Europe's chorus of disapproval

[concerned]

Much has changed since September 11 and the transitory wave of sympathy and support for America that followed. US policy is once again regularly trashed in the European press. The ambivalence among European elites has been matched by growing exasperation in the US. As an old Atlanticist, I am saddened. Yet reducing the rift will be more of a challenge to Europe than to the US.

Welcome as it is, the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact has ended any serious direct military threat to western Europe. With this has come a diminished sense of concern and responsibility. European defense budgets continue to shrink, leading to a steadily growing gap in military technology and capability, to which Britain is something of an exception.

This gap has brought an interesting division of labour: the US does the heavy lifting in combat, while Europe prvides the critique. Continental Europe appears to be becoming a larger Sweden, moralising about the defects of American actions.

European criticism of policy has been matched by attacks on Mr. Bush himself. This is a part of a familiar pattern in the past quarter century, of each incoming president being battered in the European press for various and conflicting reasons.

Mr. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, has been portrayed as an aggresive, blundering cowboy. Jimmy Carter was seen as indecisive and foolishly moralistic. Bill Clinton was criticised for being indecisive but also for being too pushy and self-assertive. In a reflection of European ambivalence, US presidents are accused either of not demonstrating leadership or of playing the insensitive, self assertive superpower.
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The article continues, but it is quite long to post it here. If you want to see the complete article search in the Financial Times of Tuesday May 21st, 2002. The article's title is "Europe's chorus of disapproval" by James Schlesinger.

[Fabi]

the only thing that comes to my mind right now, it's 4:07am here, is that even if i was american i'd still have that 'european notion' to my views....
does that make sense?

[concerned]

Well it's impossible to know what you would be like if you were American. Anyway, socialists tend to think that American schools "brainwash" people. I think that is what socialism does, I think Europeans are pretty brainwashed themselves and think better of themselves somehow by critisizing the hell out of Americans. It helps them compensate for the fact that they are not the world leaders anymore.

[concerned]

By the way here is the complete article:

Europe's chorus of disapproval
By James Schlesinger
Financial Times; May 21, 2002


George W. Bush's visit to Europe this week provides an opportunity to reduce the evident rift that has developed in the transatlantic relationship.

Much has changed since September 11 and the transitory wave of sympathy and support for America that followed. US policy is once again regularly trashed in the European press. The ambivalence among European elites has been matched by a growing exasperation in the US. As an old Atlanticist, I am saddened. Yet reducing this rift will be more of a challenge to Europe than to the US.

Welcome as it is, the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact has ended any serious direct military threat to western Europe. With this has come a diminished sense of concern and responsibility. European defence budgets continue to shrink, leading to a steadily growing gap in military technology and capability, to which Britain is something of an exception.

This gap has brought an interesting division of labour: the US does the heavy lifting in combat, while Europe provides the critique. Continental Europe appears to be becoming a larger Sweden, moralising about the defects of American actions.

European criticism of policy has been matched by attacks on Mr Bush himself. This is part of a familiar pattern in the past quarter- century, of each incoming president being battered in the European press for various and conflicting reasons.

Mr Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, has been portrayed as an aggressive, blundering cowboy. Jimmy Carter was seen as indecisive and foolishly moralistic. Bill Clinton was criticised for being indecisive but also for being too pushy and self-assertive. In a reflection of European ambivalence, US presidents are accused either of not demonstrating leadership or of playing the insensitive, self-assertive superpower.

It is not that any of these men have been beyond criticism. It is the seemingly automatic barrage, the initial baptism of fire. It is tiresome at best. In the US, a president starts with a honeymoon and goes downhill from there. In Europe, the opposite holds: the US president starts in the pits and his image gradually improves, in preparation for a blast at his successor.

Consider some of the charges that have been levelled against the Bush administration. First, that any tampering with the anti- ballistic-missile treaty, the supposed cornerstone of strategic stability, would ignite a new arms race. This set of critics seemed lost in a bipolar world that dis-appeared long ago. Instead of a new arms race, we have a bilateral arms reduction and a Russia-US relationship far healthier than in the past.

Second, that the US was being irresponsible by rejecting the Kyoto accord on global warming. On this issue, criticism of Mr Bush was particularly fervent last spring. The European criticism presupposes that the science is settled with respect to the degree to which global warming reflects the release of greenhouse gases, as opposed to solar variability. But unlike Europe's, the population of the US continues to grow. Its economy has been growing faster than Europe's and Kyoto would have imposed vastly greater cuts on the US than on Europe.

Whether the question is the treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo, the International Criminal Court, the use of landmines, or capital punishment, the presumption seems to be that US policy is simply unreasonable or unreasoning - that the Americans are behaving badly.

A spokesman for the International Committee of the Red Cross asserts erroneously that there is no distinction between prisoners of war and unlawful combatants. Although capital punishment is generally approved of by European voters, the elites seem to have concluded that it is an indication of American savagery, separating the US from European civilisation. And some in Europe complain about American cultural imperialism!

Meanwhile, there is an expectation that Washington should be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat and resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. That conflict has gone on for a long time (as Britain, the one-time mandatory power in Palestine, should know). The failure of the Camp David summit two years ago, in spite of the generous stance of Ehud Barak, then Israeli prime minister, suggests the conflict may be nigh-on irreconcilable.

The fundamental problem is that two parties are fighting over the same piece of land. The optimistically termed "peace process" should more accurately be described as the "peace hope". Meanwhile, much of Europe treats Yassir Arafat and the Palestinian Authority with the same naivety that once marked Europe's attitude towards Ho Chi Min and the Viet Cong.

Apart from attitudes, there are problems in knowing which body represents Europe - the European Union, national states or Nato. An example is the decision on Galileo, a global positioning satellite system. European transport ministers recently decided to deploy Galileo on the grounds that the US, which now provides free positioning and timing services, could not be trusted.

Unless Europe adopts GPS standards, that action could disrupt military operations as well as add greatly to costs. It also threatens Nato. Yet Nato, which includes the same governments, was not consulted or considered. The technical concerns of the US were simply brushed aside.

If the transatlantic relationship is to flourish, if the west is to remain reasonably united, these attitudes must change. Condescension, based upon a presumed greater European "sophistication", will not be conducive to unity.

As European critics point out, US society is not particularly sensitive to, or even aware of, the attitudes and interests of others. But I am confident that if serious positions were presented to our government in a serious way, the US would listen carefully.

We are prepared to listen to serious thoughts but not to a barrage of ritualistic complaints. The latter we are likely simply to ignore, even if that adds to mis-understanding.

The writer is a member of the US Defence Policy Board. He is a former secretary of defence and director of central intelligence

[Fabi]

oh my god...
this is like some guy talking about how big his dick is... i mean, what the fuck do i care?

[Fabi]

have you been to 'european' schools?
there isnt even such a thing as 'european' schools...
there are german schools, french schools... you get my point?

europeans are brainwashed? so what kind of a person is the typical 'european' anyway?
they're not even under one government... the education is not anti-US... and, yes, at least american (well, virginian... i suppose texas is way worse) high schools have some aspects that certainly do completely suck...

but i dont want to keep talking about the same thing again and again and again and again... cause that really does get boring...

i am not saying that that is what you are, but in those posts you sounded like some pouting little kid, who cant take criticism.... so i guess my posts might be quite similar in attitude... ;)

----------- by the way.. no offense... at the moment i am playing around with fruityloops....

happy posting...

[concerned]

If there is no such thing as 'european' schools there is no such thing as 'american' schools either. There is New York schools, Texas schools, Oklahoma schools....
And even within a state schools vary widely.

Do you think you know all about American schools now because you attended 1 highschool for a little while? That's like judging a whole country for just someone that you met from there.

From my personal experiece I can just say this. In general I get the feeling that European truly believe (or like to believe) they so much smarter and better overall than Americans. Personally I wouldn't think this is true. Europeans do know more languages (there is no question why) and know sometimes more about their world around. However when it comes to common sense decisions, Americans are usually more reasonable. Europeans tend to be utopians and not to have their feet on the ground. They are very naive, other people manipulate them and they don't even notice it.

[Fabi]

i would not necessarily consider pro-life, ignorant, homophobic, pro-capital punishment and pro big corporations as reasonable...

on the other hand i would not consider that only american, either...

by the way... what about all the other exchange students i met from all over the world who spent time in an american high school and thought it was incredibly easy?

and common sense could just mean something like 'them blacks dont drive no mustangs cuz them dont'............

come to think of it i often defend the US and americans when people start being stupid and ignorant about ignorant 'americans'--- it's not that everyone is anti-american. i just think wherever you are, question it... it? well, it, everything... or at least try...

so maybe some people dont really care for the US too much...
and if i cant say anything about the 'bad' american education, you cant say anything about the 'good' american education, either, cause you, too, didnt spend you high school career in every school in the world to be able to compare, huh? ;)

i hope you know that i am not really as *****y as my posts make it look... ;)

[concerned]

Ok now I would like to know why you think big corporations are necessarily bad. Do you thionk Germany would be better of without BMW, Mercedez Benz and Deutsche Bank?. There is nothing bad about big corporations. A few corporations (both big and small) are sometimes unethical, but this is not the rule and the blame is not on the size of the corporation.

And I would like to know why you think abortion is so great but capital punishment is so terrible. That makes total sense, lets protect the criminals and instead kill and vacuum babies inside their mother's womb. Since we can not see them suffering, who cares right? But capital punishment, oh that is bad...the poor criminals..


That is exactly my point when I say find Europeans as not often being reasonable..

I am in school currently in America getting a masters degree, and believe me it is damn hard. It depends a lot to the school you go to, in America there are schools for all the tastes. You can go to a party school or you can go to Harvard, Standford, MIT, Cornell, Yale, Columbia, Princeton,... or many of the very fine universities that this country offers. It is up to the individual.

[Fabi]

i believe you that college is hard...

i dont have time right now to answer the aborrtion/ cap punishmnet thing.... it does make sense for the reasons i have... i am pro-life... of course i am.... but pro-choice also.. know what i mean??
it's not that i am ANTI life....