VIENNA -- Between the world wars, the theater director Max Reinhardt had, by his own account, a lovely time owning the Schloss Leopoldskron. He put in a mirrored Venetian Room and a Chinese Room --which in its strange excess might better be called Oriental -- and put on productions through the house that had his audiences travel from room to room and sometimes into the garden, overlooking a lake. The party ended with the war, and the Nazis decided the house was theirs owing to Reinhardt's Jewishness. The "Max" character in "The Sound of Music" is said to have been based partly on Reinhardt, who never saw the house again. (He died in 1943.) The lakeside terrace and the Venetian Room were featured in shooting the film. My children were upset that I was going to be in the "Sound of Music" Schloss and they weren't. They had a point. They've loyally watched the movie many times and know the songs. I wish I could remember at what age they overcame their fear of the film's Nazis. Even Disney Nazis are scary. I think it was around 5.
Max Reinhardt's son, Gottfried, once said that "the Salzburg Seminar combines the two worlds that made up the world of Max Reinhardt: Europe and America." At the seminar I attended at the Schloss last week, the combination was uneasy. In theory, the assembled scholars, government officials, bureaucrats and journalists were there to discuss both what the U.S. should do abroad in an Obama administration and what the rest of the world should do, but in practice the attendees were happiest thinking of tasks for the U.S. For a while I found this surprising. What country, after all, really wants advice from foreigners? Then over time I realized that, while laziness was indeed a factor, the main reason they were giving advice exclusively to America was because there were problems abroad that they, even the relatively empowered Europeans, did not believe they could solve. They needed the Americans.
There was in the proceedings a solid helping of European arrogance, ex-imperial bitterness and confusion, and all the other emotional currents that can still send former-great-power Europeans into a bewildering rage. But there was also this particular helplessness. It was, to me at least, touching, though as a political substance it appeared very volatile. On the seminar's last day a European official said to me, miserably, "I didn't know before how unimportant Europe really is." Neither did I, but it was clear by the end of the week. It informed everything we did. It must have hit this official particularly hard as the bearers of the news were Europeans themselves, or in any case non-Americans. (There were significant contingents of South Asians and of Chinese.)
The situation was, to a degree, summed up in the urging of America under Obama to exercise "leadership" and renewed "moral authority." On these, the Europeans and the non-Europeans (not counting us few Americans) split. The non-Europeans, while polite, were really not interested in the moral authority of the United States, which indeed they didn't seem even to perceive; and they were wary of its leadership. The Europeans took the opposite, and, to me, less comprehensible view. Again, it took me a while to realize that the Europeans were really talking about something like their own moral authority and leadership -- the principle of it and perhaps also the history of it -- transmuted into an American form yet retaining its European essence. How likely was it, after all, that they would urge "moral authority" and "leadership" on an America that conceived these in purely American terms? That was what George Bush had done. And boy did they hate and despise him for it.
But with Obama everything would change, wouldn't it? It will, I'd guess, but not in the way this liberal internationalist Europe is hoping. It will change in the direction of an ever closer U.S.-China relationship. This became obvious to me in the course of an excellent lecture by Alan Beattie, who is the world trade editor of the Financial Times, which cosponsored the Salzburg event. Beattie is himself British as well as (a source close to his thinking suggested some HuffPost readers might want to know) both handsome and single.
Beattie argued that the real global problem in the financial crisis was not a lack of global regulatory oversight, it was a political failure by the developed-economy governments to work with the "emerging" economies. Fixing that, he maintained, was really the precondition for global action, rather than some potential result, way down the road, of institutional or other reforms undertaken by the great powers themselves. "You can't just rearrange the architecture," he said. "You fundamentally have to change the way you address them."
Beattie told two fascinating stories about China. One was that, when the developed economies coordinated a rate cut a few weeks ago, they did not tell China; and China quickly then made a cut of its own. The second story had to with Pakistan's President Zardari desperately traveling the other day to China, cap in hand, in hopes of avoiding recourse to the International Monetary Fund for a bailout. The Chinese, frequently accused of a stony-faced nationalist mercantilism proudly ignorant of the needs of others, refused to help, despite long ties to Pakistan. China insisted that the bailout be done under IMF supervision. China would help; but it wouldn't undermine the system, even if that system was not, at present, treating China very well.
Beattie worried that Obama had been banging on about Chinese currency manipulation, as have other Democrats. It boded ill for the U.S.-China relationship. But I wondered. These two stories suggested a profound level of Chinese engagement with the international system -- all the more profound because they showed the Chinese leadership making internationalist decisions in the face of Western neglect, condescension and even insult. Those are the kind of decisions that matter most. And assuming there is enough contact between the U.S. and China, they are the kind of decisions that will cement the single most important relationship in global politics.
It is true that China manipulates its currency to keep export-led growth high. (Much of this growth is dependent on the money and know-how of non-Chinese investors, of course, who themselves benefit from Chinese currency policy. And some of those investors are Americans, although American investment in China tends to be oriented more toward Chinese consumers.) It is also true that China has parked a lot of its earnings in dollars, following in the steps of Asian and other countries who, taking a lesson from the Asian monetary crisis of 1997-8, have built up huge reserves in foreign currency (particularly dollars) to make it impossible for them to be abandoned again by the rich world as they were in 1998.
One cannot really know, but it does seem to me that China's policies, financial and otherwise, are aimed not at intimidation but at forcing the U.S. to bind itself to China. When the bad times come -- I suppose they're already here -- neither will be able to abandon the other. At which point the international institutions, financial and otherwise, will indeed be reformed, on Sino-American terms.
The last day in Salzburg was dominated by UN-related meetings. We heard a lot about the usual blockages and the usual solutions. Under Obama, small fixes and a big improvement in UN atmospherics seem likely. It wouldn't take much (or, within reason, involve much political risk domestically). But the route to a solution on a grander scale would seem to lie in much greater American use of the Security Council as a place to manage the relationship with China. Not to "manage China." The time for that is gone.
If the American choice -- put too starkly, but still -- is between revitalizing the Security Council (with China) or watching the SecCo (with Britain and France) slowly fade, I think I know which the U.S. under Obama is likely to pick. I can't see him sacrificing financial stability, and a shot at (slowly) revitalizing the international architecture, on the altar of Western solidarity or even Western (or universal) values.
I took a day to see Vienna after my little China/U.S. epiphany in Salzburg. Mel Brooks' "The Producers" was being staged - in a German version, yet! It had debuted in June. I wonder what the Viennese make of "Springtime for Hitler." The war is indeed over.