MADRID: Robert Kagan, the provocative neo-conservative foreign policy thinker, would have been in paradise had he wandered past the Centro de Arte Reina Sofia museum here a few days ago.

In his celebrated new book, “Of Paradise and Power,” Kagan argues that a split between Europe and the United States over war in Iraq was inevitable because Europe’s military weakness has encouraged it to favour law and negotiation over force — paradise over power — to resolve conflicts between nations.

Outside the Madrid museum, Kagan would surely have found proof in the tables where activists did a brisk business in T-shirts and buttons emblazoned with a bright red slogan that needed no translation: “No a la Guerra!” At one end of the bustling square, someone had spray-painted another anti-war slogan over a huge poster of Picasso’s “Guernica” — the monumental memorial to the horrors of the Spanish Civil War that hangs inside the museum.

Yet the sort of instinctive pacifism visible in the square that day seems only part of the answer for European hostility to the Iraq war, which appears undiminished despite the conflict’s swift and successful conclusion.

The deeper divide may be that Europe strikes a very different balance than the United States between individual freedom and the common good. In their domestic politics, Europeans have been more willing than Americans to accept limits on their individual choices to build a stronger common community. In direct extension, they are now more willing than President Bush to accept limits on national sovereignty to create a more cohesive international community.

The contrast is most vivid in the role of government. Europeans accept a welfare state that erects much greater barriers to the individual accumulation of wealth — through much higher top tax rates — but provides for a much more comprehensive social safety net than in America, through universal health care and generous subsidies for the unemployed.

Similarly, the constraints imposed by the Kyoto Treaty to limit the emission of the gases associated with global warming appears much less onerous in European societies than in the United States because the treaty merely reinforces existing limits — both of natural resources and sheer space in urban areas — that encourage energy conservation and the use of smaller cars than Americans prefer.

In both these examples, European societies reached a consensus that the common good sometimes requires individuals to accept greater limits on their own options — whether to amass wealth or to drive mammoth SUVs. The European support for international rules and institutions — from the European Union to the United Nations — merely extends that principle to govern the relations between nations. This is a point that Kagan, a conservative with a minimalist view of government, obscures.

Yet this core philosophy seems the real source of the European conflict with Bush. At home and abroad, Bush’s priority is the opposite: He consistently aims to reduce constraints on individual choice, even when that weakens collective institutions.

TAX CUTS & IRAQ: Bush’s tax cuts, for instance, put more income back in individual pockets, but at the price of eviscerating government revenues that support activities society can only undertake collectively — from providing a social safety net to building roads and schools.

On both Social Security and Medicare, Bush’s vision is to give individuals increased choice — at the price of almost certainly diminishing the universal benefit guaranteed to all.

In health care, Bush strikes a similar balance. He wants to provide tax credits to help some of the 41.2 million uninsured Americans buy coverage on their own. Over time, that approach could erode the system of group insurance through employers that has allowed society to pool risk by yoking together the young and the old, the healthy and the sick. The likely result would be to increase individual freedom — at least for the young and healthy who could probably obtain better deals from insurers than they do now — at the price of eroding the collective guarantee of decent care for all of the insured.

Bush’s foreign policy vision follows those same principles. At its foundation is a desire to increase America’s freedom to pursue what he perceives as its national interests, even when that weakens collective institutions.

Bush cut the mold when he rejected the Kyoto Treaty because he said it threatened the US economy.

Likewise, on Iraq. Bush was willing to engage the United Nations, but only to a point. In the end, Bush was unwilling to accept a collective limit on his individual freedom to launch an invasion that he (and by then most US leaders) believed essential to national security.

Probably no president would have accepted a UN veto of military force by that point. But few might have lost as little sleep as Bush about the damage his determination to preserve his freedom of action was imposing on the United Nations and the other institutions of collective international action.

This, more than the imbalance of military power, may be the real difference between the sensitivities of Europe and the United States. In Europe, the dominant opinion sees a value in strengthening collective institutions — domestically and internationally — even when that constrains individual choices.

No US president would strike the balance as far toward the collective as Europe; it’s not in America’s genes. But in both his domestic and foreign policies, Bush seems especially distant from the European model; in many of his actions he seems actively hostile to it.

After the war, Bush and European leaders may talk of reconciling. But the chasm between them less on the use of force than on the value of collective action virtually guarantees more storms across the Atlantic.—Dawn/LAT-WP News Service (c) Los Angeles Times

Overdoing things is becoming a way of our life. Everything that was simple and in accord with our traditions has become big and gaudy and extravagant. Weddings that were never simple any way have now become a nine stage affair that drags on and on till dysentery claims the life of an in-law. The invitation card itself is a multi-deckered contraption that says Hey guys! If you can’t unfold this scroll you are gonna miss Bunty’s marriage with Jimmy. Pakistani names carry no weight. Not one Razia has been born in the last two decades. The last Majid was born around the birth of Pakistan. The latest is Fairy, born to Harris Khaliq and Shamsa in the 2nd year of the September 11 Century. The call to prayer comes through sixteen loudspeakers strategically arranged in a surround hi-fi system besieging your house. The purpose is not to reach you but to rent the sky asunder and force open the doors of Paradise. At symposiums and seminars the participants wear huge multicoloured silk flowers on their jacket lapels that have been growing in size over the years. Now the chief guest’s is as big as the circumference of his head.

This menace is all pervasive and highly infectious. It has spread to the realm of literature as well. Now all books good, bad or mediocre, verse or prose, translation or compilation bear the author’s picture on the back title cover or inner flap. Some go further and include selections from their family albums also. This would be appropriate in a biographical work, as would be a picture of one’s funeral in a posthumous publication.

The most bizarre of spectacles is being presented by our universities where annual convocations to award degrees have assumed the dimensions of a coronation. Much money is being invested in making the affair as pompous, majestic, regal and splashy as the crowning of a prince. The big change has come in the shape, size, colour and design of gowns or cloaks and caps in which passing graduates and university dons, professors, the VC and the Guest of Honor are required to appear to participate in the investiture. From the simple black cotton gown of days gone by, the current rage is massive regalia of heavy velvet, bordered with golden embroidery, sequined and sashed and laced all over.

The most clownish of capes and headgear are designed for members of the high stage. Often now-a-days it is a mixture of three head covers — a round cap, a square board perched overhead and a dopatta that is stuffed inside the cap. From the square board that sits atop the cap, a huge golden tassel dangles from one end and the shawl or dopatta that is attached to the embroidered cap covers a shoulder and hangs in front in multiple folds.

Such was the latest trousseau that the Hamdard University had got prepared for its Convocation the other day. Its material, colour scheme, the shapes and manner of its multiple parts suggested a clever concoction brewed together with a Joshanda, Khamira, Itrifal and Majoon. It goes to the large heartedness and graciousness of our Prime Minister that he agreed to wrap himself up in this atrocious sartorial monstrosity without causing any hurt or embarrassment to the enthusiasm of the herbal mendicants.

Old graduates of Punjab University would recall colleges provided simple black gowns for the convocation to their qualifying students at no extra charge. In Rawalpindi, the Gordon College administration would charge a small fee to cover gown rental and tea after convocation that professors and students took together in the lawns. Bhatti photographer also rented out a small number but these were actually for making ceremonial group photos. Those who could not get a gown made do with their sisters’ two piece burqa. Nobody bothered.

Universities are centres of learning and houses of knowledge. They should discourage pomp and meaningless pageantry and set an example of simplicity and economy. The crude display of tasteless grandeur that the Hamdard University put on show was quite unbecoming and indeed “Rooh Farsa”.