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Does Europe Hate US?

Last evening, I watched the latest episode of “Tom Friedman Reports” on the Discovery Times Channel. Now, I’m never sure if he actually is a good reporter or its just that the rest of the New York Times staff is so bad that they make him look better than he is, but as a rule, I tend to like him.

The subject of this episode is about something I’ve written about many times, the general state of affairs between Europe and the US.

I’ve been haunted by the show all day.

In this show, Friedman had many small audiences of Europeans and Americans living in Europe to describe the state of affairs between the two societies. It ran the gamut from a WWII French citizen who also served as a GI, to the usual rabble of disaffected youth.

The episode in a nutshell comes down to this:

Taken as a whole, the euros really, really hate George W. Bush in a deep visceral way and they aren’t too sure about us everyday American Folk either.

I thought Friedman did a good job on the show and several points he asked the euro audiences some pretty pointed questions that they clearly were unprepared to answer, but I do wish that he had put forth one statement to the assembled masses of European opinion givers. And that is:

“You know, we don’t have to be your friends”

There seems to be an assumption on both parties that at the end of the day, all will be forgiven and we will go back to the shiny happy days of the past. The first mistake in that idea is this, that the happy days of the past weren’t so happy. Those that think there was once a golden age that we have all just slipped away from are in need of spending a little more time in their history classes. The vast majority of our history with Europe has been spent in strife with one party or the other. It has only been during the wars of the last century that Europe has looked to America as its new best friend.

The euros seem to think we are obligated to be their friends, no matter what their position or behavior towards us. Euros take us very much for granted that after all is said and done that the good ole yanks will just kiss and make up and all will be as it once was.

I’m not so sure.

I was joking with someone the other day that the way things are going, I’m more likely to get mugged for being an American in Paris than I would be as an American in Beirut.

It’s a joke of course, but I don’t think it’s too far off from accurate. I think our new friends may just come from the liberated countries of the Middle East rather than the sedate capitols of Europe.

Europe is now a competitor, nothing more nothing less so its natural that their would be very little room anyway for this idea of “countries as good friends”. To be sure, Europe is acting as we are, in their own self interest, and to that I say, good for them! But I do want to make clear to many people in Europe that there are consequences for your actions. Your governments are going into over time to spin the world’s evils as exclusive effluent from America, but you might want to look a little closer to home.

Europe is very clearly using the WTO as a tool to beat American business into submission, and they are no longer making any bones about it. It is clear that the Green parties of each of the countries in the EU are working overtime to do whatever they can to strangle American business. American business is doings its best to fight back and given a level playing field they are remaining competitive, despite the most dire predictions.

Oops, I guess we are customers of Europe too. Well golly isn’t that interesting. The way I see it, just about everything under the sun can be bought from all over the world now, so tell me, what is it that I have to get from Europe that I cant get from anywhere else at half the price and twice as fast?

Like us, Hate us, burn our flag in protest, our president in effigy, be our guest, we really don’t care either way. Just don’t expect me to be there when the going get tough, and its going to get very tough in the new world of a level playing field. Both Tom Peters and Tom Friedman have made very good points about how the world is changing, and I’m afraid it’s a message that the Euros are missing. Once upon a time, the Germans were the most competitive country on earth. Scads of books were written in the 1980’s telling us Americans how lost it was for us that we couldn’t hope to compete against the big government German machine. Much of the same was said about the Japanese. For my generation, we were taught that Americans couldn’t compete in the world. They were wrong of course, but everyone back then wanted you to believe it. I suspect the same is true today by those who say we can’t compete against the EU.

Let us all be very clear here, the EU wasn’t invented to compete, it was built to protect.

Germany by herself is not much of a factor as a competitive nation anymore. Japan has been in a recession for 10 years. Imagine that, 10 years. Germany has been in double digits unemployment for so long they don’t know what to do to get out. These are not the Germans I remember from the 1980’s. This all just a polite way of saying that I’m not really worried about Europe as a competitor. First of all, you have to have Europeans to compete with and the way their birth rate is going, it’s just a matter of time before what was Europe simply ceases to be anything more than an old folks home.

As we say in flying, the euros seem to be behind the ‘power curve’ economically speaking. Its another way of saying that the euros are writing checks with their mouths that their asses can’t cash.

I like Europe. I like Europeans. But I have some standards on who it is I let call themselves my friends. My standard has always been “ If I had an emergency and I had to deal with a problem out of town, is this someone that I could give my car keys to?”

My friends would take care of the car as if it were their own, and without asking fill the tank for the times they drove it while I was gone. My associates would put it in the driveway and just make sure it didn’t get hurt but they would use it without refilling the gas tank. My neighbors wouldn’t do much at all except make sure it didn’t get broken into.

So, from my eyes, Europe is failing the test of friendship and has now fallen into the mode of either ‘associates’ or worse, just ‘neighbors’. We might be friendly, but we are not friends.

Europe increasingly reminds me of a former girlfriend that used to call at 2:00 in the morning, just to argue with me. This was as if this would somehow remind me of how much I missed her.

All it reminded me of is how glad I was I dumped her.

Posted @ April 12, 2005 08:16 PM | Current Events

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