Geir Lundestad Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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You told us about your origins, and now you are head of a prestigious museum in Norway. How has being a Norwegian affected the way you've looked at Europe and the world?
The important thing to remember about Norway is that Norway is not a member of the EU. We have twice voted against joining the EU, so we are a very independent-minded country with very close ties to the U.S. This has been a good point of departure for me, knowing something about the U.S., being a European country but still not in the EU. The Norwegian foreign policy tradition is, in a way, a mix of realism and idealism, and this is also the starting point, I would argue, for the Nobel Peace Prize, with the emphasis on the idealistic side. So, that's the starting point for the work on the Nobel Peace Prize.
Before we talk about that -- we'll get to that in one minute, because this is an important role that Norway is playing and we want to explore your involvement in that. Let's talk a little about the United States, because you're a Norwegian, a European who's studied a lot, you've done advanced studies in the United States several times, and so on. What's going on, on the U.S. side, do you think, in helping us understand our role in the way the world is changing, and in the way U.S. - European relations are changing?
There have been very significant changes in American/European relations, and one important factor is certainly that the Cold War is over. This was the element that more than anything held the Europeans and Americans together. Terrorism is not quite the same threat, at least not yet. Then there have been very significant changes in the U.S. The U.S. has always considered itself an exceptional country, "God's own country," if you will. That has always been there, but for many, many years, or even for centuries, this was combined with weakness and led to isolationism. Now, America has become tremendously strong, the Soviet Union has disappeared, there's no military power that can challenge the U.S., the U.S. economy has been doing extremely well, so there is a feeling of triumphalism, or there was a feeling of triumphalism in America.
Then you had September 11th, which changed everything, or almost everything, it seemed, in your foreign policy. And on top of that, you could then add the Republican domination, first in Congress from '94, and then with George Bush. So, I think there can be no question that America has become more nationalist, if you will, and more insistent on pursuing its own national interests. All countries pursue their national interest, but when you put it that way, like the Bush administration does, it is obviously to indicate that the Clinton administration wasn't really pursuing America's national interests, it was just too multilateral in its orientation.
Does this all come together in the Iraq war, namely, America's acting on this self-perception and its perception of the world, and then the European response?
Yes. You had, in a way, an America with Bush which thought that leadership was everything. If the United States would just lead, the world, or at least the Europeans, would follow. But this was not the way the Europeans saw it. The EU had made great progress. The Europeans felt that they should have more influence, so then you had a collision of a very insistent Bush administration and Europe, or significant parts of Europe, insisting on being heard in a quite different way than had been the case in the past. And when the United States then more or less insisted on going to war, the Europeans, for the first time really, were not prepared to go along. Take France. France in the past had always criticized the United States, but in a crisis always supported the U.S.: the Berlin crisis, Cuban crisis, the Gulf War -- the French did sign on, two minutes to twelve, they always signed on. But now they didn't. And France and Germany, with some support in other countries, and support from public opinion in virtually every European country, were not prepared anymore to support the U.S.
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