Could it be — as it’s seemed for the last week — that the real “clash of civilizations” is (gulp) between the new American global “civilizing mission” and the new European version of a “EU-topian” world? Are Americans from Mars, as Timothy Garton Ash quotes Robert Kagan writing, and Europeans (disparagingly, of course) from Venus, and so a bunch of “Euro-weenies”?
The two pieces that follow seem timely, given the transatlantic verbal scuffling that’s been going on between an angered, frustrated Bush administration and the leaders of France and Germany. Eric Margolis, my favorite conservative columnist, offers a rabble-rousing column on American anti-European sentiments in the Toronto Sun today and, as it happens, Timothy Garton Ash has just written a long, thoughtful account of American anti-French and anti-European sentiments of the moment, and what to make of them, in the New York Review of Books. “The new Rome no longer feels in awe of the old Greeks,” he writes and, remarking on the fact that Washington is now a war capital in an otherwise less warlike land, concludes that, with or without a war in Iraq, the rift between the continents is only likely to widen. “The Soviet Union united the West, the Middle East divides it,” he concludes.
Finally, for a sobering dose of economic reality, you might consider looking at columnist Will Hutton’s piece in today’s British Observer, “Why Bush is sunk without Europe,” in which he says, in part:
“The US’s economic position is far too vulnerable to allow it to go war without cast-iron multilateral support that could underpin it economically as well as diplomatically and militarily. The multi-lateralism Bush scorns is, in truth, an economic necessity. America may be a superpower that spends more on defence than the next nine countries combined and is preparing to increase defence spending this year by an enormous $48 billion, equivalent to Britain’s entire defence budget, but it is a strategic position built on economic sand…. The US’s military capacity may allow unilateralism; its soft economic underbelly, we are discovering, does not.”
To read more of Hutton click here
Tom
Europe urges restraint, but Bush knows best
By Eric Margolis
Contributing Foreign Editor
The Toronto Sun
January 26, 2003Time’s European edition asked its readers what nation posed the greatest threat to world peace. Of the 268,000 respondents (as of this writing), 7.8% replied North Korea, 8.9% named Iraq and a shocking 83.3% said the United States. Good work, President Bush.
To read more of Hutton click here
Tom
Europe urges restraint, but Bush knows best
By Eric Margolis
Contributing Foreign Editor
The Toronto Sun
January 26, 2003Time’s European edition asked its readers what nation posed the greatest threat to world peace. Of the 268,000 respondents (as of this writing), 7.8% replied North Korea, 8.9% named Iraq and a shocking 83.3% said the United States. Good work, President Bush.
The Time poll mirrors feeling around the globe, with the exceptions of Israel and Britain. American neo-conservatives, however, will dismiss this poll as just another example of European wimpiness, irrelevance and anti-American prejudice. So will George Bush and his hawkish entourage, who have made it plain they don’t care what the rest of the world thinks so long as America and Israel get their way.
Last week, France’s able foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, warned his nation would delay, or might even veto, efforts by the Bush administration to strong-arm the UN Security Council into a rushed war vote against Iraq. Germany, China and Russia backed France.
To read more Margolis click here
Anti-Europeanism in America
By Timothy Garton Ash
The New York Review of Books
February 13, 2003This year, especially if the United States goes to war against Iraq, you will doubtless see more articles in the American press on “Anti-Americanism in Europe.” But what about anti-Europeanism in the United States? Consider this:
To the list of polities destined to slip down the Eurinal of history, we must add the European Union and France’s Fifth Republic. The only question is how messy their disintegration will be.
(Mark Steyn, Jewish World Review, May 1, 2002)And:
Even the phrase “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” is used [to describe the French] as often as the French say “screw the Jews.” Oops, sorry, that’s a different popular French expression.
(Jonah Goldberg, National Review Online, July 16, 2002)