Internal divisions and mutual perceptions

Pierre Hassner

A few points seem beyond controversy. Domestically, the United States has moved to the right even if economic or international circumstances may lead, now and then, the Democrats to victory. There are comparable trends in Europe, where the failures of social-democracy and the crisis of the welfare state produce periodic calls for reform in the Thatcher-Reagan direction, but the resistance is much stronger. The priority given to equal-ity and securequal-ity over competitiveness and flexibilequal-ity is still alive.

Another, perhaps even more spectacularly growing difference, is about religion. Europeans are becoming less religious, Americans more. Euro-peans are the exception to the revival which seems to occur in all major religions, with explosive political consequences.¹³ They tend, mistakenly, to identify American religiosity with Protestant fundamentalism, whereas American religion has in great part, followed the same evolution in an individualistic, non-dogmatic direction as in Europe.¹⁴ But the political influence of conservative Protestants has no equivalent in Europe. As Karsten Voigt remarked, in Germany, fundamentalist Protestants are pre-dominantly pacifists, in America they tend to be prepre-dominantly Mani-chean.

None of these differences is fixed and permanent, however. Many appar-ently specific American trends are coming to Europe, from evangelical preachers to harsher penal sentences and to capitalist concentration in newspapers, in publishing and the media.

What may justify the variety of interpretations are the internal divisions both within the United States and within Europe?

Beyond Iraq: The Transatlantic Crisis in Perspective

103 return to the virtues of work, family, patriotism, discipline or manliness and for “a de-Europeanization i.e. re-moralization of American culture.”

She called for “a change in culture through politics.” In large measure, this has been accomplished by the election of George W. Bush and above all by the shock of 9/11. But it had started earlier. The rise of this trend has been described and explained in various ways as the rise of the “Jack-sonians” (W. Russell Mead)¹⁶ as the conquest of the United States by Texas or by the South (Michael Lind).¹⁷

Many Europeans have tended to deplore what they saw as the wild swings in the American moods and intellectual fashions. Yesterday, Europeans, and particularly Parisian intellectuals, were mocking the ex-cesses of “political correctness,” of legalism, of feminism, of self-denigration, of risk-avoidance (like the primacy of force-protection and the search for a “zero-death” military posture). To-day, they criticize the opposite excesses – bigotry, brutality, self-righteousness, Manicheism, arrogance, adventurism. It does seem an American tendency for the pen-dulum to go from one extreme to another, although some balancing mechanisms have preserved the United States, unlike most of Europe, both from the fascist and from the communist experience.

But the point is that while some Europeans criticize the oscillations in American political culture, most of them criticize one version and identify with the other. The groups traditionally most pro-American, the youth, the educated, are, today, the most hostile to the Bush administration.

Some recent American presidents like Kennedy and Clinton have been popular among the European young, as symbols of dynamism and mod-ernity. Carter was respected by some for his stand on human rights, but irritated others by his sanctimoniousness and moralism. Nixon was at-tacked by the left because of Vietnam and Chile, he was criticized by Protestant Europe for Watergate but found favor with Catholics and Latins more hostile to moralism and appreciative of realism. Reagan was criticized for his black-and-white view of the world and for his vigorous assertion of American primacy but criticized by the right and applauded by the left for his understanding with Gorbachev. Only George W. Bush

16 Walter Russell Mead, Special Providence, Knopf, 2001.

17 Michael Lind, Made in Texas. George W. Bush and the Southern Takeover of American Politics, Basic Books, 2003.

Pierre Hassner

is almost unanimously condemned in Western Europe, for being both ar-rogant and simplistic, trigger-happy and missionary.

This quasi-unanimity is broken, however, by the attitudes of the formerly communist European countries.¹⁸ American traditionalism, complete with patriotism, religion, family values, death penalty and repression of sexual minorities reassures them more than it shocks them. They are more en-thusiastic about capitalism than about social democracy even though many of them are nostalgic of the stability provided by the last years of communism, and East Germans have remained distrustful of “American imperialism.” While Greece is the most anti-American country, Albani-ans, particularly Kosovars, are the most pro-American people. And this brings in the second aspect, the role of the American superpower in the world.

For most West Europeans, American power was necessary and beneficial (although occasionally misguided like in Vietnam) as long as there was a Soviet danger. Once the United States has remained the only military su-perpower as well as at the center of the world economic system, the ten-dency to resent its superiority and to fear its domination has increased spectacularly, as well as the temptation to blame it for all the injustices and disruptions of the world, whether caused by its influence or by broader phenomena as globalization. For the East Europeans, by contrast, America has remained the Liberator, the country that, by standing up to the Soviet Union or to Milosevic, has delivered them from evil. Most im-portantly, it remains the power they trust for their protection against their former masters, and, initially at least, they were ready to give it the bene-fit of the doubt in its search for liberating the world from other tyrannies.

West Europeans, too, have expressed solidarity with the United States after 9/11 against the new common enemy, Al Quaida, witness the fa-mous editorial in Le Monde “We are all Americans,” and the immediate and unanimous invocation of article 5 of the NATO treaty. But the dis-dain with which these shows of solidarity and these offers of help were received by the Bush administration, the difference of intensity of the re-action and, above all, the difference of analysis between Americans and Europeans of the threat and of the means to counter it, have soon soured

Beyond Iraq: The Transatlantic Crisis in Perspective

105 these feelings of communality and, above all, the faith of West Europeans in America’s leadership. While for some, on the left, the search for the root causes of terrorism led to seeing America as having created the situa-tion which lead to Islamic terrorism, a vast majority of the critics insist that their quarrel is with the Bush administration, not with the United States as such, nor its past policies. For instance 76% of the French and 68% of the Germans blame Bush rather than America. For the Russians, the proportion is the opposite: 29% blame Bush, 48% America.¹⁹ Never-theless their negative reaction to current American policies does translate, particularly among countries nostalgic of their past position, like France, or eager to show their independence, like Germany, into a more long-range desire for Europe to ensure its own defense and security even though, as we have seen, this desire is not likely to lead to a real financial and military effort any time soon. What this shows is that Americans and Europeans do not live in different worlds but that their reaction to the same challenges may lead to divergences and disputes between them.

Very often, however, these transatlantic divergences and disputes are an-other face of intra-American and intra-European ones. Just as the Ameri-can right’s outbursts against Europeans are often primarily aimed at American liberals, so the desire of European governments to show their independence from the United States is often, above all, a way of courting the favor of their own pacifist youth or of undercutting their leftist or na-tionalist challengers.