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MARTIN BUREAU/EPA-AFP |
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NOT QUITE:
This Paris protester may not know U.S. opinion is evenly split on whether to fight Iraq |
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| Mad At America |
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Europe has long had a love-hate relationship with the U.S. But as an unpopular war looms, anger and resentment are peaking. A calm look at a stormy — but resilient — alliance
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By J.F.O. McALLISTER/London |
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Posted Sunday, Jan. 12, 2003; 2.09 p.m. GMT
It was a cozy, intimate dinner party for some of Brussels' leading lights, held at the home of one of the city's premier architects. Leonard Schrank, the American chief executive of the financial services firm Swift and president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Belgium, took a seat next to an elegant woman he recognized as one of Belgium's richest people. During the pre-dinner chitchat in a room full of museum-quality contemporary art, she ventured offhandedly that it was "good that the Americans got hit on Sept. 11. Maybe it taught them a lesson."
"What the hell are you talking about?" Schrank responded. "More than 3,000 people died!" The woman wilted under his assault, but for Schrank the moral of the story was clear. "She was just repeating what she had heard," he says. "The real point is that 90% of the people she talks to every day would agree with her."
Welcome to the strange world of the transatlantic relationship, which lately seems to be borrowing less from traditional manuals of diplomacy than from pop psychology books about dysfunctional families. The Brussels woman may belong to Europe's upper crust, but these days it seems that every social stratum on the Continent is seized by fear and loathing of the U.S. Hundreds of thousands march through the capitals of Europe to denounce the looming American-led war against Iraq, hanging George W. Bush in effigy and burning Old Glory as they go. But fierce opposition to the prospect of war is merely the latest catalyst for anti-U.S. feeling; ask a European about America and you're likely to get an earful about American cultural and economic domination, American arrogance, American insularity, American blindness to global warming, world poverty and the plight of the Palestinians.
Hating the States is a growth industry across Europe, with best-selling books like L'Effroyable Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud) in France and Why Do People Hate America? in Britain. The anti-American movement even has an American mascot: social critic Michael Moore, whose latest movie (Bowling for Columbine), book (Stupid White Men) and one-man stage show all toss poison-tipped darts at the red-white-and-blue target — and are all doing brisk business in Europe. "Anti-Americanism in Europe," says a senior U.S. diplomat, "is creeping apace." As the military buildup continues against Iraq — without any obvious casus belli found by the weapons inspectors — "people are getting especially twitchy," says a British official.
The shared horror after Sept. 11 that led Le Monde to declare "We are all Americans" has vanished. In its place: European scorn for an American military response to terrorism that hasn't done much to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. A poll by the Pew Global Attitudes Project shows regard for the U.S. dropping in almost all European countries since 2000 — down 17 percentage points in Germany, eight in Britain, six in Italy. Senior American diplomats in Europe talk darkly about a "tectonic shift" in values that, with the glue of a common Soviet enemy removed, is pulling apart the most successful alliance in history.
American conservative intellectuals think the shift is already past the point of no return: they see a Europe devoted to lowest-common-denominator consensus, allergic to conflict, pathetically trying to restrain with vapid legalisms the only country with the strength and guts to do the dirty work of a Hobbesian world. In the cauldron of the White House, that viewpoint is boiled down to a brutal shorthand: "Eurowimp."
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