World on Fire - Brownstein, Michael [127]
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While typically more muted, similar anti-Americanism exists in all our Western European allies—though, needless to say, each country has its own historical relationship to and distinctive set of grievances against the United States. In Germany, for example, there is an intellectual strand of anti-Americanism dating back to the poet Heinrich Heine’s scorn in the 1800s for Germans who emigrated to the Americas to get rich. More recently, Germany was furious when the United States effectively vetoed Berlin’s nominee to run the International Monetary Fund.
A general cultural fault line between America and Europe, however, bears directly on American market-dominance. François Bujon de l’Estang, French ambassador to the United States, put it this way: “What we may see emerging now is a new ideological rift. On one side is the American model of free-market capitalism, which was emulated by Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom. On the other is a milder, European model that includes a stronger social safety net with attributes such as a national health care system and government-funded retirement and unemployment plans. Most Europeans, as well as the Canadians, are very attached to that model.” Philip Gordon suggests that there is a feeling in Europe, and especially in France, “that globalization is playing to America’s strengths by reinforcing the dominance of our economic model and business practices. . . .”
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Many of the European nations—among them France, Germany, and Spain—were of course once great world powers, both militarily and culturally. For these countries, being eclipsed today by America’s upstart, hotdogging rise to global dominance is additionally grating. The same might be said of Great Britain. As Jonathan Freedland recently wrote in London’s Spectator only half-facetiously, “After all, it was the Yanks who dared pushed Britain off its top perch in the first half of the last century,” and then had “the impertinence to force us to give up our empire by stopping our adventure in the Suez.” On the other hand, Britain has an advantage over Europe because of its linguistic, cultural, and historical links to the United States, which arguably give Britain a better shot at influencing Washington—“playing Athens to America’s Rome,” as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once put it.
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In any event, far more so than in Great Britain, European anti-Americanism has translated into concrete economic and political policies that, while not exactly inimical to U.S. interests, are clearly directed at offsetting America’s global power. Most crucially, the interest in a stronger, more united Europe—indeed, the European Union itself—is based in large part on the hope of making Europe competitive with, if not superior to, America as a global economic and political power. “[T]alk of European integration has increasingly gone hand in hand with anti-American rhetoric,” James Kitfield noted recently. “The whole debate in Europe is now dominated by charges of U.S. ‘hegemony’ and ‘unilateralism,’” adds an editor with Suddeutsche Zeitung. “Germans are rallying to the common cause of ‘Euronationalism,’ fueled in part by anti-American sentiment.” The deputy director of a Berlin think tank agreed: “[W]e are beginning to catch the ‘French disease,’ which holds that you can only build greater European unity around anti-American rhetoric.”
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Similarly, the euro is in part a desire to counter the global dominance of the American dollar,