Hell Hath No Fury
Scorned, the goddess Europa
Guido Cagnacci (1601-1663)
We are going to be briefly geopolitical today. This comes over us every once in a while, but it’s not serious and you don’t have to pay attention if you don’t want to.
Somebody much more authoritative than “Upper Italy” has finally clarified a point that is central to relations between Italy – and the rest of Europe, for that matter – and the United States. That is World Bank President Robert Zoellick, formerly the number two in the State Department, who recently told Europeans at the Brussels Forum that the next U.S. president is going to piss them off just like the last one did. According to “Foreign Policy” (here):
“Zoellick began his session by challenging European expectations for a new U.S. president. “My major concern is that the tenor of the debate in Europe is raising expectations – regardless of who the next president is – that overlooks a range of interests that I think both parties in the United States would pursue and also some ideologies… they would pursue, and that those heightened expectations will inevitably have to be adjusted,” he said.”
Here’s the deal. Continental Europeans, very nearly all of them, think they hate George W. Bush. They read that they do very often in the papers and some of this has naturally stuck.
The problem, at least superficially, has been – we know this is perfectly obvious – Iraq. A couple of big European leaders – Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schroeder, both of them politically no longer with us by chance – had said very clearly that the Americans should not do anything about Saddam Hussein, and then they went ahead and did so anyway! Why, it was almost as if the U.S. did not care very much about European opinions on the matter…
If you are not European it’s a good deal easier to grasp that this last is the simple truth. Having heard from the Russians, the Chinese and Japanese, the Indians and even the Brazilians that it was okay to go bust the Iraqi dictator’s hairy Baathist ass, why, the Americans figured that was really pretty much all they needed.
Europe has been, or has at least felt to be, at the navel of history for a long time. Though you might think that the Cold War should have already made clear how things actually stood – since it basically treated the Continent as a buffer zone, the place where the last battles would be fought if the big hammer fell – that was not the perception here.
People seemed to still care what European governments said about things, European maîtres à penser still got read by American college students. People like Pablo Picasso, the painter, Sigmund Freud, the shrink and Karl Marx, the political thinker, had been dead rather less long and still mattered. Even people like Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were taken seriously by people who could not read what they wrote.
This is gone. The only Europeans to become true worldwide icons in thirty years have been fashion designers, though Elton John had a good run and Princess Diane and Harry Potter have worked out well as literary personages.
Europeans fail utterly to understand that what they think or do is not terribly important to the Americans anymore. They do not and cannot realize that the United States faces on two ocean and not just one, and that of the two it has for some time been the Pacific that matters.
The Italian papers – but this is true across the Continent – almost daily explain in their editorial pages what the American Government should be doing, and then become quite irritated when the U.S. goes ahead and does something different. The last thing they can think is that nobody is even reading what they write. They appear to believe instead that their careful reasoning is being deliberately discarded by an evil adiminstration which, at the very best, is probably not capable of grasping the brilliance of their opinions because of a thick-headed President who is known to wear cowboy boots.
They liked Bill Clinton well enough. He pandered more to Europe, but Bill was from Arkansas, drank purple wine in college and was an intellectual conservative who felt about Europe the way other Americans once felt about New York – until it became evident that the “Big Apple” and the “Old Country” were both places where fads went to die, elephants’ graveyards of thought. Bill was even a Rhodes Scholar. How Sixties is that?
So European/American relations are riding for a fall. The Europeans believe their problem with the U.S. is George Bush. They assume then that when he is gone everything will be fine again. That is not the case. The pondered geographical center of American concerns is somewhere to the West of the Hawaiian Islands and is going to stay there.
That’s the way it is with the End of the World as We Know It; it’s not heralded by archangels with trumpets, it just sneaks up on you while you’re trying to make some money off wine exports and the high-end rag trade.
Do you hear that deafening silence? It’s the sound of the Americans mostly not giving a shit.