Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

by Adam Tooze

If we are looking for one crucial difference it is surely this: From the morning of September 11, 2001, America was a superpower at war. Not only that, under the Bush administration, it was a regime pursuing a global war on terror. The initial European reaction to the attacks of 9/11 was one of solidarity. The ouster of the Taliban from Kabul enjoyed general support. But over the winter of 2002–2003, as Washington and London pushed toward the invasion of Iraq, that sense of common commitment evaporated. The German and French governments came out in opposition to war, as did millions of European citizens who filled the streets in some of the largest demonstrations in Europe’s history. This was the moment in which the American neoconservative Robert Kagan coined his famous phrase that Americans were from Mars and Europeans from Venus.58 Europe’s leading intellectuals responded in kind. The unlikely pairing of Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida issued a counterblast. Significantly, for them, the transatlantic divide went far beyond foreign policy. It extended to social policy and political culture. In the early twenty-first century it amounted to nothing less than a civilization divide, a bifurcation within modernity, between the chastened postimperial world of Europe and the expansive, imperially aggressive Anglosphere.