Pardon me, MNI, but the following is bullshit (sorry guys: as a French speaker, I don't mind writing derogatory stuff in full....):
"No, there is one thing I think I can say as a global judgement: Europeans are not united well enough to wage any kind of economic war seriously, even if low-scale, cold-war style, or hidden, especially against the US. And Anti-American sentiment, or consideration of own interest if opposed to US is simply out of fashion. As I tried to communicate in the last post, the strongest 'anti-Americanism' we are capable of is a moment now and then in which people think 'the US are REALLY our best buddy, aren't they?' Compare it to maturing love among insecure youth ... if it came out that 'maybe they aren't, after all', then we would focus all our energy and set out to reform ourselves, to become even more loveable!"
This lenient statement might fit in pretty well with a Rotary Club gathering a bunch of cosmopolitan happy fews from both shores of the Atlantic --especially multicultural-minded European bourgeois fluent in English and well aware of how silly anti-Americanism might be.... But it still does not reflect the exact mainstream feeling of the European plebs towards America.
I think the proper method to sort out the right pattern of the Euro-American relationship in the years ahead is first to rely on a couple of sociological criteria:
o The nationalist cast is not the same in France, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, etc. Take France for instance: right now, I've got on my desk the last issue of Le Nouvel Economiste (No.1138 -from Oct 29 to Nov 9, 1999), and guess who's portrayed on its cover? Jos‚ Bov‚, the (far-)leftist farmer (actually a sheep farmer) who was imprisoned for the ransacking of a McDonald's fastfood in Millau, France. Make no mistake: the guy is a national hero --not only in France but also in Belgium, Italy, Spain, etc.-- who will be among the French delegates to the Millenium Round in Seattle, WA.
Although Jos‚ Bov‚ is not what Frenchmen call an anti-Am‚ricain primaire (ie a Yank-bashing redneck) --his parents moved to California as university researchers while he was a child and he remembered how shocked his grandparents were on their return to France when their grandson Jos‚ talked to them.... in English!-- he is yet perceived as Europe's David struggling with an evil American Goliath.
Germany has several strategic reasons not to be as blatantly anti-American as the French (and their closet European allies): German capitalism is successfully carving up the global cake with Anglo-Saxon capitalism and Germany knows that only the US can help it so. Furthermore, there's a key psychological factor at work: Germany perceives itself as a global power on the rise, not on the decline.... After all, what's going on with Germany today? It has recovered its full geographic realm (East Germany), it's the economic engine of Europe, with the loudest voice in the ECB; it can play France against the UK in order to scoop the best out of any European deal (like the Dasa/Matra defence merger, or the Frankfurt/London alliance); finally, thanks to NATO, Germany can become more assertive in the diplomatic arena. All in all, time is on Germany's side: in a couple of years from now, the German bourgeoisie will be able to reclaim its due share in military issues, putting the squeeze on the French....
Contrast with that, the French spleen of a country on the decline, threatened on every corner: culturally, the French feel assailed by Hollywood's imperialism; economically, they fear a corporate colonization by the German/US combo; and militarily, they know they no longer have the global clout to intervene in Africa, in the Pacific, or in the Middle East, on their own.
That's for the nationalist criterion.
o Now, for the "generation-gap" criterion: as I put it earlier, European youth is overwhelmingly pro-American as far as by pro-American one alludes to the sport/show-biz culture. This is especillay true in Nordic/Germanic countries such as Sweden, the Netherlands, Belgium's Flanders, etc. where cultural elites favor the learning of English as a cultural prerequisite. The Dutch and the Scandinavians, for instance, perfectly know how parochial their respective languages are, hence their encouragement to bilingualism and their indifference towards the broadcast of subtitled US soaps and movies (French TV networks always broadcast dubbed movies).
However, there's still an intriguing pecularity that transcends the generation divide: it's Europe's common assumption that, overall, the US culture is basically a "junk culture", or a cheap culture.... Contrary to the Roman Empire, or the Chinese (Ming,....) dynasties, or the Aztec kingdom, or the British colonial empire, the United States seems to be the first global empire whose cultural legacy is denigrated by the "conquered/subjugated dominions". Rome has successfully imposed Latin and the Roman law as symbols of civilization. [...]
o Finally, there's the class(ist) divide: the bourgeois stratum of the European social fabric is anti-American to the extent that anti-Americanism serves its capitalist interests: if the US tries to corner the French in central Africa, then some dirty tricks must be expected by the US power elite, e.g.
So far, this bourgeois anti-Americanism was restricted to economical matters but I suspect that in, say, 10 years from now, a broader, cultural divide will support it. Europe will pose a larger challenge to the US, not merely an economic one, but a cultural and political one as well....
My 2 cents,
Gus. |
