Has the American Right Changed its Mind About Europe?

Recently I had occasion to revisit the theme of the passing of the "European dream"--the hope, or rather, the illusion that in a world where the United States had come to be identified with neoliberalism and neoconservatism the countries of Europe, individually and also collectively through the European Union (EU), would provide an alternative model more appealing to progressives--no leftist paradise, it is true, but still, socially more egalitarian, ecologically more sustainable, in foreign policy less militaristic, certainly to a degree that would matter and, from this standpoint, leave the world better off.

Such views derived some support from the inability of successive European governments to do more than chip away at protections for workers that looked extravgant to Anglosphere eyes; from Germany's successfully pioneering methods for pioneering the expansion of renewable energy, and the EU's emissions trading schemes; from the French and German opposition to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. And the expectation was shared by people in and outside Europe--the term "European dream" I use here the title of a book by Jeremy Rifkin making exactly this case, while the sociologist Emmanuel Todd made the same case, not least in his book on the anticipated decline of the "American empire," in which drama the last act would be Europe's own ascendance as Britain with its financial weight and Russia with its military might and natural resources joined in the building of an even greater community extending from "sea to shining sea."

Of course, all this quickly waned after 2008 as European elites, long fantasizing about remaking the continent in the image of post-Thatcher Britain or post-Reagan America, not only grappled with an economic crisis of colossal proportions, but saw an extraordinary opportunity to cram neoliberalism down the throats of a public that had more strongly resisted the policy than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts. They did not hesitate to be brutal with the working classes of the continent, especially in its smaller and poorer nations--with not only their claims to social and economic rights, but their more classically liberal civil and political ones trampled. I am no admirer of Silvio Berlusconi, but the EU's squeezing him out of office was hardly democratic, and even as one prone to think of talk of Fourth Reichs and the like as melodramatic, it was impossible not to get the feeling watching Berlin impose its diktat on a horrifically brutalized Greece--and a French President who had kind words for Vichy unleashed the state security apparatus in a brutal assault on protesters against his predictably centrist "fake left, go right" course.

At the same time Germany, while in respects paving the way for a world getting its energy from renewable sources, has seen its policy substantially remain in the grip of coal barons, whose filthy, polluting production has meant that even as the solar panels and the wind turbines spread, the country's greenhouse gas emissions remained high--in spite of that emissions trading scheme, which did not amount to very much. And the European states that balked at invading Iraq in 2003 did not hesitate to back regime change in Libya, Syria, Ukraine; or display great viciousness in a militarized response to the refugee crisis to which those "regime change" attempts contributed so much.

As one considers all this it is worth remembering that the more progressive, greener, pacifistic version of Europe was the object of enormous contempt on the part of right-wing American commentators. Remember Eurosclerosis? Remember Donald Rumsfeld's witless, illiterate rhetoric about "Old Europe and New Europe?" Remember the inanity that was the renaming of french fries and french toast Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast? One hears less of such things than before, and that does not seem accidental. It would be an exaggeration to say that the American right has come to love Europe. But, as Europe has changed in accordance with their ideals, they have at least come to be more accepting of it.