Guns or Espresso?

You know those guys in German cafes wearing stylish shirts over slim, well-trained chests sipping caffeine from a small cup while watching the world walk by at 5:30 in the afternoon.  That is what you get when you have a society geared toward leisure, with affluence spread across the population, limited working hours and a tiny military budget.

Robert Gates is on a well-orchestrated, diplomatically-timed grumpy tour, telling friends and allies what he really thinks.  Today he is chastising NATO for not having the military arsenal and stockpiles required to carry out a sustained campaign. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/11/world/europe/11gates.html?hp

He also correctly points out that important NATO countries have not demonstrated the political commitment to engaging their troops in Afghanistan.  Gates praises some small member nations, such as Belgium and Denmark, but he clearly means to criticize Germany as the leading nation to refuse to participate in American-led military interventions.  He does this just days after the President has awarded Angela Merkel with the Medal of Freedom. 

Of course, Gates has a point.  The reality is that NATO has always counted on the United States to take the lead in military assertiveness, even during the Cold War. All of Europe could get along as long as no one European nation claimed military leadership.  If the Americans take the charge, then Europe can find a means to follow.

Post-Communism, this arrangement no longer holds, for there is little consensus among Europeans for military intervention outside the continent.  Gates may fume all he wants, the reason Germany does not spend more on its military budget is because the voters do not want it to do so.  Whereas World War Two is continually invoked in the United States as a justification for projecting military power, the same war functions in Germany as a reason not build up the military.  The larger picture is that European countries would prefer to spend their tax money of social improvements.

Democracy in this case functions as a brake on military expenditure.  And who really would like to see Germany develop an interest in foreign military intervention--no one other than a few short-sighted American hawks.

The world is much safer with those two guys in the cafe sipping espresso, and they're happier, too.  It is only the Americans who feel the burden of domination.

Global Museum: Antwerp's opportunity

How does one design a global museum?  Any museum that is not a website, needs to contain its collection within a building and make sure to secure funding from a specific political entity, which usually means attracting the right kind of influential audience.

The new MAS in Antwerp has all the holdings of a museum about globalization and its history, but it has not put them all together into a coherent form. The MAS holds diverse collections brought together from many smaller museums.  The topics range from paintings and porcelain, the history of Antwerp, anthropological artifacts from tribal peoples in the Pacific, African and the Americas, the history of shipping, traditional folk culture in Flanders. 

How did the MAS end up with this hodge-podge?  It does not take too much imagination to realize that the content of these collections reflects the interests of Antwerp's ruling elite during the nineteenth-century. Some of the upper class wanted to demonstrated their refined taste by collecting European decorative arts, others were filled with civic pride and another group traveled the world.  All three could be spun together into a narrative of globalization.  If Antwerp were not such a major port, we would hardly have found a collection of Indonesian and African masks in the MAS.  Why not link the presence of these collections with Antwerp's colonial and global economic history? 

As the exhibits now stand, the history of the city is told compellingly in terms of the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Golden Age as art historians sometimes still call it.  This historical narrative structures the most coherent and exciting part of the MAS, but with a broader and longer view, the history of Antwerp would easily be placed within the context of colonialism and the spread of European capitalism across the globe.  The curators have all read Ferdinand Braudel and Immanuel Wallerstein. Thus, it would not be so difficult to link Antwerp's history within the Spanish Empire and the later nineteenth-century anthropological collections.  But such a curatorial approach would require presenting Antwerp as more than just the gorgeous sacrificial victim of the Eighty Years War.  It would require the museum to address the question of nationalism, Flemish, and as well French and German.  It is not so hard to see how one group of nineteenth-century collectors would become fascinated with African art, while another would focus intensely on Flemish village life.   Domestic ethnography is the nationalist response to colonial expansion.  Finally, the museum's vast collection on Antwerp shipping provides the obvious link between all the other collections.  

Why not turn the museum into an investigation of Antwerp's global past?   The answer surely has everything to do with Belgium's awkward political present.   The conflicts between Walloons and Flemings are so exhausting that most Belgians just discreetly refer to them for fear of unleashing yet another ideological cavalcade.    This reticence, this desire not to wade into the broader terms of Belgian political history, stymies museums such as the MAS who are obliged to present more than their local heritage.