Europe with a Dubya
Date: 09/04/2001
As Starbucks arrives and McDonald's expands, Europeans have begun a 'slow food' backlash against American cultural imperialism. Now US President George W. Bush has them worried about their security and environment too, writes Simon Mann in London.
· Part One: Power walk
On a day last week when George Bush was busy sabre rattling with the Chinese, a fresh challenge to America's global supremacy was brewing in Italy. It came in the form of a cafe latte.
Campaigners for real Italian food and culture were outraged that an American coffee bar chain, Starbucks, had boldly announced its arrival in the land of espresso.
"We thought we had everything in Italy, but it turns out we lacked one thing - American coffee," the newspaper La Stampa cited with heavy irony.
It's not particularly new, this backlash against things American. Once, the symbols of cultural encroachment were Coca Cola and imported petrol-guzzling "automobiles". Now, they are hamburger chains and coffee bars and Hollywood blockbusters that are often charged with distorting history.
But the resentments are suddenly coming to the fore on the back of President Bush's decision to kill the Kyoto deal on greenhouse gas emissions, a move that the European Commission denounced as "appalling and provocative" and that French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin condemned as having ignored "the certain rules that make the international community work".
"[After Bush's Kyoto decision] something fascinating happened, something which had long been waiting to happen," wrote Vanity Fair's London editor, Henry Porter.
"All the resentments about American national life - the continued use of the death penalty, the refusal to address guns, the overbearing nature of its entertainment industry, the disinclination to wholeheartedly ratify treaties on landmines and the International Criminal Court - coalesced into a single charge sheet which damned American society as being arrogant and out of touch with global concerns."
The burgeoning new mood is bringing into sharp focus transatlantic differences that started emerging during NATO's bombing campaign against Yugoslavia two years ago and have become glaringly apparent in the 70-odd days since George Bush's removals van, stuffed full of icons of small town America and IOUs to the oil industry, backed up to the Oval Office.
Points of tension are emerging on several fronts - defence, foreign policy and trade, as well as environmental stewardship - and the barbs are coming from the staunchest of America's European allies, who reckon George W. has got just a little bit too big for his fancy Texan boots.
A Labour MP, Bill Michie, last week in the House of Commons asked British Prime Minister, Tony Blair: "Will you impress upon the President of the United States as strongly as possible that the world is not owned by the US but is the property of every living soul on this planet?"
In Berlin, the co-ordinator for US-German relations, Karsten D. Voigt, said: "The religious view of America that man should be master of the Earth collides with the German idea that endangered nature has to be guarded from man."
And in France, where Green parties captured a stunning 12 per cent of the vote in recent local government elections, the Bush decision was branded an abuse of America's power.
Says Charles Henry Dubail, editor-in-chief of L'Environnement magazine: "The French have always had strong feelings for the Americans. Of course, in the world wars they came to our rescue and we are free partly because of them.
"But there is a new generation of French who have forgotten that debt. What they see is a different America altogether." Their reaction, he adds, is more hostile, and their assessment of American motives more searching than ever before.
The question now being debated in Europe, therefore, is how to meet the changed circumstances of an increasingly isolationist America. If a policy vacuum is truly emerging, can the EU realistically fill it?
"We all understand that when you have a new administration life is pretty uncomfortable while they sort themselves out," says Professor William Wallace, head of international relations at the London School of Economics and Politics.
"But the way the Kyoto decision was handled was not good and the fact that this administration seems unconcerned if it manages to worsen relations with China, North Korea and Russia all at the same time, doesn't seem very wise to me."
He adds: "One of the biggest problems they've got at the moment is convincing the Europeans that they know what they're doing. The impressions being given are of disunity, of a bunch of ideologues getting back at the pragmatists, and of a President who's not fully in control."
Asked about the implications of George Bush for Europe, the director of the Centre for Defence and Security Studies at Lancaster University, Dr Martin Edmonds, responds wryly: "This is almost an invitation to go back and count the number of stamps in George Bush's passport, of which there are not many."
There is much amiss with the US-Europe relationship, but in the past a historical, mutual interest in security has papered over some of the cracks.
Until now, McDonald's was a convenient metaphor for American dominance. The hamburger chain continues to plant golden arches across Europe at an astonishing rate. It now boasts 5000 franchises, double the number of a decade earlier.
The emergence of genetically-modified foods, is a newer target for anti-American sentiment, with the US corporation Monsanto held up as an evil empire.
While the European Parliament last month declared its support for biotechnology, it stopped short of lifting a ban on new GM food strains, pending clearer rules on testing and monitoring the environmental impact. The hold-up is a source of irritation to producers in the US.
The chances of a quick resolution seem remote. After all, Europe and America have been squabbling over banana imports for almost a decade.
But food is not the Europeans' only beef.
American culture permeates nearly every aspect of European life. There can be no clearer example than the film and television industry.
Such is the American influence that fire chiefs in West Sussex, England, recently bemoaned that British youngsters were more likely to dial the American 911 emergency telephone number than Britain's 999.
US films dominate European screens and the influence is growing with the opening of US-owned multi-screen complexes in nearly every EU country. In 1998, the most recent figures available, American films accounted for 75 per cent of all box office takings in Europe and an even greater proportion in the Netherlands (90 per cent), Germany (85pc) and Britain (82pc).
The figures arguably vindicate the French government minister who once griped that globalisation meant "wall-to-wall Dallas".
The cultural and commercial dominance of America may have masked a fatigue that was slowly emerging in the mortar that once bound the US and Europe on issues of defence and security.
The partners found a measure of unity over their defence of Kosovo, but it was the Balkan conflict, ironically, that brought them asunder.
The Americans, quite simply, want Europe to take greater responsibility for its own security. That has been the message for years from successive administrations. But Europe's response in the aftermath of the Kosovo conflict - a planned 60,000-strong European rapid reaction force - is troubling Washington, which seems to consider it a direct challenge to the authority of the 50-year old NATO alliance.
Most of Europe, meanwhile, strongly opposes Washington's planned nuclear missile defence shield, seeing it as an American shield first and foremost and not a protector of all members of the NATO alliance.
An even starker policy divergence relates to Russia. The Bush Administration is looking to downgrade its relationship. Europe, however, has been drawing ever closer. Germany, especially, relies increasingly on Russian oil and gas to drive its powerhouse economy. An assertive Russian President, Vladimir Putin, may look to exploit further such transatlantic contradictions.
While NATO has struck a co-operative arrangement with Moscow, Russia continues to thumb its nose at Washington with a foreign policy that runs counter to American interests. It provides nuclear technology to Iran, for example, and military and economic aid to Iraq.
Only Britain's support of US policy of ostracising Iraq holds watertight. But London is finding itself increasingly isolated within the EU. France is promoting dialogue as the only credible means of dealing with Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
"The most urgent task now is to fill the void that the US is creating under its new President," said London's Observer newspaper last week. "This means a significant new role for the European Union. The EU could offer North Korea the food and aid it requires in exchange for relinquishing its missiles.
"The EU with Russia, China, India and Japan, could forge the climate change convention - without the US. The euro-zone could stabilise the world economy."
But not everyone is convinced that a seemingly disparate group of 15 nation states is capable of taking over in America's absence, especially when Brussels is currently struggling to put together unified policies on energy reform and immigration, and while influential members such as Britain show little appetite for monetary solidarity.
"In terms of diplomacy, Europe isn't quite accustomed to speaking with a common voice," argues Dr Edmonds.
"Really, European foreign policy is almost an oxymoron. Europe has neither the infrastructure, nor the tradition, nor the person to do it."
Professor Wallace also views such a contention with suspicion: "Filling the vacuum is an opportunity that Europe would not particularly wish to have, although I think Europe will have to fill it to some extent.
"But we don't really want to run before we can walk. We have a long way to go in terms of developing a common foreign policy."
Professor Wallace, however, sounds a note of caution about how difficult Europe's future will be because of Bush.
"I have lived through several changes of administrations and of parties in Washington and each time the first two months are very uncomfortable," he says.
"Clinton, for example, took an awful long time to get people in place so there was drift ... There was also that dreadful period from Ford to Carter and then Carter to Reagan, when you kept having Americans dashing through London and saying 'Forget everything that other lot told you, the line now is this'.
"It was just as painful then as it is now."
Story Picture: No logo ... Europeans are increasingly outraged at a balance of world power in which globalisation has come to mean "wall-to-wall Dallas".
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