"The United States and the European Union have become an arena of interesting developments, political as well as cultural, in the post-communist, post-1989 world. The issues concern such fundamental problems as the meaning of the West, the unity or discontinuity between the European and American civilizations, attitudes to the crises of modernity, attitudes to modernization of the East-European part of the European Union. There are several interrelated problems here. One is the hegemonic status of the United States. The challenge for America is to find military and political means to secure its national interests without provoking an anti-US across-the-board coalition, and without subordinating its sovereign, constitutionally established power, to international law, institutions, and powerful NGOs with their own interests and ideological agendas. With this goes a crucial issue of how to combine this hegemonic status with the soft cultural power: not the unchallenged mass culture, but ‘culture’ understood as the American metaphor of democracy, republican participation against post-political bureaucratic tendencies, religious freedom and plurality, freedom of opportunity and solidarity as opposed to the mindless pursuit of equality – mechanical and based on resentment. The other problem concerns the claim of the European Union, even if recently muffled, to form itself into a new and morally higher civilization not just in terms of economic growth, but as an ideological and cultural model of the first post-national, post-political and post-metaphysical empire based on the administration of human rights."(...)