Den Beste highlights the growing rift between the US and Europe and finds the word ‘effete’ to describe Europe, a word that has three meanings: decadent, weak and barren (or sterile), Cara Remal has some comments on it as well. Indeed, Europe is drifting and it is not exactly clear where it is going. It would therefore be wrong to say that Europe is morally incompetent, and I would say that it has lost its moral compass. If that situation continues for longer than is good for Europe we can talk about incompetence.

In various communications with friends and family back in Holland there has been a marked increase in concern and disagreement with the positions I have taken on Peaktalk. My pro-American position when discussing the war on terror as well as some critical comments on the old continent on this blog have not been taken kindly by some. Now it is important to note that my family and close friends are generally people who vote right of the center, are law and order types, support fiscal restraint and free markets and are well-educated which in turn has resulted in a decent slot for them on the social and economical ladder. Not exactly your left-liberal anti-war type you would say.

Take my father, now seventy-six, a man whose life interest was built up around what happened during the World War II which played itself out during his teenage years, indeed he had to hide out in the final year of the war when Germans started to round-up and deport young men for forced labor in their rapidly collapsing war industry. He listened illegally to the BBC and his fascination with, and admiration for, Winston Churchill continues unabated to this day. He is a free-market liberal, and when given a chance he will visit war memorials and allied cemeteries wherever he is in Europe. Yet, ever since the beginning of this year he has somehow combined his strong held beliefs about freedom and the importance of a strong transatlantic alliance with a decided dislike of the Bush administration and my mailbox is often filled with Dutch press clippings he has collected that seek to enlighten me over my misguided beliefs around pre-emption and the war against terror in general. I am disappointed about this as it flies in the face of everything he taught me as a child; it was not for nothing that he took me to so many war commemorations and allied cemeteries as a kid. The trauma and enormous casualties that Holland suffered during the Second War helped in instilling the important notion in me that never ever should we appease terror and never again should we shirk in the face of political fanaticism. That thinking fueled the strong support of those on the right in Europe in supporting nuclear armament during the post-war years, deterrence was something that had been painfully forgotten during the 1930s and would not be repeated in the face of Soviet aggression. And now that it has turned out that our apparent greatest enemy collapsed, and that the real enemy with deadly aggressor attitudes has revealed itself, my father drops it. And so does my mother, who all of sudden is able to explain to me over the phone what the problem is with neo-conservatives. And so do many friends who berate me over writing positively about Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. And then there was the gem of one other good friend who advised me to tune in to the BBC to get a more balanced view in the run up to the invasion of Iraq. Again, none of them are uneducated; none of them are lefties, on the contrary.

They have disconnected themselves from the US and its core values of defending freedom and democracy and by accident help the acceleration of the deep rift that in the long run will no doubt destabilize Europe and combined with demographic pressures may lead to a gradual collapse of the continent’s political and economic prowess. Indeed, over the next few generations there’s no doubt in my mind that Europe will be under extreme pressure to survive as the polity it is today. I say that without any pleasure or seeming moral superiority, it is a fact and it does not make me very happy, in a way it makes me very sad.

Note that this may also be why al-Qaeda and similar groups are avoiding Europe as a terrorist target. It is a great place to recruit and set-up operations, but more importantly a direct attack on any EU member state might solidify the slowly evaporating link between the US and Europe. Don’t count on a bomb on the Paris metro or Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. And an attack on a densely crowded London Underground station is not on the cards, as yet.

So what is underlying this slow and steady European slide? In the case of my father it may be the wariness of having to endure another world war, remember that support for Iraqi Freedom was lowest among the older generations, even in America. It may also be the case that in order to define itself Europeans adopt the Canadian model of self-definition: What is it that we are? What we are is what we aren’t, and we are definitely not American. Europeans, left, right and center, young and old go out of their way to define themselves as not American. Not that it does not necessarily define them as European, but still it puts them on the map somewhere, they think.

What many Europeans seem to be doing is to isolate themselves from the evil that is engulfing this world by looking down on what European intellectualism defines as the so-called American simplicity and penchant to solve everything with a gun. It is incredible but I grew up in awe of everything that was American and saw the nation as an edifice of achievement and success combined with a willingness to fight for it and to defend it. That was why Reagan struck a chord with the young and ambitious Europeans during the 1980s. He opened the door to what could be if you worked hard and stood up to tyranny. For those of us raised with the notions of freedom and liberty, Ronald Reagan was a validation of what we had always known and it was good to see some retrenchment of leftist policies during those years on both sides of the Atlantic. Yet, anti-Americanism lurked beneath the surface, sinking deeper during the Clinton years when the fruits of the 1980s economic restructuring manifested themselves and a president occupied the White House who seemed so European. Bush’s entry however unleashed all that lurked beneath the European surface in terms of anti-Americanism and after the September 11 attacks it did not take long for many old country media to launch their arguments “it’s tragic what happened, but …”. I bet you that line of reasoning would have been more muted had Clinton still been in the White House. Europeans reject the individualistic, direct, confident, and uncomplicated American that is George Bush, that is Ronald Reagan. Why? Because that is the person that left the Old World to seek a better opportunity across the Atlantic. Europeans could never really deal with these far-flung family members that came back with stories of big houses, big cars and an abundance of food that many in Europe did not know existed. Resentment, probably yes, self-reproach for not having been adventurous enough? Maybe. America represents a level of success and makeability that Europeans never had and to the extent they had it we will have to go back to the industrial revolution and before, to find it. That spirit has somehow left them and those left behind will go as far to jeopardize their own security in order to prove their point about America. The dominant European media reinforce this notion and if the geographic distribution of my readership is any indication of Europeans’ willingness to hear a different point of view, then I am not very optimistic that they will ever get one. This time the US will not bail out the old continent as the strategic and economic map of the world has changed beyond recognition. As a child I once uncovered in our attic an old newspaper clipping with a map of Europe from 1939 that my father had colored blue, red and green to see which country stood where in the conflict between the allies and the axis. Today we can use just one color to determine who stands where. One color representing a directionless strategy that combines the worst of appeasement and inaction. This time the European self-defeating position will lead to their ultimate undoing.