European insults fall on deaf ears in America's heartland GERARD BAKER:
Financial Times; London (UK); Feb 6, 2003; Baker, Gerard;
[ the retrieval service I have access to doesn't have today's column yet, but I thought the one from last week was amusing enough. Preview for the local rabble: "Outside a small claque of rightwing ultras in Washington led by Mr Rumsfeld (and even he has the good grace to differentiate between good Europeans and bad Europeans), and a few belligerents in the predictable parts of the press, real anti-European feeling in America is largely mute." Guess that tells us where the dominant FADG faction sits on the spectrum . ]
Donald Rumsfeld's aspersions on old Europe signal to some a rising tide of anti-European sentiment in the US. If it were true, it would be unsurprising. "C'est un animal mechant," the French say; "quand on l'attaque, il se defend."
For years Americans have got used to being condemned as global bullies by critics in Europe. In the past six months Americans have watched as European politicians have lined up to castigate their supposed imperialist designs. They have witnessed popular demonstrations on the streets, an election campaign in Germany that turned on a hostile representation of American policy, crude lampoons of their president and his administration in the European media and, two weeks ago, an ambush by the two biggest countries on the old continent to condemn US policy in Iraq. Americans could surely be forgiven for feeling inclined to return some of the bile that has been sprayed their way.
But the real story here is the almost complete absence of genuine anti-European sentiment on this side of the Atlantic. Outside a small claque of rightwing ultras in Washington led by Mr Rumsfeld (and even he has the good grace to differentiate between good Europeans and bad Europeans), and a few belligerents in the predictable parts of the press, real anti-European feeling in America is largely mute.
Members of Congress report no spike in angry correspondence calling for US troops to be pulled out of Europe. Polls suggest little change in public views from where they have been for the past 20 years. Yes, some countries are viewed more favourably than others; none is viewed as favourably as is Britain. But the suggestion of, for example, Timothy Garton Ash, a British academic, in an epistle in the latest New York Review of Books, that there is a "growing contempt for, and even hostility" to Europeans, is utterly without foundation. Mr Garton Ash relies for evidence principally on the conservative Euro-baiters in the press, plus some casino-goers in Kansas and a handful of students in Missouri.
Of course, European gutlessness - particularly French - has always been the butt of American jokes. Bart Simpson's characterisation of the French as "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" springs to mind - but that dates to the mid-1990s, a period of relatively warm transatlantic comity.
But while grotesque caricatures of gun-toting cowboys, money-grubbing casino capitalists and oil-grabbing Uncle Sams routinely grace the pages of even serious European newspapers, I am at a loss to think of a single identifiable caricature of either a European nation or the continent as a whole that resonates broadly in the US.
I entered "Anti-Americanism in Europe" into a Yahoo search and got an initial response of 21,400 matches. (Note the round number - it is Yahoo's way of saying: "we haven't got a clue how many are out there but here's the first batch.") "Anti-Europeanism in America" produces 358.
Europe just does not animate Americans as America does Europeans. I will wager that, rough as the diplomatic road may get with the Europeans, no American will throw a brick through the gaslit windows of bijou brasserie chains in the Midwest, or carve rude messages about German labour-market rigidity into the back of a Porsche 944.
Americans, despite all the stereotypes about arrogant, swaggering know-alls, are ambivalent about Europe. Certainly there is disdain for the apparent unwillingness of European governments to confront global threats; but many Americans also still harbour a kind of cultural inferiority complex.
For every Euro-hater in the conservative establishment there are at least half a dozen Americans ready to laud Europe. The cultural elite still likes to decry US TV and it longs for the virtues of British television, blissfully unaware that almost every piece of trash on American TV screens - from American Idol to I'm a Celebrity, Get me Out of Here - has a British provenance. Many will witter fondly about French cinema - though I doubt any of them has actually seen a French film since Belle de Jour.
You can still reduce Americans to whispering awe by telling them that you attended Oxford or the Sorbonne, even though the average State University of Wherever knocks the best European academic institutions into a cocked hat. And they might scoff at the nonsense of medieval pageantry, but they will roll over like a royal corgi at the prospect of an honorary gong.
And it is not just the National Public Radio-listening, Chablis-swilling, cosmopolitan elite of Washington and New York I am talking about, either. Out in the great heartland, you will find attitudes to Europe that are far from hostile. More American students each year spend a term or two in Europe. Some of them doubtless come back with anti-European prejudice reinforced but most find it a horizon-broadening experience.
The real surprise is that there is not more derision, given that the US surpassed Europe as the pre-eminent power decades ago. Given, too, that its political system has been a continuous exercise in democratic self-expression for 200 years or more - not quite the European experience. While French revolutionaries were lopping each others' heads off in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity, American revolutionaries were arguing over the merits of the impeachment clause of the US constitution. And given that it has twice sent its sons and daughters to die to save ungrateful Europeans from themselves.
This enduring tolerance of Europe's foibles owes much to the fact that, even today, many Americans claim a European heritage. Almost every American you meet will tell you that he hails from Galway or Padua or Leeds. It emerges only later that he has spent his entire life in Wisconsin but that his great-great-grandfather escaped the old continent a century ago and he is still wistful about it. His ancestors left, of course, because the old country was so horrible.
But, mostly, it is because Americans do not really care very much what Europeans think. America's pre-eminence and Europe's irrelevance have numbed US citizens to anything Europeans say about them.
I was going to suggest that it might at last be time for a bit of real anti-Europeanism in the US. But that would not be the American way. Instead Americans should just look across the Atlantic at the impotence- and stagnation-induced posturing of the old continent and smile. Or better still, laugh. |
