The future that divides Europe from America

War to the Americans is a natural weapon of justice, while to the Europeans it is the very last resort

So Germany and France are now just part of the "Old Europe" and eastern Europe represents the new, according to the US Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. To which the the French Finance Minister, Francis Mer, acidly replied that "this 'old Europe' has resilience, and is capable of bouncing back... and will." Or, as the French Ecology Minister, Roselyn Bachelot, responded, "If you knew what I feel like telling Mr Rumsfeld..." She then fell silent, saying the word would be too offensive.

Is any word too offensive, now that the gloves are off in the gathering row between America and France and Germany over going to war in Iraq? Scratch the surface of most politicians in Washington and you soon get the belief that "might is right"; that those who have power have a right to use it and those who don't, such as France, "aren't worth diddley shit," in the words of one American I know.

But then scratch the surface of any Frenchmen (and not a few Germans these days) and you get the view enunciated yesterday by the former French Labour minister, Martine Aubry that what we have here is the "arrogance of the United States" which "continues to want to alone govern the world, and more and more without rules." (It's interesting that the most outspoken politicians in France tend to be women, while the opposite is true of the Anglo-Saxons.)

In other words both sides – and they are "sides", for all the efforts of Colin Powell and the diplomats to smooth over the conflict – think the other represents a reversion to the past. America sees itself as bringing about a new world order of peace and democracy, with France opposing them for reasons of petty nationalism. France and Germany see themselves as ushering in a new era of unified regions, with America wanting to castrate them as competitors.

Both could be said to be right. The past makes the present either side of the Atlantic. To the Europeans, it is a history of mass slaughter and imperial retreat. Time has taught them to seek not the perfect but the possible, with a distaste for the grand design. For America history is written in economic and military success, heightened by a moral righteousness that Europeans can no longer share.

Now you can exaggerate these differences. Behind the insults America and Europe have far more in common than their differences, as every politician with a prepared speech will tell his or her audience.

If Clinton were still in the White House, or if Chancellor Schröder had not won the last election in Germany and President Chirac hadn't increased his hold of French politics, we probably wouldn't be witnessing such a public row. The Bush administration has gone out of its way not just to assert American global power, but to make sure that everyone publicly acknowledges it.

But it would be entirely wrong to sweep away this particular quarrel as broken crockery in a marital spat. Iraq has brought out – in a way that no other issue has since the fall of Berlin Wall – the profound differences in the way that the two sides of the Atlantic view not the past but the future.

For America, the world is made up of "God-given" (to use the Bush way of approaching affairs) values of democracy, free trade and peacefulness which all self-respecting people share but which have to be robustly defended against "enemies" intent on destroying them. The job of its allies, in the EU or the UN, is to arm themselves and be prepared to fight the "evil."

For the Europeans, given their history, the future has to be built on the constant effort to restrain the natural forces of power, ambition and destruction that lurk in every society. For them, the objective is to tie potentially destructive forces into international systems – the European Union at the regional level, the United Nations at the global one.

Iraq is the litmus test because it is a challenge accepted by all but which appears in quite different guises to those in Washington, who see the destruction of Saddam Hussein as the route to a peaceful, democratised region; and the Europeans, who see Saddam as the distortion of a history which will only be unbalanced further if he is made a victim of Western military superiority. War to the American mind is a natural weapon of justice, while to the European mind it is a terrible curse that should only be called on in the very last resort.

The tragedy of the present exchange of insults is that it prevents any real dialogue between those in the US who take a more "European" view of the conflict or those in Europe who tend to the American view. Tony Blair's dream of being the bridge has been nullified by the fact that he cannot represent the European view to Washington, since he has offered his wholehearted commitment to America, but then nor does he seem able to persuade to the American view the sizable number of those – even in Britain – who reject the whole enterprise.

What none of this argument supports is Rumsfeld's view that there is an "old Europe" of problem countries and a new Europe represented by the liberated countries of the former eastern bloc. It's not so. On the question of Iraq, eastern and western Europe, and the Middle East and Far East for that matter, are far nearer the views of Paris than Washington.

The word that may have stayed on Ms Bachelot's lips on the public airwaves yesterday was probably "merde". She should have used it. It would have been a fair riposte.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk