“The difference is that is this country we argue against the power of the bureaucracy.
Europeans have been conditioned by centuries of servitude to the state to accept the dictates of the state and whatever crumbs the state chooses to leave to the people.”
- I agree, to some extent.
Americans are, by tradition, more hostile to the ideas of ‘big governments’ than Europeans. But Europeans rebel a lot, although especially in Western Europe the wrong kind of people often rebel for the wrong reasons. Just look at Socialists and French farmers.
The Eastern Europeans, on the other hand, didn’t hesitate to overthrow their despotic governments recently and I hope they’ve still got much of that spirit left.
One reason many ordinary Europeans might put too much of trust in strong governments is the fact that alliances between common people and a strong ruler (often a monarch) was the only way of counteracting the ambitions of the nobility in history, together with the fact that strong leadership often was needed in times of war.
I agree that in history the power of the central government was a way of protecting the people against predatory nobles. But this dependence has matured far beyond the need for physical protection toward a desire for state-sponsored well being.
People in Europe do rebel, riot would be a better word, but normally they do so to force the government to give them more money. They don’t wish to overthrow the state or be free of it but simply to begin or continue to draw sustenance from it.
East Europeans are different. They have a history of being subservient to a alien central power, as the Poles were controlled by the Russians or the Czechs were controlled by the Austro-Hungarian empire. Naturally, east Europeans are more suspicious of state power. Still, they have the tendency, far more muted than in western Europe but still existing, to depend on the state.