I reckon so, Mr. Reporter There isn't much meat in Timothy Garton Ash's recent NYRB article, "Anti-Europeanism in America" - it reads like a hastily produced if slightly longer op-ed, with a range of by-now familiar anti-American and anti-European views reported but not accompanied by any fresh insight or analysis. Thus it has a strangely out-of-date feel, reinforced by such statements as this:

Moreover, I found two senior administration officials in Washington quite receptive to the argument—which is beginning to be made by some American commentators—that the democratization of the greater Middle East should be the big new transatlantic project for a revitalized West.

In context this comes across as a non-sequitur, or rather, as evidence of a misapprehension that the author's Washington interlocutors share his assumptions about what the linchpin of Middle East peace is. (Read it and see if you agree.) For my part I found that "beginning to" very odd. But this may just be due to the fact that I've been exposing myself for the last 17 months to all those daft messianic right-wing bloggers.

So you may or may not find a nugget or two of interest here. I did in this one paragraph:

Anti-Europeanism is not symmetrical with anti-Americanism. The emotional leitmotifs of anti-Americanism are resentment mingled with envy; those of anti-Europeanism are irritation mixed with contempt. Anti-Americanism is a real obsession for entire countries—notably for France, as Jean-François Revel has recently argued[...]. Anti-Europeanism is very far from being an American obsession. In fact, the predominant American popular attitude toward Europe is probably mildly benign indifference, mixed with impressive ignorance. I traveled around Kansas for two days asking people I met: "If I say 'Europe' what do you think of?" Many reacted with a long, stunned silence, sometimes punctuated by giggles. Then they said things like "Well, I guess they don't have much huntin' down there" (Vernon Masqua, a carpenter in McLouth); "Well, it's a long way from home" (Richard Souza, whose parents came from France and Portugal); or, after a very long pause for thought, "Well, it's quite a ways across the pond" (Jack Weishaar, an elderly farmer of German descent). If you said "America" to a farmer or carpenter in even the remotest village of Andalusia or Ruthenia, he would, you may be sure, have a whole lot more to say on the subject.

That first statement is no doubt correct, but the last, since Garton Ash does not expand upon it, seems to indicate that he sees a positive correlation between loquacity on a subject and possession of real knowledge thereof. I come across lots of European opinion on America, from the intelligent and well-informed to the laughably ignorant, but volubility of expression is not a marker of which is which. (Furthermore, "America" is an abstraction very different from the idea of "Europe".)

But what is choice about this paragraph is that the Kansans are really quite funny - but not at all in the way that the author seems to think they're funny. "If I say 'Europe' what do you think of?" is an awfully silly question, akin to "So tell me (in 1000 words or less while at stand here at this coffee shop counter with you), what do you think of life?"

Frankly, if some continental intellectual type found me on my home ground and struck up a casual, very time-limited conversation by asking "If I say 'Europe' what do you think of?", my first (and alas, probably irresistible impulse) would be to assume the blankest, most puzzled facial expression I could manage, and say "Europe? Where's that? Is that near South America?" Giggle optional.

Posted by Moira Breen at January 28, 2003 08:55 AM