Some of the differences, writes Garret FitzGerald, that have arisen between the peoples of the US and Europe over Iraq are explicable in terms of the different intensity of the impact of September 11th on a US population directly affected by this catastrophe and on a European population external to the action - people who, horrified and deeply sympathetic, remained nevertheless observers of, rather than participants in, that traumatic event.
But that is far from being the whole story. An important factor, I believe, has been the widely overlooked reality that throughout the second half of the 20th century, in response to quite different stimuli, the American and European approaches to international affairs systems were developing along very divergent lines - a fact that Iraq has suddenly and dramatically highlighted.
American political attitudes to the world were heavily influenced by the experience of the Cold War, and more recently by the emergence of the US from it as the sole global superpower. By contrast, over the same period Europe was - and still is - deeply engaged in a prolonged retrospective reaction to the traumatic impact upon it of the hugely destructive second World War.
The lesson that Europeans finally drew from their continent's increasingly destructive history between the 17th and mid-20th centuries was that co-operation among neighbouring states on a basis of mutual respect and something like equality is the best - the only - way to manage its affairs. But the Cold War experience of the US has persuaded many in that country that its interests can best be protected by the exercise of power.
As has often been the case with intellectual revolutions, these divergent reactions to their international experiences over many decades have been little noticed on either side of the Atlantic; all the less because in this particular instance much of the attention of both peoples during the latter part of the last century was engaged by their joint concern with the defence of their underlying common fundamental values of freedom and democracy against the Soviet Union.
During that period the unique geographical situation and global role of the US made it unnecessary to contemplate in the latter half of the 20th century any sharing of sovereignty with other states. Moreover, its relative geographical isolation left it fairly impervious to external influences of the kind that every European state was having to deal with daily. So it is really not surprising that eventually the US would be tempted, in extreme circumstances, to go its own way, even against the thrust of world opinion.
The challenge for the apparently failed Europe of 1945 was to find a way to exploit its intellectual inheritance in a manner that would provide its inhabitants with a reasonable future in the new bipolar world. Attempts at European domination by one or other of its ethnic groups had all failed abysmally to yield anything other than mutual destruction. Europe's salvation could now lie only in the reversal of history's tide through the sharing of state sovereignties.
The pursuit by Europe of this objective of sovereignty-sharing necessarily involved the development of new, appropriate values. More or less in chronological order, as they emerged, they comprised:
First, a commitment to international law, combined with a concern to protect the role of the United Nations which, whatever its defects, has been seen as offering the best available protection against global anarchy.
Second, within Europe, the subordination of states' sovereignty vis-à-vis citizens to a supranational Court of Human Rights.
Third, the creation of a peace zone in western Europe in which the rule of law replaced war as the ultimate arm of policy.
Fourth, as part of the post-war process of abandonment of colonialism - a feature of Europe's past that had always been a bone of contention with Americans - there emerged a European commitment to large-scale civil development aid for the Third World.
Fifth, the abolition of capital punishment became a European requirement.
Sixth, deriving from Europe's extensive trade and development relations with the rest of the world, there emerged a European commitment to global ecology, in co-operation with developing countries.
Seventh, most recently, there has emerged a European willingness to render more acceptable the role of Europeans as peace-makers overseas by making the actions of their soldiers on such missions subject to international criminal law
These seven revolutionary developments in Europe's approach to international affairs have clearly taken our continent along a path no part of which has been followed by the US. Of course not all bear directly on Europe-US relations, to which, however, they provide an important backdrop. But some of them have proved important in the context of the Iraq crisis, for example:
The strong European commitment to international law and to the United Nations and its procedures;
The partial - in the case of some states complete - reorientation of European armies towards peacekeeping;
And perhaps also the European commitment to human rights, which has been challenged by the Guantanamo situation.
From the point of view of the US, which has undertaken the lead role in the effort to deal with international terrorism, the overall thrust of this changed European approach to international affairs may seem at times to be "wimpish", or even irritatingly self-righteous. Where the US has clearly been in error, however, is in its use of the term "Old Europe" in this connection: whatever may be thought of Europeans' response to the Iraq issue, that response came from a New Europe, not from an Old Europe.
Europe's instinctive reaction has been to try to get the transatlantic relationship back on to an even keel again as quickly as possible. But for the US the scale of the changes in Europe's international value system during the second half of the 20th century, little understood in the US, may make the mending of these fences a good deal more difficult.
However, post-war events in Iraq, which should have been but were not foreseen by the US, have recently begun to put pressure on their policymakers to move back towards a more multilateral approach to this, and perhaps eventually also to other international problems.
These are some of the issues that I shall be addressing during a US university lecture tour later this month. It will be interesting to see what response such reflections will evoke from American audiences.