Europe Gets Real About America

By Bronwen Maddox
Monday, July 21, 2008

Berlin was always going to be the best backdrop for Barack Obama's big European speech this week. London offered only the besieged Gordon Brown, who is determined, aides have let it be known, to have a technocratic conversation with the Democratic candidate, hammering away at food and fuel prices. Paris's own pomp and architecture upstage most leaders. So does Carla Sarkozy. And although U.S.-French relations are unfreezing, defense and trade are still tough issues.

But Berlin, oversupplied with resonant monuments to a once-divided continent, is the perfect stage for any politician who wants to strike the big themes of democracy, freedom and unity in the face of common threats. There was an endearing comedy in the efforts of the Obama team to find exactly the right location once Chancellor Angela Merkel vetoed the Brandenburg Gate. Should it be the new U.S. embassy, near enough to the gate that TV cameras might still catch it? Or the Templehof airport where the American flights landed during the Berlin airlift of 1948? Or the Schoenburg City Hall where, in 1962, John F. Kennedy declared that "Ich bin ein Berliner," but which is now a bit dowdy? And what about the keynote sentence? In German, like Kennedy, or English, like Ronald Reagan's "Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev"?

Much less attention has been paid to what Mr. Obama might actually say after that one sentence. There have been cursory warnings in the British press that he will deliver a message of "tough love," telling Europe to pay more for its own defense -- and for Afghanistan's -- and giving much less ground on trade than the European Union would like. But there seems a determination to love him for his "European" qualities -- such as caution about military engagement, and acknowledgement of union rights -- even if the defense bills and the protectionism that might follow would be at Europe's expense.

Is this just the reaction to the end of the era of George W. Bush? I don't think so, although obviously that's a big part of it. I think there is in it the seeds of a new appreciation of America in Europe, after a long spell of anti-American feeling that went back well beyond Mr. Bush.

Of course, it is hard to think that any American president for a long time will be hated in Europe in the way that Mr. Bush was loathed after the Iraq invasion. The antiwar and anti-Bush demonstration in London's Trafalgar Square in November 2003, which drew a crowd of hundreds of thousands, remains the largest to have gathered in London on a weekday; at the end, an effigy of Mr. Bush was pulled down from a plinth to huge cheers, echoing the toppling of Saddam Hussein's statue in Baghdad.

But anti-American feeling was entrenched before Iraq. Even in Britain, where there is a deep and pervasive affection for the U.S. (and far more anxious talk about the fraying of the "special relationship" between the two countries than you ever hear in the U.S.), the grumbling undercurrents were getting louder through the 1990s. That mood -- far stronger in continental Europe -- drew new energy from the fall of the Soviet Union, which left the U.S. as the sole superpower, and freed Europe from its dependence on American protection against the threat to the east. The sentiment was inspired, too, by the antiglobalization movement, which railed at American economic and cultural reach, even while enjoying its benefits. It was always amusing to see writers type out their disparagement of the American imperial giant on laptops running Microsoft software.

But there is a sense now in Europe that this hostility is fading in a new appreciation of shared problems. Afghanistan is one of those -- but one where the U.S. contributes by far the greatest military resources (about 85% of the air power and two-thirds of the military effort overall). So is Iran, and so is Africa; in Britain, the U.S.'s willingness to stand firmly behind a drive for sanctions on Zimbabwe was deeply appreciated as an affirmation of shared democratic values. Russia is prickly, bordering on systematically obstructive to Western goals, and Europe is well aware of its dependence on the gas pipelines running westwards and the value of American support in this difficult diplomacy. There is a new sense that Europe should be careful what it wishes for; that it is harder to persuade the U.S. to stay engaged in these problems than to keep it at bay.

The question is whether, in gratitude that the next U.S. president is not George W. Bush, America's critics will forgive him for decisions that are in the U.S.'s interests and not their own, or whether they will be disappointed and angry, expecting a radical transformation that was never going to happen, whichever candidate wins. In the new mood of worry, about the economy, as well as security, I'd bet on the first: that the America-bashing of the past two decades will seem like a luxury best now discarded.