Where Did the "European Dream" Come From Anyway?

Not long ago I again took up the issue of the "European Dream" some left-leaning observers of the international scene held in the earlier part of this century--their hope that if the U.S. was unlikely to deviate from the neoliberal-neoconservative path they found troubling the European Union could play a more constructive role in international affairs, helping in peacemaking, facilitating international development, and leading the way on climate change in the ways the U.S. had signally failed to do.

Such hopes have long since waned as Europe has proven to be led by an elite just as neoliberal and neoconservative as its American counterpart, as seen not only in the legacy of the reforms they were already instituting in the early 2000s (as with the Harz reforms in Germany), but their conduct in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis (exemplified by the brutalization of Greece); and their propensity for military intervention in Libya and elsewhere. (One may say that this turn has been evident, too, in the way that the American press has laid off the formerly furious Europe-bashing to display a much more approving attitude of European conduct.)

In hindsight it seems to me the expectation of a Europe being a center-left alternative to the right-wing U.S. in international life was implausible, and I found myself wondering why so many held it, focusing on the American (and more broadly, Anglosphere) observers who thought this way. My conclusion was that their expectation was, frankly, a function of a simple-minded view of Europe rooted in cartoonish stereotype and plain ignorance. In spite of ancestry and familial links; their tendencies with regard to travel in the case of tourism, study, business, military service; the foreign languages they are most likely to acquire and foreign literature they are most likely to read (if admittedly they are monolingual and don't read much" of anything, let alone literature, in any language); the American policy elite (and that of other closely associated nations) tend to be profoundly ignorant about Europe on the whole, such that even if they do not need to be told that "Europe is not a country" the way they do Africa, their knowledge about it would not seem to extend much further than that.

One aspect of this is their obliviousness to such things as the differences not just between European nations but within European nations. Even in an era in which Thatcherism, deindustrialization, Brexit have given regional differences within England itself a new topical, how many know Cornwall from Yorkshire, let alone either from Surrey? (Indeed, the American commentariat's obliviousness to such parts of England is underlined by how Thomas Frank correctly saw it as worthwhile to head to the industrial heartland of north England in Brexit's wake.) How many grasp the lingering differences between "Ossi" and "Wessi" in Germany (especially insofar as they are unable to see German reunification in terms of anything but Cold War triumphalism)? Of the relations between Paris and the "provinces?" Few indeed--which is just one factor in their having a grossly oversimplified picture, along with the tendency to, at least as much as anywhere else, equate Europe with its ultra-privileged upper crust (as seen in the equation of the Englishman with the "English gentleman"), reinforced by European high fashion and the like. (Thus do American advertisers insult their viewers' intelligence by saying of some such good that "It's European!" expecting the American to say "Ooh, I'll take it!"--to the point of getting a man who would never carry a purse to . . . carry a purse.)

All of this has served that commentariat poorly in thinking about Europe in the past (to the extent that they were trying to do their jobs at all rather than play courtier). It continues to serve them poorly now--and will likely do only worse in the years ahead, promising as they do a far more difficult and dangerous international scene.