Speech: Nonie Valentine

Mars, Venus, and the Hazards of Power

I’d like to first say one thing about transatlantic leadership, whether it’s leadership at the top or leadership embedded in our populations: Nations are just like individuals in that they have within them a drive towards wholeness, an intrinsic growth-force, if you like, and wise leaders will try and attune to that force and cooperate with it.

This is an invitation to think rather differently than political scientists usually do about the transatlantic relationship, as if you were a psychotherapist working with an actual couple, and one of the couple is in an acute developmental crisis.

You might be familiar with Robert Kagan, author of the book, Of Paradise and Power, who created quite a stir when he gave us the metaphor of the US as Mars, and Europe as Venus. He proposed, to wildly oversimplify, that the US is Mars, which can deal properly with threats in the world because it holds superior military or “hard” power, while Europe is Venus, which can’t because it can only fall back on inadequate soft power such as diplomacy, peace-keeping, multi-lateral organizations, and foreign aid. Europe’s “relational” style, with an emphasis on dialogue, is a handicap. She should, for God’s sake, get herself together and be more like the United States.

(I’m going to be cheeky here and refer to Europe as “she” and the US as “he”.)

As a psychotherapist myself, I actually found surprising resonance in the transatlantic Mars/Venus metaphor with the couples’ dynamics I met in my office. But I think Kagan’s conclusion is, well, wrong, because he falls into the pervasive bias against Venus, and soft power, a bias I feel is already proving to be hazardous to the world. We need Venus just as much as Mars, in a new balance.

Viewed in this way, the US and Europe have an extraordinary complementary potential to address together the most pressing problems the world faces. The archetypes of Mars and Venus together signify both attraction, and creativity. But their creative complementarity can only be realized if the power imbalance that distorts the transatlantic picture is dealt with.

The superpower is like the more powerful man, traditionally speaking, in a couple, in the ostensible position to define what matters. US can overvalue his own Mars approach and undervalue, even condemn, Europe’s Venus approach and actually undermine a vital contribution to the partnership that the world needs.

In the end, the Mars/Venus couple is too simple a metaphor, but I see it is a key dimension of transatlantic reality.

Kagan’s challenge to Europe may have woken her up to her indecisiveness and neglect of hard power. Good. US dismissal of different European voices in the last couple of years, may actually be an opportunity for her, in disguise as an insult: it could be Europe’s wake-up call to further unify, cohere her multiple voices, improve her decision-making, efficiency, and defense.

But even more importantly, to value the strengths she already has as an essential contribution, even if the superpower does not regard them in this way.

My main proposition is that…

There’s an emergency upon us.

In psychological terms, US as Mars is in a critical developmental crisis, reacting in ways that are both self-defeating and damaging all round. Furthermore, after September 11, he became a wounded Mars, reacting with unprecedented military power at his disposal.

Europe holds a key: she can be a catalyst for America to renew a creative role in the world.

Emergency doesn’t just have to mean crisis, but also, in psychological terms, can mean an emergence from an old way of being or an outworn developmental stage.

America had long reached what researchers thought of as the peak of human development – the stage of autonomy where one is no longer dependent on others, but is a separate self with a sense of personal rights and the capacity for linear, rational thought. This stage is characterized by ideological leanings and institutional loyalties, along with a certain pride in self-control. There’s an of either/or quality to the thinking.

Lo and behold, US researchers discovered there is a further developmental stage of interdependence. There, there is a loosening of boundaries and a flow between rationality, intuition, and feeling which gives rise to dialectical or both/and thinking. The orientation is now more towards relationship but within it there is also autonomy. One’s felt loyalty is to universal human rights and responsibilities, rather than to ideology. Uncertainty is more comfortable than it was.

I think that US leadership represents an emphatic resistance to the country’s own pull towards its next stage, holding fast to the idea that it knows what’s right and can go it alone.

When we grip too tightly onto the stage of autonomy we are outgrowing, our efforts become more caricatured: We try to maintain certainty at all costs. We reject criticism, we repudiate any vulnerability and shut out doubt, and this leads to a kind of absolutism and a false sense of omnipotence. The ideological cast of the old stage is intensified as we see, for example, in the form of US neo-conservativism which wants to remake the world in its own image.

I’m describing the character of entrenched resistance to growth, which is all the more dangerous when it is backed by formidable hard power. The combination of resistance and hard power escalates crisis and can only backfire sooner or later in the reality of an interconnected world, as I believe we are now seeing with the spiraling violence in Iraq.

Interestingly, the transition to the next stage requires that we surrender any sense of immunity we have and discover that we are not ultimately separate and exempt from the fate or the pain of other nations. That’s exactly what began, in the most brutal way imaginable, for Americans on September 11, at which time the country became a wounded Mars. Unfortunately, the public fear and outrage were used as fuel for the resistance I’ve described, and pressed into the service of unilaterateralist policies. We have a wounded Mars with the best weapons in the world, creating the antagonisms it intended to prevent.

Where has this led?

How does Europe hold a key?
While America’s leadership is resisting the country‘s natural direction for growth, Europe, I think, is stumbling in its right direction—beyond nationalism and towards integration.

The Venus tendencies in Europe, imperfect as they are, can catalyze America’s memory of connection, of relationship, so that he can be more aware and respectful of other national and global realities.

Europe can see, and to some extent bring, what’s missing in America’s repertoire. There are rich archives of knowledge in the soil itself. Europe knows about the power of history; knows about war and its aftermath: about invasion, persecution, occupation, and atrocity - not to mention the hazards of empire. She knows that security can’t finally be equated with war-making capacity, can‘t be total, nor in isolation from other nations. That international law matters, and multi-lateral institutions are worth struggling to build.

And she knows its essential to have dialogue over differences.

What can she do with her wounded Mars partner?

She can refuse to collaborate with his my way or the highway style of autonomy, and support emergence with her own commitment to interdependence, so the breaking down of the old stage can become a breakthrough to the next.

In couples work, the more powerful partner does not have to be the key to change. If the less powerful partner “starts anyway”, it changes the dynamic.

The new message Europe as Venus may need to give to the US as Mars is: “Yes, I want this relationship, but not under just any conditions,” and to figure out, in fact, what those conditions are. She’s grieving the loss of the old relationship of protected to protector and is called on to re-envision a partnership that respects her strengths too. This means a shift away from placating the US or from trying to prove herself to him.

But it doesn’t mean to act from rebelliousness, rather to be open to the relationship and steady in her refusal to collude with what is old and unhelpful, like bullying and contempt for different views.

She’d need to do the listening to herself that the US is not doing, and so cohere her voice, from the diversity of European voices available to her.

She’d need to turn away from her habit of seeing Mars as the source of her actions and values. This forces her to face the fears of standing on her own and being responsible, of losing out if she does not placate, of being subject to reprisals. Any support she can find to go through the fears, without then converting them into policy, is extremely helpful.

She also can show solidarity with America’s fear and trauma of losing immunity - without joining in policies that are based on that fear.

The more powerful partner has to be suffering enough, or feel need enough, to work constructively on the relationship. If Venus stays true to herself, Mars’ hidden vulnerabilities and needs will come to the surface, as we see now when things go dreadfully wrong in Iraq, where it turns out, Mars needs legitimacy and support after all. Venus can trust that the realities of a connected world will contradict the distortions of unilateralist power.

I made it sound easy, didn’t I? Of course it’s not; it’s messy and slow, and stumbling, and sometimes hopeless.

And yet, a world that is whole needs both Mars and Venus, evolving to a new balance - Mars able to acknowledge his vulnerability and Venus her strength. A world that is in trouble needs every ounce of ingenuity that the powers together can muster: It needs initiative and dialogue, a sense of future and respect for history, decisiveness and deliberation, sureness of purpose and acceptance of uncertainty. This aching world of ours is summoning both America and Europe to regenerate themselves and to re-ignite their relationship on its behalf.

Now that’s creativity. That’s romance.

Nonie Valentine