Continental drift
Donald Rumsfield's calling France and Germany "old Europe" and lumping the two together as "a problem" brought the intellectuals onto the Old World's barricades this week. In an effort to soothe hurt feelings, the US ambassador to Berlin, Daniel Coats, appeared on German television yesterday where he described Rumsfield's word choice as a "slip of the tongue", but it was, of course, no such thing. The defence secretary was doing nothing more than expressing a commonly held feeling in the higher echelons in Washington: anti-Europeanism.
At least that is what Timothy Garton-Ash calls the phenomenon in a valuable essay in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Titled "Anti-Europeanism in America", the piece makes for disturbing, if not depressing reading. As one expects from an historian of Garton-Ash's ability, the arguments are presented with erudition and elegance, and gentle humour:
"Anti-Europeanism is not symmetrical with anti-Americanism. The emotional leitmotifs of anti-Americanism are resentment mingled with envy; those of anti-Europeanism are irritation mixed with contempt. Anti-Americanism is a real obsession for entire countries — notably for France, as Jean-Fran篩s Revel has recently argued. Anti-Europeanism is very far from being an American obsession. In fact, the predominant American popular attitude toward Europe is probably mildly benign indifference, mixed with impressive ignorance. I traveled around Kansas for two days asking people I met: 'If I say 'Europe' what do you think of?' Many reacted with a long, stunned silence, sometimes punctuated by giggles. Then they said things like 'Well, I guess they don't have much huntin' down there' (Vernon Masqua, a carpenter in McLouth); 'Well, it's a long way from home' (Richard Souza, whose parents came from France and Portugal); or, after a very long pause for thought, 'Well, it's quite a ways across the pond' (Jack Weishaar, an elderly farmer of German descent). If you said 'America' to a farmer or carpenter in even the remotest village of Andalusia or Ruthenia, he would, you may be sure, have a whole lot more to say on the subject."
Garton-Ash visited New York, Boston, Washington and the Bible-belt states of Kansas and Missouri to look at American attitudes towards Europe and he found "a level of irritation with Europe and Europeans higher even than at the last memorable peak, in the early 1980s." Terms of contempt used by the US chattering classes for Europeans, include "the Euros," "the Euroids," "the 'peens," "the Euroweenies" and the "EU-nuchs." This latter causes Garton-Ash to ponder the sexual imagery of the stereotype. One example: last year's influential Policy Review article by Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, "Power and Weakness." He notes that Kagan approvingly writes "Americans are from Mars, and Europeans are from Venus", thus echoing the title of the best-seller about relations between men and women, Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus. In other words, the martial Americans are virile, heterosexual males; Europeans are female, impotent, or castrated.
Disillusionment with the Europeans can now be found even among lifelong liberal State Department Europeanists, says Garton-Ash. The appalling failure to prevent the genocide of a quarter of a million Bosnian Muslims in it's own backyard, proved to be the turning point. And that Colin Powell had to be called in to resolve a dispute between Spain and Morocco over a tiny, uninhabited island off the Moroccan coast just added to the feeling that Europe is not a serious place anymore. "Historically, the tables are turned," Garton-Ash writes. "For what was Charles de Gaulle's verdict on the Americans? 'Ils ne sont pas s鲩eux.'
Garton-Ash's summation:
"At the moment it seems that a second Gulf war will only widen the gulf between Europe and America. Even if there is not a war on Iraq, the Middle East can still provide the vortex in which real or alleged European anti-Americanism fuels real or alleged American anti-Europeanism, which in turn fuels more anti-Americanism, both being aggravated by sweeping charges of European anti-Semitism. A change might come through a major conscious effort on both sides of the Atlantic, or with a new administration arriving in Washington in 2005 or 2009. Yet a lot of damage can be done in the meantime..."
And his distressing conclusion:
"You might say that to highlight 'American anti-Europeanism,' as I have done in this essay, will itself contribute to the downward spiral of mutual distrust. But writers are not diplomats. American anti-Europeanism exists; and its carriers may be the first swallows of a long, bad summer."
Diarist of the day: Evelyn Waugh, 25 January 1947"Embarked on the America full of cocaine, opium and brandy, feeble and low spirited. One of the reasons for putting myself under the surgeon's knife was to be absolutely well and free from ointments for Laura's American treat. All the reasons for the operation [for piles] appeared ineffective immediately afterwards. The pain was excruciating and the humiliations constant. The hospital was reasonably comfortable and the nurses charming -- the grace of God apparent everywhere. But I had ample time to reflect that I had undergone an operation, which others only endure after years of growing agony, when I had in fact suffered nothing worse than occasional discomfort. I took no advice, either from a physician or fellow sufferers, just went to the surgeon and ordered the operation as I would have ordered new shirts. In fact I had behaved totally irrationally and was paying for it."
