Fear of America

Date: 01/02/03

Ah, those old Europeans' old anti-Americanism

EUROPEANS are not anti-American, explains an aristocratic British writer and politician; it is just that they are “frightened that the destinies of the world should be in the hands of a giant with the limbs of an undergraduate and the brain of a peahen.” The United States, declares an eminent French philosopher, has “rabies”; Europe must step away or “we shall be bitten and infected next.” Either of those comments could have been made last week. In fact they were both uttered in the early 1950s, by Harold Nicolson and Jean-Paul Sartre respectively.

A direct line of descent links the fear and loathing of the United States expressed by the likes of Sartre and Nicolson to contemporary comments such as the recent description of the American government by a British playwright, Harold Pinter, as a “bloodthirsty wild animal” or the pronouncement by Jacques Derrida, Sartre's heir as hero of left-bank philosophes, that the United States is the world's “leading rogue state”. Then as now, the American-bashing views of such intellectuals are extreme - but by no means entirely unrepresentative. Pinterite visceral hatred of the United States is not too common in Europe. But the feeling that American policy towards Iraq is aggressive and dangerous is pretty mainstream. American officials attending the recent World Economic Forum meeting in Davos were taken aback by the wave of criticism they got - from corporate bosses, not from long-haired lefties.

Even in countries whose governments are well-disposed to the Bush administration and favour American policy on Iraq, opinion polls show a lot of public unease. Only 30% of Britons, according to one poll, back a war unconditionally; some 87% of Spaniards, according to another, are against. Once again, the echoes of past arguments are there to be heard. As an American historian, William Hitchcock, points out in a new history of post-war Europe (“The Struggle for Europe”), “Throughout the 1950s, polls showed that a third to one half of the public in Britain, France and Italy wished to remain neutral in the cold war.”

Fear that the United States would drag Europe into war has recurred at regular intervals ever since. In 1965 General de Gaulle proclaimed that the “United States is the greatest danger in the world today to peace”. The Vietnam war prompted demonstrations across Europe. The deployment of American cruise missiles in Europe under Ronald Reagan provoked a renewed European spasm of alarm. George Bush's talk of an “axis of evil” has been widely denounced in Europe as simple-minded, as was Mr Reagan's talk of the Soviet Union's “evil empire”. As Mr Bush himself might put it, we've seen this movie before.

Doubtless the movie would be released under different titles on either side of the Atlantic. In the United States, it would be “Eurowimps Four: They Never Learn”. In Europe, “Dr Strangelove - The Return” would better capture the popular mood. As with all remakes and sequels, new elements have been added to the script. The cold war's end removed Russia's military threat to Europe and so let Europeans feel that America's fight is not theirs. Germany, now it is no longer on the front line of the confrontation with the Soviet Union, has moved from being one of Europe's most staunchly Atlanticist countries to being the most instinctively neutral. America's new doctrine of preventive war in the struggle against terrorism is easier to portray as unwarranted aggression than was containing the Soviet Union.

Now the United States itself has been attacked, Americans are more likely to feel betrayed by European criticism, adding an extra touch of bitterness to transatlantic exchanges. American neo-conservative talk of “Euroweenies”, charges of European anti-Semitism and descriptions of the French as “cheese-eating surrender-monkeys” (to quote a recent article in the National Review) show that when it comes to invective the Americans can give as good as they get.

Do all these differences mean that the new movie about Euro-American relations will end differently from all previous episodes? In the cold war, despite all the tensions, there was always a happy ending: the Atlantic alliance stayed intact and emerged triumphant. Many analysts assume that France's threat to veto military action against Iraq at the United Nations is just an effort to keep viewers watching until the last frame, before returning to the familiar script. In the end, they reckon, France will go along with a war and even Germany will mute its opposition. Others think that too sanguine, and reckon that Jacques Chirac, France's president, is determined to resist American pressure and to isolate Tony Blair, the British prime minister, within Europe.

New versus old?

That last ambition may be too much of a stretch. For while it is easy to talk of a split between Europe and the United States, Europe's own divisions are just as real. It is not just, as Donald Rumsfeld, the American defence secretary, suggests, a divide between the “new Europe” of pro-American central Europeans and an “old Europe” represented by France and Germany. Even the old bit is divided, with the Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Danish governments closer to London's viewpoint than to those in Paris and Berlin.

Yet Mr Chirac and Germany's chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, know that “standing up to America” plays well at home. So does portraying the United States as a nation of crazed gunslingers and religious fanatics. But Europeans should remember that these stereotypes were consistently peddled in the cold war - and were consistently wrong. Who in Europe now seriously argues that it was a mistake to side with the United States in the struggle against the Soviet Union? And who could dispute that the phrase “evil empire” was actually a rather succinct summary of the facts rather than florid hyperbole? Those Europeans who accuse Americans of lack of sophistication and an ignorance of history might benefit from a brief history lesson themselves.

Commentary feature on current relations between the USA and Europe.

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