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of us in the heartland must confess that we were raised with our
fathers' old and rather predictable prejudices against Europe. Whether
out of a sense of cultural inferiority, ignorance of the wider world,
or the 20th-century tendency of wild men in Europe to disrupt our
peace, the older generations once embraced a certain suspicion of
things French, German, and English. In their view, each unappreciated
generation of 20th-century Americans went over either to Europe,
to be killed, gassed, or shot at — or else to the Pacific,
to fight various wars spawned by a tumult that had begun in Europe.
So our supposedly blinkered fathers once had a lurking suspicion
that, while we had inherited our democratic ideals from the European
Enlightenment, our forebears across the water were a much different
people from us. In this line of thinking, it was imagined that Europeans
had privately concluded that we pushy Americans had simply gone
too far in our experiments with unchecked capitalism, class mobility,
and freedom. In our efforts to welcome radical egalitarianism, material
well-being, and massive immigration, Americans had more or less
obliterated ideas of landed gentry, the importance of breeding,
class, ancestry, and accent — and perhaps high culture altogether.
The postwar peace of the last half-century was to have ended all
the needless suspicion and downright ignorance about a supposedly
aristocratic and jealous Europe. Millions of Americans served in
wars overseas. Millions more have traveled to London, Paris, and
Rome in the boom and affluence of the last 50 years. Not only was
our generation of Americans impressed by the European propensity
to eat better and slower, preserve their inner cities and hallowed
buildings, promote their small farms and towns, and build an efficient
and humane infrastructure of mass transit and medical care —
but Europeans in their turn admired our idealism (if not naïveté)
and energy, and so came to appreciate that in a single century,
we had saved the continent from Prussian militarism, German and
Italian fascism, and Soviet Communism. And so we two more or less
got along well — as should the twin offspring of a shared Western
heritage.
The recent war, however, is revealing how far America and Europe
have drifted apart just in the past decade. In the last few days,
we have been lectured by the Spanish — whose record of freedom
and the protection of individual rights in the last few centuries
is hardly stellar — that we cannot expect extradition of those
enemy warriors implicated in the conspiracy to kill our thousands.
Instead, we must assure Franco's children that these alien soldiers
of war who tried — and will try — to kill us will be processed
solely through our civil courts.
Even some British leaders — whose troops comprise a small
percentage of those fighting on land and in the air to free Afghanistan
— have announced that should their men catch bin Laden first
(hardly likely), they will not ship such an odious mass murderer
to America to answer for his killing of our innocents. You see,
we still have the death penalty. To British sensibilities, we thus
cannot be trusted to mete out a fair justice to the CEO of Terror,
Inc. True, a few years ago we were reluctantly welcomed to fly into
central Europe, destroy fascism in Serbia, and stop an ethnic holocaust
a few hours away from Berlin and Rome — but surely all that
should not suggest that we can be let loose on our own turf to try
the killers of thousands of our innocent.
The French recently made a convicted cop-killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal,
an honorary citizen of Paris — though he was condemned by a
jury of his peers, and has produced no evidence that either his
fingerprints or witness testimony contradict the court's verdict
that he blew out the brains of a prostrate policeman. Even Jane
Fonda and Noam Chomsky never warranted that honor.
European papers, in the first few weeks after September 11, sounded
themes of the "chickens coming home to roost" in their
efforts to suggest either that American "imperialism"
had prompted such attacks, or that our distrust of the international
accords fashioned at Kyoto and Durban had made our appeals to create
coalitions against terror hypocritical and vain. Antiwar demonstrations
in London and Paris were large, and overtly anti-American. What,
then, is going on, if our NATO allies — in a time of war, no
less — do not trust our courts, our culture — or us!
Anyone who has followed the growth of the European Union over the
last decade — 18,000 bureaucrats with the equivalent of an
80-billion-dollar budget — could offer answers. Increasingly,
Europe is no longer democratic in the American sense, but is ever
so insidiously creating a sprawling regime of appointed, rather
than truly elected, officials to override nationhood in order to
create a utopian culture — with all the arrogance, smugness,
and authoritarianism such pipedreams always entail.
The result is that although sizable majorities of Europeans support
the death penalty, it cannot be enacted in any EU country. All states
prove their seriousness by their ability to protect themselves,
and so Europeans publicly boast of new pan-continental armies and
air forces on the drawing boards that will supplement NATO. Privately,
of course, most Europeans concede that it's far better to rent us
bases in Spain, Germany, Naples, and Crete, so that their own security
is assured and paid for by someone else — with the added bonus
that they can voice anti-Americanism on the cheap when our planes
take off in necessary but unpopular missions to bomb in Kosovo or
Afghanistan. This is a continent, after all, now squabbling not
about sending troops into battle, but over the relative dangers
of stationing them in a conquered capital.
Perhaps it is the rather small confines of Europe, the pressures
on its resources, its history of internecine war — who really
knows? — that prompts it to welcome a paternalistic government
of highly educated elites to distill utopian bromides, without real
grassroots audit or public scrutiny. The reality, however, is that,
in exchange for giving up its sovereignty and autonomy, European
states have opted for the assurance of a comfortable lifestyle subsidized
by American defense, cheap immigrant labor across the continent,
and generous social-welfare spending — and all of it fine-tuned
by highly educated and aristocratic bureaucrats who, more and more,
will answer to no one except their immediate superiors.
What should we Americans do when such novel political developments
over there result in such thinly disguised disdain for us here —
and at a time when we are fighting for our very way of life? Nothing
and everything. We must maintain our de jure NATO membership,
but de facto accept that it is no longer an alliance. Rather,
it is a mere informal understanding that the Untied States can base
troops in Europe, in exchange for unilaterally defending the West
and protecting the type of world that Europe desperately depends
on (though it so rarely admits it).
Mutual heritage and tradition insist also that we seek common ground
when the enemies of Western civilization promise to destroy us all.
And we should listen fairly to European concern about environmental
problems and Third-World hunger. But we must nevertheless realize
how different America is from Europe, rediscovering in the process
why our strange country appeared in the first place. The United
States was not merely a refuge for the oppressed and destitute from
Europe. It was also created as its antithesis, in its insistence
on the right of popular government and in its willingness to defend
a new way of life at all costs. In that regard, the Europeans' kudos
to an unctuous Clinton, not their disparagement of a principled
Bush, should cause worry.
Our muscular commitment to liberty and economic freedom explains
why we probably will be even more at odds with Europe in the future.
Accused of being imperialist, America in fact has little colonial
heritage, but rather a strange habit of intervening in very dangerous
places where there is at times no clear national interest other
than the protection of isolated states like Israel, or the starving
in Somalia — or Europeans themselves who are being butchered,
whether in 1941 or 1997. We Americans must not be shy in accepting
the truth that we execute terrorists like Timothy McVeigh, while
Europeans released them after the Munich Olympics. Communists were
welcomed into European coalitions even as Americans spent billions
to ensure that Russian tanks did not make it to the Atlantic.
While we should do nothing overt to end our special relationship
with the Europeans, in the meantime we should be attuned to the
radically different world that September 11 has ushered in. There
are emerging powers in the world that are nuclear, democratic, capitalist,
and continental. India and Russia, for example, share some of our
own multiracial and multicultural challenges; remain suspicious
of militant Islam; pay for their own defense; and are trying to
flee, not welcome in, an all-intrusive state power. We should seek
stronger ties of friendship, if not overt alliances, with both in
the future. Japan and Germany, again whether we like it or not,
inevitably will seek military status and a world role commensurate
with their natural power. Both must be dealt with, on such occasions,
as near-equals, in ways that are mostly unconcerned with the European
Union per se.
This perplexing relationship with the Europeans also sheds light
on many of our own paradoxes here at home. Throughout this entire
war, our cultural elite has taken a stance toward the war that is
incomprehensible to the vast majority of Americans — in a manner
uncannily similar to the way in which Europe has appeared so haughty
to America at large. Are professors, the hierarchy at CNN, and Hollywood
so similar to the Spanish, Dutch, Belgians, French, and Scandinavians
because they both pose as sophisticates, shuddering at what the
bumbling, blue-collar, flag-waving Americans have gotten themselves
into?
Maybe. But the real truth is that a small, privileged group in
America no longer has any idea whence their very sustenance, freedom,
and leisure arise. Upscale liberals are safe because hundreds of
thousands of less polished, but quite smart people join their armed
forces, put out their fires, and arrest criminals in their neighborhoods.
They are comfortable because of millions of less educated but very
industrious laborers who cut their grass, lay their cement, pick
their fruit, pave their streets, and unplug their drains. And they
are smug because they have found a way to get good money, plenty
of time, and personal security without having anything to do with
those who give them so much of what they expect as their birthright.
And so — either out of guilt, old-fashioned aristocratic arrogance,
or simple naiveté and stupidity — a very large class
of utopians promotes pie-in-the-sky solutions to distant problems
that only undermine those others, who are less fortunate, under
their noses.
We are not supposed to say this — class is now the third rail
of affluent liberals — but we see these antitheses in America
almost every day of this war: a heroic middle-class and now-dead
Johnny Spann versus a spoiled, traitorous, and "mixed-up"
Marin County Johnny Walker; Sarah Jane Olson, an upscale suburbanite
with almost no concern about the past bombing of blue-collar policemen;
a smart-alecky ex-terrorist and now-tenured Bill Ayers with little
remorse about past dynamiting aimed at soldiers and public employees
of the working class. Repeatedly, we witness mostly upscale Americans
flirting with the forces of destruction — but only for a while,
always with mitigating circumstances, and ultimately with the ready
sanctuary of a nearby progressive legal or academic enclave, supported
in its comfort and security by the working classes.
In the same manner, an affluent and spoiled Europe hectors a brutish
United States which, in its Neanderthal way, still executes murderers,
bombs terrorists, and sets up military tribunals to try killers.
And like our own elite, Europeans preach such easy morality always
and only with the assurance that this other America with its dirty
fingernails will — as it once blocked Soviet divisions from
storming into Germany — continue to keep Greeks and Turks apart,
to provide neighborhood security off the North African coast, to
take out their garbage in Serbia, to keep the noise down across
the street in the Middle East, to prune back the annual growth of
Saddam — and to scrub away al Qaeda.
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