Europe Needs to Get Real
To this American, it's Europeans who are naive, superficial and materialistic
By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
 
Any American who spends time in Europe will have lived through the moment — usually around 11 p.m., after Bordeaux or Bushmills has got the better of the guests.[CB: Americans generally drink much more and stronger things than the Europeans or the French, mostly meant here I guess. It is an old outdated prejudice: seeing the French as winos.]
— when an old friend wheels his gaze slowly around the dinner table, like a piece of mechanized artillery, until you're staring into his angry muzzle. Out comes a salvo of imprecations about American foreign policy and the United States in general. Call it the George W. Bush-cowboy-Palestine-death-penalty-Enron moment. This is a transatlantic tradition, of course, but there's something discomfiting about hearing such things (as I did recently) from someone who'd called you up from Paris on Sept. 11, 2001, sobbing in solidarity with your country.
[CB: Sobbing about what happened does not automatically require to be elated about what measures where suggested afterwards and especially introduced, like all those ineffectual freedom-reducing laws!]
What happened to that solidarity? The piles of flowers in front of U.S. embassies in every capital, the concerts in Berlin, the Continent-wide three minutes of silence, the invocation of Article V by Europe's NATO members? It all seems very long ago. Today a majority of French and Russians think America opposes Iraq only as a pretext to seize its oil. 
[CB: It really is that and not much else. I actually thought that Bin Laden is a formerly American-sponsored Saudi-Arabian hiding in Afghanistan, not in Iraq.]
A German Chancellor with an abysmal economic record won re-election by sneering at U.S. arrogance at every whistle stop.
[CB: He won for other reasons too, helped by the floods, and the electorate here is as stupid as the electorate over there which voted for Bush.]
There is no questioning the sincerity of Europe's post-Sept. 11 mourning. But the turnabout since then has been so sudden, so strong and focused that I begin to worry that Europeans oppose America not despite the attacks but because of them. Here's what I mean. For decades, Europeans of all ideologies asked whether the prosperous democracies of the West had become too decadent to defend themselves. Once the U.S. moved to dislodge the terrorist-sponsoring Taliban in Afghanistan, Europe was faced with an ally doing something it would not — could not — have done itself. It had the choice, then, of whether to consider the U.S. less decadent or less democratic than Europe. It's not hard to see which version is easier on a continent's self-image.

The new economy of the 1990s did a lot to set the two continents at cross-purposes. Americans have never developed a critique of globalization, because we haven't suffered either France's rolling strikes or Germany's festering joblessness. With impeccable market logic, European antiglobalists complain that in a global economy that fosters specialization, the U.S. has become the specialist — the monopolist — in the military defense of the West. Monopolies behave as monopolies do, in America's case by polluting disproportionately, throwing its weight around and flouting European norms on such matters as multilateral consultation and the death penalty. And monopolies, even if you happen to like their products, must be broken up for the greater good.
[CB: I do not particularly like the products of Microsoft nor their prices, I had not much choice.]
The American view is that the Europeans are looking a gift horse in the mouth. 
[CB: They should better send the gift back. Timeo Danaos et dona ferentes... The Europeans, especially the Germans and French, excluding the British, have just done better politics in those problematic countries.]
They get what defense strategist Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment calls "free security," which subsidizes a Continental life of Riley. If the Europeans want a larger voice in the defense of the West, let them pay for it, even if it means buying fewer garbage trucks or defibrillators or opera houses. So when Europeans make their impassioned points across the dinner table, Americans tend to doubt they have the will to match their words with actions.

But Americans go further. We increasingly take the anti-American stereotypes of postwar Europeans and reverse them. We see ourselves as inhabiting history — doing the ugly, necessary work of the world — while it is the Euros who inhabit a superficial society. Europeans are materialistic; the E.U. has a low profile on strategic issues because it was designed by bureaucrats obsessed with trade and money. [CB: You must have put a mirror between you and Europe while trying to observe the latter.]
Europeans care more than we do about physical pleasure;
[CB: And because Americans don't care as much, their soldiers like to be sent to the battle fields of formerly Vietnam and now Iraq.]
they traffic in titillation (to judge from the nightly offerings on television or such bestsellers as The Sexual Life of Catherine M.)
[CB: Here I can only say, without having read the above book, but enough other ones, and having seen my share of offerings around that time of the night on various of our TV channels, you poor dull Doris Day fed reborn BibleBelty! ;-) Maybe your friend's angry muzzle above at 11 P.M. had something to do with his frustration of missing those TV offerings starting around that hour... :-)]
and are obsessed with their food (which is, by the way, no longer superior to ours).
[CB: This is your first real truth. How could it be better than yours, after you flooded Europe with your kind of food?]
And if "heritage," Europe's age-old bragging point, is measured by family traditions and religious values, then Europeans no longer have a lock on it.
[CB: We have more enlightened traditions or heritage than some of your family and religious nonsense.]
To American eyes, it's tough to have family traditions in a region where so many choose to be childless (the fertility rate in E.U. countries is 1.47 births per woman), [CB: This is also a matter of responsibility in a much more difficult situation than yours, your resources being overplenty and protected from the rest of the world by very high gates; it is also the normal sign of economic progress and higher education, we are not in India after all, and the backseats of our cars are not as large as yours... ;-)]
tough to have religious values when less than 20% of Europeans regularly attend church.
[CB: When I listen to the horrors spread by your religious right, I can consider our turning our backs to the churches as a big progress.]

But the heart of the American complaint — again, reversing an old European saw — is that Europeans are naive and provincial.
[CB: If anyone is naive here and provincial, it certainly is the American. Americans generally do not really know anything about the rest of the world. (Not everyone is a senior editor of a U.S. opinion magazine like you, stationed in Europe and reporting from there.) They do not know languages, have stopped traveling Europe in masses like they used to do, are geographically far away from anything much different, have a very low level of secondary education, etc.]
It is easy enough to browbeat Americans about the flimsy coverage the E.U. gets in U.S. dailies. But where does European interest in the world rise above the dilettantish?
[CB: Here is the word I have been waiting for. Dilettantism. How better could one describe all you did decades ago and continue doing in those areas of the planet where we now have the biggest problems.]
When has the E.U. come up with a workable plan for Iraq? For the Middle East? For North Korea?
[CB: Well, our politicians may not be much better than yours, so the solutions have to come from elsewhere. And they certainly are there, but not listened to or prevented by those you consider the saviors. Europeans are just fed up with wars, since they saw enough of it with their very own eyes inside their own countries, not on TV alone. You have not had a war inside your country for well over a century at least. Your kind of push-button war from your Pentagon desks, while brains and livers are exploding and tainting the soil in red elsewhere, is not what we want to support. FORTUNATELY THERE ARE ALSO AMERICANS THAT THINK DIFFERENTLY. Just have a look at
http://www.unclesamsucks.com/home.htm
http://www.unclesamsucks.com/home.htm !]
After the carnage of two world wars, the European distrust of power politics is something for which we have reason to be grateful. The problem is that postwar Europeans think their strategic differences with America are the product not of a specific historic experience but of a new, higher morality.
[CB: What is wrong with finally accessing a new higher morality?]
And that is what George Bernard Shaw was talking about when he defined a barbarian as one who mistakes the customs of his tribe for the laws of nature.
[CB: As you rightly say, dear John Wayne!!!]
[CB: Or, as Brian Eno, the musician, said: "Regime change begins at home."]