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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (28162)	1/29/2003 6:07:10 PM
From: AC Flyer	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 74559

You'll like this article, Ray. Europe Needs to Get Real To this American, it's Europeans who are naive, superficial and materialistic By CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL Posted Sunday, Jan. 12, 2003; 2.09 p.m. GMT Any American who spends time in Europe will have lived through the moment — usually around 11 p.m., after Bordeaux or Bushmills has got the better of the guests — when an old friend wheels his gaze slowly around the dinner table, like a piece of mechanized artillery, until you're staring into his angry muzzle. Out comes a salvo of imprecations about American foreign policy and the United States in general. Call it the George W. Bush-cowboy-Palestine-death-penalty-Enron moment. This is a transatlantic tradition, of course, but there's something discomfiting about hearing such things (as I did recently) from someone who'd called you up from Paris on Sept. 11, 2001, sobbing in solidarity with your country. What happened to that solidarity? The piles of flowers in front of U.S. embassies in every capital, the concerts in Berlin, the Continent-wide three minutes of silence, the invocation of Article V by Europe's NATO members? It all seems very long ago. Today a majority of French and Russians think America opposes Iraq only as a pretext to seize its oil. A German Chancellor with an abysmal economic record won re-election by sneering at U.S. arrogance at every whistle stop. There is no questioning the sincerity of Europe's post-Sept. 11 mourning. But the turnabout since then has been so sudden, so strong and focused that I begin to worry that Europeans oppose America not despite the attacks but because of them. Here's what I mean. For decades, Europeans of all ideologies asked whether the prosperous democracies of the West had become too decadent to defend themselves. Once the U.S. moved to dislodge the terrorist-sponsoring Taliban in Afghanistan, Europe was faced with an ally doing something it would not — could not — have done itself. It had the choice, then, of whether to consider the U.S. less decadent or less democratic than Europe. It's not hard to see which version is easier on a continent's self-image. The new economy of the 1990s did a lot to set the two continents at cross-purposes. Americans have never developed a critique of globalization, because we haven't suffered either France's rolling strikes or Germany's festering joblessness. With impeccable market logic, European antiglobalists complain that in a global economy that fosters specialization, the U.S. has become the specialist — the monopolist — in the military defense of the West. Monopolies behave as monopolies do, in America's case by polluting disproportionately, throwing its weight around and flouting European norms on such matters as multilateral consultation and the death penalty. And monopolies, even if you happen to like their products, must be broken up for the greater good. The American view is that the Europeans are looking a gift horse in the mouth. They get what defense strategist Robert Kagan of the Carnegie Endowment calls "free security," which subsidizes a Continental life of Riley. If the Europeans want a larger voice in the defense of the West, let them pay for it, even if it means buying fewer garbage trucks or defibrillators or opera houses. So when Europeans make their impassioned points across the dinner table, Americans tend to doubt they have the will to match their words with actions. But Americans go further. We increasingly take the anti-American stereotypes of postwar Europeans and reverse them. We see ourselves as inhabiting history — doing the ugly, necessary work of the world — while it is the Euros who inhabit a superficial society. Europeans are materialistic; the E.U. has a low profile on strategic issues because it was designed by bureaucrats obsessed with trade and money. Europeans care more than we do about physical pleasure; they traffic in titillation (to judge from the nightly offerings on television or such bestsellers as The Sexual Life of Catherine M.) and are obsessed with their food (which is, by the way, no longer superior to ours). And if "heritage," Europe's age-old bragging point, is measured by family traditions and religious values, then Europeans no longer have a lock on it. To American eyes, it's tough to have family traditions in a region where so many choose to be childless (the fertility rate in E.U. countries is 1.47 births per woman), tough to have religious values when less than 20% of Europeans regularly attend church. But the heart of the American complaint — again, reversing an old European saw — is that Europeans are naive and provincial. It is easy enough to browbeat Americans about the flimsy coverage the E.U. gets in U.S. dailies. But where does European interest in the world rise above the dilettantish? When has the E.U. come up with a workable plan for Iraq? For the Middle East? For North Korea? After the carnage of two world wars, the European distrust of power politics is something for which we have reason to be grateful. The problem is that postwar Europeans think their strategic differences with America are the product not of a specific historic experience but of a new, higher morality. And that is what George Bernard Shaw was talking about when he defined a barbarian as one who mistakes the customs of his tribe for the laws of nature. Christopher Caldwell reports from Europe for the Weekly Standard, a U.S. opinion magazine, where he is a senior editor time.com