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European Anti-Americanism: What's New?
Rob Kroes
| "Nous sommes tous Américains." We are all Americans. Such was the rallying cry of Jean-Marie Colombani, the editor-in-chief of the French newspaper Le Monde published two days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack against symbols of America's power. He went on to say: "We are all New Yorkers, as surely as John Kennedy declared himself, in 196[3] in Berlin, to be a Berliner." While Colombani evoked Kennedy's historic declaration for his readers, an even older use of this rhetorical call to solidarity may come to mind. It is Thomas Jefferson's call for unity after America's first taste of two-party strife. Leading the opposition forces to victory in the presidential election of 1800, he assured Americans that "we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists" and urged his audience to rise above the differences that many feared might divide the young nation against itself. Clearly, there would have been no need for such a ringing rhetorical call if there had not been an acute sense of difference and division at the time. The same could be said of Colombani's timely expression of solidarity with an ally singled out for a vengeful attack, solely because it had come to represent the global challenge posed by a shared Western way of life. An attack against America was therefore an attack against common values held dear by all who live by standards of democracy and the open society that it implies. But as in Jefferson's case, the rhetorical urgency of the call for solidarity suggested that there were differences and divisions to be transcended, or at least temporarily shunted aside. That sense of difference between the United States and its European allies had always been there during the Cold War, but it was contained by the threat of a common enemy. The end of the Cold War brought the felt need for a reorientation of strategic thinking on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean that, if anything, only sharpened differences and divisions.1 |
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Many changes that occurred during the 1990s were direct consequences of the end of the Cold War and the Soviet Union's collapse. They would likely not have occurred without the breakdown of the international balance of power and ideology and of patterns of clientage that were typical of the Cold War world. Some of the obvious examples are the expansion of the European Union (EU) and of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) into areas previously under the sway of the Soviet Union; the Balkan wars of the 1990s; and Saddam Hussein's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. Most dramatically, perhaps, transatlantic tensions, never absent during the Cold War but contained by the imperative of a joint defense against the Soviet bloc, now became manifest as clashing visions of the post–Cold War new world order. The phrase "new world order" was used by the elder George Bush during the first Gulf War, when briefly it seemed as if a framework of international institutions centered on the United Nations could finally come into its own.2 But the world has moved a long way from those early hopes and visions of global unity. |
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Perhaps we should be asking ourselves a new question: Do the terrorist attacks on symbols of American power on September 11, 2001, represent a greater sea change than the end of the Cold War? Or were they merely the catalyst that led America to implement a foreign policy that had been in the making since the early 1990s? If the second scenario is true, and it seems likely that it is, then America's current foreign policy is clearly a response to its position as the single hegemon in a unipolar world, intent on safeguarding that position. |
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