EUROPEAN/AMERICAN RELATIONS: WHO LEADS?
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for themselves. Now came the Americans, their ambassadors as power–
ful as satraps, their military manning bases and harbors, introducing a
vernacu lar language and a culture comprising food and clothes and
popular music, quite different and more informal manners. They had
their ways of doing business in private and public.
It is reasonable to assert that the large majority of Europeans wel–
comed this epic development, taking it as evidence of liberation and not
colonialism. I remember that in postwar Italy the children my age went
barefoot, and that in postwar France I saw women washing linen in the
farmyard stream while the men were driving Percheron carthorses to
drink in that water. Now their descendants dress like Americans in jeans
and baseball caps worn back to front. Out have gone blue berets, and
the Percherons have given way to Massey-Ferguson tractors. National
costume is a thing of the past. In has come fast food, the household gad–
getry of television sets and washing machines, and of course the equal–
ity of the sexes and the changes in family life and relationships that
necessarily accompany the gadgetry. W. H. Auden, a cosmopolitan
spirit, wrote a poem to celebrate the installation of an American kitchen
in his house in provincial Austria. At this level, almost everyone wel–
comes Americanization, as once the Germanic tribes gladly shed animal
skins in favor of togas, or citizens of the British empire abandoned
native clothes in favor of trousers and jackets, and took to eating sticky
puddings as well.
European elites, though, are a different matter. In ruling circles in
Europe, democracy is a concession to be made to the great unwashed,
not a good in itself-the worst of systems except for all the other sys–
tems, in Churchill's abiding words . To them, elections are best treated
not as an appeal for the consent of the governed but as a form of musi–
cal chairs in a privileged circle. The outstanding example is Italy, where
there have been over fifty changes of government, but the offices have
been shared between about three hundred ministers. Hilton Kramer
asked me to mention how the Italians have solved the cultural problem.
They award prizes for everyone. There are over
3,000
literary prizes in
Italy alone. So if you meet a novelist, he's likely to have several hundred
literary prizes to his biography. The accommodating French system
allows for "co-habitation," an arrangement which principally allows a
division of the spoils. In Germany, coalition politics keep the same
handful of people in office for years .
Taking their intellectual and political supremacy for granted, Euro–
pean elites have long been accustomed to setting the standards in taste
and culture, as well. For them, Americanization has been a challenge to
