America at center stage in the European press
During the last couple of months the United States has been occupying an unprecedented amount of space in the pages dedicated to international news in the European press. Foreign correspondents have been working overtime and the excessive interest in what goes on in the private life of the American president is probably taking its toll on the private lives of those who are expected to recount every succulent detail. However, it’s not just Clinton’s zipper that they’ve had to worry about, but the fate of Karla Tucker and, of course, that of Saddam Hussein.
Of the three issues it seems that Clinton’s sex life, except for the judicial implications, is the one that causes the least concern. Europeans have always expressed their incomprehension of why Americans seem so overwhelmingly preoccupied with the sex lives of their politicians. However, more poignant is their interest in the issues of capital punishment and military intervention in Iraq. The two arguments in the minds of Europeans were entwined, not only because they happened to come to the surface at the same time but because of the moral implications that surround them both. And now that "Old Sparky" is back in action, they are concerned with the catching up of executions taking place this week in the state of Florida. The issue occupies more space in European newspapers than it does in the very state where those executions are taking place.
Europeans have always had a certain love/hate relationship with America’s social values as well as its military might. Reluctant in their gratefulness for getting them out of deep water in WW I, WW II, Bosnia, and even in the last Gulf crisis, they demonstrate indignation toward a country which pretends to teach moral values to the rest of the world to the point of flexing its military muscles to thwart evil, i.e., Saddam Hussein, when on the other hand, that very same government condones and applies capital punishment, considered an emblem of anachronistic incivility by most Europeans.
The trouble with this line of reasoning is that it demonstrates a basic ignorance of how the American system of government works and the roots of that system which lie in its Constitution. The two sacrosanct principles upon which our nation was built are the concept of the separation of powers and the importance given to federalism.
The American system is categorically democratic in such matters. It is not the American government as an overwhelming power that be that exerts its will in the implementation of laws regarding capital punishment. The American federal system delegates such decisions to the states. The states determine their position on such matters and the state legislatures decide on the basis of the opinions of their constituents.
The inherent problem here is that in Europe decisions that regard such important moral issues are not trusted to the wrath or reason of the plebiscite. Such decisions are the domain of a discerning and discriminating government which is supposedly above the rage of ignorance.
The only way to override the supremacy of the states and the federal system is for the Supreme Court to intervene on the grounds of unconstitutionality. This route has already been tried. The NAACP made a successful plea for a moratorium to the liberal Warren court of the sixties on the grounds that capital punishment is a violation of the Eighth Amendment which prohibits "cruel and unusual punishment" and on the grounds of the arbitrary and racial discriminatory nature of much of the sentencing.
However, since the seventies the climate has changed drastically: Many states have made amendments to their laws to make them less arbitrary. The civil rights movement and affirmative action have radically changed if not solved problems of discrimination. The justices appointed to the Supreme Court have become increasingly conservative. And the American public has become more intolerant of crime, less concerned with the rights of criminals as citizens, and more concerned with the rights of their victims.
So if Europeans truly wish to exert their will to remove capital punishment from the American judicial system, it’s not by exercising pressure on the government that that will occur. It would require a massive campaign to persuade and influence the opinion of the American people.
Here lies a dilemma perhaps even more difficult to resolve. How can a society such as that in France or in Italy, profoundly Catholic and based on the principles of compassion and forgiveness pretend to influence the American society which is profoundly Protestant and whose values lie in the importance given to the responsibility of one’s actions? To narrow the gap of such fundamental differences would seem to be a pipedream.
The pragmatism of Americans may be more sensitive to more practical issues rather than moral ones. Franco Pantarelli, in an article in the Il Secolo XIX of Genoa, reveals two of these issues of a judicial nature which perhaps deserve more attention. He describes the interests of jurists concerned about two negative implications of the existence of capital punishment in the United States. There are those jurists who are concerned about external implications, i.e., the fact that "many countries refuse to extradite criminals to the U.S. because of the existence of capital punishment, thereby obstructing the efficiency of the war on drugs and terrorism." And there are those who are concerned about internal discrimination, i.e., that the gravity of the punishment is based not on the magnitude of the crime, but on what state one happens to be arrested in.
Americans may be rightfully wary when considering from what pulpit the preaching comes. Although no European country condones capital punishment, there are many flaws in the name of justice in many of their judicial systems. However, if the United States expects the world to follow it as a moral role model in its actions and deeds, it will have to reckon with the fact that Europeans have difficulty coming to grips with what they consider double standards of civility in the country whose leadership they are expected to follow.
April 1998
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