Europe's fading anti-Americans

[questionnaire]

1. Who is Martin Walker?



2. What are his politics?



3. What are his qualifications?



3. Where is the attitudinal survey, properly conducted, with the obligatory methodological discussion?



4. I am not Anti-American. I am European. Yet I oppose the illegal invasion of Iraq and the attempt by American corporations and their puppet government to dominate the globe politically, economically and culturally. Many people feel that way. So surely looking at Anti-American sentiment is barking up the wrong tree?



This is very low-grade material you cutting and pasting here, Ron. Can you not find anything more rigorous and informative?

[MIKE BURN]

Ignorance is a bliss and ignorance is one of the biggest problems of America, which is sitting on such a high horse that it is too high for words.



To give you an example:



It was worth a single headline on CNN, somewhere buried

in the "world" section, that Austrian president Thomas Klestil died last night.



Well, the ignorance here is not only that it is only worth to be mentioned somewhere, but that the headline on CNN and elsewhere in America reads:



"Austrian leader dies at 71"



Well, if the journalist (Mr. Walker) who wrote the quoted article in the initial posting worked with the same ignorance, you then know how much worth his 'evaluations' are.



Plain zero.



Europeans do not think in leader terms, unlike the Americans and this is the reason why Austrian president Klestil was not the "leader" but ONLY the president. A president in a European democracy only fulfills representative functions and can't "rule", "order" or decide anything not to speak of waging wars.

[RonOnGuitar]

An interesting article via United Press International (UPI)

=========================================



Europe's fading anti-Americans



By Martin Walker

UPI Editor



Paris, France, Jul. 5 (UPI) -- Walker's World for July 5.





Whoever wins the American presidential election this November (and polls, economic prospects and the unknown dangers of terrorism and Iraq make it too close to even think of calling), will have to deal with the fact that there has already been a fundamental changing of the guard in Europe.



The usual players of Britain's Prime Minister Tony Blair, France's President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder remain in place, but the political dynamics of the European Union have shifted. Romano Prodi, the former Italian premier who has been president of the European Commission for the past five years is being replaced by Portugal's center-right and pro-American premier Jose Manuel Barroso.



Prodi was a center-left critic of the Iraq war, always ready to give discreet backing to the French sniping at President George W. Bush. His departure, and the dramatic failure of the French and Germans to replace him with the even more outspokenly anti-American Belgian premier Guy Verhofstadt, is good news for all friends of the Atlantic alliance.



Verhofstadt was vetoed by Tony Blair, with the steady support of the Poles, Italians, Danes and others. This was a decisive rebuff to the Franco-German axis that has for so long dominated EU affairs. Verhofstadt's call for the EU to be "emancipated" from American influence sank his candidacy.



There was absolutely no support for Chirac's fallback offering, the only French candidate, the new Foreign Minister Michel Barnier, who informed a recent high-level Transatlantic seminar: "What our American friends must understand is that we are going to build Europe not only as a market but as a power."



That raising of the old Gaullist flag of a Europe as "a counterweight" to the United States, which has been a feature of French diplomacy since the days of President Charles De Gaulle from 1958-1969, wins few salutes in the new Europe.



The EU's eight new member states from Central and Eastern Europe, who still feel the heavy legacy and the enduring shadow of 40 years under Soviet dominance, have no intention of playing the French game. They understand clearly that their national security in the future will be far more secure with NATO and a continuing American military presence in Europe than with some French-devised security system that will be long on rhetoric and woefully short on performance.



In his first interviews since becoming the agreed candidate to run the EU Commission, Portugal's Barroso has been crystal clear in his rejection of this French "counterweight" theory, even when Paris dresses it up as simply an inevitable process of an emerging multi-polar world in which American dominance will be eroded by the coming new great powers of China and India.



"It is stupid to see Europe as a counterweight," Barroso insists. "In some European countries, there is the idea we'll be independent if we are a counterweight. This is silly. It is a counterpart, not a counterweight."



"What is strategically intelligent in building an identity against the United States?" Barroso asks. Or responsible."



The French concept of a Europe playing an independent role on the world stage, which has been the dynamic behind the bitter Transatlantic wrangling over Iraq, is not going to disappear. It is embedded deeply within the DNA of French diplomacy. And within the DNA of the convinced European federalists who still dominate so much of the EU bureaucracy. Moreover, clumsy American diplomacy in the abrasive style of U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld or Vice-president Dick Cheney, and contemptuous American media commentary about anti-Semitism and pacifism and economic feebleness in Europe can help the French make their case.



Suspicion of America is like a recessive gene in Europe, always ready in the right circumstances or provocation to reappear. But most EU member states, and particularly the new ones from Eastern Europe, now understand that anti-Americanism that can hope to rally the whole of Europe; it can only, as Tony Blair keeps saying, divide the Europeans.



So the next American president, whether it be Bush or his Democratic challenger John Kerry, can probably look forward to a rather more productive relationship with the Europeans -- so long as Washington does not expect too much in the way of Blair-style readiness to put at risk troops and political capital in tangential causes.



But that is not the only good news from Europe for the next American president. Possibly just as important, for the next 3 years, the EU Council, the crucial decision-making body, will be in the hands of the Dutch, the Luxemburgers, the British, the Austrians, the Germans and the Finns. (This stems from the eminently fair but politically bizarre way that the EU rotates its chairmanship of the Council among different countries every six months. The new EU Constitution, if it ever gets ratified by all 25 member states, will change this with a new post of Council president with a 30-month mandate. But for the moment, the EU is stuck with the old system of rotation.)



These are all countries that pay far more into the EU coffers than they receive in return, and thus want to keep the EU budget as low as possible. This means in turn that they will exert a great deal of steady pressure to restrain and reform the EU's costly and indefensible Common Agricultural Program. This is the one area where the Franco-German axis is at its weakest. The French want to keep the CAP, which helps their powerful farming lobby, while the Germans would save a lot of money if it could be reformed.



Americans should bear in mind one last point when they consider the rather different EU that looks likely to emerge in the next few years. Germany's Gerhard Schroeder faces re-election in the fall of 2006, and France's Jacques Chirac faces re-election in the spring of 2007. There is a very strong prospect that the next U.S. president will see France and Germany under new management, free of the divisive baggage of recent years. It may be over-optimistic to suggest this, but the great Transatlantic crisis of the past two years may have already be over, with much fairer prospects ahead.

[HKRockChick]

not to mention that in the messages attached to this article a lot of folks refer to boomerang and kangaroos and koalas and aboriginals, great barrier reef... they think that Austria is the same as Australia!!!!!!!!!!



story.news.yahoo.com/news...8&ncid=716

***************************

eg:

news.messages.yahoo.com/b...59&mid=447



Austria is not in Europe you Jokes!!!

by: donkenobi 07/07/04 05:20 am

Msg: 447 of 450



The Capital of Austria is Sydney....

Australians live in Austria.



*************************



Take a look at the rest of the messag board. Crikey, so much ignorance is hard to handle. Where do you start?

[questionnaire]

"...not to mention that in the messages attached to this article a lot of folks refer to boomerang and kangaroos and koalas and aboriginals, great barrier reef... they think that Austria is the same as Australia!!!!!!!!!!"







This relates to your post about the 'S' factor. Ron has been clickety-clicking around the internet again. He appears not to have realized that the internet is unregulated, and any fool with a computer and an HTML editor can put up any old rubbish they want.



Ron, could you please improve the quality of your sources before posting? They're not all as bad as this one, but in this case it's impossible to base an intelligent discussion on this rubbish, and presenting it as bona fide material does your own credibility no good at all. As I'm sure Debbie can verify, if a politics or social science student referred to sources such as this in an essay, it would result in a fail, although in the first-year, which in Britain is diagnostic in the sense that the marks don't count towards the final degree classification, we would let them off with a warning.



He'll be quoting from the bloody Reader's Digest next.

[DreamTone7]

"The EU's eight new member states from Central and Eastern Europe, who still feel the heavy legacy and the enduring shadow of 40 years under Soviet dominance, have no intention of playing the French game. They understand clearly that their national security in the future will be far more secure with NATO and a continuing American military presence in Europe than with some French-devised security system that will be long on rhetoric and woefully short on performance."







No new news here...but it's still funny to hear it stated so bluntly.

[questionnaire]

DT, what is the source of that quote, and which state officials were surveyed or interviewed in order to establish the basic data on which the assertion was made? Also, is that a view predominant amongst the populations of those countries?

[MIKE BURN]

Quote:

---

not to mention that in the messages attached to this article a lot of folks refer to boomerang and kangaroos and koalas and aboriginals, great barrier reef... they think that Austria is the same as Australia!!!!!!!!!!

---

[DreamTone7]

As I said...no NEW news...meaning this is old news. The kind of old news you'd have to be paying attention to history for the past 65+ years to get a feel for. Because it involves articles and actions over the past 65+ years, I'm not going to bother with it. Suffice it to say that this is par for the French course...mostly talk and little action (to say the same thing another way).



BTW, the quote is from Ron's original post.

[questionnaire]

.... some of us here have been paying attention to history over the last 650 years, never mind 65. If you think back over European history you will notice that the French were indeed 'all action' in the 18th and early 19th centuries (when the citizens of your very young and inexperienced nation were 80% illiterate and still riding around on horses shooting at each other). The same imperialistic action that Bush and the corporations are up to now - and the French made the same excuse, "we will improve all your lives if you let us control you".



French imperialism ended in defeat and disaster, and they learnt their lesson: i.e. that 'action' without intelligent thought is very dangerous. Now they are more civilized and mature. Your nation needs to catch up in those qualities.