Anti-Americanism versus Anti-Europeanism...
Presented with limited commentary, two articles about the relationship between Europe and America. One from the Washington Post (Politicians With Guts) that makes the stunning suggestion that a continent of states should make decisions on international politics based upon whether or not they owe the United States a favour for helping out in a war that ended sixty years ago, while simultaneously somehow suggesting that any disagreement with American foreign politics is tantamount to setting-up death-camps:
By using the word "generosity," they even implied that Europeans might now owe the United States a little generosity in return ... Britain's most gifted scholars sift through American writings about Europe searching for signs of derogatory "sexual imagery." In Paris, all the talk is of oil and "imperialism" (and Jews). In Madrid, it's oil, imperialism, past American support for Franco (and Jews).
The other article is from the New York Review of Books (Anti-Europeanism in America) which talks about the stereotypes of the European:
Europeans are wimps. They are weak, petulant, hypocritical, disunited, duplicitous, sometimes anti-Semitic and often anti-American appeasers. In a word: "Euroweenies." Their values and their spines have dissolved in a lukewarm bath of multilateral, transnational, secular, and postmodern fudge. They spend their euros on wine, holidays, and bloated welfare states instead of on defense. Then they jeer from the sidelines while the United States does the hard and dirty business of keeping the world safe for Europeans. Americans, by contrast, are strong, principled defenders of freedom, standing tall in the patriotic service of the world's last truly sovereign nation-state.
And gets to the crux of the issue:
Anti-Americanism and anti-Europeanism are at opposite ends of the political scale. European anti-Americanism is mainly to be found on the left, American anti-Europeanism on the right. The most outspoken American Euro-bashers are neoconservatives using the same sort of combative rhetoric they have habitually deployed against American liberals. In fact, as Jonah Goldberg himself acknowledged to me, "the Europeans" are also a stalking-horse for liberals. So, I asked him, was Bill Clinton a European? "Yes," said Goldberg, "or at least, Clinton thinks like a European."
Comments
Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.
William Pfaff has a great column in the IHT on this topic. I particularly like the fact that he points out one reason the Europeans try to avoid war: They have experienced it in ways the U.S. has not. Europe and America: Some know more about war
→ Posted by: barry at February 2, 2003 6:58 PM
Anti-Americanism, Anti-Europeanism, it's so much easier to attack stereotypes than it is to debate the issues isn't it? Find yourself a straw-man and a match and everyone will be so absorbed in the ensuing fire that they don't notice what's actually going on around them.
Of course, everybody knows New Zealanders are infinitely morally superior...
→ Posted by: Sarah at February 2, 2003 7:20 PM
There's a great deal of media indoctrination on both sides, as you might expect, particularly when it comes to the 'war debt' argument that Europe should blindly accept
As has been noted, not simply by the left, the US sat on its hands in the name of individual freedom from September 1939 to December 1941, and previously, from June 1914 to 1917; US losses on the WW2 battlefield were much lower than those of most European (and Asian) nations, with no mainland civilian attacks, and nothing like the devastation of either the Somme or Gallipoli or Stalingrad or... etc. In short, the last time Americans were killed en masse on home territory was when they were killing each other in the 1860s.
My attitude towards war is coloured by my grandparents' cultural memory of WW2, and by the historical legacy of the generation before that, and its experience of WW1. It's vindicated by that experience.
As for Kagan's particular piece of dreck, which is particularly distasteful for its waving the anti-Semitism shroud in the way that only Americans can: it's worth noting that he doesn't pay attention to the fact that at least three of the signatories of that particular letter have questionable pasts: the PMs of Poland and Hungary were Politburo apparatchiks, and Berlusconi is a crook with neo-fascist tendencies. (The Danish and Spanish PMs are also right-wing populists, the former being especially good at bashing immigrants. Gosh, where have we heard that before?)
Moral courage? My arse. 'Pettiness and insecurity'? No, not really: just the feeling that while Blair would need Dyno-Rod to extract his tongue from George Bush's behind, other leaders in Europe have captured the continent's mood and are actually fulfilling their mandate.
→ Posted by: nick sweeney at February 2, 2003 9:12 PM
Thanks for those links. Kagan and Garton-Ash have obviously been at odds for some time. I take it that the sneering reference in Kagan's WP article to 'Britain's most gifted scholars sift through American writings about Europe searching for signs of derogatory "sexual imagery".' refers back to Garton-Ash's NYRB piece.
Garton-Ash himself refers to Kagan's 'influential' paper Power and Weakness in Policy Review. Notice we're back to the dualism with which the issue seems to be plagued. Not quite as simplisticly offensive as 'you're either with us or against us' but for me perhaps even more worrying for being less crass. As far as the 'debt/gratitude' issue is concerned, my father talks about the debt Europe owes the US as a result of the Marshall Plan which helped rebuild Europe after the second World War. I do not agree that this act, which demanded no recompense, should now act as a moral pressure to make decisions some might regard as immoral. Whether the plan was motivated by altruism, enlightened self-interest or a clearly-focused eye on the main chance, it is interesting to compare that initiative with US efforts at 'nation-building' in Afghanistan: see http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/2405191.stm for instance - there are many more. Thanks for prompting me to organise my thoughts a bit on this (specially since my site's down and I can't do it there!).
→ Posted by: qB at February 3, 2003 12:00 PM
MORNING
I AM A STUDENT AT UNIVERSITY OF NORTH WEST (SOUTH AFRICA) I COULD LIKE YOU TO HELP ME IN THIS : AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN-THEIR ATTITUDES TO DEATH. BOTH SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES.
THANK YOU IN ADVANCE
→ Posted by: LEBOGANG at October 6, 2005 7:52 AM
Problems: Europeans think their opinion is fact.
Euros claim superiority through age but are at a complete loss to explain WWI WWII.
Euros do stick their noses in where they don't belong yet only blame America for this.
Example: death penalty, France invading and recolonizing Ivory Coast withoput U.N. permission at the same time USA invaded Iraq.
→ Posted by: john turner at March 16, 2007 1:44 AM