They might be a little "GREEN" with envy too...
Can you conver 4.49 seconds @332 miles/hour to euro?
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.
I do.
Why? They will all come to us and ask for more tax-payers' money, whether they like us or not. The only reason any foreign country has ever been agreeable to us is because they wanted money. Do you know that in 2002, the US gave $9,159,306,001.00 (per the US Govt Greenbook Report), to the rest of the world? And we can't afford to fix our tax and social security systems? Fine. Let's be nice to them. I don't care. But stop raping our country for the good of others who laugh when we get attacked, and certainly NEVER come to our aid when we have a disaster. If I remember correctly, the only country who offered anything other then "heartfelt condolences" after 9/11 was some stupid sheik, who said he'd give us ten million dollars if we would admit that we were partially at fault for 9/11 because of our policies. Nobody ever likes the prettiest, richest kid in school, but everyone wants to be her friend.
There is a word in Arabic for what the Eurabians are - dhimmini. It means second class citizens in Moslem dominiated countries.
Why? Because:
A)We have mutual interests, such as fighting terrorism, drugs, transnational criminal enterprises. Just because you don't see these efforts, doesn't mean they aren't happening.
B)In a global economy America depends on trade with other countries.
Man, can you ever write! That's so much better said than anything I could ever hope to say. I hope you write a book, if not some columns some day. Or perhaps you already have?
The best thing that could happen to them would be for us to withdraw the security defense of American military and make them fend for themselves. Also, they have been on a very conformist, PC binge. They need a Ruppert Murdock or two.
No doubt that's in the European future. But the simplistic "all or nothing" attitude is just wrong when it comes to international relations. Right now NYC is booming with European tourists who think nothing of spending $300 a night for a hotel and dropping another $300 a day on restaurants, plays and shopping. That's good for the economy. In the future, the EU will play an even larger role with its 300 million citizens.
A) I realize that we are involved with other countries in a number of enterprises. However, most countries need us more than we need them. We will always scratch each other's backs when it comes to things such as terrorism, because it is everyone who benefits, not just the US.
B) We have the money, and we make good products. Countries don't do business based on how much they like each other. For that matter, neither does any big business, which is all government is.
I thought you were calling for an isolationist stance from your previous post. My mistake.
No, no, I just want to stop giving away all our money.
Oh, and I really don't care if they like us or not.
I suspect that we're getting something in return, though not being well versed in diplomacy I'm at a loss to list the type of influence that kind of money buys.
Geez, I sure don't know what the srongest, richest country in the world gets for nine billion dollars. The Middle East and West Africa alone got 3.5 billion. That baffles me.
I've heard rumors that the Middle East is unstable and has oil. West Africa is rich in rare earth minerals, which will play an increasingly important role in technology.
I have to get to work now, but you might want to research the weird mineral called tantalum used in making capacitors. A rare mineral, it's used in a variety of high tech gadgets, including video games. Only found in any quantity in Africa.
Ok Germany. You can take France now; we promise, we won't save the "cheese eating surrender monkies" ever again. They're all yours!
Yes, but isn't it enough that we BUY those things? Do we have to donate the farm, as well? Especially since both of those places support terrorism.
They might be a little "GREEN" with envy too...
Can you conver 4.49 seconds @332 miles/hour to euro?
By the way, it is interesting that Helmut Kohl opposes Turkish entry into the E.U. - Kohl has a Turkish daughter-in-law.
I don't know. You're into geopolitics now. And nothing is as simple as it seems.
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