Before you read Jean Pisani-Ferry’s remarks musing over whether Europe is our friend or foe at Project Syndicate, let me tell you a story.
Once upon a time, about 400 years ago, England deposited its real “wretched refuse” on newly-established colonies in the New World, thousands of miles from Old Blighty, far enough away that they couldn’t do any harm. The refuse included the debtors that James Oglethorpe had transported to Georgia to join in his utopian trust, poor people including destitute children who were forced to sell themselves into servitude, people who practiced the wrong religion, or were members of the wrong ethnic group, or ne’er-do-well sons of English aristocrats. But not the aristocrats themselves. They stayed home in England.
The motley assortment of misfits had a challenge before them: how to maintain a society that vaguely resembled the one that they knew without an aristocracy to tell them what to do and how to do it? Other than the occasional press gang or ambitious crown governor they were largely left to their own devices for two hundred years to work that out and what they came up with laid the foundation for the United States.
After those colonies had the unmitigated gall to separate themselves from the Mother Country, occasional rich people sent their sons to England to further their education, the erstwhile colonies continued to accept misfits, particularly the Irish, and the American hayseeds could always serve as objects of derision to the English. During the early period our relationship with France was warmer than that with England but that largely ended when Napoleon crowned himself emperor. And that’s about where things stood for a century.
Until the Brits needed us to fight the Prussians, Germans, and Austrians in the Great War, a cause supported by some of our wealthy (they had been educated in England, remember?). Then it was ixnay on the ayseedhay. We helped pull their onions out of the fire and were largely forgotten again until the Germans began invading their neighbors in the mid 1930s at which point we began hearing about our common heritage, Western values, and the like.
Let’s fast forward to the modern day. We’ve engaged in a long list of activities for the last 60 years or so which have promoted British interests, French interests, and German interests but not our own including just about every war we’ve engaged in over the period until 9/11. We’ve reciprocated by drawing our NATO allies into our war in Afghanistan. All the while the Germans have been cozying up to the Russians, the Iranians, and the Chinese and the French and English have been snickering up their sleeves at us.
Throughout 300 of these 400 years we’ve been more diverse ethnically, racially, and religiously than any European country. 15% of our population (at least) has been black or American Indian or Mexican for that period. We don’t really have that much commonality of experience with the Europeans. The notion of a frontier is vital to an understanding of the development of American society, something of which the Europeans have no awareness. They also don’t know how large we are. The distance from New York to Los Angeles is about the same as that between Paris and Moscow. We are decentralized in a way unknown in any European country.
We have a lot more in common with former English colonies like Canada or Australia and even with former Spanish colonies like Mexico or former Portuguese colonies like Brazil. Nonetheless we keep being taught English history as though it were our own (at least I was) despite more Americans having German ancestry than do English ancestry. I, for example, don’t have a drop of English ancestry.
My point is this. What is Europe to us? We aren’t friends. We aren’t exactly enemies. We’re more like complete strangers. We’re competitors. Their vision of a rules-based liberal order in which they provide the rules and we provide the order is already crumbling around their ears.
