“Thus, while few Americans are disturbed by Europeans' lavish welfare states, many Europeans take offense at America's "capitalist" system.”
A recurring question has been how much European views should influence American thinking when the two are at odds”
AND
“In the judgment of advanced Europeans today, the nation-state system has proven an abject failure, at least for Europe. The world wars of the last century brought Europe to the brink of devastation and reduced it from the pinnacle of world power to a secondary position.”
VS
“America's experience with the nation-state could hardly have been more different. The nation-state has not failed Americans--indeed, it hasn't occurred to the average citizen that its status could be doubted. Americans turn instinctively to the nation for security, and they regard it as a permanent locus of meaningful political life. This difference in perspective is fundamental and leads inevitably to different ways of responding to the world.”
”EUROPE HAS LONG been an exporter of ideas. Its thinkers are used to regarding Europe as the center of the world, and therefore usually fail to notice that from a global perspective, what is taking place in Europe is of parochial significance. Instead, most European theorists and their American followers have sought to universalize the European experience.
As he illustrates it is important to note that US's success are not Europe’s failures as he points out in Balkans war, Gulf war,cold war.
They only have themsleves to blame...as the welfare state gets larger, proxies of the dependancy class are put into power while real leaders with vision are ridiculed and shoved aside. That they complain about their position in the world yet show no inclination to fix it, is the damning evidence of of their impotence.
All of Europe is beginning to look and sound like France. Watch out for Germany if the situation continues to degrade.
Two paradoxes.
1) Caesar rightly notes that we care so little about European chatter about the death penalty or gun control that it's hard to get worked up about their protests. Do they really take such things at all seriously over there, or is it just a formality? One can object to their attitudes and interventions but does it really add up to a desire to remake the world, or just busy work? In any event, Ceasar's admission that we care so little about their views on such things makes it unconvincing that these things are of any great importance.
2) Why does the "war of civilizations" or "war for the west" end up dividing Western civilization more than anything else? If one really believes in the West, would one really let oneself enter the black hole of pointless and endless US/European abuse? If one believes in a Western civilization beyond the conflicts of the day, why is the sight of it so easily lost in the vituperation?
Ceasar could have written an article like this twenty years ago, during the protests over missile stationing. Tempers ran higher then. And yet the alliance survived and triumphed because of agreement about the fundamentals and the means of achieving them, and because the greater struggle with the enemy never degenerated into a Europe vs. the U.S. conflict.