Why Europe’s elites have embraced sneering anti-Americanism
Expressing anger against America appears to be the one emotion that binds the European political establishment. As one Financial Times commentator explained earlier this month, ‘Trump is Europe’s best enemy yet’. He has apparently provided Europe with the ‘common foe’ it needs. It appears that anti-Americanism is now the glue holding together otherwise disoriented and divided European elites.
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Contempt for the American way of life has always been particularly widespread among European intellectual and the cultural elites. Writing at the turn of the 20th century, British economist Sydney Brooks attributed the hostility to America to ‘envy of her prosperity and success’. Europeans, he wrote, ‘intensely resent the bearing of Americans… They hate the American form of swagger.’ They saw a country ‘crudely and completely immersed in materialism’.
One of the most famous slurs against the US came in the early 20th century, when French prime minister Georges Clemenceau sneered that, ‘America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilisation’.
During the Cold War years, Europe’s cultural elite continued to view America with a mixture of resentment and contempt. ‘America the violent, America the crass, America the inept have all become everyday images in Europe’, concluded the US ambassador in London in early 1987. This attitude has got much worse since. The well-known British author Margaret Drabble wrote in May 2003, two months after the invasion of Iraq:
‘It has possessed me like a disease. It rises in my throat like acid reflux… I can’t keep it down any longer. I detest Disneyfication. I detest Coca-Cola. I detest burgers. I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history.’
Drabble’s visceral disgust towards America was shared throughout Europe. German theatre director Peter Zadek gave full vent to his prejudices against the American people during the Iraq War:
‘The Bush administration was more or less democratically elected, and it had the support of the majority of Americans in its Iraq War. One can therefore be against the Americans, just as most of the world was against the Germans in the Second World War. In this sense, I am an anti-American.’
Today, the European elites’ anti-American ideology has acquired a new dimension. It is now interwoven with their fear and loathing of the right-wing populism now rising within Europe itself. As Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in the Guardian last week:
‘European governments are terrified of Donald Trump’s threats on trade, Greenland and the future of NATO. But the biggest threat is not that Trump invades an ally or leaves Europe at the mercy of Russia. It is that his ideological movement could transform Europe from the inside.’...
There is no reason to think that the populist surge in Europe will abate when Trump departs the White House. European elites, uncomfortable with the principle of national sovereignty, have long channelled decision-making away from the people and towards expert institutions, non-governmental organisations and international bodies. It is this profound democratic deficit, not the Trump White House, that has provided populist movements with their energy. They appeal to vast swathes of Europe’s national publics – to those, that is, who believe that they have been excluded from the decision-making that impacts their lives.
It is therefore unlikely that European elites’ increasingly shrill anti-Americanism will do much to dent the growing influence of populist parties. Nor can it create a European identity with widespread public appeal. As matters stand, European anti-Americanism is likely to emulate the post-Brexit ‘Remainer’ identity.
Like Remainerism’s antipathy to British national sovereignty, this new Europeanism has little substantive content beyond its opposition to Trump’s America.
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