Europe Becomes More Like America, America Becomes More Like Europe

Back in the period of the "trans-Atlantic rift" that followed in the wake of the 2003 invasion America's rightist and particularly neoconservative-dominated commentariat was exceedingly negative about Europe, damning Europeans as militarily irrelevant and economically declining decadents. (The gendered language in Robert Kagan's characteristically superficial quip that Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus is not insignificant.) One aspect of that decline and decadence was Europe's comparatively low, sub-replacement level birth rates over which the neocons tended to gloat as they compared them with America's higher rates, which they self-satisfiedly attributed to America's greater religiosity and generally (from the conservative perspective) "healthier" values.

Fast forward two decades to today and you see rather a different picture. America's still rightist and particularly neoconservative-dominated commentariat (utterly unscathed where its standing is concerned by the disaster that was Iraq, for in the mainstream the right never gets any albatrosses hung around its neck no matter what happens) were rather less negative about Europe. This was not because Europe was really militarily or economically stronger. If anything its position had only eroded in the past decades where "hard power" is concerned (with even the outer and especially Eastern "New Europe" in which neoconservatives took some heart seeing its modest progress stall far, far short of catch-up with its Western counterparts). And indeed the country's demographic situation worsened from their perspective as the Total Fertility Rate (TFR) from the little over 1.5 it had been at the time of the rift to not quite 1.4. But the tenor of European policy had moved far to the right, with European governments showing a more interventionist sensibility (France and Germany sat out the war to overthrow Saddam Hussein, but sent forces to help fight the forces unleashed by the chaos that overtook the country post-invasion a decade later), and pressing for neoliberal reforms at home, the more in as with such ideologues the right pieties matter for so much even in the absence of positive results. By the same token, if not getting those birth rates up, they also took a far harsher line against foreigners as they slammed the door on refugees in the face of the worst refugee crisis since the era of the Second World War, while conservatives drew hope from what they held to be a resurgence of both old-fashioned conservative nationalism and religious faith among the European public.

Still, as they approved Europe's becoming "more American," they would seem to have been worried by those ways in which America became "more European"--as the superior economic dynamism that they claimed for the United States amid the years of New Economy hype (given a measure of extension by a real estate bubble) disappeared amid a Great Recession that promptly saw America's TFR collapse from its near-replacement levels in the era of trans-Atlantic sneering to a 1.6 scarcely ahead of Europe at that time, and only marginally better than Europe today. Of course, few speak of the matter that way today--but one may well wonder whether these are the only ways in which American politics have become more European as said conservatives look darkly upon a revival of trade unionism and calls for social democracy of the sort they had hoped finished forever in the day when they thought that globalization was something one could do no more about than they did the rising of the sun.