World Policy

World Policy Journal
Volume XVII, No 2, Summer 2000

 

What Europeans Think of America
By Martin Walker

 

The traveler heading south from Paris to Toulouse and Spain no longer needs to thread the streets of the old Gallo-Roman city of Perigueux, marvel at the many domes of its cathedral and ponder the establishment, this far to the west, of a building so evidently Byzantine in inspiration. Instead, the Route Nationale runs south from the fabled oak forests of the Limousin, whose trees to this day provide the casks that endow Chardonnay, Cognac, and the better malt whiskies with their distinctive woody flavor, and skirts Perigueux in a great loop.

At the principal intersection of this ring road, where the roads go west to Bordeaux, south to Spain, or east to the distant industrial city of Clermont-Ferrand, sprawls a gigantic shopping complex. Its approach is signaled by car dealerships and warehouses selling instant kitchens and bathrooms. There are huge furniture stores, a monster supermarket, discount clothing shops, garden centers, and endless car parks. The mall is anchored on the one side by a McDonalds and on the other by a red-roofed building that sports a jaunty set of cow's horns stretching perhaps 30 feet in length and proclaiming this to be Buffalo Bill's Steakhouse.

Toto, I don't think we're in France anymore. In fact, young Judy Garland would feel quite at home in this little patch of Kansas in Perigord. This is the mall architecture, and even the brand names, of middle America. But go back into the town of Perigueux, past the market stalls where they sell cheap copies of Levi jeans and Nike trainers, and the music stands blare out French rap, and into the bookshop behind the cathedral. Instead of closing its doors promptly at the end of the working day, it is holding one of its regular evenings à l'Americaine, with glasses of wine and coke, and pretzels, while an author talks to customers about his book and signs the copies they buy.

Or go south to the old inland port of Bergerac, whence the great wine barges have taken their cargo down the Dordogne River to the quays of Bordeaux since Roman times, and learn that the new white wine that is winning all the prizes and getting the write-ups in the Guide Hachette is called Château de la Jaubertie. It is owned and run by Hugh Ryman, an Englishman who made his fortune in the stationery business, went off to Australia and California to learn how to make wines, and imported New World equipment and winemakers to this most traditional part of la France profonde. His venture has been a triumphant success, in part because it goes so well with the new dishes like blackened tuna with kiwi fruit that have invaded the menus of this ancient heartland of the truffle and foie gras.

 

What's New

It is an oddly schizoid experience to live in Europe these days. It is a place where more and more people live and work and eat and dress and relax like Americans, while exercising considerable ingenuity in finding new complaints about the United States. Critics of the cliché that Europe and America share a common democratic value system cite America's use of the death penalty and its addiction to handguns, its draconian rules against smoking, and its cult of political correctness. They compare the power of the Christian Coalition in American politics with the very different political pattern in Europe, where parties emerging from the fringe into the mainstream include French, Italian, and German communists, Jörg Haider's right-wing Austrian Freedom Party, and Mussolini's heirs in Italy. The contrast is startling between the enthusiasm with which most Europeans welcome the cheapness and convenience of their increasingly suburban lifestyles and the grumpiness in the public discourse about their cultural source. It's not enough to say that America is far less popular than its products; it probably always has been. But there is something new in the mix.

Take, for example, a letter written by a young American student, who witnessed demonstrations by Austrians in Vienna four days after the NATO bombing of Serbia began, and published in the Harvard Salient: "There was little of America to be seen. Except for our flag lying on the ground covered with spittle.... The posters grew increasingly threatening: 'USA = Nazi,' '1939 = Hitler, 1999 = Clinton, Jews = Then, Serbia = Now....' These could have been young American children by the way they looked; their hearts and minds, however, are a world away." 1

Or take another example from a rather more mature source, a former minister in the Socialist government of Greece, George Mangakis, writing in Eleftherotypia last November, on the eve of Clinton's scheduled visit to Greece: "We are exasperated at the very thought of the U.S. President's presence that will contaminate the blood-sanctified soil of our motherland. We forbid him to set foot on Pnyka Hill, the temple of democracy, and in the Parthenon, the temple of ineffable beauty. We regret that the Greek government ignores the feelings of the Greek people towards a murderer of people, ideals, values, beauty, and life. We are proud that once again the Greek people resists and fights against the threat of barbarism and will thus mobilize against the visit of this lord of the planet." 2

Americans should be accustomed to this by now. Anti-Americanism has been a part of Europe's cultural furniture for 50 years and longer. For every admiring Tocqueville, there was always a Heinrich Heine mocking American democracy as the place where "the most repulsive of tyrants, the populace, hold vulgar sway." Within living memory, British civilians during the Second World War complained that their allies were "overpaid, over-sexed, and over here." The National Assembly voted to outlaw Coca-Cola throughout France and its colonial possessions, even as those colonies were being reoccupied with American arms and loans, and as the Marshall Plan was being drafted.

France has always been unique, in that its governments have been ready to lend some official endorsement to a suspicion of America that elsewhere in Europe has long been officially muted. In 1992, during the national referendum on the Maastricht Treaty to approve European economic and monetary union, the French government's main poster calling for a "yes" vote featured an American in cowboy hat squashing the globe; the slogan read "Faire l'Europe, c'est faire le poids." Building Europe gives us some weight.

Some of this is to be expected. Europeans have always resented the strongest power on the block, and at various times the arrogant Spaniard, the bullying German, the patronizing Frenchman, and perfidious Albion have played that scapegoat role that Americans have filled since 1945. But some striking new features have emerged in recent years, which appear to break down into four main attitudes. They may be summarized as a series of resentments: of America's traditional military power; of its new economic-technological power; of its cultural influence; and in a distinctly new feature, of the force of its political example.

Before analyzing these resentments in turn, some crucial elements of the background should be stressed. Europe no longer lives under the shadow of the Cold War and the threat of Soviet power, and this essential glue of the Atlantic Alliance has lost its hold. Germany is no longer divided and has been increasingly free in the past decade to act as a normal nation-state. However, a combination of habit and economic difficulties and internal politics have restrained successive German governments from trying to exercise that political dominance its economic weight might imply. The European experiment has taken on a tangible new form with the launch of the single currency, the euro, although its feeble performance in the currency markets suggests that considerable doubts remain. So they should; despite cyclical economic recovery and the boost given to exports by the weak euro, unemployment in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remains at or above 10 percent of the workforce.

Another important factor is that Britain is no longer semi-detached from its partners in the European Union (EU). Despite its reluctance (because of an economic cycle more in tune with the American than with the European mainland's, as well as for domestic political reasons) to join the single currency regime, the Blair government is determined to demonstrate its strategic commitment to Europe in other ways. The new attempt to create an autonomous EU defense capability began as a British initiative, breaking with 50 years of devotion to the "special relationship" with the United States, which required that any such European effort be interpreted as a dire threat to NATO.

Finally, the traditional custodian and locomotive of the European idea, the Brussels-based European Commission, has been badly weakened and discredited by a series of scandals over fraud and mismanagement, which in 1999 forced the resignation of all 20 commissioners. The subsequent attempt to reinvigorate the commission with the appointment of the respected former Italian premier Romano Prodi has faltered, amid repeated rumors of palace coups against him. 3

 

The American Way

There are also three ephemeral but probably important foreground features that have colored European attitudes to America in the immediate past. The first was the unsuccessful impeachment of President Clinton for lying about his sexual dalliance with a young aide, Monica Lewinsky. The response in Europe, which likes to pride itself on a certain sophistication in romantic matters and takes both infidelities and discretion about them to be fairly natural, was broadly one of amused bafflement. One very senior French politician was heard at a private dinner party to say, "Of course, the Monica nonsense could never happen in Europe. We have our little lady friends, but we feed them better, we dress them better, we treat them better-and we keep them quiet." 4 But the Lewinsky affair did serve to emphasize the profound distinctions between the European and American cultures. A much more devout and church-going country than any in Europe, America likes to hold its presidents to a high and exemplary standard, and takes lying on oath-even about a sexual peccadillo-very seriously.

The second, and by far the more important, factor in coloring European attitudes in 1999 was the bombing of Serbia. This controversial operation showed that even with precision weapons, aerial bombing remains a blunt and uncertain instrument that has traditionally proved more likely to rally patriotic unity among the bombed than to intimidate them into surrender. Although all the European NATO governments supported the operation, there were strong political reservations about its legality, its utility, and its morality. There were also widespread demonstrations after the accidental attack on a refugee column whose tractors may have been mistaken for tanks.

The final foreground factor, which I shall analyze in some detail later, is political. But during the Kosovo crisis, it is important to remember that Bill Clinton was the beneficiary of some unusually warm personal relations with European leaders. Just as NATO diplomacy in the 1980s was eased by the political sympathies between President Reagan, Mrs. Thatcher, and, to a lesser degree, Chancellor Kohl, in the late 1990s President Clinton had the benefit of congenial center-left political counterparts across most of Europe. They included the leaders of Britain, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Finland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, and, to a lesser extent, France. While there was a distinct lack of personal chemistry between Bill Clinton and French premier Lionel Jospin, French president Jacques Chirac, who had learned his English as a student in the United States, where he had served hamburgers in a Howard Johnson restaurant, got on well with his American colleague.

The effect of these personal relationships at the highest political level was to mask the very real tensions the Kosovo operation had provoked among the European public. Feeling that their own governments were being too subservient to Washington, many European antiwar demonstrators took out their venom on America, which helps explain the burning of American flags in Vienna recorded above and the viciousness of the Greek attack on President Clinton. Antiwar sentiment over Kosovo and Serbia combined with the longer-running resentment of the human costs of the U.S.-led sanctions against Iraq. These and the simultaneous resentments over US exports of genetically modified foods led to some of the most intense anti-American demonstrations in Europe since the installation of Cruise and Pershing missiles in the early 1980s. In both Brussels and London, I saw demonstrators carrying placards charging that Clinton "bombs Serb children, starves Iraqi babies, and poisons our kids."

With these background and foreground factors in mind, let us consider the curious alchemy of resentments.

 

Resentment of Traditional Power

The French have a word for it: hyperpuissance, or hyperpower, coined by Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine to suggest that the current simultaneous American predominance in military, economic, cultural, and technological affairs is unique-and therefore a new term was required to encompass it. More immediately, this reflects the fact that the US military could quite probably take on all of the rest of the world's military forces at the same time and beat them with ease. And so it should, given that the United States spends more on defense than the next nine biggest military powers combined. This would only be a problem if the United States showed a desire to achieve such a triumph, which it does not, or to claim the spoils by acting as if it had already done so.

The United States, despite some ridiculous and mean-spirited congressional posturing over the United Nations, does not behave in such a way. It is a country that temporarily enjoys a military predominance unmatched since the days of ancient Rome, but with neither the political will nor the cold-eyed tradition of realpolitik to use it. This is just as well, since both the Gulf War and the Serbian bombing campaign (and the Russian difficulties in Chechnya) revealed the limits of the military instrument. The US military is designed to defeat other armies in the field, not to impose its will on the populations of other countries. And before taking Vedrine's rhetoric too seriously, ponder whether even today's mighty Pentagon would dare risk a land war in Asia.

What really irritates the French foreign minister is something else, which he expressed in a long conversation with journalists last December 14 in Paris. Discussing the European Union's plans to develop its own autonomous defense capability, he said: "In the American suspicion of European defense, there is an initial aspect which we can't accept, which has to be got over, and that is a sort of determination to be top dog.... In my recent address to the French Institute of International Relations I wondered aloud whether the US, which is so powerful, can or cannot accept having real partners, which isn't so easy when your country is so much more powerful than others. I added: we want to believe that it can." 5

Vedrine put this another way in a speech to French diplomats shortly after he took office in 1997. "There is only one great power nowadays, the United States, but unless it is counter-balanced, that power brings with it the risk of monopoly domination." His answer was to propose that France should take the lead in a European Union which "must gradually affirm itself as a centre of power." 6 Vedrine is a subtle fellow, who has subsequently suggested that the American courtship of China and support for its entry into the World Trade Organization shows that the United States believes that there should be a multipolar rather than unipolar world. And at their Helsinki summit in December 1999, the EU leaders sought to address the main American concerns about ESDI (European Security and Defense Identity), stressing that it would reinforce rather than replace NATO, and that the EU nations would improve their defense capabilities. They also met another longstanding US strategic concern by formally accepting Turkey as a candidate for EU membership.

The resentment of America is not purely a French phenomenon. Former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt was bitterly critical of the way the failure of American diplomacy at the Rambouillet negotiations on Kosovo led NATO into the bombing campaign against Serbia. "Held on a leash by the Americans, we have violated international law and the charter of the United Nations," said Schmidt, whose Atlanticist credentials-as the man who called in 1979 for Cruise and Pershing missiles to be stationed in his country-are impeccable. 7 Michael Steiner, the foreign policy adviser to Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, reacted angrily this year when the United States blocked the initial German candidate to be the new International Monetary Fund managing director: "We have discovered that the superpower sees its global role not only in the military area but also in setting the rules of globalization through the IMF," he said. 8

Even former British foreign minister Douglas Hurd, a devout Atlanticist, noted in February this year: "A valid Atlantic partnership cannot safely depend on a unique superpower one side of the Atlantic, with an array of Europeans on the other side, strong in rhetoric, but chronically short of coherence and muscle.... To some extent, the Americans have us both ways. If Europe became strong and determined in defence matters, some Americans would use this as a reason for withdrawal from Europe. Yet the same lesson might be drawn if Europe continued as feckless and idle as many American commentators believe we are." 9

 

Divide (and Rule)

A further argument is now looming over US proposals to proceed with antimissile defenses. Russia opposes the adjustments to the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty this would involve, a view shared by the EU governments. But as usual, Britain is tending to the American rather than the European view, after conversations between President Clinton and Prime Minister Tony Blair, who have agreed in principle to incorporate the Royal Air Force's Fylingdales early warning station in Yorkshire into the US system. The crucial small print, on the degree to which Britain will get compensating protection for the consequent risk, and a share of the technology and manufacturing, has yet to be hammered out. But the almost automatic way in which Britain likes to accede to US wishes, and the degree to which British Aerospace is now seen by the Pentagon as an honorary American corporation, points to the ease with which the United States can divide (and rule) the Europeans. It also points to the limits of Blair's ability to demonstrate his European credentials by playing the defense card, and triggers visceral Gaullist suspicions of "les Anglo-Saxons." 10

What Europeans want is some respect, rather more consultation, and some American reassurance that they will be treated as allies and partners rather than as satellites. Traditionally in NATO, American diplomats and soldiers have been rather good at this, since NATO is a body that operates by consensus and one dissenting voice can stall the entire alliance. But building an autonomous EU defense capability does raise the question of whether the United States will have a veto over EU operations. In practical terms it will, since for the foreseeable future any EU operation will require the loan of NATO assets.

But in the very distant future, a nuclear-armed Europe could become a serious and independent global strategic player. It is not outlandish to suggest that such a development might get the Pentagon's mind turning toward the kind of worst-case scenario contingency plans that had the US navy of the 1920s assuming that one potential enemy could be the British fleet.

 

Resentment of Techno-economic Power

American military power is sustained and enhanced by a technological supremacy whose effects range far beyond any putative battlefield. The use of computerized combat and logistics support, satellites, and encrypted communications, and their convergence into a coherent battlefield system, is quite simply a generation ahead of anything else on the planet. This has its parallel in the sinews of the New Economy. Finland may have in proportion slightly more Internet users than the United States. The European GMS cell phone system may be far superior to the US variant. And British and German (and Indian) software may be a match for its American competition. But no other country can emulate the way in which the United States has blended marketing, venture capital, stock control, out-sourcing, online purchasing, and e-commerce into a coherent system.

This means that Americans are writing the rules of the New Economy, from security standards to credit controls, while American banks and companies are establishing a dominance over the commanding heights of this emerging global market. Microsoft is the world's operating system; Amazon is its bookstore; Cisco builds the switches. Above all, America issues the patents, twice as many as Europe, and writes loose new rules that make it much faster to turn innovating ideas into bankable intellectual property. For example, the US Patent Office has granted a patent to Amazon.com for the one-click order technology. Under international rules, this patent must be recognized in European courts, even though European rules would not allow this process to be patented.

One telling sign of the resentment this provokes came at the special technology summit attended by all 15 EU heads of government in Lisbon in March 2000. In the course of a long communiqué on the structural and regulatory reforms the EU would need to join the New Economy-including an end to charging for local phone calls, which has been a serious obstacle to Internet penetration-the EU leaders managed to avoid any reference to the United States at all. One sardonic commentator noted that this was rather like rewriting the Bible while avoiding any reference to God. 11

The speed with which this American techno-commercial dominance has come about has been stunning. Ten years ago, it seemed as if Toyota and Honda and Nissan would dominate global auto markets for years to come. The big three are now General Motors, Ford, and Daimler-Chrysler. The resilience of the old American economy has been quite as dramatic as the vigor of the new one. The European response has been, if you can't beat them, join them. The Germans have bought American banks and car makers. The Dutch have bought American insurance companies. The British have bought American oil corporations and telecommunications networks. The French have bought American concrete and plastic manufacturers, construction firms, and software houses. The result has been that US exports to the EU have gone from $76 billion in 1990 to over $400 billion in 1999. EU exports to the United States have grown in parallel, and when their investments in one another's economies are added to the trade figures, the total economic relationship of the EU and the United States is now running at almost $2 trillion a year. 12

This has been healthy for both sides. But while Europeans know they can compete in luxury cars, media, and financial services, they fear that they will lose a crucial step as they try to compete in a New Economy in which the rules have already been written by their main competitor.

This has been most apparent in the agricultural sector, which is where the most serious EU-U.S. trade skirmishes tend to take place because government subsidies are so important to agriculture (as they are in aerospace, another regular bone of contention). We have had the beef-hormone row, the battle of the bananas (which neither the EU nor the United States grows), and most serious of all, the clash over GMOs (genetically modified organisms). Trade rows seldom get terribly serious, at least beyond the trenches where the rival companies and bureaucrats fight hand to hand, but the GMO issue was different because it combined bureaucratic attrition with legal assault, and above all because it involved a new technology and a profound cultural difference. European consumers rejected products containing GMOs, their supermarket chains responded by refusing to stock them, and the ever-inventive British press came up with the killer phrase, "Frankenstein foods." Perhaps forgetting that the apple industry of Washington State was almost wiped out by the Alar scare, the US corporation Monsanto (which had almost bet the company on GMOs) charged that this represented illegal and improper European protectionism aimed at buying time for Europe's own agribusiness to catch up. There may be something in this. Certainly the British Ministry of Agriculture is proceeding with its own cautious experiments with GMO crops. But it is having great difficulty in recruiting the 96 experimental farms it seeks. The resistance, among farmers and consumers alike, is real.

 

Resentment of Cultural Influence

Now that the new Disneyland outside Paris is making profits, that monstrous phrase, "a cultural Auschwitz," is no longer heard. And American cultural predominance is no longer what it was even five years ago, when the church authorities of Notre Dame de Paris reached a deal with Disney for joint ticketing services for the cathedral, the Disney film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, and the amusement park. Today, Disney is closing its three stores in Germany, and its share price has slumped. The penetration of English is lagging, now that MTV broadcasts music videos in French and German. The hot new television show in America is "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" (from Britain), which is soon to be joined on the air by the exotic Dutch dating show in which a woman is chained to five men for four days at a time. She cuts one loose a day until she is left with the swain of her choice. The global sports team is neither the Redskins nor the Atlanta Braves but the English soccer giant Manchester United. French-made movies, from Asterix the Gaul to Joan of Arc have been doing well enough at the box office to relax earlier French panics over the Hollywood invasion.

Moreover, Hollywood studios are now owned by Japanese and Australian corporations, just as Germany's Bertelsmann, Britain's Pearson, and Australia's NewsCorp dominate US publishing, Japan's Sony Music and Britain's Capitol Records dominate the music industry, and kids in Europe and the United States alike buy Japanese Pokemon toys.

American cultural dominance is, or ought to be, outdated news. But it retains its force as a vector of anti-American sentiment because it, along with GMOs and Microsoft and American Express, can all be wrapped up and condemned with the single term "globalization." No matter that Japan's Sony, Germany's Mercedes, Britain's Vodafone, and Italy's Benetton are all unindicted co-conspirators of the globalizing wave. And no matter that by far the most passionate and successful opposition to globalization erupted in the United States, at the 1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle.

 

A Global Culture?

"Globalization is frequently analyzed by the French as meaning Americanization," acknowledges the current French ambassador to Washington, François Bujon de l'Estang. "But the real issue is the prospect of uniformity of values, culture, economy, social structures, everything. That is perceived as a threat, and I suppose that is not surprising for a country with a long and proud history and a very rich culture. No one wants uniformity, a sort of global culture." 13

Up to a point, Mr. Ambassador. Presumably, we all want a universal code of human rights, and a sufficiently uniform system of international law so that genocides may be deterred, war criminals punished, and ethnic cleansers and rapists face justice. And it is fair to ask whether, in the case of China or Serbia for example, there might be unsavory reasons for resisting this kind of globalization of justice and rights, which dates back to the United Nations Charter. It is also worth noting that the United States has been one of the less reliable members of the United Nations, and that it was America that torpedoed the International Criminal Tribunal, largely for fear that its generals might some day be held legally liable for actions committed by their troops. This is one aspect of globalization where the United States may be counted among the resisters. 14

The globalization debate should not be difficult. We already have an international example of the kind of globalization we all find useful, under which citizens of the globe may fly anywhere, in reasonable assurance that an agreed and voluntary code of rules will minimize accidents. The air traffic control system allows big planes and small ones, fast ones and slow ones, military and civilian, and privately or publicly owned ones to fly wherever, whenever, and as rarely or frequently as they wish. There is some loss of pilot sovereignty in agreeing to abide by air traffic instructions in airports and in crowded airlanes, and the universal language of the airways is English. But on the whole, it works.

Unfortunately, these are not the terms in which globalization is currently being debated. As US ambassador to France, Felix Rohatyn, said recently: "The anti-Americanism today encompasses not a specific policy like Iranian sanctions but a feeling that globalization has an American face and is a danger to the European and French view of society. There is the sense that America is such an extraordinary power that it can crush everything in its way. It is more frustration and anxiety now than plain anti-Americanism." 15

Note the ambassador's use of the terms "a feeling" and "a sense." We are dealing here with the unquantifiable, with subjective moods rather than objective facts. It is tempting to assume that we are witnessing here a pathology, perhaps even a recessive gene that lets some Europeans leap upon any new bandwagon that can plausibly be deemed a vehicle for anti-Americanism.

America is paying the price of its success. Now that the Clinton boom has become the longest sustained period of economic expansion in history, there is no more of that Schadenfreude that relished the way Japan was buying up Manhattan real estate in the late 1980s. As the euro droops against the dollar, the haughty ease with which European finance ministers could lecture Americans about the destabilizing effects of US budget deficits seems to have come in another era. In fact, with the Vietnam War long over and the Cold War safely won, and race relations in the United States showing distinctly more signs of improvement that those in France, Spain, or Germany, the themes and rhetoric of anti-Americanism have been changing in significant ways.

The death penalty is one example, although France retained the guillotine until the Mitterrand presidency, and it remains on the statute book in Britain for high treason. Other than his ancestry, the single fact about presidential candidate George W. Bush that is most likely to be known to a European is that he has authorized over 100 executions in Texas. America's gun laws, its health system, the high costs of and damages awarded under its legal system, and the oddities thrown up by its attempt to civilize the national discourse through political correctness all inspire jibes and sneers. Certainly, now that the Vietnam War and the civil rights struggle are no longer available to justify anti-American demonstrations, Europeans have been ingenious in finding rather less obvious targets.

No Thanks, Uncle Sam, a new book published in France this year by Noel Mamere and Olivier Warin (which has caused more of a stir in the US media than in the French), lists a range of complaints, from the Senate's rejection of the Comprehensive Test-Ban Treaty to the European Parliament's inquiry into allegations that the United States is bugging Europe's governments, companies, and individuals. "It is appropriate to be downright anti-American," the book concludes, after savaging the gun laws, the gaps in health insurance, and the "racism" of the criminal justice system. 16 But bear in mind that French government ministers and commentators have this year savaged Britain's property prices, its public transport, and its national health service in equally pungent terms. The reason for their pique was that the lovely French model who was chosen last year to be the new "Marianne," the visual representation of France, decided to live in London, apparently for tax reasons.

"Relations with the US always seem to reflect a mixture of fascination, sympathy, admiration and exasperation," notes Foreign Minister Vedrine. And for every critical book, one can cite a work of admiration, like Jonathan Freedland's Bring Home the Revolution. This English reporter argues that Britain needs the modernizations, the federalism, the antitrust and tort and presidential primary systems of America, along with the commitment to individual freedom and democracy that Tom Paine took to its shores over 200 years ago and which helped inspire the American Revolution.

 

Resentment of Political Example

One factor that appears wholly new in this current wave of anti-Americanism is the political dimension. In the past, this was muted because anti-American sentiments were to be found on the patriotic right, where de Gaulle and Enoch Powell complained that Americans were seeking to undermine the colonial empires, as much as on the left, which criticized Americans for different reasons. No doubt, on occasion some of their critiques of US support for unsavory but anticommunist regimes helped to reinforce the Soviet bloc's wider propaganda efforts during the Cold War. Today, although the colonies and the Soviet Union have all disappeared, this curious bipartisan criticizing of America remains. European conservatives attack America for undermining their proud national cultures. Socialists attack it for running an economic system that is unfair to the poor. Greens attack it for being the archpolluter and for dragging its heels over ratifying the Kyoto Convention on global warming.

But two new factors are at work. The first involves corruption and campaign finance. One of the remarkable features of the scandal concerning the secret donations to the Christian Democratic Union under the leadership of Chancellor Helmut Kohl was the way in which the European press frequently referred to "American practices." American money could not be blamed, nor American corrupters (unlike in the famous Lockheed bribery scandal), but the American system of campaign finance was put in the dock.

This is curious, since apart from federal matching funds for official presidential candidates, the US government does not use taxpayers' money to finance political parties and candidates. Germany does. Nonetheless, the implication was that a European innocence had been corrupted in the Kohl affair, and it was somehow the Americans' fault, just as the steady fall in voter turnout (barely 50 percent in the last European Parliament elections) suggested that the heirs of Athenian democracy were falling into bad American habits.

The second factor has been the erosion of social democracy. In the election year of 1992, when the slogan of the fleetingly successful former senator Paul Tsongas was "the Cold War is over-and Japan won," the most admired model for the Democratic challengers was European social democracy. Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas made a national health insurance system, modeled loosely on those of Britain and Germany, into a central feature of his campaign. He attacked the incumbent Bush administration's neglect of the economy as a dereliction of an elementary duty of government.

Clinton's proposed remedy was to inject some classically Keynesian public spending into the economy in the form of a "stimulus package" along with strategic state investments. 17 But once in office, President Clinton disavowed this traditional social democratic nostrum and followed the advice of his central banker, Alan Greenspan, to raise taxes, attack the deficit, and enter the virtuous circuit of the market's reward for orthodoxy, gaining his stimulus from a rapid fall in interest rates. What followed was the longest sustained period of economic growth in the history of the United States, and "social democracy" has virtually disappeared from the American political vocabulary.

 

The Last Hurrah of Social Democracy

1992 campaign may thus go down in history as the last hurrah of the social democratic wave. It had governed Western Europe since the aftermath of the Second World War, and had been in slightly paler form the guiding principle of the American political economy from the era of the New Deal to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. Eight years after Clinton's election, the Europeans too have steadily, and in some cases stealthily, begun to dismantle their once-admired social democratic system. Tony Blair's New Labour government has surrendered the power to set interest rates to the Bank of England, just as the United States grants it to the Fed. It has copied Clinton's Earned Income Tax Credit, to give tax rebates so that even the poorest families with one working member do not fall below the poverty line, and introduced workfare as a replacement for welfare.

Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder, who campaigned on the Clinton-Blair model by appealing to the Neue Mitte, the New Center, has cut taxes and launched an ambitious program of welfare reform. Above all, he accepted that shareholders, rather than some presumed national interest, should decide whether the giant Mannesmann communications group could be sold to Britain's Vodaphone.

Even in France, where the rhetoric of the Jospin government has been most resistant to the Third Way, the pace of privatization of state assets has been stepped up. And the controversial decision to cut the working week to 35 hours (without pay cuts) has become the occasion for a wholesale restructuring of the labor force by French management.

What was once called the "Rhineland model," for the ways in which German Social and Christian Democrats and French Gaullists and Socialists alike all embraced a broadly social democratic system of mixed economies, generous welfare, and considerable state direction, is changing beyond recognition. All in all, European governments have embraced Clinton's conversion to free markets, more free trade, reform of their once-generous welfare systems, privatization of state-owned enterprises, tax cuts, deregulation, and the pursuit of the New Economy.

Social democracy was originally portrayed as a pragmatic yet principled middle course between socialist rigor and ruthless capitalism. Similarly, the "Third Way" that Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and various other European leaders have been exploring in a well-publicized series of seminars since 1997 may itself be seen as a compromise between traditional social democracy and the free market messianism of the Reagan-Thatcher years. The ideology is of some interest, but it is the cultural and international implications of this change that are compelling.

Just as Euruope takes its security system, its fast food, its films and, increasingly, its television programs, its jeans and baseball caps, its rap music, and its computer software from America, it now also takes its political fashions from the across the Atlantic. The continent that gave the world the nation-state and the balance of power, Marxism and fascism, Social Democracy and Christian Democracy, Colbert and Keynes, and the welfare state and the state enterprise is now reduced to importing its political concepts from America.

 

Living Well

The essence of European attitudes toward America as the new millennium opens is a broad resentment that almost no field of human activity is left that is not dominated by the military, economic, cultural, technological, and political hyperpower. American products and services, and American manners have penetrated every aspect of European life, while luring away many of the cleverest and most ambitious of its students to American business and graduate schools. The complaint deserves some respect, but also some balance at a time when the annual meeting of the Oxford-Cambridge Club of Washington, D.C. can assemble a president, the top White House aides, cabinet members, nine senators, and a quorum of the Supreme Court.

But then anti-Americanism, rather like the anti-Semitism it sometime resembles, has never depended on rational explanations. Even the volatility of the Nasdaq stock exchange, the legal dismantling of Microsoft, the defeat of Monsanto, the outselling of Boeing by Europe's Airbus, and the Daimler-Chrysler takeover have not changed the psychological aspect of the phenomenon. And even in metaphor, it is foolish business to apply psycho-analytical terms to a country, let alone to 15 of them.

However, it seems evident that there is a love-hate process at work, a conflict between attraction and revulsion. A cynic might suggest that Europeans are looking for ways to conceal their envy with scorn. A pragmatist might suggest that Americans recall some of their own "Jap-bashing" rhetoric of the late 1980s, when Japan seemed fated to become the world's leading economy.

A realist would end on a cautionary note. This is a time when the basic building blocks of global society are changing fast. Japan is no longer seen as an ever-richer threat. The EU is now looking rather more convincing as something greater than the sum of its nation-state parts. The Soviet Union, whose challenge in the late 1940s foreclosed the option of an American return to its isolationist traditions, no longer exists.

There is no guarantee that America, as we think of it in the year 2000, will be immune from such changes. America's current military status is a hangover from its success in the Cold War, and the country may yet revert to its pre-1940 detachment, or choose to plow a unilateralist furrow rather than endure the taunts and jibes of its supposed allies in Europe. America in the year 2020 will be demographically more Hispanic and more Asian, and proportionally less European, in heritage. In this sense, a future America may perceive different strategic self-interests, to the degree that a European Union in fear of a resurgent Russia may by then be begging a reluctant America to return to its defense.

Certainly the EU of the year 2020 will be different. It will be larger, including at least 20, and perhaps as many as 28 states, if Turkey's "official candidate status" has by then been translated into full membership. In the first wave of new members will be Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, already members of NATO, and determined to keep NATO and the US alliance as their core security guarantor. This alone should reassure US policymakers that European grumblings about America are not likely to have dramatic strategic effects.

The Europe of 2020 will probably by then be accustomed to operating a common currency, a common foreign and defense policy, and a common body of laws. Whereas it now looks like a confederacy of individual and sovereign states, it may by then be looking more like a federal system, and starting to resemble-insofar as the language problem permits-a United States of Europe.

But for the foreseeable future, there is no serious prospect of any military or technological or cultural challenger toppling the United States from its perch. It is conceivable and even likely that the euro will rival the dollar as a global currency, and the planned course of EU enlargement should over the next two decades ensure that the EU's population stays ahead of the American and its total GDP remains comparable.

The Europeans may grumble, but they are likely to live with this. If they were seriously prepared to do something about it, they would put their money where their mouths are by increasing their defense budgets. On the whole, they are cutting them. The average EU member state spends 1.8 per cent of GDP on defence, precisely half what the United States spends. 18 And there is not the slightest sign that Europe's taxpayers are prepared to pay more.

Nor that they are prepared to stop watching Friends and The Simpsons, or taking their vacations in Florida and Aspen, or that they will boycott the Internet. Moreover, both the McDonalds and the Buffalo Bill Steakhouse at that mall outside Perigueux continue to prosper. And another "Macdo," as the French call them, is to open in the city next year.

 

Endnotes

Note 1: See Jennifer Monti, "Letter from Vienna," Harvard Salient, April 15, 1999. Back.

Note 2: Eleftherotypia (Athens), November 15, 1999. Trans. Nikos Sarantakos, Democritus University, Thrace. Back.

Note 3: For the plots against Prodi, see "Charlemagne," The Economist, April 8, 2000. Back.

Note 4: The author was present at the dinner in Brussels where this bon mot was uttered. Back.

Note 5: Transcript issued by French Foreign Ministry, December 14, 1999. Back.

Note 6: The Times (London), September 28, 1997.Back.

Note 7: As quoted in Frank Viviano, "Bitter Debate in Europe on US Role," San Francisco Chronicle, April 15, 1999.Back.

Note 8: As quoted in Suzanne Daley, "More Vehemently than Ever, Europe Is Scorning the US," New York Times, April 9, 2000.Back.

Note 9: Douglas Hurd, "Not a Time to Rest on Defence," Financial Times (London), February 18, 2000. Back.

Note 10: For more on the special relationship between British Aerospace and the Pentagon, see "Defence: Platform Envy," The Economist, December 12, 1998. Back.

Note 11: See "Europe's New Economy," The Economist, March 25, 2000. Back.

Note 12: The figures are from the US Mission to the European Union, Brussels, updated annually. Back.

Note 13: See the interview with the ambassador in the winter 1999/2000 issue of France magazine, which is published by the French embassy in Washington, DC Back.

Note 14: Hubert Vedrine makes this point in his December 14, 1999 statement cited above. Back.

Note 15: Quoted in Daley, "More Vehemently." Back.

Note 16: Ibid. Back.

Note 17: See a longer discussion of this issue in Martin Walker, The President We Deserve, (New York: Crown, 1996), chaps. 5-7. Back.

Note 18: See John Bolton, "European Common Foreign, Security and Defense Policies: Implications for the US and the Atlantic Alliance," (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, November 1999). See also the statement before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee by Frank D. Kramer, assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, March 9, 2000. Back.