From: wolda002@umn.edu
Date: Sat Jul 17 2010 - 00:44:45 EDT
Venus Envy
America's ignorant, narcissistic anti-Europeanism is an embarrassment.
BY SIMON TISDALL | JULY 15, 2010
It fell to Barack Obama, as is often the case, to identify the problem.
But, as is often the case, he had no solution. Speaking in Strasbourg,
France, deep in the subsidized heartlands of the European Union in April
last year, Obama deplored a growing mutual antipathy, bordering on open
hostility, between Europe and America. Europeans were too often guilty of
an "insidious" anti-Americanism while Americans had at times "shown
arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive" of Europe's achievements.
To European ears, President Obama's analysis -- a characteristic piece of
consensus-building -- appeared wholly reasonable, even unexceptional. On
Thursday, Jose Barroso, president of the European Commission, indicated his
agreement, telling the British newspaper The Times, "The transatlantic
relationship is not living up to its potential."
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But in the United States, Obama's critique of American attitudes, his
studied humility, and his implicit apology for the overbearing behavior of
George W. Bush's administration was instantly condemned by some
commentators as an extraordinary, unprecedented betrayal, all the worse
because it was committed on foreign soil.
Beside himself with indignation, columnist and pundit Charles Krauthammer
led the charge on Fox News:
"Obama says, 'In America there is a failure to appreciate Europe's leading
role in the world.' Well, maybe that's because when there was a civil war
on Europe's doorstep in the Balkans, and genocide, it didn't lift a finger
until America led. Maybe it's because when there was an invasion of Kuwait
it didn't lift a finger until America led. Maybe it's because with America
spending over half a trillion a year, keeping open the sea lanes in
defending the world, Europe is spending pennies on defense. It's hard to
appreciate an entity's leading role in the world when it's been sucking on
your tit for 60 years."
Many Americans shared his fury. But in his eagerness to condemn Obama's
European "apology tour" (as former Bush advisor Karl Rove later dubbed it),
the spluttering Krauthammer inadvertently revealed that he suffered from
the very problem Obama was trying to address. After all, it is one thing to
disagree with a president and his policy. It is quite another to be so
bitterly and scathingly contemptuous of an entire continent and its people,
especially one that, for better or worse, is a historical ally and a close
political, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic relation.
Uncertain whether to laugh or cry, Europeans ask: Is this sort of thing to
be taken seriously? What is going on? For let's be honest: Krauthammer is a
bit of a clown. And he has a very European surname.
Seen from Europe, of which Britain is (arguably) a part, the roots of
American anti-Europeanism appear many and varied. At one end of the
spectrum, there is the widely shared view that Europe does not pull its
weight in a world that Washington would like to order according to its
lights. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the unpalatable fact of
widespread American ignorance, exacerbated by indifference, of all things
European.
Examples of the latter abound. While covering the siege of the Branch
Davidians in Waco, Texas, in 1993, a European reporter was asked in all
sincerity: "Is Sweden a country or a city?" In Richmond, Virginia, a cab
driver congratulated a visiting Briton on not having to bother about voting
or elections "because you've got the Queen." And then there was the
waitress in Arkansas who asked an unsuspecting Englishman: "What language
do you speak in your country?"
But historically, anti-Europeanism is hardly a new phenomenon. America's
first president warned against "permanent alliances" after successfully
conspiring in an alliance with the French against the British in the
Revolutionary War. President James Monroe issued his famous doctrine
expressly to keep the European powers out of a New World to which a then
much weaker Washington presumptuously laid claim. (Monroe neglected to
mention that it would for the most part be the British Royal Navy tasked
with enforcing his doctrine.)
Fear, envy, anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism, cultural
inferiority-superiority complexes, trade, political and military rivalries,
and America's quest for identity all fed anti-European feeling as the new
country sought to differentiate itself from the old countries whence most
of its people came. Many of these phenomena remain relevant today.
"Expressing one's anti-European sentiment can be a way of building up and
displaying one's American identity and patriotism," said Patrick Chamorel
in a European University Institute study published in Italy in 2004.
"Anti-Europeanism has always been part of American exceptionalism, which
defined itself in contrast to European history, politics, and society."
It would be easy for Europeans to shrug off America's Europhobic
generalizations and mischaracterizations if they were exclusive to
would-be-intellectual neoconservatives, Bible Belt evangelists, and
provincial Midwest xenophobes. But ever since the European Union dropped
the ball in the Balkans in the mid-1990s, a potent mix of influential
American thinkers, policymakers, and commentators have given
anti-Europeanism a new respectability that cannot be dismissed out of hand.
On the major issues that preoccupy Americans -- defense, security,
terrorism, intervention, free trade, sovereignty, and nationalism -- the
argument that Europe has lost its way has gained in influence. And as a
debt-laden European Union stares at the fiscal abyss, one can almost feel
the schadenfreude emanating from across the pond.
The American debate over Europe has waxed and waned over the past decade,
always unresolved, always infused with passion and fury. In The Last Days
of Europe: Epitaph for an Old Continent (2007), historian Walter Laqueur
summarized the case against. Europe is "in the process of disappearing" as
a force in the world, he argued, because political integration via the
European Union has stalled, welfare-state policies are unsustainable,
fertility rates are below replacement levels, and assimilation of
increasingly hostile and angry Muslim immigrant populations has failed.
Europe could not and would not defend itself, according to Laqueur. Bruce
Thornton's Gibbonesque Decline and Fall: Europe's Slow Motion Suicide also
offered a compilation of factors supposedly explaining the certain demise
of Europe's failed utopian experiment: sluggish, state-regulated economic
growth, high unemployment, high social entitlements, a mortifying museum
culture, and the abandonment of the Christian tradition, which encouraged
the growth of "pseudo-religions" -- among them environmentalism,
multiculturalism, and hedonism.
There has been a corresponding, if quiet, backlash in the United States
against native, anti-European sentiment. Strong support came from T.R.
Reid, a former Washington Post foreign correspondent, in his 2004 book, The
United States of Europe. Reid lauded in particular the advent of the common
currency -- the euro -- and the creation of a European Constitution,
evidence in his view of a growing European ascendancy. Others, such as
Jeremy Rifkin and Steven Hill, were similarly enthusiastic in writing about
the advent of "Generation E" -- younger Europeans who disregard national
boundaries to embrace an empowering common culture.
American writer Robert Kagan famously synthesized the conflicting views in
his influential 2002 "Mars and Venus" essay in Policy Review. "It is time
to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the
world, or even that they occupy the same world," he said. One inhabited a
fantasyland of laws, the other a land governed by the law of the jungle.
But Kagan's summary was ultimately too blithe to sustain serious scrutiny.
Can Kagan account for how exactly the two irreconcilable "sides" he
sketches managed to swap roles over the past hundred years? Just as the
European great powers of the 19th century used brute force to impose their
imperial will and vision while the priggishly constitutional United States
kept its hands clean and looked on (and grew stronger and richer under
Britain's de facto protection), so now does the United States wield the
hammer while the Europeans look askance, all the time benefiting from
Washington's security umbrella.
Moreover, Kagan failed to foresee the inherent weaknesses of each side's
arguments. The European collectivist "soft power" model is under serious
challenge after the near implosion of the European Union's vaunted
Constitution and amid bitter argument over Greece's bankruptcy bailout and
the euro's possible collapse. The American "hard power" model has been
undermined by the U.S. military's inability to "win" two major wars, in
Iraq and Afghanistan, and by the global financial crisis, a capitalist
heart attack from which the patient has yet to recover.
Ultimately, though, foreign-policy preferences aren't the greatest
instigator of the persistent transatlantic culture clash. Of all the
differences Americans perceive in Europe, it's the old continent's moral
decadence that seems to enrage them the most. It's that ethical lament
that's the most intractable rift because it's not a policy debate at issue,
but the status of one's own way of life. Citing conservatives such as
Richard Perle who noisily lamented Europe's loss of "moral compass" and
France's loss of "moral fiber," Timothy Garton Ash succinctly summarized in
the New York Review of Books the widespread American stereotype of
Europeans as godless wimps during the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war. "They
[the Europeans] are weak, petulant, hypocritical, disunited, duplicitous,
sometimes anti-Semitic and often anti-American appeasers," Garton Ash wrote
of America's implicit disdain for its allies. Social trends seem to
constantly reinforce that opinion. Rising secularism and spreading,
ultraliberal social attitudes in Europe contrast ever more sharply with a
perceived new American Puritanism.
As Obama said, it's a shame we can't just get along. Given the way the
globalized world is placing increasing stress on international cooperation,
given the way absolute U.S. power is retreating as the unipolar moment
fades, and given the way China and other rising 21st-century powers are
challenging the current balance of power and the values and beliefs that
underpin it, Europe and America will inevitably need each other more and
more. It's a stormy marriage, but a marriage all the same. And the
alternatives are all worse.
But, hey, that's just a liberal Euroweenie speaking, right? I would think
of it as a pragmatic, realpolitik viewpoint, but it could be mistaken for
appeasement, which would never do in the United States. In the words of an
email I once received from a reader in New York, "Don't forget who saved
your ass twice, buddy. If it wasn't for the good ole US of A you'd all be
speaking German!"
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