This blog is becoming interactive! My friend Lars Hasselblad Torres sent<\/p>\n
me the following email, which I quote with his permission: "Hey peter,<\/p>\n
scouted out your blog today, and noted your irritation<\/p>\n with European anti-war movement<\/a>. Is it safe to say their anti-americanism,<\/p>\n or is it their tactics to get in the way of Bush policy? Anyway, thought<\/p>\n you might find ‘of<\/p>\n paradise and power: america and europe in the new world order<\/a>‘ of<\/p>\n interest: robert kagan lays out a hobbesian vs. kantian mood form each."<\/p>\n Lars then followed up with a set of good references to the whole question<\/p>\n of US-European relations, including this link to the Foreign<\/p>\n Policy Association<\/a>. To Lars’ list, I would add Timothy Garten Ash’s<\/p>\n good New York Review <\/i>piece<\/a><\/p>\n that collects virulently anti-European comments by senior US officials.<\/p>\n These are at least as inflammatory and unjustified as the anti-American<\/p>\n comments that set me off.<\/p>\n I suppose my suspicions about European anti-Americanism were born a long<\/p>\n time ago, especially in graduate school in England. There’s a lot of bad<\/p>\n faith and scapegoating on the European left: a desire to attribute bad<\/p>\n things to the US when European countries are just as responsible. I also<\/p>\n think that people on the European left tend to attribute undesirable features<\/p>\n of American life to something intrinsic and cultural about us—for<\/p>\n instance, "American individualism"—when the causes of our<\/p>\n problems apply to them as well. Three examples:<\/p>\n high schools. Universally, British pundits attributed these crimes to<\/p>\n a profound sickness in US culture. I would have said that the "epidemic"<\/p>\n of school shootings (which involved about 1 in every ten million students)<\/p>\n was not a symptom of anything; it was a copy-cat phenemonon. Indeed,<\/p>\n copy-cat school killers subsequently turned up in France, Scotland,<\/p>\n and Germany.<\/li>\n of American culture, although European and Japanese firms generate a<\/p>\n considerable amount of it; the US also produces a mighty stream of high<\/p>\n <\/i>culture; and the demand for the worst products is global. So I think<\/p>\n it’s largely irrelevant to interpret Hollywood and pop music as "American"<\/p>\n phenomena.<\/li>\n although the gap is not as big as Europeans tend to think. (They focus<\/p>\n on the federal government and don’t realize that our states take 8.5<\/p>\n percent of GNP in taxes and spend it on domestic programs. As a result,<\/p>\n the government’s share of GNP is almost exactly the same—30 percent—in<\/p>\n\n