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本帖最后由 woikuraki 于 2012-3-31 13:28 编辑
【中文标题】王者归来 － 欧洲为什么需要一个新拿破仑？
【原文标题】The Return of the King Why Europe needs another Napoleon
【登载媒体】外交政策
【原文作者】JAMES POULOS
【原文链接】http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/03/05/the_return_of_the_king
在死去200年之后，拿破仑•波拿巴终于得到了我们这个时代所能授予的最高荣誉：他自己的主题公园。拿破仑乐园——别笑——的创意来自一位前法国大臣，用身临其境的游乐项目和图腾式的文化形象来与迪斯尼乐园竞争。购物、就餐、重现奥斯德立兹之战，的确是重现这位所向无敌、狂妄自大的流亡皇帝的好创意。
老实说，欧洲即将出现拿破仑乐园——而不是希特勒乐园——的现象值得我们深思一些问题。盎格鲁血统的美国人喜欢把法兰西第一帝国的统领与德意志第三帝国的领袖相提并论，这样的想法实在不招人待见。英国记者Stephen Glover说：“一个依然推崇这样的人的国家，必然存在问题。或许我们不应当把拿破仑与20世纪的独裁者相比，比如希特勒和斯大林，但他无论如何也算是某种令人生畏的领袖。” Glover称此为“毁灭性的愿望”。历史学家Victor Davis Hanson已经把二者划为同一范畴，认为“拿破仑的欧陆体系与第三帝国的扩张都是人类的噩梦”，其目的是“用自作主张的欧洲‘愿景’把欧洲人民统一在一个庞大、不民主的体制中，不管是无意还是有意”。法国人权委员会的成员Claude Ribbe甚至说拿破仑是种族灭绝者。
尽管拿破仑•波拿巴和阿道夫•希特勒都痴迷于霸权野心，最后都身败名裂，但二者间鲜明的区别对欧洲的未来具有重大意义。希特勒，一介平民，期望把欧洲纳入一个政治党派，而不是为了帝国的扩张。波拿巴，热那亚贵族行伍出身，在欧洲大陆上横冲直撞，为了谋求政治的统一，而不是为了扩大种族生存空间。
我们需要好好思考一下，为什么现代欧洲最近一次全体意见一致是在修建拿破仑乐园的问题上？当欧盟碌碌无为的政治领导机构飞蛾扑火时，德国的经济实力让历史上处于权力顶峰的法国政治经济实力望尘莫及。
富有影响力的西方评论人士坚持认为，名副其实的德意志第四帝国是拯救欧洲的唯一出路，德国至上论甚嚣尘上。在Niall Ferguson对2021年欧洲的设想中，取代欧盟的欧罗巴合众国被德国所掌控，其总部位于威尼斯。Ferguson写道：“德国官员兴奋地讨论未来的雅尔塔协议，划分俄罗斯和欧洲在东欧的势力范围。”评论人士把新欧洲称作“完整的德意志帝国”。德国高于一切的口号再次出现，发展经济才是王道。
Hanson则直言不讳地宣称，德国的民族性格确保了它在未来的统治地位。他写道：“德国的新欧洲秩序是再明显不过的了：如果你想像德国人一样生活，你必须要像德国人一样工作和积蓄。没有其它选择。”
欧洲未来的德国特点不仅仅使盎格鲁血统的美国梦想成真，它还让所有西方人确信，他们的经济体制并未从根本上崩溃。那些强壮的德国人告诉我们，如果你的行动富有远见，你就完全可以避开金融末日。
但这是一个相当危险的乐观主义观点，就像Walter Russell Mead曾经警告过：“德国的政治制度似乎不惜以摧毁欧洲为代价，来向德国公众隐瞒其制度愚蠢程度的真相。德国领导人想尽办法掩盖德国金融和政治机构在承担地中海俱乐部所有债务事件中所犯的错误，这件事和挥霍无度的希腊人一样，是造成欧洲困苦局面的重要因素。”
把这些见不得人的事实扫入地毯下面，要比把只能用经济手段解决根深蒂固的政治问题这样的谎言重复一千遍管用得多。它让我们误以为，二战后同盟国建立起的这个德国政权，已经把欧洲的未来牢牢掌握在自己的手里。对欧盟协商制度的常规调整，已经无法让欧洲恢复以往的秩序。
实际上，要在欧盟的一片废墟之上重建政治认同信息，不仅仅需要经济措施。Clifford Orwin看衰欧盟的未来：“欧洲依然是一个爱管闲事的官僚机构。”
而这恰恰就是拿破仑和法国所主张的。Orwin还认为欧洲人没有共同的身份认同感：“现代历史中，没有任何一个欧洲国家的政治制度可以上升到整个欧洲大陆全体认可的级别。”但是波拿巴所主张的，以及很多人所接受的，恰恰就是把一个国家的政治制度可以上升到整个欧洲大陆全体认可的程度。即使在他的时代没落之后，德国人也并没有完全抛弃拿破仑留给后世的遗留之物。去年，波兰人在华沙重建了一座波拿巴的纪念碑，加上依然矗立在布雷拉米兰城市艺术馆中的拿破仑塑像，都在提醒我们这位皇帝永恒的影响力。他的辉煌转瞬而逝，但是他专注于法国大革命所爆发出的群众力量，以及在整个欧洲释放这股力量的能力，为后世留下了不可磨灭的印记。
法兰西帝国的覆灭并不是因为欧洲人民的起义反抗，而是因为拿破仑没有让新一体化的欧洲理念逐渐深入人心，而选择向莫斯科进军。他在欧洲大陆上的豪赌失败了。现在，欧洲人所畏惧的另一场赌博也即将以失败告终，那就是共同价值观的重要性。
今天，如果欧洲人希望寻求能支持他们统一在一起的价值观，那么只能是法国，或者米兰城市艺术馆中的塑像。以前的二把手英国，已经开始退出欧洲政坛——降低其军事行动姿态，在各方面尽量依赖法国。无论像美国总统奥巴马一样的自由干涉主义者，还是努力获取右派影响力的谨小慎微的保守主义者，都已经准备转移美国在欧洲的军事重心。当美国的力量和全球地位依然无可动摇的时候，其对科索沃相对克制的军事干涉曾经引起争议。今天，它已经没有兴趣再次卷入盘根错节的欧洲问题，那里的反节衣缩食运动已经逐渐失去了控制。
以民主名义进行干涉的理想破灭之后，很多美国人转而拥护现实主义的外交政策，比如很少用硬实力说话。软实力的概念依然在欧洲存在，那里很多人都渴望一个政治机构可以更多地使用安抚，而不是武力的手段来加强军队力量。如果这片大陆延续混乱的局面，痛苦不堪的欧洲会转投德国的历史、德国的理念、德国的英雄吗？不会。任何宣称德国软实力领导欧洲的论调不但言之过早，而且缺乏理性。欧洲不是很快就可以被改变的，希特勒和拿破仑所留给后世的记忆很难消除。
与此相比，法国软实力领导欧洲的论断则格外清晰，而且深入人心。当历史悠久的君主制和封建贵族统治这片大陆时，法国革命宣言似乎是奇怪、吓人的战斗口号。但是在今天，这不过是欧洲人民的常识。它已经不再是一个煽动性的好斗口号，而是爱好和平的欧洲人每天赖以生存的基本道理（尤其是与邻国交往时）。与其它国家比较起来，今天的欧洲似乎更像是法国政治理念下的产物。在欧洲，没有任何一句话比“自由，平等，博爱（译者注：法国大革命时期的口号，后被写入法国宪法）”更加切合美国的“我们合众国人民（译者注：美国宪法的开篇之词）”的含义。这不仅仅是法国人对待法国的态度，也是对待欧洲和世界的态度。
法国是一个既有硬实力又具备深厚软实力的国家，它是英国以西、俄罗斯以东唯一一个具有核武器的国家。它的航空母舰数量多于英国，后者正在模仿法国的军事发展体制。它有能力、有意愿迅速采取对外军事行动，甚至远到象牙海岸。2008年一份内部高级别的法国军力报告，一方面导致北约重新整合，另一方面让专注于“自由行动”的大战略浮出水面。今天的巴黎不但更加关注这片大陆，而且更加积极地应对全球的挑战。不管是有意还是无意，这种战略性变化让法国背后出现了一个非孤立主义的欧洲温和派的支持。
欧盟摇摇欲坠的现状已经表明，欧洲的团结并不能依靠抽象的官僚概念，而且要依靠有血有肉的人的领导。现在的欧盟轮值主席经常是来自布鲁塞尔或者柏林的无名之辈，那么法国人的傲慢——实际上更加慷慨、强大、合法——难道真的让人难以接受吗？
如果欧洲人认真回答这个问题，他们或许会让拿破仑的遗产不仅仅是一个旅游圣地。
原文：
Nearly 200 years after his death, Napoleon Bonaparte is finally getting the greatest honor our age can bestow: his own theme park. Napoleonland -- stop laughing -- was concocted by a former French minister to rival Disneyland in its immersive fun and totemic cultural status. Shopping! Dining! Re-enactments of the Battle of Austerlitz! Not a bad rehabilitation for an all-conquering megalomaniacal exiled emperor.
Truth be told, there's a serious lesson to be found in the fact that Europe will soon have a Napoleonland -- but never, for instance, a Hitlerworld. Unfortunately, Anglo-Americans are apt to unfavorably compare the head of the First French Empire to the leader of the Third German Reich. "A country which can still partly revere such a man surely has a problem," says British journalist Stephen Glover of France and Bonaparte. "We would probably be wrong to equate Napoleon with 20th century totalitarian monsters such as Hitler and Stalin, but he was nonetheless a new sort of terrifying leader" with what Glover calls a "destructive will." Historian Victor Davis Hanson does come close to equating the two, associating "the nightmarish spread of Napoleon's Continental System and the Third Reich" with the longing of "self-described European 'visionaries'" to unite Europe's peoples "under one grand -- and undemocratic -- system, willingly or not." And Claude Ribbe, a member of France's own human rights commission, even blasts Napoleon as genocidal.
But while both Napoleon Bonaparte and Adolf Hitler possessed hegemonic ambitions and left ruin in their wake, the contrasts between the two are rich with significance for Europe's future. Hitler, a plebian and civilian, sought to absorb Europe into a political party, not extend it with an empire. Bonaparte, a professional soldier born to Genovese nobles, spread his armies across the continent in a quest for political unity, not racial Lebensraum.
We'd do well to contemplate why the closest modern Europe has ever been to such unity is when it was Napoleonland. As the European Union's paltry political authority heads for the funeral pyre, German economic strength is still no match for the unifying power of historically French ideals and the relative legitimacy of French political leadership.
Yet influential Western commentators are holding fast to the idea that a veritable Fourth Reich of German efficiency is the only way to save Europe. Pro-German prognostications hold sway. In Niall Ferguson's imagining of Europe in 2021, the United States of Europe, which has replaced the EU, is dominated by Germany from a Viennese headquarters. "German officials talk excitedly about a future Treaty of Yalta, dividing Eastern Europe anew into Russian and European spheres of influence," Ferguson writes. Critics call new Europe the "Wholly German Empire." It's Deutschland über alles again, only economics is king.
Hanson, for his part, proclaims that the German national character will guarantee its future dominance. "Germany's new European order is clear: If you wish to live like a German, then you must work and save like a German," he writes. "Take it or leave it."
The prospect of Europe's German future is not only an Anglo-American dream come true -- it reassures all Westerners that their economic system isn't fundamentally broken. Those sturdy Germans show that if you play by the rules of prudence, you can sidestep financial apocalypse.
But that's a dangerously optimistic view, as Walter Russell Mead has cautioned. "The German political establishment," he warns, "seems willing to destroy Europe to avoid telling German voters the truth about how stupid it has been. Germany's leaders are doing everything possible to conceal the ugly truth that the mistakes that the German banking and regulatory establishments made in underwriting Club Med debts are as much a cause of Europe's woes as spendthrift Greeks."
Sweeping these embarrassing facts under the rug does more than reinforce the lie that there are merely economic solutions to what are deeply political problems. It misleads us into believing that the German regime created by the Allies after World War II has the future of Europe safely in hand. A few institutional tweaks to the European Union's treaty system cannot forge the legitimacy needed to get Europe's house -- or head space -- back in order.
The fact is, it will take more than economic arrangements to rebuild a shared political identity from the rubble of the EU. As Clifford Orwin rightly observes in his pessimistic take on the EU's future, "Europe remains a meddlesome abstraction embodied in an all-too-concrete bureaucracy."
That's where Napoleon and France come in. Orwin also argues that Europeans have no sense of shared identity: "Nothing in their modern history supported the elevation of their political allegiances to a continental plane." But Bonaparte proposed, and many accepted, just such an elevation of Europe's political allegiances to a continental plane. Even after he fell, the Germans opted not to expunge the Napoleonic Code he left behind. Just last year, Poles restored a commemorative monument to Bonaparte in Warsaw that reminds us -- along with another statue that still stands in the courtyard of Milan's city art gallery at the Palace of Brera -- of the Emperor's enduring reach. His conquests came and went, but Bonaparte's ability to focus the explosive popular power unleashed by the French Revolution and express it as something grandly European has left an indelible mark.
The French Empire fell not because Europe's peoples rose against him, but because Napoleon chose to march on Moscow instead of allowing Europe's new and greater unity to sink in. He gambled the continent and lost. And now, as a very different kind of gamble has Europeans fearing that all, yet again, will be lost, the importance of shared values that are more than platitudes grows.
Today, if Europeans wish to find concrete support for the values that unite them, it's France or bust. The usual alternative, Britain, is retreating from European politics -- reducing its military profile and leaning heavily on France in the process. Both liberal interventionists like U.S. President Barack Obama and wary conservatives gaining influence on the right are ready to shift America's military center of gravity decisively away from Europe. The limited U.S. intervention in Kosovo was controversial when America's strength and world domination were unquestioned. Today, there is no stomach for the deeper, more difficult interventions that will have to come in any European country where anti-austerity unrest spirals out of control.
Disillusionment with democracy-promoting interventions has led many Americans to warm to views associated with foreign-policy realism, such as relying on hard power sparingly applied. The concept of soft power, however, remains relevant with Europe, where many long for a political authority able to support the force of arms with something more reassuring than realpolitik. If disorder spreads across the continent, will struggling Europeans look to German history, German ideals, and German heroes? Nein. Any German claim to soft-power political leadership over Europe is not just too soon -- it's too thin. That's unlikely to change for ages. As Hitler and Bonaparte both demonstrated posthumously, collective memory stubbornly endures.
France's claims to soft-power preeminence, by contrast, are crystal clear and deeply intertwined. At a time when centuries-old monarchies and feudal aristocracies ruled the continent, the French revolutionary motto was a strange and frightening war cry. Today, it is better described as the common sense of the European people. Instead of a militant abstraction, it's a statement of the peaceable principles Europeans largely live out in real life (especially relative to their neighbors). Europe today is more a product of France's political creed than of any other nation's. In Europe, there is no closer cognate to America's "We the People" than "Liberté, égalité, fraternité" -- a phrase that captures France's attitude not only toward the French, but toward Europe and the world.
Uniquely, France has maintained this deep reservoir of soft power without having run short of hard power. It's the only nuclear-armed state east of Britain and west of Russia. It has more aircraft carriers than Britain, which is working to redesign its own to mimic the systems used by the French. And it's willing and able to intervene quickly in its near abroad, as in Ivory Coast, and take the lead in international military operations, such as in Libya. An internal high-level 2008 review of French military policy led to NATO reintegration on the one hand and a grand strategy devoted to "freedom of action" on the other. Today, Paris is at once more focused on the continent and more attentive to meeting the challenge of global threats. Intentionally or not, this strategic turn toward a non-isolationist Eurocentrism reflects a growing authority behind France's power position.
The precarious weakness of the EU now makes plain that European unity is to be found not in abstractions or bureaucracies but in the leadership of particular, flesh-and-blood human beings. When the alternatives to French leadership are either nowhere men dispatched from Brussels or bean-counters in Berlin, does French pride -- relatively more generous, powerful, and legitimate -- seem so outrageous?
If Europeans answer that question seriously, they just might be inspired to make more of Napoleon's legacy than a tourist trap.
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发表于 2012-3-13 11:03
