Europe for the Right Reasons: A Conversation with Stanley Hoffmann

Stanley Hoffmann, a longtime New York Review contributor and professor of international relations at Harvard University, died on September 13. The following conversation is drawn from Michal Matlak’s unpublished interview with Hoffmann, which took place in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in December 2011.

Michal Matlak: Europe is not in good shape.

Stanley Hoffmann: Any American newspaper will tell you this. Those poor Europeans, they don’t know what they are doing! I am originally from France, and I recently went back to see some friends. It looked perfectly normal to me. They are not exactly doing brilliantly, but the notion that the whole thing will collapse, that there will be no EU, is plainly absurd. There are ups and downs—this is a period of down, but it is not the end of the story.

As a Pole I have to ask you about one of your Harvard colleagues, Zbigniew Brzezinski. Is Europe important to him?

I don’t think he has ever shown any interest in European unity. He was always fascinated by and worried about the Soviet Union and nothing else. I liked him very much. But then he was a great supporter of the Vietnam War which I thought was a disaster and unwinnable. Now he has completely changed. I don’t think he remembers that he was such a supporter of the war. I was quite surprised at a conference which took place in Berlin about ten years ago to hear Zbig explaining that what the US did in Vietnam was a form of colonialism. He would never have said that earlier. In other words he was wise enough to change his mind. We are exactly the same age.

Zbig is a complicated guy. There was this permanent battle that went on between Zbig, representing the hard line on Russia, and Cyrus Vance, who wanted more accommodation, more flexibility. And the relations between the two of them were just awful. The story of my department was, for years, the battle between Zbigniew and Henry Kissinger. The difference has been that Kissinger never took Zbigniew seriously, and Zbigniew could not tolerate Henry, because Henry was there always before Zbig in occupying the high positions. ...