Does “the West” still exist? Have we moved from a world with two Europes and one West to a world with one Europe and two Wests? Transatlantic tensions of the past — the Suez debacle, the French departure from NATO in 1966, the Vietnam War, and the Euromissiles crisis in the 1980s — were contained by painful memories of World War II and the unifying effects of the Soviet threat. But if the long-term cause of today’s emotional estrangement was November 9, 1989, the day the Berlin Wall came down, the short-term catalyst was September 11, 2001. For the past two years, the United States has been at war, but attempts to elevate America’s foe to a new common enemy, to redefine the West in purely negative terms, have been largely divisive. Islamic fundamentalism, international terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have not had the same unifying effect as yesterday’s Soviet threat because Europe and the United States have increasingly differed on how to confront them. The challenge is to accept that although Europeans and Americans have different interests, values, and sensibilities, both sides still need one other and must work toward a new modus operandi. Europeans have always found it difficult to understand Americans. This is particularly true today, when less savory sides of the American character — its nationalist religiosity, its intolerant suspicion of others — have returned to the fore. These forces, moreover, are no longer counterbalanced by the deep understanding of Europe that American elites possessed in the past. Perhaps this is because the United States has lost its cultural inferiority complex. After all, the best universities in the world — the places where the brightest students from China, Japan, eve Germany, want to go — are now in the United States. Sociological and political factors have also undermined Americans’ interest in Europe. As Hispanics and Asian-Americans have become more prominent and the political center of gravity has shifted from the East Coast to Texas and the Midwest, European studies have increasingly been consigned to the fringes of university syllabuses. Today, in the eyes of many Americans, Europe is neither a subject nor an object of history. It has become a theme park, a museum, a charming place to visit, an interesting experiment in collective sovereignty — and, above all, a growing source of irritation. It is as if, divided over its institutional and geographic future, Europe feels that it must exist as an alternative to the United States — a different and better West. It is unfortunate that Europeans have not chosen to define themselves positively in the name of a clear project from Europe. Unlike anti-American sentiments in the past, this breed of anti-Americanism is not so much a reaction to what the United States does as a reaction to what it represents. (Excerpted from an article by Dominique Moisi in ‘Foreign Affairs’, November/ December 2003)
