This was inspired by a brief tangent from the discussion about Blair's photo-op for der Gropenator, as
diaried by opendna last night. We briefly discussed Europeans' attitudes towards Americans.
My wife and I spent about a year and a half in Europe, from May 2004 to November 2005. Our itinerary was based primarily on visiting prehistoric, historic, and art historic sites, with a few detours for such cultural or pop cultural favorites as the childhood homes of the Beatles (John's and Paul's have been donated to the National Trust!), the village where Colette grew up, the homes where Jane Austen wrote and Monet painted, the castle where "Brideshead Revisited" was filmed, and the small Welsh village where The Prisoner took a stand for humanity.
We visited every country in Western and Central Europe, except for Finland, the Balkans states, and Andorra (and yes- that means we did make brief stops in San Marino, Liechtenstein and Monaco!). We spent at least one night in over a hundred different places, and made side trips to hundreds more. We never left the ground (except when we were on water)- drove everywhere, took trains and ferries and buses, and must have spoken with thousands of different people. And we must have discussed politics with half that many. There are many Europeans who use this site, and many Americans who live in Europe, each of whom probably has different insights than we, but these are some of our broad strokes impressions.
I should begin by saying that we were a bit worried about anti-Americanism. We joked about putting Canadian flag patches on our packs and bags (and I'm from Oregon, and have spent a bit of time in B.C., while my wife's from Buffalo- so it's not TOO far off...), and wondered if we should avoid talking politics altogether. Happy to report that our worries were completely unfounded! For one thing, American pop culture is so omnipresent, with young people everywhere wearing Yankees baseball caps (and I did explain to some that rooting for the Yankees is like rooting for Chelsea or Milan, and that it's infinitely cooler to wear a Red Sox cap!- side note: after suffering through '75 and '78, and not being able to sleep for a week after '86, The Curse was broken while we were in Budapest- the night before we caught a morning train to Vienna, and I couldn't afford to stay up all night to watch!), street musicians in Italy playing Green Day, and blonde Norwegian street artists in Oslo performing rap! So, there is a predisposition among many to like us!
We talked politics everywhere, and it proved to be a great ice-breaker! From a young family at a stone circle in Cumbria, to a museum guard and his friend in Burgundy, to a hotel clerk in Lisbon to a Swiss doctor at a restaurant in Stockholm, to a Finnish science writer at the castle in Heidelberg, EVERYONE WANTED to talk politics! And we did not feel pre-judged, as Americans. They were curious, concerned, and completely engaged!
The way I've been explaining the attitude to friends is this:
Suppose you have an old friend, someone you've known a long time, someone you've trusted and looked up to, someone who's helped you out of a few jams. You love them and trust them, and you've always felt you can talk honestly to them, and that even when you have disagreements you both generally listen to each other. But suddenly, they're going off the rails. You don't understand them, and you can't get through to them. You're worried, angered, and completely baffled. You don't hate them, although their behavior, of late, freaks you out, and you've begun to wonder if you even know them anymore. That was what it was like. People didn't want to lecture us or admonish us, they wanted to ask questions! They wanted to know what the hell was going on! And all we could tell them was that it's even worse than they thought!
One of the greatest political accomplishments in much of Europe has been the definitive divorce between church and state. It took a couple millenia of wars of unimaginable brutality to reach this point, but in much of Europe, to base political policy on religious dogma is almost unthinkable. In Germany, most shops are required to close on Sundays, but that was the closest we saw to government imposition of religion on daily life. Most of Europe has been secularized to a degree that we can't imagine (as for the twin homes of the Inquisition- only about 12% of Romans regularly attend church, and Spain legalized gay marriage!). And because of that, the fact that the modern Republican Party has been built on entirely theocratic foundations is completely unimaginable to most Europeans! Even the most politically astute seemed to miss that aspect entirely! It is not even on their radar! So, they are angry about Iraq and Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and Kyoto, but generally oblivious to the common theme that unites all these depredations. So, the first thing we had to do was explain that we have, essentially, gone Medieval on them. And the second thing we had to explain was our media.
In Europe, most newspapers have open biases. Our first stop on the entire trip was Winchester, the original Norman capital of England. When I asked for a Guardian newspaper, the man shrugged and said, "I'm a Telegraph boy, myself." There is no assumption of pure objectivity by most newspapers, and everyone knows where their paper stands. But television news was completely different. If ours is biased in favor of Israel, theirs is biased in favor of the Palestinians, but other than that, there was an amazing professionalism in television news- even by the anchors (or "presenters", as they call them). CNN International's anchors are attractive but not overly made up, and they sit at simple desks, like ours used to. Interviews are long, pointed, and at times aggressive. And BBC anchors occasionally really hammer their guests! And, upon our return, the first time we turned on the news, it was "This is Wolf Blitzer, and you're in The Situation Room!" Big sets, bells and whistles, shrill dramatics, and bimbo interviews... That was the last time we turned on the U.S. television news! So, after first explaining that we are creeping towards theocracy, the second thing we would explain is that we no longer have a professional, independent media.
Another point I want to make is that I think many Americans are unaware of some of the political currents now roiling Europe. The fall of the Soviet Union has meant an enormous influx of young workers into the west, and in Germany, in particular, assimilating the East has been an economic anchor on the West. And the EU is enormously unpopular in the wealthier states, while generally appreciated in the recipient states. There is a striking optimism in Ireland, where EU money and enlightened leadership has transformed the economy- they will soon become the first nation to go from EU recipient to donor!- and we constantly heard things like "well, now everyone has money to spend!," or "it's not like the Seventies, when everyone's pockets were empty!" In Portugal and Spain, too, the sense of a better future was palpable. But in the four largest economies, the mood was strikingly sour, and their political leaders uniformly unpopular- regardless of their political bent or stance on the Iraq war. Blair is a liberal who supports Bush's war, and he's enormously unpopular, Schröder is a liberal who opposed Bush's war and he was also enormously unpopular (although a brilliant campaigner, and he almost pulled it off!); Berlusconi was a conservative who supported Bush's war, and he was also enormously unpopular (and even his near complete control over his nation's media couldn't save his job!), and Chirac is a conservative who opposes Bush's war- and he, too, is very unpopular. So, that's one thing we all need keep in mind when we think about Europe- they are in the midst of enormous political upheaval, and no one is sure how it will shake out. Merkel's coalition is too weak for her to pursue her agenda, and so is Prodi's. England eagerly anticipates the arrival of heir-apparent Gordon Brown, but many French are worried about the likely advent of law-and-order conservative Nicolas Sarközy.
And it is impossible to talk about modern Europe without talking about race relations and "Third World" immigration. You see poor Africans selling cheap designer knock-offs on the streets of many cities, particularly in the south. The first time we attempted to visit Rome's Capitoline Museums, they were closed down because of an unannounced protest in the piazza, staged by Africans desperate for government attention. In Amsterdam, a friend who has been working there for a couple years was beaten up in the street, while walking home late one night after visiting other friends. The very openness of Dutch society has created a crisis. For centuries, they have welcomed immigrants, but because their society is so open and secular, they were oblivious to the religious extremism that some of those immigrants brought with them. Unexpected bigotry against gays brought to unexpected political prominence a gay conservative, Pym Fortuyn, whose assassination led to a crackdown on immigration, with thousands of illegal immigrants deported, and dramatic drops in the number of allowed legal immigrants. The murder of controversial filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by a Muslim extremist only added to the increasing xenophobia. Purely by chance, we returned to London just days after the bombings, and we left France just weeks before the riots- and we had visited many of the towns where the riots were most explosive. In general, Europe is awakening to two stark facts: 1) open doors have allowed in too many religious extremists whose basic values run counter to Europe's openness and secularism, and 2) the governments have done much too little to help the proponderant well-intentioned immigrants assimilate. These facts will be prominent in European politics for the forseeable future.
Overall, though, as I mentioned above, our experiences with Europeans everywhere was amazing. Other than a break-in at our apartment in Rome, we had NO bad experiences with Europeans (and almost as bad as the break-in was the response of the cops- as Dylan said about Juarez: "the cops don't need you, and man, they expect the same"!). We were also in Rome during the Giuliana Sgrena atrocity, and there was a palpable fury at Bush and Berlusconi over the murder by American troops of Italian agent Nicola Calipari- but NONE of it was directed at us! And because everyone we met took us at face value, and was willing to listen, we found that being liberal Americans opened doors! But whether or not we talked politics, the one constant was a kindness and generosity that we hadn't expected:
An old man in old Granada, who spoke less English than we did Spanish, but could tell we were lost, and once he could understand what we were looking for (he was near deaf), led us to it.
A bartender in Thessaloniki who, when we asked how we could cross the busy street (with our bags) between the bar and where our outbound ferry was docked, took a break from work, threw our bags in her car, and drove us.
Four French friends outside the Louvre- a doctor, a cop, and two engineers- who stopped and talked politics for a while, then spent the rest of the night driving us around to take photos of the lights of Paris (we all became close friends).
An Italian-Swiss waitress in Berlin who took her day off work to also drive us around and see the sights (also became a close friend).
I could go on and on...
So, if you're thinking about going to Europe, or worried about what they think of us, don't be TOO worried. They DO hate our government, but they're willing to give people a chance. In a year and a half of travel, we never got dirty looks or open scorn or rudeness or anything negative at all (except for the break-in, which I'm still getting over, because all they took was my laptop, and I lost forty pages of writing when my microdrive backup conveniently failed). And in all that time, we met exactly TWO people who liked Bush- a Belgian, in Nice, where we stopped for exactly one day, to see the Chagall and Matisse museums, and who likes Bush because he WANTS chaos and destruction- with great prescience he also told us France would soon break out in violent riots, and he hoped it would be as bad as the 1790s!; and an Italian accountant in Rome, a friend of a friend, who must have been reading our right wing websites or watching Faux News, because all he could spew were fact-challenged repug talking point- while his French wife quietly apologized to mine with the explanation that they had never talked politics before marrying...
Moving forward, I have little doubt that a Democratic president and Congress can quickly heal the damage with Europe, and hopefully enlist their aid in solving the catastrophes in the Middle East. They WANT to like us, they WANT to trust us, and the DESPERATELY want us to use our unprecedented power to show some international leadership!