One of the smartest places to be in Munich on the night of the US election was the Amerika Haus, home of the Bavarian-American Center. There, tightly guarded by security police, well groomed Bavarian Americophiles (including some “aristocrats”, I was proudly informed) mixed with US citizens to watch CNN, dance to jazz bands, wear funny hats and consume sausages and beer. It was a festive occasion... before the results came in. One thing was clear from badges and conversations: almost every German in the building was rooting for John Kerry. The US they loved was not the one that voted for George W. Bush. They had come to celebrate; they left in a state of mourning.
The same was true for most Europeans. Why? Was it, perhaps, because they agreed with the eminent US scholar Garry Wills, who described the Bush victory as the defeat of the Enlightenment in the US? In his view, the land shaped by Jefferson and Lincoln has been taken over by “moral zealots”. Is Europe now the last beacon of Enlightenment values, and America the counter-Enlightenment?
Almost 60 years ago, in the rubble of the Third Reich, Germans had turned to the Amerika Haus for reason and light. Housed for many years in the former Nazi headquarters, and paid for by the US, the Amerika Haus in the late 1940s and 1950s was visited by about 80,000 people a month to watch US films and read US books and periodicals. It was in such institutions that Germany’s “re-education” took place, where democracy was imbibed from the US masters.
West Germans proved to be good pupils. As General Lucius D. Clay, in charge of the postwar US occupation, is said to have remarked: “Germans may make bad Germans, but they make damned good Americans.” Liberal-minded Germans wanted nothing more than to be free from their murderous past. US culture was embraced with an enthusiasm bordering on zeal. The young consumed rock and roll, the rich collected modern US art, Hollywood conquered all, and Jack Kennedy was a Berliner too.
Liberal Americophilia, or Atlanticism, was boosted by the demands of the cold war. A particular idea of “the west” - capitalist, democratic, US-influenced and US-led - was defined in opposition to the communist empires that loomed menacingly from the east. Goethe and Jefferson fused, as it were, in a united front. The US, led by an east-coast elite which felt as much at home in Paris, Bonn or London as in Princeton or Washington DC, was seen as the greatest champion of the European Enlightenment. The “west” in which I, like all western Europeans over 40, grew up was a creation of cultivated Atlanticists, led by such conservative gentlemen as Konrad Adenauer and Harold Macmillan on one side of the ocean and Dean Acheson and George Kennan on the other.
All this has changed. In the course of the 1990s, after German reunification, the collapse of the Soviet empire and the first Iraq war, wide cracks began to appear in the “west”. The glue of anti-communism was coming apart. And such institutions as the Amerika Haus began to look like historical monuments, as passe as Bill Haley and the Comets. The US government no longer saw any point in paying for such an anachronism. The Germans had no more need to learn about democracy and free enterprise. The rump that is left of the Amerika Haus is now financed by Bavarians.
The growing estrangement between Europe and the US is partly a question of interests - economic differences do not have to be obscured because of common security concerns. It is also geographic. US politicians from Texas or California no longer see Europe as the source of civilisation. The “abroad” they know is usually Mexico, not France. If they speak any foreign language at all, it is likely to be Spanish. In terms of strategic interests, China, South-east Asia and the Middle East count for more than Europe, which can more or less take care of itself.
But the main difference between Europe and the US is political: the former is still governed by elites, especially on the level of the EU, while populism has swept the US. Senators often used to be courtly figures with old-world contacts and tastes. Now many have the manners and opinions of backwoodsmen, and have difficulty telling one European country from another. And even when heartland Republicans are not really yokels, they often pretend to be, for they know which side their bread is buttered. This shift is illustrated by the differences between Bush father and son.
The elder Bush was still of the courtly school, an old-fashioned Atlanticist who travelled widely and liked to manage the world in the manner of a gentleman’s club - discreetly, politely, cautiously. I believe he spoke French and his religion was a private matter. Bush the younger, private boarding school and Yale notwithstanding, swaggers like a Texan loudmouth, has barely travelled and wears God on his sleeve. He regards internationalism and consensus-building as something strictly for sissies. And he picked up a little Spanish from his youthful high jinks across the Mexican border.
America does matter to Europeans, of course, for it is much too powerful to ignore. But European elites, not least in Germany, are changing too. Politicians of Gerhard Schroeder’s generation, who have no personal memories of the second world war, talk about Germany becoming a “normal” nation again. As Timothy Garton Ash observes in his book, Free World: “Phrases like ‘not a colony’, ‘not to be treated as a vassal’ and ‘the need for emancipation’ surfaced again and again in the German debates.” Emancipation from US tutelage is one thing; emancipation from the legacy of Hitler is another. The two sometimes get conflated, hence the current spate of books that apply Holocaust terminology to allied war crimes against the Germans. Some of this revisionism is a necessary corrective to self-flagellation, but it slips too easily into resentment of US domination. These feelings, sometimes tinged with anti-Semitism (the Jewish “cabal” in Washington, etc), can find solace in a common front with France, which always hated the idea of “Anglo-Saxons” leading the western world.
The danger of the current rift in the “west” is that attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic feed off mutual resentments. Many Bush supporters are as contemptuous of “the Europeans”, whom they regard as a bunch of effete, godless, homo snobs, as the newly assertive Europeans are of Bush’s people, whom they dismiss as ignorant, philistine cowboys.
But “Europeans”, as Garton Ash has pointed out, is often code in Washington for something else: for the old liberal, Atlanticist elite, represented by Democrats such as Kerry, but also country club Republicans such as Bush the elder. To be “European” means to be on the side of secular liberalism at home, and cautious diplomacy and alliance-building abroad. To be “European” is to be sceptical about revolutionary schemes, about global missions to free mankind from evil, about ideological wars. And to be “European” is to speak French, hence Kerry has to hide this facility.
The disdain for “Europeans”, then, is a complicated mixture. Apart from the populist contempt for old elites, it also stems from the notion that as Europeans are no longer willing to defend their own liberal traditions, it is up to Americans to stand up to dictators and extremists. But I suspect the main reason for the bias towards Kerry at the Amerika Haus was nostalgia for the old times when the “west” was ruled by “Europeans”, for an age when New England and New York provided US leaders, instead of Texas and Wyoming. In a sense it was nostalgia for the cold war, when Germany and other western Europeans could concentrate on getting rich.
As a sentimental Atlanticist I share some of this nostalgia. I am not comfortable with men who think God has given them a mission to cleanse the world from evil. But I’m not at all sure that Garry Wills is right to claim that Bush’s US has turned its back on the Enlightenment. European intellectuals like to believe Europe is now the only legitimate carrier of the liberal heritage bequeathed by Diderot, John Locke and, yes, Thomas Jefferson. But is it true? On the level of rhetoric, if nothing else, Bushism sends out mixed signals. The constant invocation of the Lord’s name is not in the spirit of Diderot, and the religious loathing of homosexuality, abortion and the scientific approach to life’s mysteries is also less than enlightened. But the Enlightenment was also about liberation from despotism, and about the notion that reason is a universal human faculty, and that rational solutions can therefore be universally applied. In this sense, the Bushist project, articulated by such wholly secular - and indeed elitist - figures as Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, is in tune with the Enlightenment.
The idea that the US can transform dictatorships into areas of democracy and free enterprise is close to the world view of Locke - closer, at any rate, than the common “European” view that we cannot mess with alien cultures, that tyrants are part of a foreign tradition which it would be folly to challenge with force. This kind of scepticism is actually closer to the counter-Enlightenment, which emphasises culture rather than universal ideals.
Of course, the Enlightenment is one of those catch-all terms. Good things came out of it, but bad things too. The French Revolution would not have been possible without the anti-clerical rationalism of the Enlightenment. But rationalism was also the basis of “scientific socialism”, which led to man-made famines and the gulag. So to say that something is rooted in the Enlightenment does not mean it is necessarily good. The neo-con attempt to remake the world is enlightened in principle, but may also be imprudent and likely to cause more harm than good.
What many Europeans find difficult to understand about Bush’s US is that neo-cons really do believe in defending liberty by exporting liberalism. To claim that this is a lie, to obscure the real aim of securing oil fields, is to misunderstand their very American ideology, which is a mixture of rationalism and religious zeal. It has always been there but it has never been so zealous. And zealotry, even in service of enlightened ideals, is always dangerous.
It is possible, perhaps even probable, that this form of zealotry, like others in the past, will crash on the rocks of the real world, but this will not necessarily result in a revival of the old transatlantic elites. The US could easily withdraw in sulky isolation. And Europeans may respond with a populism of their own. Berlusconi is a harbinger perhaps, as was the Dutch maverick, Pim Fortuyn.
Europeans have so far been unable to come up with plausible ways to deal with hostile dictators and religious terrorists. And the chances are that anti-Muslim prejudice will feed the European populism to come. We can already see the level of popular hostility to Turkey’s attempts to join the EU. It is something even such elitist politicians as Jacques Chirac will find hard to ignore.
So what should we do now that the era of Amerika Haus is over? To be less dependent on US security would surely be a good thing. But to turn our backs on the US, even under George W. Bush, would be folly - all democracies, however flawed, have more in common with one another than with any form of dictatorship. Those who think that Bush is more dangerous than Kim Jong-il delude themselves, or are not democrats at heart. And to think, as the French government appears to do, that we must challenge the US by making common cause with authoritarian states such as China, is neither prudent, nor wise, nor indeed remotely in tune with the principles of the Enlightenment.
Ian Buruma is professor of human rights, democracy and journalism at Bard College, New York.
