The West might be superficially divided between hawks and doves, but there is a deeper division: between foxes and hedgehogs. In a famous essay on Tolstoy, Isaiah Berlin said the division was ‘one of the deepest’ among human beings. The distinction applies just as well to politicians and governments.
Foxes, said Berlin, are sophisticated, pluralist, usually atheist, and distrustful of absolutes. Hedgehogs are anti-intellectual, single-minded, often religious, and comfortable with certainties, chief among which are ‘good’ and ‘evil’. Foxes think many small things; hedgehogs think one big thing.
The UN and the EU are fox heaven. They stand for multilateralism and the ‘post-modern’ world order, for negotiation, containment and compromise. The mood is pacific and highbrow; the instruments are protocols, charters and communiquZs. Nato, on the other hand, is hedgehog country. Its one big thing is its belief in the essential rightness of the Judaeo-Christian tradition and the Anglo-Saxon political model.
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