Posted on 11/20/2004 7:12:40 AM PST by Valin
The reelection of George W. Bush sent a cloud of gloom over much of Europe. "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?" was the headline of the post-election edition of the Daily Mirror, a British tabloid.
Once the European intelligentsia recovered its wits well enough to speak, a common theme emerged: America was not what they thought it was. Before November 2, it could be hoped that Bush was a fluke, a truly "accidental president" who did not really represent Americans. After November 2, Europe had to come to grips with the fact that a majority of American voters actually liked the 43rd president, or at any rate preferred him to the suave Europhile John Kerry. As one European diplomat said, "Now we know it’s not just the group of people who rules; it’s the way American society is evolving. It’s distinctly less European than it used to be." Guillaume Parmentier, director of the French Center on the United States, agreed that "There’s a feeling in Europe today that America has profoundly changed."
Such sentiments naturally lead to two questions. Has anything really changed? And, if so, is it America that changed—or Europe?
In one sense, it is clear that there is at least some exaggeration about the degree to which anything has changed. Did French-American relations become strained because of Iraq? Hardly. In World War II, some of the first combat Americans faced in the European war was against French troops fighting for the Vichy regime in North Africa. In 1956, the U.S. found itself on the opposite side from France (and Britain) during the Suez crisis. In 1966, France removed itself from the military arm of NATO, meaning that France has not been a military ally of the United States for nearly 40 years. In 1980, French President Valery Giscard d’Estang infuriated Jimmy Carter when he met secretly with Soviet dictator Leonid Brezhnev to discuss ways around Carter’s post-Afghanistan anti-Soviet toughness. In 1986, American pilots on their way to bomb Libya in retaliation for a terrorist attack were put at risk when France refused to allow them to fly over French territory. Throughout the 1990s, French leaders portrayed the European Union as a conscious counterweight to America. In 1999, France opposed Bill Clinton’s war in Kosovo.
More generally, Europe has long been awash in knee-jerk anti-Americanism among its elites, who have viewed Americans as rough, uncultured upstarts. It has also long been afflicted by higher levels of collectivism and statism, as well as an appeasement reflex that goes back at least as far as travails with the Barbary Coast pirates in the Mediterranean in the early 1800s. The Europeans preferred to buy the pirates off; Jefferson preferred to send the Marines to the shores of Tripoli. For their part, Americans have long liked to view their country as part of the New World, a place where one could escape the feudal hierarchy, the pointless jealousies, and the authoritarianism of Europe.
To the extent that something has changed, though, the Europeans have it backwards. It is Europe that has "evolved" and red-state America that has adhered to older norms, in at least three key areas.
First, while the values divide between Europe and America may be growing, it is not because America is growing more religious. Rather, it is because Europe has all but abandoned the religious heritage that has served as the moral foundation of Western Civilization for two millenia. Europeans are free, of course, to take their moral guidance from Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre, and Derrida rather than Moses and St. Paul, but they are not entitled to embrace nihilism and hedonism as their new religion and then accuse Americans of changing.
Second, while the United States has long valued international organizations and still gives them every bit of respect that they earn, most Americans are reluctant to surrender their national sovereignty to those organizations, especially when their freedom and safety is at stake. This, however, is not a new position; it is a position as old as the nation-state. It is Europeans who have embarked on the unprecedented experiment of voluntarily subsuming their national identities to the whims of international bureaucracies.
This point leads inexorably into the third. Americans continue to cling to old verities of natural law and natural rights, not least of which is the supreme demand for government based on the consent of the governed. It is precisely the connection between consent on one hand and accountability and legitimacy on the other that causes Americans to prefer fealty to their Constitution over international organizations. We can hold George Bush (or Tom Daschle) accountable, but how can we hold accountable Kofi Annan or Hans Blix? There is a growing recognition by observers that the European Union has been built at a great cost to democracy; Europeans themselves refer to a "democratic deficit." Many Europeans may be willing to throw overboard one of the most central principles of a free society, but they can hardly complain when Americans prove not so willing.
Altogether, Europeans have effectively removed themselves from Christendom while surrendering their sovereignty and much of the basis of their liberty. It is Europeans who have stopped having children and who have instead opened the floodgates to a potentially decisive fifth column of anti-Western immigrants; Europeans who have adopted the historically novel view that diplomacy with tyrants can succeed in the absence of a credible threat of force. And now it is Europeans who argue that Americans are the ones who have changed. This might be a good time for self-reflection among Europe’s elites, if they can spare a moment from their mourning.
Andrew E. Busch is a Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and an Adjunct Fellow of the Ashbrook Center.
yo snowman,
Nice post
Nice post
Nice post
why 3 of the same thing?
>Europeans who have adopted the historically novel view that diplomacy with tyrants can succeed in the absence of a credible threat of force
Ha. Seems that I remember a British gentleman who thought the same way after giving Hitler what he wanted
Some things haven't changed.
Now, we pulled their nuts out of the fire then, but they have to actually embrace those value systems that they had then, to be able to defend themselves now, and I just don't see it happening without...Oh, hell, I just don't see it happening.
I do not understand the thought process that embraces such lunacy
"If we had demanded repayment for all the lend lease and all the money given to France, Germany, and Great Britian not to mention Russia. We wouldn't have a national debt that would be a 1/4 as large."
You could be right there. But the net effect could have been something like that of a bank that didn't lend money. And would you really have wanted either Stalin or Hitler to have occupied all of Europe, plus the Middle East? - because that would have been one of the risks of not giving lend-lease.
Isn't it a question of how isolationist you want America to be?
Yup. Most of the western Europeans with brains must've been killed off in the World Wars, and the region is now populated by the progeny of the lame-brains. How else can one explain that they have done everything possible to ensure that Europe will YET AGAIN be the world's battlefield?
"I do not understand the thought process that embraces such lunacy!"
Lunatics as a group have no logical thought processes.
Consideration for a moral clarity and a nailed it! ping
Suggest you read up on Thomas Jefferson for this approach to "natural law"
Great read!
You Euroweenies have begun to get it. We have changed from a long, dark period of forty years of RAT-induced socialistic sleep brought on by RATs in charge all that time. Now they are no longer in charge and reality time is here. The bad guys are in deep doodoo and they know it. The euros may soon understand that Bush has the majority of the people behind him and he will do what he said he would do to terrorists and solve the RAT's social issues, Social Security as well as fixing the tax code once and for all. Whatta a relief!
I am aware of his writings on natural law, majority rule and minority rights, but I do not see your point.
Thanks for the ping!
No, it couldn't be there; all their children are ABOVE average.
"Lend-Lease also involved Britain's surrender of her rights and royalties in a series of British technological achievements. Although the British performance in industrial techniques in the inter-war years had been marked by a period of more general decline, the achievements of our scientists and technologists had equalled the most remarkable eras of British inventive greatness. Radar, antibiotics, jet aircraft and British advances in nuclear research had created an industrial revolution all over the developed world. Under Lend-Lease, these inventions were surrendered as part of the inter-Allied war effort, free of any royalty or other payments from the United States. Had Churchill been able to insist on adequate royalties for these inventions, both our wartime and our post-war balance of payments would have been very different."
Harold Wilson, Memoirs: 1916-1964 (1986)
Just another opinion, yes?
Very different indeed. We would not have cooperated and Britain would be a German-speaking northern territory of Grossdeutschland.
Oh dear, same old rubbish.
The turning point vis-a-vis Britain becoming part of the German-speaking northern territory of Grossdeutschland was the Battle of Britain in 1940.
What we really needed then were arses on seats, the seats in question being in the cockpits of Hurricanes, Spitfires, Defiants and Beaufighters. We were out-producing Germany in terms of fighter and bomber production in 1940, thanks to our own efforts, but we were short of pilots due to the attrition rate of constant warfare. Our saviours were.. the Poles.
For which 'Dziêkuj¹' to the Polish nation.
I learn something new every day.
not really as Churchill said after the war "I come not for Silver I come for aluminum I come not for gold I come for steel." And Truman gave the Brits 50 BIL worth.
"not really as Churchill said after the war "I come not for Silver I come for aluminum I come not for gold I come for steel." And Truman gave the Brits 50 BIL worth"
Are you sure about that?
The entire lend-lease was "only" $50 billion, and Russia/USSR got the largest single part of that.
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