How Europe Looks at America

THIS is a marriage that has arrived at middle age," says Italian Columnist Arrigo Levi of the longstanding relationship between the U.S. and Europe. "It needs some sexual stimulation." This year the diplomatic stimulation across the Atlantic will be more intense than it has been in years. It will take place in a changed atmosphere: the old and comfortable relationship of a protective America and a dependent Europe has given way to one of rivalry.

If anything, this new relationship is likely to intensify Europe's perennial if ambiguous fascination with the mystery that is America. In 1830 that observant Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville saw in America "the image of democracy itself, with its inclinations, its prejudices and its passions." A century and a half later, another astute French observer, Jean-Franc,ois Revel (Without Marx or Jesus) described America as "an example for all democracies and all technological societies today." Other observers argue that America is an example of precisely what other modern nations should not be.

The range of European attitudes and opinions on the U.S. is as broad and varied as Europe itself. In the north, for instance, Sweden's opposition to the war in Viet Nam has spilled over into continuing, virulent anti-Americanism. Far to the south, the average Italian, says University of Rome Sociologist Francesco Ferrarotti, "has a deep sense of almost compulsive admiration for Americans."

In between, there is the mixed opinion of the West Germans. Says Ulrich Littmann, executive director of the Fulbright Commission in Germany: "The German has an optically broken picture of the Americans. It's like a beam of light hitting the water. He thinks of the U.S. in terms of the people who sent men to the moon, the people who are portrayed in western movies and TV thrillers, the people who conducted a war in Viet Nam." The same German who goes out and throws a stone through the window of America House in protest of the bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong cheers the U.S. military band marching in the Carnival parade.

Something of the same double vision plagues the French. Says Revel, France's best-known America watcher: "The French are, of course, ignorant of American society in any case. They live a continual ambiguity. On the one hand, they are unconsciously seduced and fascinated by American life, and they love to imitate it. On the other hand, it is almost a national custom to reject U.S. actions and disparage American institutions out of hand."

European attitudes toward the U.S. are to some extent determined by age. To most people over 40 in Western Europe, America still represents the deliverance from the evil that was Nazism. There is a middle-range group of leftist intellectuals, roughly in their early 30s, who are violently anti-American because they consider the U.S. the model of a capitalist, imperialist society. The young generally see the U.S. as a corrupt military-industrial establishment --even as they absorb and emulate the latest made-in-America styles in rock sounds, drugs and fashions.

One particular American who arouses strong but disparate feelings in Europe is Richard Nixon. In England, he is regarded in official quarters with almost unqualified admiration for his rapprochements with China and the Soviet Union. The popular feeling, though, is considerably cooler: one recent poll showed that 65% of the British public disapproved of his handling of the Viet Nam War. Italians admire Nixon's pragmatism, a quality notably lacking in their own politicians. Germans like his political finesse, but sometimes wonder about his dedication to the Atlantic Alliance, and hence to their security. In France, Nixon's policy of benign neglect of Europe in the past has suited the Gaullists fine.

The Viet Nam War has caused some Europeans to question the future of the Atlantic Alliance. Historian Arnold Toynbee, who strongly believes that the U.S. should reduce its military presence in Europe, notes that "South Viet Nam has suffered even more than North Viet Nam, and for America's other allies this is rather a warning as to what can happen. The risk of being a Czechoslovakia is less than the risk of being a South Viet Nam."

From a different perspective, Italian Columnist Levi thinks there is a "fundamental fear that for the second consecutive time, the U.S. will draw its own lessons from history. It applied lessons learned in Europe in the '40s and '50s to Asia and found to its dismay Asia was not Europe. To extract itself from the Asian mistake, it had to play a balance-of-power maneuver. The fear is that Washington may apply the lessons learned in Asia in the '60s to Europe in the '70s. A balance-of-power game in Europe would be a disaster."

Ideology. Apart from such geopolitical problems, Europeans must cope with ever-increasing inroads of Americanization on their own more traditional and stratified societies. Europe has simply not produced a competing ideology to defend itself against the impact of American emphasis on mobility, expansion, informality and disregard of class barriers and inherited privilege. Yet there is a widespread feeling that the U.S. is in chaos, deeply divided, unable to act, and economically on the fringe of a major crisis. Such British America-watchers as Louis Heren and Andrew Shonfield wonder about the imponderable effect of a triumph of conservatism in the U.S. Heren is one of the few to perceive a "new equilibrium" in the U.S. that he regards as an encouraging trend away from unrest. In recent years, Europe has been infected with what has seemed America's doubt about its own future and the American dream. The feeling is widespread that the time has come for the U.S. to learn some lessons from Europe, rather than the reverse.

Still, British Strategic Analyst Alistair Buchan argues: "The U.S. is still the world's great experimental society and it does not behoove Europeans to look down their noses at it because we, for the time being, have more successfully solved some problems of crime and environment. This is simply because American problems are on a much, much larger scale." Echoing Tocqueville, Revel and countless other fascinated tourists to the New World, Switzerland's Georges-Henri Martin, editor of La Tribune de Geneve, notes: "America is still our model, for better or worse. What happens there, we find, comes here later."

The fact remains that the U.S. cannot regain the all-powerful image it had after World War II--and Europeans don't want it to. What Europeans do want is for the U.S. to discover and define its mission for the next generation or two. Despite the new sense of rivalry and independence, there is still an almost inescapable sense of a linked fate with the U.S.

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