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A Clash of Personal Freedom and Common Good

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Robert Kagan, the provocative neoconservative foreign policy thinker, would have been in paradise had he wandered past the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia museum here a few days ago.

In his celebrated new book, “Of Paradise and Power,” Kagan argues that a split between Europe and the United States over war in Iraq was inevitable because Europe’s military weakness has encouraged it to favor law and negotiation over force -- paradise over power -- to resolve conflicts between nations.

Outside the Madrid museum, Kagan surely would have found proof in the tables where activists did a brisk business in T-shirts and buttons emblazoned with a bright red slogan that needed no translation: No a la Guerra! At one end of the bustling square, someone had spray-painted another antiwar slogan over a huge poster of Picasso’s “Guernica” -- the monumental memorial to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War that hangs inside the museum.

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Yet the sort of instinctive pacifism visible in the square seems only part of the answer for European hostility to the Iraq war, which appears undiminished despite the war’s swift and successful conclusion.

The deeper divide may be that Europe strikes a very different balance than the United States between individual freedom and the common good. In their domestic politics, Europeans have been more willing than Americans to accept limits on their individual choices to build a stronger common community. In direct extension, they are now more willing than President Bush to accept limits on national sovereignty to create a more cohesive international community.

The contrast is most vivid in the role of government. Europeans accept a welfare state that erects much greater barriers to the individual accumulation of wealth -- through much higher top tax rates -- but provides for a much more comprehensive social safety net than in America, through universal health care and generous subsidies for the unemployed.

Similarly, the constraints imposed by the Kyoto treaty to limit the emission of the gases associated with global warming appear much less onerous in European societies than in the United States because the treaty merely reinforces existing limits -- both of natural resources and sheer space in urban areas -- that encourage energy conservation and the use of smaller cars than Americans prefer.

In both examples, European societies reached a consensus that the common good sometimes requires individuals to accept greater limits on their own options -- whether to amass wealth or to drive mammoth SUVs. The European support for international rules and institutions -- from the European Union to the United Nations -- extends that principle to govern the relations between nations. This is a point that Kagan, a conservative with a minimalist view of government, obscures.

Yet this core philosophy seems the real source of the European conflict with Bush. At home and abroad, Bush’s priority is the opposite: He consistently aims to reduce constraints on individual choice, even when that weakens collective institutions.

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Bush’s tax cuts, for instance, put more income back in individual pockets, but at the price of eviscerating government revenues that support activities society can undertake only collectively -- from providing a social safety net to building roads and schools.

On Social Security and Medicare, Bush’s vision is to give individuals increased choice -- at the price of almost certainly diminishing the universal benefit guaranteed to all.

In health care, Bush strikes a similar balance. He wants to provide tax credits to help some of the 41.2 million uninsured Americans buy coverage on their own. Over time, that approach could erode the system of group insurance through employers that has allowed society to pool risk by yoking together the young and the old, the healthy and the sick. The likely result would be to increase individual freedom -- at least for the young and healthy who probably could obtain better deals from insurers than they do now -- at the price of eroding the collective guarantee of decent care for all of the insured.

Bush’s foreign policy vision follows the same principles. At its foundation is a desire to increase America’s freedom to pursue what he perceives as its national interests, even when that weakens collective institutions.

Bush cut the mold when he rejected the Kyoto treaty because he said it threatened the U.S. economy. Neither then, nor since, has his administration appeared much concerned about the effect of such an unequivocal American withdrawal on efforts to forge a common worldwide response to the problem of global warming.

Likewise, on Iraq. Bush was willing to engage the U.N., but only to a point. In the end, Bush was unwilling to accept a collective limit on his individual freedom to launch an invasion that he (and by then most U.S. leaders) believed essential to national security.

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Probably no president would have accepted a U.N. veto of military force by that point. But few might have lost as little sleep as Bush about the damage his determination to preserve his freedom of action was imposing on the U.N. and the other traditional institutions of collective international action.

This, more than the imbalance of military power, may be the real difference between the sensitivities of Europe and the United States. In Europe, the dominant opinion sees a value in strengthening collective institutions -- domestically and internationally -- even when that constrains individual choices.

No U.S. president would strike the balance as far toward the collective as Europe; it’s not in America’s genes. But in his domestic and foreign policies, Bush seems especially distant from the European model; in many of his actions --from his emphasis on tax cuts to his rejection of a meaningful U.N. role even in postwar Iraq -- he seems actively hostile to it.

After the war, Bush and European leaders may talk of reconciling. But the chasm between them -- less on the use of force than on the value of collective action -- virtually guarantees more storms across the Atlantic.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns on The Times’ Web site at www.latimes.com/brownstein

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