And you know what? Polls show that most Europeans still see the United States as a beacon of freedom, and by large majorities. Even the French, no longer known as America lovers, openly admire America’s power, its freedoms, its wealth and its dynamism. Last December, 65 percent considered it pretty sympathique. And yet… as one influential official in Paris explained last week, “You can love the Americans and still be paranoid.”
Tremors of fear (if not loathing)–of American power, American hubris and what is perceived as an American inclination to ignore its friends as it damns its enemies–are coursing through Europe these days. As Europeans listened last week to Bush proclaim his vision of a new and dangerous epoch–which, with its very own “axis of evil,” sounded chillingly like world wars of the past–America’s traditional allies were left wondering where they fit into his scheme of things. Bush made just one scant reference to Europe in his State of the Union speech, and yet much of what he said will directly affect European lives. Some feel as if they’re hooked to a superpower locomotive that’s about to go out of control, with an engineer who sees no reason to heed their warnings. “What is worse,” says former Swedish prime minister Carl Bildt, “is that [the Europeans] don’t have a clue where it’s going.”
In the hallways of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria, where VIPs gathered for the World Economic Forum last week, many European dignitaries and diplomats were resentful. What had become of the antiterrorist partnership Europeans thought they’d built with the United States and reinforced after September 11? The prevailing sentiment seemed to be that Europe had been taken for granted at best, and at worst forgotten. “For any coalition to last, it has to be real,” French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine publicly chided Secretary of State Colin Powell. “If you are talking about a coalition for a stable world, it’s not enough just to fight terrorism.” Even NATO, forged by the great binding treaty that spans the Atlantic, didn’t seem to figure in the plans Bush described to Congress. “Will Americans fight a war through NATO ever again?” asks Bildt. “It’s doubtful.” Instead, the Swede bitterly imagines a different division of power: “The U.S. reserves the right to itself to wage war, and dumps on others the messy, expensive business of nation-building and peacekeeping.”
Even in Britain, America’s most dependable European ally in times of trouble, anxieties are bubbling up. British Member of Parliament Peter Mandelson told the Council on Foreign Relations in New York that he saw a “nascent cleaving” between the United States and Europe. “In the aftermath of September 11,” says Richard Norton-Taylor, security editor of The Guardian newspaper, “there was a hope that America would engage the rest of the world.” Instead, there is a growing sense that Bush tailors his policies for “American consumption… and ignores the opinions of Europe and the Middle East.” The photos out of Guantanamo Bay of Taliban and Qaeda prisoners shackled and blindfolded show “the complete disregard, not to say contempt, the Bush administration has for [international] public opinion,” says Norton-Taylor. British Prime Minister Tony Blair has taken flak at home for seeming too chummy with Bush and other Americans.
Europeans have always found the United States ingenuous, even dangerously so, when it throws its weight around. More than a century ago, Rudyard Kipling warned Americans about the risks of waging “savage wars of peace”; in the 1950s Graham Greene wrote that American “innocence is a kind of insanity.” And a certain residual anti-Americanism is probably endemic in Europe, especially among the elites. But beyond the tired jealousies of faded colonial powers, the rivalry of trading blocs and the snobbery of old cultures about new ones, several specific issues divide the United States from much of Europe. The cursory way the United States rejected the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gases, its reluctance to pursue a campaign against offshore tax havens and its willingness to toss out the antiballistic-missile treaty are just some of the issues that set European nerves on edge even before September 11.
Europe is a place where the death penalty isn’t allowed and where the environment is an issue that makes or breaks governments. Taxes are higher, but then people are less wasteful of gasoline that costs $4 a gallon. The welfare of society and the community is exalted over that of the individual. Diplomacy is favored over force in almost every instance. “There exists a European art of living,” says France’s Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin. “We have our own way of taking action, of defending freedoms, of fighting against inequality and discrimination, of thinking and of organizing labor relations, of teaching and of healing and of managing our time. Each of our countries has its own traditions and rules, but together they make up a common universe.”
That universe, however, rubs right up against another. The Arab and Muslim world is on Europe’s doorstep, with a long, painful, complicated history of clashing faiths–or civilizations, if you will–that Europe has internalized. The French and Germans and Britons understand that the United States feels vulnerable as never before. But so do they. And they don’t have much faith that a military campaign here or there will solve their problems.
In parts of Europe, Turks and North Africans provide most of the immigrant labor force. Many live in increasingly volatile communities where second- and third-generation Muslim youths are unemployed, unintegrated and angry. A few of those young men have been recruited into the ranks of Al Qaeda. Others carry out random acts of vandalism and violence. The communal wars of Kurds and Turks that seem so distant to most Americans have been transplanted to the hearts of many German cities.
The conflict between Arabs and Israelis is felt between the French Muslims and French Jews living side by side in the working-class suburbs of Paris and Marseilles. Since the new wave of violence began between Israel and the Palestinians, some surveys have shown a massive increase in vandalism of French Jewish schools and synagogues, as well as sporadic attacks on individual Jews. Among the European far right and Roman Catholic extremists, there may be residual anti-Semitism of the kind that tolerated and collaborated with the Holocaust. And European Jews are wary as well of upper-crust condescension that walks a thin line between disapproval of Israeli policy and an uglier disdain for Israelis. But that isn’t what this new violence is about, says one leading Israeli historian; “this is a new form of communal violence by a deprived Arab community that has not integrated, and will strike out at any target, under any pretext.”
These are not the kinds of problems that European leaders think Washington’s war on terror is likely to solve. And when they see the Bush administration taking sides in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, instead of pressuring both parties to negotiate, they can barely contain their frustration. When Washington and Israel then resist European efforts to foster a solution, there’s consternation. “The Americans aren’t prepared to do anything,” says a senior adviser to Tony Blair, “and they don’t want anyone else to do anything either.”
And yet by presenting itself as the superpower arbiter of the world’s conflicts, Washington sometimes cannot help but be hated by one side or another. One country where the United States is really loathed, certifiably and widely, is Greece–but by the Christians. Days after September 11, crowds in Athens were burning American flags, and polls showed that many thought the United States had gotten what it deserved at Ground Zero. Why? Because it failed to force the Muslim Turks out of northern Cyprus, and it backed the Muslim Bosnians and Kosovars against the Serbs, who are mostly Orthodox Catholics, like the Greeks.
But the disquiet in Europe is not only about differences on security issues, or the war on terror, or the shift in the Mideast peace process. There’s another, deeper, perhaps existential (to use a favorite European word) element: all this is happening as the Europeans are trying to redefine exactly who they themselves are.
When France sent the Statue of Liberty to the United States as a testimony of faith in the freedom America represented, Europe was an incubator for totalitarians, a slaughterhouse for the common people. But 57 years have passed since the end of World War II, and Europe is now in the midst of an amazing experiment, building unity through consensus instead of empire. Since January a single currency has jingled in the pockets of people in 12 countries, and the European Union is expected to admit at least 10 more members–for a total of 25–by the end of 2004. Europe will eventually be a single market of 500 million people–stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Mediterranean, from the west coast of Ireland to the eastern border of Poland.
Thus far, this union has been a technocratic miracle, and sometimes a bureaucratic nightmare. But Europeans are searching for a better way to define it politically and socially. For want of another vision, many describe it as the “un-America,” like the “un-cola.” They cherish the notion that it’s kinder, gentler, safer, wiser, worldlier and (ahem) more civilized.
Of course, Europe has been able to cultivate its humanistic values because it was protected by the awesome military power of the United States. But some Europeans think those days are ending in the midst of this war on terror. They see Bush extolling his relationship with China and Russia, with India and Israel, and they wonder why they’ve been left off the A-list. There may even be a risk that in Bush’s “with us or against us” world of policymaking, as Europe tries to assert itself more strongly, the un-America could truly become anti-America. But that fear still seems to tip toward paranoia. For now, the criticism sounds more like one of Graham Greene’s weary, worldly heroes, talking about an idealistic Yank “who was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he might cause others.”
