Interessanter Text von David
Runciman im "London Review of Books" zu Robert Kagans "Of Paradise and Power" (Europa: Kant, USA: Hobbes) und die Verkürzung/Verdrehung philosophischer Thesen.

>> [...]
'On major strategic and international questions today,' Kagan writes, 'Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.' Kagan does not repeat this remark, though it has been endlessly repeated elsewhere. He is more insistent about another distinction he makes on the first page, and which he reiterates throughout the book. Europeans are now Kantians, seeking to inhabit 'a self-contained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and co-operation'. The United States, by contrast, 'remains mired in history, exercising power in an anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable'. He goes on to clarify this distinction by arguing that 'one of the things that most clearly divides Europeans and Americans today is a philosophical, even metaphysical disagreement over where exactly mankind stands on the continuum between the laws of the jungle and the laws of reason.' But this clarifies nothing, because the original distinction makes no sense. Kant is not from Venus and Hobbes is not from Mars. Both were, in their own terms, philosophers of what they each called 'Peace'. Indeed, to call the Hobbesian world anarchic is to make a mockery of everything Hobbes says. But more than this, the overriding problem with Kagan's account is that the real Hobbesians are the Europeans.

It is the European way, as Kagan describes it, to trust that international law can be the basis of agreement if only you recognise the appropriate international actors. It is the European way to prefer to deal with the states you know rather than the unspecified threats about which you can only speculate. Europeans insist on their right to be the best judges of what constitutes a threat to their own security, regardless of what the Americans might tell them. All this makes the Europeans good Hobbesians. Kagan notes that in Europe the preference is to talk of 'failed states', while in the US the vogue is to describe them as 'rogue states'. It is in Hobbes's world, not Kant's, that states fail or break down, and it is in Hobbes's world that all other judgments about whether states are good or evil are ruled out of court. State-building, in the new world order, is a European idea, and one of the reasons Bill Clinton is thought to have flirted with being a 'European' President is his willingness to flirt with this idea as well (flirting, it might be said, is also opposed to the martial qualities of true American politics). But state-building is also the Hobbesian idea. It was Hobbes's hope that if you could build enough states, the result would be peace.

It doesn't follow from this, of course, that if the Europeans are Hobbesians, the Americans must be Kantians, though the idea of the 'rogue state' is a lot closer to the work of a neo-Kantian political philosopher like John Rawls than to anything you will find in Hobbes. [....] <<