EUROPEAN/AMERICAN RELATIONS: WHO LEADS?
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enough to come within reach. Ultimately, these are manifestations of
distress and self-hate from which nothing is to be learnt.
The same phenomenon is to be observed in the United States, of
course.
It
may be, as we said this morning, that Tocqueville's pessimism
about the inevitable decline of the arts in a democracy is being borne out
before our eyes. But
J
believe that something more profound is taking
place. Years of brutalism, structuralism, deconstruction, existentialism,
relativism, the
nouveau roman,
the theatre of the absurd, Foucault,
Lacan, the Red Brigade, the Baader-Meinhof gang, the IRA, Euro-Com–
munism, functiona lism, postmodernism, neo-fascism, and all the other
-isms and their promoters testify not to vitality but to loss of direction,
the general inversion of moral values, the supremacy of unexamined
emotion, in a word, degeneracy.
The political and cultural elites of Europe, it seems to me, are play–
ing to these feelings. Internalizing them, they seek to defend themselves
first by projecting a hostile stereotype of people who they know are
more energetic and successful than themselves. So they think of Ameri–
cans as self-appointed to be God's chosen people, undeservedly privi–
leged, indecently rich, retrograde in the certainty of their traditional
morality. Americans have the death penalty; they bomb all over the
globe from Iraq to Serbia; they support Israel; they refuse to sign do–
gooding treaties that will save the world's environment or bring dicta–
tors before an international court; they pretend to be in favor of free
trade but impose economic sanctions when it suits them; and they pur–
sue those who come to kill them. The
Guardian,
a repository of such
stereotyping, spoke for the opinion-making left throughout Europe
when it recently declared that President Reagan's phrase "the empire of
evil" now describes the United States, or that the United States is an
"unrepentant outlaw." This attitudinizing seeps down from the top to
the mob on the street traveling around cities to break up summit meet–
ings in the name of anti-globalization, itself an inventive slogan for anti–
Americanism. Although himself a natural grazer in the bilious pastures
of the
Guardian,
Salman Rushdie is a rare example of an intellectual
willing to backpedal. This spring he wrote, "Anyone who has visited
Britain and Europe, or followed the public conversation there during
the past five months, will have been struck, even shocked, by the depth
of anti-Amer ican feeling among large segments of the population. West–
ern anti-Americanism is an altogether more petulant phenomenon than
its Islamic counterpart and far more personalized....
In
the non–
American West, the main objection seems to be to American people."
