SECULARISM, STATISM, AND SATYRISM RIDE THE WEAK HORSE:

Western Europe's America Problem (ANDREI S. MARKOVITS, The Chronicle Review)

Any trip to Europe confirms what surveys have been finding: The aversion to America is becoming greater, louder, more determined. It is unifying Western Europeans more than any other political emotion — with the exception of a common hostility toward Israel. Indeed, the virulence in Western Europe's antipathy to Israel cannot be understood without the presence of anti-Americanism and hostility to the United States. Those two closely related resentments are now considered proper etiquette. They are present in polite company and acceptable in the discourse of the political classes. They constitute common fare not only among Western Europe's cultural and media elites, but also throughout society itself, from London to Athens and from Stockholm to Rome, even if European politicians visiting Washington or European professors at international conferences about anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are adamant about denying or sugarcoating that reality. [...]

Anti-Americanism constitutes a particular prejudice that renders it not only acceptable but indeed commendable in the context of an otherwise welcome discourse that favors the weak. Just as in the case of any prejudice, anti-Americanism also says much more about those who hold it than about the object of its ire and contempt. But where it differs markedly from "classical" prejudices — such as anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, and racism — is in the dimension of power. Jews, gays and lesbians, women, and ethnic minorities rarely if ever have any actual power in or over the majority populations or the dominant gender of most countries. However, the real, existing United States does have considerable power, which has increasingly assumed a global dimension since the end of the 19th century, and which has, according to many scholarly analyses, become unparalleled in human history.

While other public prejudices, particularly against the weak, have — in a fine testimony to progress and tolerance over the past 40 years — become largely illegitimate in the public discourse of most advanced industrial democracies (the massive change in the accepted language over the past three decades in those societies about women, gays, the physically challenged, minorities of all kinds, and animals, to name but a few, has been nothing short of fundamental), nothing of the sort pertains to the perceived and the actually strong. Thus anti-Americanism not only remains acceptable in many circles but has even become commendable, a badge of honor, and perhaps one of the most distinct icons of what it means to be a progressive these days.

So, too, with hostility to Israel. Because of its association with the United States, Israel is perceived by its European critics as powerful, with both countries seen as mere extensions of one another. To be sure, there is something else at work here as well, because America has many other powerful allies that never receive anywhere near the hostile scrutiny that Israel confronts on a daily basis. Clearly, the fact that Israel is primarily a Jewish state, combined with Europe's deeply problematic and unresolved history with Jews, plays a central role in European anti-Semitism. But today we are witnessing a "new" anti-Semitism that adds to traditional stereotypes: It is an epiphenomenon of anti-Americanism.

The Swiss legal theorist Gret Haller has written extensively to a very receptive and wide audience about America's being fundamentally — and irreconcilably — different from (and, of course, inferior to) Europe from the very founding of the American republic. To Haller, the manner in which the relationships among state, society, law, and religion were constructed and construed in America are so markedly contrary to its European counterpart that any bridge or reconciliation between those two profoundly different views of life is neither possible nor desirable. Hence Europe should draw a clear line that separates it decisively from America. In a discussion with panelists and audience members at a conference on European anti-Americanism at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, on April 29, 2005, at which I shared the podium with Haller, she explicitly and repeatedly emphasized that Britain had always belonged to Europe, and that the clear demarcation was never to run along the channel separating Britain from the European continent, but across the ever-widening Atlantic that rightly divided a Britain-encompassing Europe from an America that from the start featured many more differences from than similarities to Europe. The past few years have merely served to render those differences clearer and to highlight their irreconcilable nature.

That widely voiced indictment accuses America of being retrograde on three levels: moral (America's being the purveyor of the death penalty and of religious fundamentalism, as opposed to Europe's having abolished the death penalty and adhering to an enlightened secularism); social (America's being the bastion of unbridled "predatory capitalism," to use the words of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and of punishment, as opposed to Europe as the home of the considerate welfare state and of rehabilitation); and cultural (America the commodified, Europe the refined; America the prudish and prurient, Europe the savvy and wise).

Britain, France Argue Which Is Closest U.S. Ally (NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT, November 13, 2007, NY Sun)

Not to be outdone by President Sarkozy's amorous overture to President Bush in Washington, Prime Minister Brown of Britain has used the first major foreign policy speech of his premiership to insist that Britain is America's closest ally.

After decades of Anglo-French rivalry, in which France has vehemently deplored the global influence America and Britain have attained and what every president of France since Charles de Gaulle has described as "Anglo-Saxon culture," Mr. Sarkozy claimed during his visit to Washington last week that France, not Britain, is now America's best friend and partner.

Mr. Brown, who has been portrayed on both sides of the Atlantic as having distanced himself from America to avoid the charge against his predecessor, Tony Blair, that he was Mr. Bush's "poodle," fought back last night, claiming in a speech at a banquet thrown by the lord mayor of the city of London that the French president's bid to usurp Britain's traditional place alongside America would not succeed.

European rationalists are right to hate America, just as Americans notoriously despise intellectuals, but we are the far enemy and what they need to worry about is the near.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 2, 2008 11:58 PM