"I have a lot of close American friends, having worked for a US corporation for a good part of the last decade. With one of them I have only to mention the number of teenagers being executed in the US and he shoots back: "Hey, if it wasn't for us, you'd all be speaking German." Then he usually takes another sip of wine and adds: "Or Russian." Less than 50% of this is an ironic evocation of Archie Bunker.
Last summer I went out with another friend who edits one of the big news magazines in the US, a very charming anglophiliac Wasp. Unwisely I began to explain the European suspicion of America, listing the usual grievances that now form the charge sheet. He took it for a while then deliberately set down his glass and gazed at its stem, evidently struggling to hold on to his temper. "The trouble with Europe is that every time you get into trouble you yell across the Atlantic for help. But, when things are good you expect us to listen to your horseshit lectures about the way we run things in the US." The point is well made, and indeed Europe's need to carry its own big stick and to sort out its own problems in the Balkans is one of the driving instincts behind the European Defence Force.
Americans see Europe as ungrateful but also congenitally inclined to political chaos. This suspicion of Europe stretches back to the hot summer of 1787 when, among others, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington sat down to write the constitution for the 13 states of America. In every sentence, they strove to distinguish the new republic from the oppression and abuse in the old world. That self-conscious creation of a political antithesis was strengthened over the 19th century and into the 20th by the fact that great numbers of people fled Europe's famines, pestilence and persecution for America. Thus the ancestral memory of Europe, albeit hazy, is as a place to escape from. American jokes about Europe dwell on its dodgy, screwed-up, murderous past.
Americans may feel cut off from the civilising presence of European culture and dimly hanker after their ethnic roots, especially those who claim Scottish, Irish, Greek and Italian ancestry. But there is also the feeling among many that their not-so-bright kin were the ones left behind to tend the goats. The European cousins may look up and see the Parthenon, the ancient temples of Sicily or the walls of Dubrovnik in their everyday life, but it doesn't substantially change the fact that they are still goatherds. Meanwhile, the American relation boasts a used car lot bigger than the Forum. So what earthly reason can there be to take notice of the European's views about landmines and genetically modified food?"
guardian.co.uk |
