Misunderstanding Europe

William Wallace and Jan Zielonka

From Foreign Affairs, November/December 1998

Article preview: first 500 of 4,470 words total.

Summary:  American commentators castigate their European allies as economic dinosaurs, hopelessly incoherent in their foreign policy and shamefully irresponsible in their duties to NATO. As Europe prepares to launch its single currency, U.S. critics have found yet another target. But smug assumptions of American supremacy are wildly overdone. Europe's economies are robust and their cooperation increasingly productive. Besides, America is not so hot either. Today's Eurobashing endangers the transatlantic relationship as much as European anti-Americanism once did. America should address its own inconsistencies in foreign policy while granting its European partners the respect they deserve.

William Wallace is a Reader in International Relations at the London School of Economics and the Liberal Democrat spokesman on defense in the British House of Lords. Jan Zielonka is Professor of Political Science at the European University Institute in Florence and author of Explaining Euro-Paralysis.

NO RESPECT

Eurobashing is back in fashion in the United States. The European visitor to Washington now encounters American economic triumphalism mixed with contempt for Europe's sluggish growth and social protection. American critics castigate Europe for not contributing to regional and global order while demanding that Europeans shoulder more of the cost of leadership. For Europeans in Washington, Newsweek's Michael Hirsh recently noted, "it's hard to get respect."

Anti-European sentiment in America is not new. The United States was built by immigrants who shook off the disappointments of the old world for the hope of the new. Businessmen and politicians in late-nineteenth-century America believed they represented the vigorous future, Europe the enfeebled past. In the two world wars Americans saw themselves as sailing across the Atlantic to sort out European quarrels that the Europeans were incapable of resolving among themselves.

After 1945, the American prescription for Europe was to make it "more like us": to build a United States of Europe that would become America's loyal partner within a broader Western alliance. In the years since, American disappointment at Europe's unwillingness to accept U.S. leadership unconditionally has fluctuated between despair over European political incoherence and fear that the European allies might agree on a framework for integration different from what Washington had prescribed.

These days, however, American commentators seem to embrace an exaggerated Euroskepticism. Irving Kristol writes of "the slowly emerging crisis in Europe's economy and society," in contrast to American economic and social vitality. "Europe is resigned to be a quasi-autonomous protectorate of the U.S.," he relates, adding, "Europeans do not know -- and seem not to want to know -- what is happening to them." Robert Altman and Charles Kupchan have asked whether the United States could help in "arresting the decline of Europe," while Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), in moving the Senate resolution on NATO enlargement, declared that "the European Union could not fight its way out of a wet paper bag." Martin Feldstein has gone so far as to call the collapse of European integration into war a plausible outcome of Europe's economic and monetary union.

Just as European anti-Americanism damaged Western solidarity during the Cold War, so American Eurobashing threatens to unravel transatlantic cooperation in the post-Cold War era. If the United States expects Europe to shoulder a larger burden of global leadership, a decent respect for Europe's opinions is in the American interest. The current approach, combining demands for greater burden-sharing with knee-jerk dismissals of European policies, risks alienating America's most important allies.

THE VIEW FROM AMERICA

Several developments have prompted these new anti-European rumblings. First, Americans remain ambivalent about how far the U.S.-inspired project of European integration should go, for fear it could produce a true global rival. Euroskepticism also stems from the tendency toward hyperbole that characterizes Washington's policy debate. To make matters worse, Americans suffer from dwindling information and expertise on Europe as the American media retreats into domestic coverage and exotic human interest stories and the generation of ...

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