With Us or Against Us
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form.47 In this, Havel and the Czech dissident intellectuals were influ-
enced by the writings of Jan Patocka and Martin Heidegger. The
latter had, after all, written of “Europe in a great pincers, squeezed
between Russia on one side and America on the other,”48 arguing
that “from a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the
same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted
organization of the ordinary man.”
Asked to comment on why such an author was considered so
important by the dissidents (i.e., surely there were more reliable
philosophical sources for thinking about democracy and the West),
the Czech samizdat translator of Being and Time attributed it to
Patocka’s influence (his “master thinkers” being Husserl and Heidegger)
and quipped that in those days “there was not much ‘being,’ but we
had a lot of time. . . .”49
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Both the Czech dissident intellectuals’ critique of Western modernity
(of which America was the most advanced incarnation) and the Polish
Catholic assumption that Western democracy (of which America was
the unquestioned leader) should be accompanied by a parallel spiritual
renaissance in Europe have a somewhat hollow ring today. Poland is
Europe’s spiritual Piedmont because, as the Pope put it, “thanks
to the experience of totalitarianism, it is Eastern Europe that has
achieved greater maturity?” Well, we know what happened to that.
We have seen, instead, after the collapse of totalitarianism and its
economy of scarcity the unbridled triumph of consumerism and com-
mercial mass culture associated primarily with America. “We have a
new god: entertainment!,” claims Czech writer Ivan Klima, comment-
ing on the state of culture, 10 years after the “velvet revolution.” In
Vaclav Havel’s words: “I am not sure if we are not catching up with
the West precisely in the ways the West should be warned against.”50
The West, not just America.
Thus, although some Central European intellectuals have, in the
1990s, rediscovered the concerns of their French colleagues about
the influence of (predominantly American) mass culture, they do not
share the latter’s defensive posture concerning the spread of English.
The East Europeans have always known that few people will make the
effort to have direct access to their language and culture and that
learning the imperial lingua franca—which today happens to be
American English—is a must for the small nations of the periphery.
They are reassured to find themselves in the company of the Germans,
the Italians, or indeed the French in this respect.
Conclusion
The contrasting perceptions and attitudes toward America’s role as
the only superpower, as a would-be model of democracy and open
society, are not only related to different historical experiences and a
different sense of one’s own role. The French have difficulty adjusting
to their current status as a medium size power while the small coun-
tries of East-Central appreciate America also as an equalizing factor
on the European scene (correcting the imbalance with France or
Germany). The different attitudes to America also have to do with
Cold War legacies and, in the French case, to different perceptions
of the peaceful revolutions of 1989. The French, at first, tried to see
there a fitting contribution to the ceremonies of the bicentennial
of the French Revolution. From a Central European perspective, 1989
was a very deliberate closing of the era opened by the French
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Revolution (followed by the Russian Revolution of 1917) based on
the idea that a better society can be brought about through violence.
The year 1989 saw the triumph of the democratic idea over the idea of
revolution and in that respect identified more easily with the legacies of
the American Revolution or the American “model” of democracy.
The contrast between old and new Europe vis-à-vis America illus-
trated here in three different ways (American power, the socioeco-
nomic model, mass culture) is by no means as clear cut as the current
political circumstances would have us believe. It might be interesting
to examine to what extent, in an integrated Europe, there might be an
extension of some of the features of West European anti-Americanism
to Eastern Europe. Conversely, it might be of interest to determine
whether elements of American Europhobia or Francophobia are
exported/adopted in East-Central Europe. A decade ago, the Paris-
based Czech writer Milan Kundera wrote that he found “francophobe
arrogance personally as offensive as the arrogance of big countries
towards the small country I come from.”51 Not a widely shared view at
the moment.
The current European divide about America might also suggest a
misleading conclusion—that the ex-communist countries of East-
central Europe are now at a crossroads, confronted with a choice
between Washington and Brussels, NATO and the E.U. Nothing
could be more removed from reality. Poland and the other East-Central
European countries do not have the option of a “Puerto Rico status.”
Their future is in the European Union, not as the fifty-first state of the
United States. Both sides in the transatlantic divide share a responsi-
bility for confronting these countries with a choice they would have
preferred to avoid.
Finally, the stark contrast outlined here concerns the political and
intellectual elites more than public opinion in general. It is also likely
to change over time. Meanwhile, the French might console them-
selves by thinking that the Central European infatuation with America’s
democratic mission is merely a phrase: “We are all Americans at puberty,
we die French” (Evelyn Waugh).
Notes
1. The letter was signed by five leaders representing member states of the
E.U. (Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, and Denmark) and three candidate
countries: Poland (Leszek Miller), Hungary (Peter Medgyessy), and
the Czech Republic (Vaclav Havel). The Wall Street Journal, January 30,
2003.
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2. “New Allies Back US Iraq Policy.” New York Times, February 6, 2003.
The letter was drafted in Washington by Bruce Jackson, a former
Pentagon consultant and chairman of the U.S. Committee for NATO.
3. The Economist, July 12–18, 2003.
4. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Confronting anti-American grievances,” New York
Times, September 1, 2002: “For America, the potential risk is that its
nonpolitically defined war on terrorism may thus be hijacked and diverted
to others ends. . . . If America comes to be viewed by its key allies in
Europe and Asia as morally obtuse and politically naive in failing to
address terrorism in its broader and deeper dimension . . . global support
for America’s policies will surely decline.”
/> 5. See Timothy Garton Ash, “Anti-Europeanism in America,” in The New York
Review of Books, February 13, 2003, pp. 32–34.
6. Thus, the American edition of a 1980s study of the phenomenon was pub-
lished under the title, The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism, edited by D.
Lacorne, J. Rupnik, and M-F. Toinet, (New York: St Martin’s, 1990) and
would now have to be revised as “the rise and fall and the rise again . . .”
7. Josef Joffe, “Continental divides,” The National Interest (spring 2003),
pp. 157–160 and “Round 1 goes to Mr Big,” New York Times, February 10,
2003.
8. Ph. Roger’s study of French anti-Americanism highlights this evolution
in the nineteenth century from “antiaméricanisme du mépris” to an
“antiaméricanisme de la crainte” after the Spanish–American War to
what became later, after World War II, an “anti-américanisme du
ressentiment.” See, L’ennemi américain, (Paris: Seuil, 2002).
9. J.-M. Colombani, “Arrogances américaines,” Le Monde, February 26, 1998.
10. This refers to the attempt by the U.S. Congress to decree who has the
right to trade with whom. Although nobody would dispute the U.S.
Congress’ right to impose trade restrictions on American corporations,
few Europeans would accept the idea that it has the authority to impose
its laws on the trade of other nations.
11. H. Védrine (dialogue avec Dominique Moïsi), Les cartes de la France à
l’heure de la mondialisation (Paris: Fayard, 2000), p. 72.
12. In the words of Andrei Plesu, the Romanian philosopher and former
foreign affairs minister: “when we said West, it never crossed our minds
that . . . Western Europe and Northern America were divergent entities.”
In “Who Do You Love The Most,” TCDS Bulletin (New York: The
Graduate School, New School University) (June 2003), p. 6.
13. The Nobel-Prize-winning Hungarian writer Imre Kertész considers that
the European states opposed to the war in Iraq “forget that without the
United States they could never have rid themselves of two dictatorships:
that of Hitler and that of Stalin.” I. Kertész, “L’Europe de l’Ouest a
tort,” Courrier International, no. 646 (March 20–26, 2003) (interview
P. Dunai published in Nepszabadsag, Budapest).
14. “It’s time to end uncertainty,” address by Z. Brzezinski to the Conference
of Central European Prime Ministers in Bratislava, May 11, 2001.
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America’s Best Friends in Europe
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15. Ronald Asmus and Ulrich Weisser, “Refit NATO to move against threats
beyond Europe,” International Herald Tribune, December 6, 2001.
R. Asmus was deputy assistant secretary of state between 1997–2000 in
charge of NATO’s enlargement and author of a study devoted to this
subject, Opening NATO’s Door (New York: Columbia University Press,
2002). See also Alexandr Vondra and Sally Painter, “No time to go it
alone,” The Washington Post, November 18, 2002. A. Vodra is deputy
minister of foreign affairs of the Czech Republic.
16. David E. Sanger, “Alliances with Europe: Bush Redraws the Map,”
New York Times, January 24, 2003.
17. Andrei Plesu ironically comments: “We kissed and licked enough boots
during our troubled history, and we’ll know how to do it again. Don’t even
mention that from time to time we might be allowed to grab something, a
bowl of warm soup, a political wedding, a funeral feast.” Art. cit., p. 6.
18. On the prospect of establishing permanent U.S. bases in Bulgaria, see the
statement of the Bulgarian foreign minister, S. Passy, in Novinite, March 5,
2003 and that of the defense minister, N. Svinarov, in Bulgarian News
Digest, March 24, 2003. Hungary already has a U.S. base at Taszar,
cf. “Une base magyare au service de la guerre contre Bagdad,” Le Courrier
International, no. 632 (December 12–18, 2002).
19. Daniel Michaels, “Who helps the US in times of trouble? Poland,
of course,” Wall Street Journal, January 8–9, 1999.
20. W. Cimoszewicz—remarks at CSIS, Washington, December 14, 2002—
Polish Embassy Post, Washington (spring 2002), p. 4. N.B.: in March
1999, the same Mr. Cimoszewicz, with 162 MPs of the Polish Sejm,
voted against NATO military intervention in Kosovo. The same MPs in
2003 voted for U.S. action in Iraq.
21. The idea that the United States should pursue in Europe “coalitions of
the willing,” “disaggregating” the E.U., which was being “diluted” by
enlargement in any case, was formulated by Richard Haas, then head of
Policy Planning at the State Department, at a conference with European
interlocutors held at Brookings, Washington, D.C. April 3–4, 2003.
22. In a little-publicized speech, made on the eve of the NATO summit in
Prague, the Czech president, Vaclav Havel pointed out that his country,
in his lifetime, went through two experiences with far-reaching conse-
quences, which Czechs bear in mind when considering support for a
military intervention. The first is Munich in 1938 and the capitulation of
European democracies facing Hitler’s threat “supposedly in the interest
of peace.” The second is the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968 when “in the name of value that ranked higher than national
sovereignty” (i.e., socialism) Soviet “brotherly help” was provided. “It is
always necessary to weigh on the finest scales whether an envisaged action
would really be an act helping people against a criminal regime and
protecting human kind against its weapons, or whether, by any chance, it
would not be another variation of the ‘brotherly help,’ though more
sophisticated than the Soviet version back in 1968.” Opening speech
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of President Vaclav Havel at the Aspen Institute conference, “The
Transformation of NATO,” Prague November 20, 2002.
23. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 27, 2003.
24. Adam Michnik, “Nous, les traîtres de l’Europe,” Libération, April 8,
2003.
25. Speech at a conference devoted to “T.G. Masaryk and America,”
Washington, D.C., September 19, 2002.
26. Veton Suroi, “Les tyrans ne tombent que sous les bombes,” Le Monde,
February 15, 2003.
27. Samantha Power, in The New Republic, February 2003.
28. This apparently applies even in the Baltic countries whose governments
were, next to the Polish one, the most favorable toward the support of
the United States: 74% in Latvia opposed toppling the Iraqi regime by
military force and Prime Minister Einars Repse’s ratings dropped from
70 to 40% after his expressing support for the U.S. position, cf. E. Tomiuc,
“Eastern Europe: do citizens of Vilnius 10 support action against Iraq. Or
only their governments? In Radio Free Europe features,” February 7,
2003.
29. A Gallup-Europe poll conducted in the last week of January 2003, see
Ch. Châtelot, “Les pays de l’Est justifient leur fidélité aux Etats-Unis,”
Le Monde, February 1, 2003.
30. The Pew Global Attitudes Project, “What the
world thinks in 2002,” The
Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C., December 2002, p. 58. The
data from the survey are also presented in The Economist’s special report
“Living with a superpower,” January 4, 2003, pp. 18–20. See also Tony
Judt, “The way we live now,” The New York Review of Books, March 27,
2003.
31. Michel Albert, Capitalisme contre capitalisme (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
32. J.M. Kovacs, “East European trajectories in times of integration and
globalization,” IWM Newsletter, no. 4 (fall 2001), p. 11.
33. Eurostat data presented by Jacques Moris, “Une nouvelle Europe . . .
celle de D. Rumsfeld?,” Bulletin de l’AFTS, no. 4 (2003), p. 5.
34. The Pew Global Attitudes Project, View of a Changing World, June 2003,
The Pew Research Center, Washington, D.C., p. 71.
35. Ibid., p. 85.
36. Ibid., p. 105 (the more East and South-East one goes, the less “liberal”
public perceptions of globalization are).
37. Ibid., p. 97.
38. Another difference concerns the peasant movements’ protests. In France,
the Confédération paysanne led by José Bové overtly attacks American
symbols as part of their campaign against globalization. In Poland,
Leppers’s “Self-defence” peasant movement is anti E.U., not anti-US.
39. There are obviously left-wing variations on the theme as well. It tends to
associate the fear of “Americanization” of French society with the segmen-
tation of culture, and multiculturalism, which undermines the universalistic
and integrating ambitions of the French “republican model.”
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40. For a lucid analysis of the issues and some of the economic data concerning
the production and the dissemination of culture, see Denis Olivennes,
“La fin de l’impérialisme culturel américain,” in Le Débat, no. 119, March
2002, pp. 108–114.
41. “La guerre cultuelle,” Le Nouvel Observateur, March 4, 1998.
42. Former French minister of culture, Jack Lang used the phrase “la machine
à raboter les cultures.” Alain Finkielkraut author of La défaite de la pensée:
“La barbarie a fini par s’emparer de la culture. C’est l’industrie des loisirs,