Sunday, Oct. 01, 2006

Drifting Apart

By J.F.O. MCALLISTER | LONDON

The men who signed the American Declaration of Independence 230 years ago were determined to build a bold new nation in the world. "These United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States," they proclaimed. "All political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved." They got their wish. For more than a century, the new United


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States of America fixed its attention westward, away from the Old World and toward its own expansion. But the divorce was never intended to be total. Much of the Declaration itself was a plea for European sympathy and understanding. "Let Facts be submitted to a candid world," it argued. "A decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." If the Americans were insisting on moving out of the house, they still wanted to be invited back for the holidays.

But would they be, today? Wherever you look in Europe, there is a palpable estrangement from U.S. values and rhetoric, at least as expressed by the leaders of the current Administration. What are the wellsprings of current sour European attitudes to the U.S., and how deep are they? How long will they last? How serious are their implications for the ability of the great democracies to work together to confront some of the most pressing issues facing the world?

It's easy to dismiss Europe's current, curdled view of things American as something that will change over time. After all, it has done so before. Sure, the argument goes, the Bush Administration has alienated Europe — over Iraq and Guantánamo and global warming, to name but three salient issues — but so did Dwight Eisenhower when he pulled the plug on the British-French-Israeli invasion of Suez, Lyndon Johnson with the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan when he deployed Pershing and cruise missiles despite Continent-wide protests. So maybe if we just wait a while, the ship will right itself, buoyed up by a vast ocean of common experience and belief: a commitment to democracy and free markets, intensifying economic links, a shared culture that ranges from the Magna Carta to Montesquieu to Madonna to Mastercard to mtv.

In one sense that has to be right. In a world still complex and dangerous, Europeans know they will not often find more natural partners than the Americans. Even as politicians disagree over how to handle Iraq and carbon emissions, French scientists find their labs are being funded along more entrepreneurial American lines, the British newspaper the Guardian has a huge U.S. readership for its website, and in Angela Merkel, Germany has elected a Chancellor determined to improve relations with the U.S. Since George W. Bush came to office, polls have shown that Europeans blame him personally more than the U.S. in general for what ails U.S.-European ties. The Transatlantic Trends survey conducted in 12 European countries for the German Marshall Fund of the United States, released last month, found that only 18% of Europeans approve of the way Bush handles international affairs. Nevertheless, 37% think U.S. leadership in world affairs is generally desirable — still a low number (down from 64% in 2002), but more than double Bush's personal score. Ron Asmus, an American who heads the Marshall Fund's Transatlantic Center in Brussels, says: "Europe has made up its mind on George Bush. But in 2008, the page will be turned. Europeans will take a new look at America, and that's when it gets interesting."

Well, maybe. But I have been writing about U.S. foreign policy for 30 years and living in Europe for the last seven, and while I hope Asmus is right, I fear there are bigger centrifugal trends at work than a single President and his unpopular war. In historical perspective, that's almost inevitable. The overarching Soviet threat of the cold war was extraordinary; so was the cooperation, from the Marshall Plan to nato to Fulbright scholarships, it inspired. "The closeness we grew used to of shared perspectives between 1950 and 1990 was the exception rather than the rule," says Tony Judt, a British-born professor of European history at New York University. "Before World War II, no one spoke about 'the West' as a shared cultural area. Americans, mostly of recent European descent, saw themselves as getting away from Europe. Europeans saw America as worryingly rootless, an exclusively mercantile place without culture, heritage, tradition, which was therefore threatening to their future. I think we may be seeing an unarticulated return to an opening of that old tap."

The young are the ones most easily inebriated. Europeans entering university this autumn have no personal memory of the joyous destruction of the Berlin Wall in 1989, let alone the preceding 40-year struggle against the Soviet system during which the survival of a free Europe depended upon an alliance with the U.S. — something their parents felt in their bones even if they disliked particular U.S. policies. The youngsters' professors might teach that the American nuclear umbrella provided the strategic framework enabling France and Germany to stop trying to annihilate each other and the European Union to take root and prosper; their grandparents might remember G.I.s bearing nylons and Hershey bars. I have seen the power of such sentiments myself. When I was a high school exchange student in 1972, I had a rollicking argument with a train compartment full of East German teenagers about "imperialist America." But when I gave one of the girls a John F. Kennedy half-dollar, she broke into tears and gave me a big kiss. How many European teenagers today would feel that way about any American President?

For Europeans to have less need of the U.S. is an inevitable fruit of cold war victory. But Judt argues that things are worse than that. Bush, he says, "has successfully attached what might have been a passing period of anger about a series of American policies to a larger sense of detachment from America." Robert von Rimscha, the German author of several books on transatlantic issues, argues that in his country, "many citizens across all generations, but especially many young, are no longer simply saying, 'We do not need the United States any longer'; they are saying, 'We do not want the United States any longer.'" David Graves, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, who has worked in France, recounts the end of a very friendly conversation with a thirtysomething Dutch couple at a restaurant in Amsterdam this summer. "I like you, and I like Americans," said the man. "But I have to tell you that my generation here in Holland is moving toward seeing the U.S. the way we saw Nazi Germany in 1944." Astrid Rosenwirth, 25, an Austrian political-science student, lived in the U.S. for four years and likes lots about the country, including a "tolerance and inclusiveness that Austria will not have achieved 20 years from now. I met the most enlightened and open-minded people there," she says. "But also the most ignorant, uneducated and prejudiced. I guess with a society built on contradictions, you can only have an ambivalent relationship." And she finds its government repulsive. "What puts us [in Europe] off most is its in-your-face hypocrisy. It's this idea of American exceptionalism, the moral talk and the overt and often naïve religiousness." Of course there is a wide spectrum of European opinion toward the U.S., and not all of it is well-informed. But Senator Chuck Hagel, a Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee, told me that his greatest worry about U.S. foreign policy is that "we're losing the next generation." Opinions don't have to be right to have political consequence.

Continuing to exacerbate those bad feelings is the Iraq war, which, more than anything else, has divided Europe from the U.S. It seems unlikely to come to a welcome end anytime soon. That the U.S. has botched the occupation of Iraq is widely agreed, including in Washington. For a hyperpower to be disliked may be inevitable. For it to be incompetent over a long period is deeply corrosive to its capacity to lead. "People hate the U.S. for not being able to handle the situation in Iraq," says Zbigniew Lewicki, professor of American Studies at Warsaw University. "It has failed in its duty to fix things." In the eyes of many Europeans, the same goes for Afghanistan, where the Taliban is resurgent, and for Islamic terrorists, too. Al-Qaeda and its allies have not mounted another attack on the scale of Sept. 11, but continue to take lives. Americans can find plenty to criticize in the way Europeans have awakened slowly to the threat posed by Islamic radicalism, and Bush is right to emphasize that the fight against it will be long. But by comparison with the cold war, this time a U.S. President hasn't managed to sell Europe on his basic strategy for winning a generational struggle. "Even though we agree that Islamic radicalism is a common threat," says a British official, "most of the world thinks the U.S. is making it worse."

Aspects of that sentiment are widely shared. Von Rimscha says "American unilateralism, militarism and disdain for international law do not even have to be argued anymore. They are firmly believed, they have become part of an entrenched canon of anti-Americanism." Other experts doubt things are that bad, but elements of this canon are migrating into the mainstream and constraining the running room of politicians all over Europe. In the Czech Republic, for example, 83% of those polled in July don't want to let the U.S. build a military base there. The Transatlantic Trends survey shows the sharpest drop in support for U.S. leadership in countries that have traditionally been most pro-American, such as the U.K. and Poland. The new leader of Britain's Conservative Party, David Cameron, has said that he wants to "rebalance" London's relationship with Washington. "We have never, until recently, been uncritical allies of America … We must strive above all for legitimacy in what we do." You can bet the ranch that Prime Minister Tony Blair's likely successor Gordon Brown will not let himself get tagged as "Bush's poodle" as he prepares to face Cameron at the polls. Of course, the next U.S. President will pick up some easy tricks in Europe simply by not being Bush. Diplomats on both sides of the Atlantic say relations have reverted to a more workmanlike calm from the storms that gathered over the preparations for the Iraq war. The Transatlantic Trends survey shows many areas where public opinion on both sides is united, including a surprising willingness to take military action against Iran if diplomacy fails to stop its nuclear program (53% in the U.S., 45% in Europe). More than 70% on both sides of the Atlantic rate terrorism, global warming, Islamic fundamentalism, global pandemics and immigration as serious threats over the next 10 years. The problem is that agreement on general ends can easily dissolve in hard choices over means. While Europe and the U.S. are singing from the same hymnal (more or less) on Iran, for example, not much pressure would be needed to provoke public disharmony. The British official says, "We've papered over our differences over Iraq, more or less. But there's a sense we don't have a common view on a lot of hard problems — not just Iran but Afghanistan and what to do if Russia uses its oil and gas to throw its weight around. There's nothing very solid underneath if something tricky comes up."

In sum, the emotional estrangement from the U.S. now evident in Europe can't simply be wished away. It may transform itself into a "cafeteria Atlanticism" — wariness in general, coupled with recognition that there will be places both sides need to do business. When Blair chose to fight the anti-American mood inside the Labour Party at its annual conference last week, he picked for guest speaker the mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa — a Hispanic environmentalist and public-transit advocate from a state that just passed into law a version of the Kyoto accords. By the time he finished, the delegates were radiating fraternal feelings toward this representative of the U.S. Frenchman Benjamin Bechaux, 24, who just completed his studies at the prestigious French university Sciences Po, also expects a pick-and-choose approach toward the U.S. He spent nine months as an intern at the French consulate in Houston and came away with an indelible portrait of America's complexity. "The whole way of life — from your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned job, then to an air-conditioned burger joint — this is the antithesis of what we want in France." But he noted that Houston, the heart of Bush country, has a Democratic mayor and a large gay population. "A lot of people there were as distraught as Europeans about the war in Lebanon," he says. "And even on an issue like global warming, there are all kinds of local and state charters to conserve energy. America is schizophrenic, the best and the worst."

How do U.S. policymakers react to Europe's new mood? To an extent, they shrug their shoulders at it, and they have some reason to do so. Europe doesn't count as much as it once did; it is not going to be the fulcrum of world wars anytime soon. It's only natural for Washington's attention to swivel toward Asia, with its rising powers, where U.S. ties are already extensive, and where it can deploy far more top-level expertise than modern Europe can. Some Americans dismiss Europe entirely. Kenneth Feltman of Radnor Inc., who surveys high-level "decision makers" for corporations and political candidates, says his U.S. decision makers have little sense of connection with Europe. One word always gets them nodding about Europe: "Whiney." Says Feltman: "Americans say, 'We used to worry about what Europe wants, but we can't figure it out. So we stopped worrying.'"

But that is dangerous ground. Not worrying about what others think speaks to a splendid isolationism of the mind. Even if Europe doesn't have the heft it used to, the U.S. will find managing the rise of Asia's new powers much harder without help from the bulk of the most prosperous democracies. Even if the U.S. seems more and more like another planet to younger Europeans, the problems posed by Islamic radicalism and Iranian nuclear weapons, to say nothing of global warming, will fester if the U.S. is not involved in seeking solutions.

So how could Europeans be persuaded to stop turning away from the U.S. and engage again? A first step would be for the U.S. not to demand submission from Europeans or lecture them all the time, but to argue and persuade: not on the basis that the "war on terror" justifies all, but showing respect for the international legal norms on which Europe now grounds its own peace and security. Europeans, you might say, want from the U.S. what a few isolated colonists on the edge of civilization thought was in their interest to offer the world two centuries ago: "A decent respect to the opinions of mankind." Without it, a deeper and unhappier independence will require no declaration.