America and the European
Sense of History

Rob Kroes

The ways in which Europeans have tried to make sense of America constitute a special chapter in the European history of ideas. At first glance what strikes us in the bewildering variety of European readings of America is the recurring attempt to formulate the critical differences that set America apart from the historical experience and cultural conventions of European nations. America is never seen as purely sui generis, as constituting an alien entity to be fathomed in terms of an inner logic wholly its own. Instead, there is always the sense that America is a stray member of a larger family, a descendant from Europe. Since America belongs to the genus of Western civilization, the point is to define the differentia specifica according to an almost Linnaean taxonomy. European conventions have always served as the yardstick, implied or explicit, in European attempts at uncovering the rules of transformation that cut America adrift from the European mainstream. Hardly ever, though, is this intellectual quest for the crucial difference entirely disinterested. More often than not there is an existential urgency in the exploration of the American difference. If Europe serves as the standard for measuring difference, the outcome is always geared to a discussion of America's potential impact on Europe. In other words, there is always a triangulation going on, in the sense that the reflection on America as a counterpoint to European conventions functions within a larger reflection on Europe's history and destiny.	1
If this unduly intellectualizes the repertoire of European views of America, I hasten to say that in addition to the more intellectually articulate versions there are vernacular, or popular, versions. Widely shared and informing everyday conversations, they are more like unreflective stereotypes, providing ready answers to people trying to understand the many Americas that reach them in their daily lives through modern mass communication. Yet we should not exaggerate the difference between the intellectual and the vernacular views of America. At both levels a triangulation takes place, less articulate, perhaps, at the vernacular level, yet similar: popular constructions of America, shared with peer groups, focus on American counterpoints that help Europeans develop individual and group identities different from models and standards prevailing in their home setting.	2
There are other ways in which we can explore the similarities underlying the European views of America. If we look at them as so many narrative accounts of perceived differences, they appear as repertoires of metaphors. While the metaphors are many, a deep structure of much greater simplicity underlies them. In a recent publication I have proposed the reduction of these repertoires to three essential dimensions that are remarkably stable regardless of time, national culture, or class. Always these three main dimensions serve to structure a discourse of cultural difference, of "Us," people in Europe, versus "Them," the Americans. One of the dimensions is spatial: America is seen as flat, because it reduces European verticality, hierarchy, the sense of high versus low, of cultural heights and depth, to purely horizontal elements playing themselves out on the surface. In another variant, Americans exteriorize what to Europeans is the inner life of the soul. The second dimension is temporal: Americans are cast as lacking the European sense of the past as a living presence. The third dimension is evident in views of American culture as lacking the European sense of holism, or of organic cohesion. Americans, in this reading, are never loath to take the European cultural heritage apart, to dissect it into component parts, and to recombine the parts with scant reverence for their historic and spatial specificity. These three dimensions constitute the discursive formation of Europe's "occidentalism," the deep structure of meanings, underlying a countless number of meaningful sentences and individual utterances ranging from the highly subtle and nuanced to the coarsely stereotypical. In spite of variations at the level of explicit statements, the motifs are drawn from repertoires that are widely shared and are of remarkable historical stability.1	. . .