Posted on 01/10/2005 6:02:37 PM PST by quidnunc
Seldom, if ever, has an American president been less popular in Europe than George W. Bush. As cartoonists never tire of illustrating, he embodies those American characteristics that Europeans most dislike: trigger-happiness, environmental unfriendliness, and — perhaps most important — utter indifference to the delicate sensibilities of America's traditional Western European allies. In the past two years, according to a survey published this past fall by the German Marshall Fund, the proportion of Europeans who disapprove of U.S. foreign policy has risen by 20 percentage points, to exceed 76 percent. An even higher proportion — 80 percent — think that Bush's invasion of Iraq was not worth the consequences. And 73 percent think that it has increased rather than reduced the risk of terrorism.
According to a poll conducted by Globescan and the University of Maryland, 74 percent of Germans wanted to see John Kerry beat Bush in November, while only 10 percent favored the president. Even in the United Kingdom the public backed Kerry over Bush by 47 percent to 16 percent. During the campaign Kerry sought to capitalize on his popularity abroad, claiming repeatedly that if elected, he could persuade unspecified allies to assist the United States in Iraq. We will never know what a Kerry administration might have accomplished. But it is hard to imagine that it could have healed the transatlantic rift, for the gap between America and Europe has been widening for fifteen years, and it has much more to do with changes in Europe than with the policies of the United States.
This is not a fashionable view, least of all in academic circles. A clear majority of those who think, write, and talk about international relations for a living believe that the transatlantic alliance system — what used to be known simply as "the West" — can and must be restored, by means of adjustments in U.S. policy.
The Oxford historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash argues in his new book, Free World, that the United States and the European Union have too many common interests to become permanently estranged. He sees "no inexorable drifting apart of two solid continental plates" but, rather, "overlapping continental shelves." In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Robert E. Hunter, a senior adviser to the RAND Corporation and a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, also called for a shoring up of the Atlantic alliance. The Bush administration's "experiment in unilateralism," he wrote, had merely revealed "the limits of such an approach." Kenneth Pollack, a member of the National Security Council under Bill Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, urges the Bush administration to work in tandem with the Europeans to curb Iran's nuclear ambitions.
Nevertheless, there are three strong reasons for doubting that real transatlantic rapprochement is possible.
First, we must not forget the primary reason for the formation of the transatlantic alliance, in the 1940s and 1950s: to keep the Soviet Union behind the Iron Curtain. We should not deceive ourselves that the French and the Germans — or, for that matter, the British — were passionately pro-American during the Cold War. But as long as a Russian empire was menacing Western Europe with missiles, troops, and spooks, there was an overwhelming practical argument for the unity of the West.
With astonishing speed, that ceased to be the case fifteen years ago, when the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev caused the Soviet empire to crumble. Incentives for transatlantic harmony have grown steadily weaker since 1989. President Vladimir Putin is manifestly no democrat, but not even his fiercest critics expect him to launch a Russian invasion across the Central European plains in the near future.
The second reason the West is unlikely to come back together is the difference in the ways Europe and the United States assess the risk of Islamic extremism. To Americans, Islamism has effectively replaced Soviet communism as a mortal danger. To Europeans, the threat of Islamic terrorists today is simply not comparable to that posed by the Red Army twenty years ago — not great enough, in other words, to require transatlantic solidarity under U.S. leadership. Indeed, ever since the Spanish elections early last year, many Europeans have behaved as if the optimal response to the growing threat of lslamist terrorism is to distance Europe from the United States.
Why? The answer is not far to seek. As a result of rising immigration from. the south and the east, there are now at least 15 million Muslims within the European Union, and some say more than 20 million: that is, anything between three and five percent of the population. And these proportions seem certain to increase as the European population ages and immigration continues. It is still too soon to speak, as the Egyptian-born scholar Bat Ye'or does, of "Eurabia." Nevertheless, profound demographic forces are shifting the balance of Europe in an Islamic direction.
Moreover, those demographic forces may soon be given a political boost if Turkey's bid for membership in the European Union is successful. If Turkey were to join in, say, 2015, that country would be as important as Germany in terms of population: according to current projections, each would account for 14.5 percent of all EU citizens. Suddenly there would be more Muslims than Protestants in this new Europe.
Admittedly, some European politicians show signs of getting cold feet about Turkish accession. "That would be the end of the European Union," the former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing famously declared in 2002. Other elder statesmen share his fears, among them the former German chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl.
But few European leaders dare say this kind of thing while they are in office. That is especially true in Germany, where party leaders are terrified of alienating the already large Turkish-German community. In any case, the majority of German voters seem to favor Turkish accession.
Unless demographic projections are wrong, the only way to avert a gradual Islamicization of Europe over the next few generations is to throw out Turkey's application for EU membership and stop further immigration from Islamic countries. Signs of support for such measures periodically manifest themselves, to be sure, but only at the level of national — as opposed to European — politics. Meanwhile, radical Islamists and their allies know that in a climate of appeasement intimidation is the best tactic; witness the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, whose recent work examined how women are treated under Islam. Criticizing Islam is at once politically incorrect and life-threatening.
So Europe is not only demographically vulnerable to Islamic penetration; it is also politically vulnerable. And perhaps even more important, Europe is religiously vulnerable too.
Here we come to the third reason why transatlantic rapprochement is so unlikely: the precipitous decline of European Christianity over the past three decades. This headlong secularization is as big a story, in its way, as Europe's demographic decline. According to the Gallup International Millennium Survey of religious observance (conducted in 1999),48 percent of people living in Western Europe almost never go to church; the figure for Eastern Europe is just a little lower, at 44 percent. In the Netherlands, Britain, Germany, Sweden, and Denmark fewer than 15 percent now attend church at least once a month. Only in Catholic Italy and Ireland do more than a third of the people worship monthly or more often.
European faith, too, as distinct from churchgoing, has waned quite dramatically in recent years. According to Gallup, 49 percent of Danes, 52 percent of Norwegians, and 55 percent of Swedes regard God as irrelevant to their lives. The proportion of Czechs who take this view is even higher. For whatever reason, Western Europeans living under Christian democracy or social democracy appear to have moved away from Christianity almost as rapidly as Eastern Europeans who used to live under "real existing socialism." In the words of the new Spanish prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, even traditionally Catholic Spaniards want "more sports, less religion."
What makes the de-Christianization of Europe so intriguing is that it cannot be explained by rising living standards; that theory collapses in the face of the contemporaneous vigor of Christianity in the United States. American religious observance is significantly higher than European; so is American religious faith. More than twice as big a percentage of Americans as Europeans attend religious services once a week or more. Some 62 percent of Americans believe in a personal God; little more than a third of Europeans do. Scarcely any Americans — compared with 15 percent of Europeans — can be characterized as atheists. Try to imagine George W. Bush calling for "more sports, less religion."
It is not so much, then, that militaristic Americans are from Mars and pacifistic Europeans from Venus. It would be more accurate to say that from an evangelical point of view, Americans are bound for heaven and Europeans for hell. At the very least, the rapid decline of European Christianity helps to explain why European conservatism has so little in common with the conservatism of the American right.
AII this helps to explain, in turn, why in so many recent surveys Europeans have expressed a desire for a foreign policy less dependent on the United States.
In the absence of the Soviet Union, in the presence of increasing numbers of Muslims, and in light of their own secularization, European societies feel more detached from the United States than at any other time since the 1930s. In a recent Gallup poll 61 percent of Europeans said they thought the EU plays a positive role with regard to "peace in the world" (while just eight percent said its role was negative). But a remarkable 50 percent took the view that the United States now plays a negative role. Compare that with American attitudes: 59 percent of Americans regard the United States as making a positive contribution to world peace, and just 15 percent think the EU plays a negative role.
In the face of this kind of asymmetry it is well nigh impossible to turn back the clock to those halcyon days when there was just one West, indivisible. John Kerry would have tried, but he would have failed. George W. Bush has lower expectations of transatlantic relations. But he should not be blamed for their deterioration. His much exaggerated "unilateralism" is not why the Atlantic seems a little wider every day. It is Europe, not America, that is drifting away.
Niall Ferguson is a professor of history at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, at Stanford. His most recent book is Colossus: The Price of America's Empire.
ping & bookmark
bttt
That's Zippy-Zap's opinion, not what Spaniards are saying. He is a hard line Socialist who has been out to get the Church since the day he was elected after the bombing; he has been trying to limit its activities in Spanish society, and has passed laws (even unilaterally, by decree) that he knows are opposed by Catholics, who comprise more than 90% of the Spanish population: gay "marriage," high-speed divorce, unrestricted abortion, etc. Of course, at the same time, he's using Spanish government funds to build mosques.
The author understands some of the problems, but he does not assign the blame where much of it is due: the increasing influence of the left, of a left, furthermore, that has not been this unabashedly anti-democractic and radical for decades. The left combined with Islam is what is changing Europe, and is the reason that for Europe's hostility towards the US.
"the increasing influence of the left, of a left, furthermore, that has not been this unabashedly anti-democractic and radical for decades"
Exactly. I agree with his points, but would list a 4th: The Euro-weasels do not criticize America in GOOD FAITH, ie. it doesn't matter what we *do* because the Euro-weasels would prefer to have America as The Scapegoat. They need someone to hate, someone to blame for all their problems, as Europe declines into either a Socialist or Islamic state.
It isnt George Bush that the Europeans dislike , its all Americans, they are insanely jealous of our liberties and our lifestyle.
To Europe...........see ya, glad we don't have to be ya, your stupid politics will be the death of you. And the way you have acted in the last couple of years, we don't give a sh*t about you and your muslim problems that will lead to your downfall. See ya!
Just my opinion
I just hope we can get the artifacts that represent 10,000 years of our heritage out when it all goes sideways.
I really would hate to see the treasures of Europe go the way of the giant statues of the Budha in Afghanistan.
As for the people, the good ones have already left, or died in the last century's wars.
SO9
I understand there is a new public toilet in Germany that automaticly demands the men sit to pee.
Maybe they supported sKerry knowing he would bring America to it's knees before Old Europe.
This about 26% less than the number of them who wanted to see Von Runstead beat Eisenhower in 1945.
Excellent article. Interesting that this guy is a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution but also a history professor at Harvard.
Also interesting that this appears in the liberal and highly intellectual Atlantic Monthly, which would normally avoid this kind of politically incorrect and uncomfortable view of the world like the plague.
He says it twice, and it's all too true: Europe is drifting away.
ping and bookmark
http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=feckless
feckless
adj 1: not fit to assume responsibility 2: generally incompetent and ineffectual; "feckless attempts to repair the plumbing"; "inept handling of the account" [syn: inept]
Aside from the fact that the bulk of these are globalists who regard American independence as divergence from the Greater Plan, there is an element of anachronism in the whole thing. A good majority of European commentators view American foreign policies strictly in terms of what they would do given a similar preponderance of power. It explains a good deal of their apprehension - they have had such a preponderance of power in the past and have set the world on fire on numerous occasions as a result of it. It has given us pogroms, mass slaughter, decades of warfare, bloody religious strife, starvation, oppression, and some remarkably bloody-handed tyrants. Anyone attempting to guess from the foregoing which century I'm talking about will have an easy job - it's all of them, from the fifth century on.
Hence a certain fondness for a collectivization that has failed, a centralization that has failed, and a minute control of citizens' daily lives by authority, which has failed. They're on a roll here.
That something else is even imaginable is difficult for those who are convinced that they've already imagined it, and it turns out to be the same old thing, a fellow in a suit in Brussels writing official memoranda concerning the permissible curvature of cucumbers. But that isn't really it. And that model is going to disappoint a lot of people who are expecting a giant gated retirement community to spring up of its own accord.
Geeez. My only problem with Bush is that he's too left wing.
Me too, man.
"In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Robert E. Hunter, a senior adviser to the RAND Corporation and a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, also called for a shoring up of the Atlantic alliance. The Bush administration's "experiment in unilateralism," he wrote, had merely revealed "the limits of such an approach."
________________________________________
Yes, unilateralism in Iraq (34 countries involved!!) is bad but unilateralism is good when it comes to dealing with North Korea. I wish these guys would make up their minds. Maybe it's all just another calculated ploy to bash Bush's America.
Who gives a crap what other countries think.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.