European Views I
A deeper cultural gap, a widening sense of estrangement
Craig S. Smith
The New York Times Saturday, February 15, 2003
AMSTERDAM When a comedian at Boom Chicago's comedy club here asked the audience for their most embarrassing confessions the other night, a European-accented voice called out from the gloom, "I'm from the United States."
.
"O.K.," the comic responded with quicksilver timing, "I'll speak more slo-o-owly then."
.
The crowd roared, delivering one of the biggest laughs of the night.
.
The joke, playing off the European stereotype of Americans as simple-minded and unaware, highlights the surprisingly vast cultural gap that divides and periodically confounds people on either side of the Atlantic.
.
On such fundamental issues as the death penalty or social welfare, Europe and America seem to have taken divergent paths and built societies with increasingly different worldviews. The Iraq crisis has sharpened those differences and exacerbated the current sense of trans-Atlantic estrangement.
.
Tremendous bonds remain, of course, built up over more than half a century of shared commitment to the liberal democracies of the West and consolidated by both personal and business ties. But Europeans and Americans appear to find each other increasingly foreign as they struggle for mutual comprehension.
.
One poll in the Netherlands in October ranked Americans among the least popular foreign nationals in the country, together with Moroccans and Turks.
.
"The more powerful America is, the less America is humble, the more the feeling grows," said Dominique Moisi, deputy director of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris. Anger at U.S. foreign policy, he added, can easily turn into a deeper anti-American mood.
.
Philippe Roger, author of "The American Enemy: A Genealogy of French Anti-Americanism," argues that because France, unlike America, underwent a true social revolution, the country emerged with a social contract more heavily weighted toward equal distribution of wealth, and so it defines democracy differently than the United States.
.
"Equality is as important, if not more important, than freedom to the French," Roger said.
.
Such ideas, and the repeated experience of traumatic social upheaval and conflict, laid the groundwork for Europe's extensive - and in the American view wasteful - tax-dependent welfare system that currently provides everything from spa vacations for German dowagers to breast implants for young women in France.
.
"Europe has a different understanding of the responsibility of society," said Friedrich Krotz, an intercultural communications expert in Muenster, Germany. "The European experience of the last 50 years was to stop war and to find other forms of intercultural communication within Europe," said Krotz, who recalled as a boy listening to his grandfather deride the French and other European nationalities whom he had fought in two wars.
.
Even the role of religion in society divides Americans and Europeans, who are uneasy with American politicians' frequent evocation of God and the use of churches and Bibles as political props. The Bush administration is often portrayed here as having a black-and-white view of the world rooted in a kind of religious certainty that God blesses America, and its mission in the world, above other nations.
.
Europeans have become increasingly lax in their religious practices. Though France is still culturally a Roman Catholic country, only about 10 percent of the French regularly attend Mass.
.
"Even in Italy, there is greater separation between church and state than in America," said Antoine Sfeir, a French author and journalist. "You will never see the Bible used here in state ceremonies," much less have heads of state hold prayer breakfasts, he added.
.
In general, the Continent has moved toward more secular and liberal views.
.
The death penalty, for example, has been overwhelmingly rejected by the majority of Europeans as a barbaric throwback to less civilized times. Its abolition is required for membership in the European Union.
.
Former Illinois Governor George Ryan was lionized across Europe for commuting all death sentences in his state two days before he left office last month. The Coliseum in Rome was bathed in golden light to commemorate the gesture.
.
The continued use of executions in the United States has contributed heavily to America's poor reputation among Europeans. The execution of a German man in 2001 was front-page news. That same year, Paris made an American death row inmate, Mumia Abu Jamal, an honorary citizen, the first such honor bestowed since Pablo Picasso received the title in 1971.
.
Meanwhile, American power has grown so daunting that it creates ambivalence in even America's biggest European fans, though that ambivalence is easily overlooked amid the global swirl of popular culture.
.
At their worst, Americans are regarded as selfish, indulgent, childish and dangerously righteous. Anything that reinforces those views proves wildly popular in Europe. The director Michael Moore's film "Bowling for Columbine," a scathing critique of the weapons culture in the United States, has been seen by more than 800,000 people in France alone.
.
Satires of the United States are the stock-in-trade for Boom Chicago, an American comedy troupe now performing in its ninth year in Amsterdam, Europe's most liberal city.
.
"Americans making fun of themselves, I'm telling you, it sells like hotcakes," says Greg Shapiro, a tall, angular American who co-wrote Boom Chicago's sell-out show, "Yankees Go Home; Americans and Why You Love to Hate Us."
.
The show, originally scheduled to run one week at the end of December, keeps getting extended thanks to popular demand. Shapiro says jokes about Texas, President George W. Bush's home state, draw some of the biggest laughs.
.
He tells about one show when a woman from Texas stood up and said, "Y'all don't understand, if y'all carried guns and treated each other with more respect, the world would be a lot safer."
.
"We are a show about the differences between cultures," said Boom Chicago's director, Andrew Moskos, explaining the company's enduring popularity. "It has its finger on the pulse."
iht.com |
