Europe Versus America

Although I have visited England dozens of times, I have never spent more than one or two weeks at a singlestretch. This year, for the first time, I am in residence for almost two months at Cambridge University, whereI am the guest of a college and giving a series of lectures on humanism at the university.

The first thing to be said is that life here is far less stressed and hectic than it is in New York, at myuniversity, Columbia. Perhaps this slightly relaxed pace is due in part to the fact that Great Britain is nolonger a world power, but also to the salutary idea that the ancient universities here are places ofreflection and study rather than economic centres for producing experts and technocrats who will serve thecorporations and the state.

So the post-imperial setting is a welcome environment for me, especially since the US is now in the middleof a war fever that is absolutely repellent as well as overwhelming. If you sit in Washington and have someconnection to the country's power elites, the rest of the world is spread out before you like a map, invitingintervention anywhere and at any time. The tone in Europe is not only more moderate and thoughtful: it is alsoless abstract, more human, more complex and subtle.

Certainly Europe generally and Britain in particular have a much larger and more demographicallysignificant Muslim population, whose views are part of the debate about war in the Middle East and againstterrorism. So discussion of the upcoming war against Iraq tends to reflect their opinions and theirreservations a great deal more than in America, where Muslims and Arabs are already considered to be on the"other side", whatever that may mean.

And being on the other side means no less than supporting Saddam Hussein and being "un-American".Both of these ideas are abhorrent to Arab and Muslim-Americans, but the idea that to be an Arab or Muslimmeans blind support of Saddam and Al-Qa'eda persists nonetheless. (Incidentally, I know no other country wherethe adjective "un" is used with the nationality as a way of designating the common enemy. No onesays unSpanish or unChinese: these are uniquely American confections that claim to prove that we all"love" our country. How can one actually "love" something so abstract and imponderable asa country anyway?).

The second major difference I have noticed between America and Europe is that religion and ideology play afar greater role in the former than in the latter. A recent poll taken in the United States reveals that 86per cent of the American population believes that God loves them. There's been a lot of ranting andcomplaining about fanatical Islam and violent jihadists, who are thought to be a universal scourge. Of coursethey are, as are any fanatics who claim to do God's will and to fight his battles in his name.

But what is most odd is the vast number of Christian fanatics in the US, who form the core of George Bush'ssupport and at 60 million strong represent the single most powerful voting block in US history. Whereas churchattendance is down dramatically in England it has never been higher in the United States whose strangefundamentalist Christian sects are, in my opinion, a menace to the world and furnish Bush's government withits rationale for punishing evil while righteously condemning whole populations to submission and poverty.

It is the coincidence between the Christian Right and the so-called neo-conservatives in America that fuelthe drive towards unilateralism, bullying, and a sense of divine mission. The neo-conservative movement beganin the 70s as an anti-communist formation whose ideology was undying enmity to communism and Americansupremacy. "American values", now so casually trotted out as a phrase to hector the world, wasinvented then by people like Irving Kristoll, Norman Podhoretz, Midge Decter, and others who had once beenMarxists and had converted completely (and religiously) to the other side.

For all of them the unquestioning defense of Israel as a bulwark of Western democracy and civilisationagainst Islam and communism was a central article of faith. Many though not all the major neo-cons (as theyare called) are Jewish, but under the Bush presidency they have welcomed the extra support of the ChristianRight which, while it is rabidly pro-Israel, is also deeply anti-Semitic (ie these Christians -- many of themSouthern Baptists -- believe that all the Jews of the world must gather in Israel so that the Messiah can comeagain; those Jews who convert to Christianity will be saved, the rest will be doomed to eternal perdition).

It is the next generation of neo-conservatives such as Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz,Condoleeza Rice, and Donald Rumsfeld who are behind the push to war against Iraq, a cause from which I verymuch doubt that Bush can ever be deterred. Colin Powell is too cautious a figure, too interested in saving hiscareer, too little a man of principle to represent much of a threat to this group which is supported by theeditorial pages of The Washington Post and dozens of columnists, media pundits on CNN, CBS, and NBC, aswell as the national weeklies that repeat the same clichés about the need to spread American democracy andfight the good fight, no matter how many wars have to be fought all over the world.

There is no trace of this sort of thing in Europe that I can detect. Nor is there that lethal combinationof money and power on a vast scale that can control elections and national policy at will. Remember thatGeorge Bush spent over $200 million to get himself elected two years ago, and even Mayor Michael Bloomberg ofNew York spent 60 million dollars for his election: this scarcely seems like the democracy to which othernations might aspire, much less emulate. But this is accepted uncritically by what seems to be an enormousmajority of Americans who equate all this with freedom and democracy, despite its obvious drawbacks.

More than any other country today, the United States is controlled at a distance from most citizens; thegreat corporations and lobbying groups do their will with "the people's" sovereignty leaving littleopportunity for real dissent or political change. Democrats and Republicans, for example, voted to give Bush ablank check for war with such enthusiasm and unquestioning loyalty as to make one doubt that there was anythought in the decision.

The ideological position common to nearly everyone in the system is that America is best, its idealsperfect, its history spotless, its actions and society at the highest levels of human achievement andgreatness. To argue with that -- if that is at all possible -- is to be "un-American" and guilty ofthe cardinal sin of anti- Americanism, which derives not from honest criticism but for hatred of the good andthe pure.

No wonder then that America has never had an organised Left or real opposition party as has been the casein every European country. The substance of American discourse is that it is divided into black and white,evil and good, ours and theirs. It is the task of a lifetime to make a change in that Manichean duality thatseems to be set forever in an unchanging ideological dimension. And so it is for most Europeans who seeAmerica as having been their saviour and is now their protector, yet whose embrace is both encumbering andannoying at the same time.

Tony Blair's wholeheartedly pro-American position therefore seems even more puzzling to an outsider likemyself. I am comforted that even to his own people he seems like a humourless aberration, a European who hasdecided in effect to obliterate his own identity in favour of this other one, represented by the lamentable MrBush. I still have time to learn when it will be that Europe will come to its senses and assume thecountervailing role to America that its size and history entitle it to play. Until then, the war approachesinexorably.