about intra-European divisions and badly misread its object. Only in Poland could America count on solid popular respect and support. Elsewhere in Europe, old and new alike, American policy on Iraq and much else was heartily disliked.[407] But the fact that a senior US official could seek to divide the Europeans in this way, just a few years after they had so painfully begun to sew themselves together, led many to conclude that the US itself was now the most serious problem facing Europe.
NATO had come into existence to compensate for Western Europe’s inability to defend itself without American help. The continuing failure of European governments to forge an effective military force of their own was what kept it in business. Beginning with the Maastricht Treaty of 1993, the European Union had at least acknowledged the need for a Common Foreign and Security Policy, though what that was and how it would be determined and implemented remained obscure. But ten years on the EU was close to establishing a 60,000-strong Rapid Response Force for intervention and peace-keeping tasks. Urged on by France and to Washington’s evident annoyance, European governments were also nearing agreement on an autonomous defense establishment capable of acting out of area and independent of NATO.
But the Atlantic gap was not just a disagreement about armies. It was not even about economic conflict, though the European Union was now large enough to bring effective pressure on the US Congress and on individual American manufacturers to conform to its norms and regulations or else risk being squeezed out of its markets: a development that caught many US Congressmen and businesses by surprise. Not only was Europe no longer in America’s shadow, but the relation was if anything reversed. European direct investment in the US in the year 2000 had reached $900 billion (against less than $650 billion of American direct investment in Europe); nearly 70 percent of all foreign investment in the US was from Europe; and European multi-nationals now owned a large number of iconic American products, including Brooks Brothers, Random House, Kent cigarettes, Pennzoil, Bird’s Eye and the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team.
Economic competition, however tense, was nonetheless a certain sort of closeness. What was really driving the two continents apart was a growing disagreement about ‘values’. In the words of
To these were added Washington’s growing disdain for international treaties, its unique perspective on everything from global warming to international law, and above all its partisan stance in the Israel-Palestine crisis. In none of these instances did American policy completely reverse direction following the election of President George W. Bush in 2000; the Atlantic gap had begun to open up well before. But the new Administration’s harsher tone confirmed for many European commentators what they already suspected: that these were not mere disagreements on discrete policy issues. They were mounting evidence of a fundamental cultural antagonism.
The idea that America was culturally different—or inferior, or threatening—was hardly original. In 1983 the French Culture Minister Jack Lang warned that the widely watched television series
What was new about the situation at the beginning of the twenty-first century was that such sentiments were becoming commonplace, and had moved from the intellectual or political fringes deep into the center of European life. The depth and breadth of anti-American feeling in contemporary Europe far exceeded anything seen during the Vietnam War or even at the height of the peace movements of the early 1980s. Although a majority in most countries still believed that the Atlantic relationship could be preserved, three out of five Europeans in 2004 (many more than that in some countries, notably Spain, Slovakia and, strikingly, Turkey) thought strong American leadership in the world to be ‘undesirable’.
Some of this could be attributed to widespread dislike of the policies and personof President George W. Bush, in contrast to the affection in which Bill Clinton, his predecessor, had been held. But many Europeans had been angry at President Lyndon Johnson in the late Sixties; yet their feelings about the war in South-East Asia had not typically mutated into dislike of America or Americans in general. Forty years later there was a widespread feeling, all across the continent (and very much including the British, who angrily objected to their Prime Minister’s enthusiastic identification with his American ally) that there was something wrong with the kind of place that America was becoming—or, as many now insisted, had always been.
Indeed, the presumptively ‘un-American’ qualities of Europe were fast becoming the highest common factor in European self-identification. European values were contrasted with American values. Europe was—or should strive to be—everything that America wasn’t. In November 1998 Jerome Clement, the President of
In the immediate post-Communist years Prague, like the rest of eastern Europe, would doubtless have pleaded guilty to a longing for all things American, from individual freedom to material abundance. And no-one visiting eastern European capitals, from Tallinn to Ljubljana, could miss the aggressive new elite of snappily dressed young men and women, zipping busily to appointments and shopping expeditions in their expensive new cars, enjoying the deadly liberal utopia of Clement’s nightmares. But even eastern Europeans were taking their distance from the American model: partly in deference to their new association with the European Union; partly because of growing aversion to aspects of American foreign policy; but increasingly because as an economic system and model of society the United States no longer seemed so self-evidently the way of the future.[409]
Extreme anti-Americanism in eastern Europe remained a minority taste. In countries like Bulgaria or Hungary it was now an indirect, politically acceptable way of expressing nostalgia for national Communism—and, as so often in the past, a serviceable surrogate for anti-Semitism. But even among mainstream commentators and politicians it was no longer commonplace to hold up American institutions or practices as a source of inspiration or an object to be emulated. For a long time America had been another time—Europe’s future. Now it was just another place. Many young people, to be sure, still dreamed of going to America. But as one Hungarian who had worked for some years in California explained to an interviewer:‘America is the place to come when you are young and single. But if it is time to grow up, you should return to Europe’.
The image of America as the perennial land of youth and adventure—with twenty-first-century Europe cast as an indulgent paradise for the middle-aged and risk-averse—had wide currency, especially in America itself. And indeed Europe
None of the traditional explanations for fertility decline seemed to account for Europe’s incipient demographic crisis. Poor countries like Moldova and rich ones like Denmark faced the same challenge. In Catholic countries like Italy or Spain, young people (married and unmarried alike) often lived in their parents’ homes well
