marque d’une continuit\u00e9 historique que d’un avatar de l’Histoire qui pourrait \u00e9galement, et \u00e0 notre sens plus justement, \u00eatre identifi\u00e9 comme une continuit\u00e9 de la psychologie am\u00e9ricaniste. L’id\u00e9e de destin\u00e9e manifeste est pr\u00e9sente aussi bien en 1847, quand le conflit contre le Mexique est lanc\u00e9, qu’aujourd’hui, apr\u00e8s six ann\u00e9es de pr\u00e9sidence Bush ; et il s’agit bien d’une id\u00e9e, d’un concept \u00e0 la fois d\u00e9fini par la passion et par certaines attitudes intellectuelles enti\u00e8res et pos\u00e9es comme autant de pr\u00e9misses par d\u00e9finition indiscutables.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tCette \u00e9quivalence entre l’histoire et la psychologie est, \u00e0 notre sens, la clef de l’aventure am\u00e9ricaniste. La politique ext\u00e9rieure des USA d\u00e9pend de conceptions, d’id\u00e9es, de perceptions psychologiques qui sont d’abord des attitudes conceptuelles sans r\u00e9el rapport avec l’exp\u00e9rience historique. Pfaff fait justement une grande place au pr\u00e9sident Woodrow Wilson (la politique bushiste, celle des n\u00e9o-conservateurs, n’est rien d’autre qu’un n\u00e9o-wilsonisme). Il d\u00e9crit cet homme, en empruntant la plume d’un diplomate britannique, en termes psychologiques intimes, voire pathologiques (nous soulignons le terme important \u00e0 notre sens) : \u00abA witness to the Versailles negotiations, the British diplomat Harold Nicolson, considered Wilson a man <\/em>obsessed<\/em><\/strong>, possessed…by the conviction that the League [of Nations] covenant was his own revelation and the solution of all human difficulties.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tLorsqu’il d\u00e9crit le fondement de la politique ext\u00e9rieure US dans cette grande p\u00e9riode, peut-\u00eatre celle de sa plus grande victoire, celle de la Guerre froide, le m\u00eame mot (soulign\u00e9 par nous) revient sous la plume, psychologie d’une politique en accord avec la psychologie d’un homme, m\u00eame si les \u00e9poques semblent diff\u00e9rer \u00e0 cause de leurs sp\u00e9cificit\u00e9s diff\u00e9rentes. \u00abIn the late 1950s, a colleague, the late Edmund Stillman, and I circulated an argument that eventually became a magazine article and book, suggesting that the American<\/em> obsession<\/em><\/strong> with Soviet Communist power was turning the United States toward an American version of Marxist historicism and ideological messianism.<\/em>\u00bb<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tOn comprend bien que nous ne sommes pas dans le domaine de la grande vision, de l’intuition inspir\u00e9e, l\u00e0 o\u00f9 les \u00e9v\u00e9nements du monde rencontrent la transcendance pour cr\u00e9er l’Histoire. Il s’agit de psychologie, et d’une psychologie dont il est fond\u00e9 de penser qu’elle est d\u00e9form\u00e9e ; par cons\u00e9quent il s’agit des tourments de l’\u00eatre exacerb\u00e9s en pathologie. La soi-disant foi qui tente de donner \u00e0 ces agitations l’apparence d’un \u00e9lan spirituel rel\u00e8ve plus souvent de la croyance sommaire, voire de la superstition pure et simple.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\tSi l’on en juge dans un cadre o\u00f9 l’on se promet de tenir compte des r\u00e9alit\u00e9s de l’Histoire plus que des phantasmes de la psychologie, il est difficile et il serait d\u00e9loyal d’\u00eatre optimiste. Le d\u00e9clin de leur puissance ne permet plus aux USA d’imposer les phantasmes de leur psychologie \u00e0 l’Histoire et ils doivent d\u00e9sormais se soumettre \u00e0 la loi de l’Histoire. Le terme de tragedy<\/em> pour d\u00e9crire le terme de l’aventure est appropri\u00e9.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Beyond Hegemony, une perspective tragique 29 janvier 2007 William Pfaff publie dans le num\u00e9ro de The New York Review of Books dat\u00e9 du 15 f\u00e9vrier 2007 une longue \u00e9tude sur la politique \u00e9trang\u00e8re des USA. Cet essai s’inscrit dans le diagnostic g\u00e9n\u00e9ral en train d’\u00eatre pos\u00e9 sur l’orientation de cette puissance, notamment la r\u00e9flexion Beyond… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"","neve_meta_content_width":0,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[6377,6379,6378,1131,4607,3099,4140],"class_list":["post-68462","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-faits-et-commentaires","tag-beyond","tag-exterieure","tag-hegemony","tag-pfaff","tag-politique","tag-psychologie","tag-wilson"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68462","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68462"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68462\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68462"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68462"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.dedefensa.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68462"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}