Stardate 20031103.2103

(On Screen): Writing in the Telegraph, Adam Nicolson comments that the trans-Atlantic rift is growing ever wider.

Perhaps the world that has been familiar for the past 50 years really is falling apart. Listen to this, the opening salvos in a column published within the past couple of weeks in the American political journal National Review. The author is a freelance journalist, Denis Boyles, and he is discussing the recent history and present condition of Europe: "Let's say you take a chunk of real estate the size of a small continent, devastate it with two of the biggest wars in the history of human conflict, then add a couple of massive genocides, a near-total collapse of most social structures, a megadose of intolerant secularism, a decline in educational standards, a flat-line birthrate and a truly impressive brain drain. Now try to imagine what kind of ideas would survive to emerge from the wreckage.

"Right. You get nihilism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism, the three knee-jerk, irrational sentiments - they fail to rise to the level of actual `ideas' that inform the modern intellectual life of Europe. In other words, you get cockroaches." That is a degree of loathing and contempt, of wilful misinterpretation of foreigners, which you would normally associate with propaganda about an enemy in wartime. Stupid, uneducated, infertile, morally incompetent, socially dead, more animal than human: Boyles's Europe is a continent of Calibans. At no time since the American War of Independence have Americans, or at least some of them, including the hardline Republican Americans of the sort now in government in Washington, viewed Europe and the Europeans with such visceral hatred.

I'm afraid it's contempt, not hatred. One has to respect those one hates.

He caricatures the attitude with this list: "stupid, uneducated, infertile, morally incompetent, socially dead, more animal than human." I don't recognize any of that. I don't think that Europe is collectively stupid, or uneducated. Perhaps a case can be made for infertility, what with their birth rates. As to "moral incompetence", I'm not even sure what the term might mean.

That's not a characterization of Europeans I recognize. I would suggest instead the word effete, for which my dictionary offers three meanings:

1. decadent: characterized by decadence, overrefinement, or overindulgence
2. weak: lacking or having lost the strength or ability to get things done
3. barren: no longer able to reproduce

Yes, I think that pretty well summarizes it.

At the weekend, the New York Times carried some fascinating remarks by Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister. Bildt says it comes down to a question of dates. Until recently, America and Europe shared 1945 as their definitive year, when one tyrannical enemy was defeated and another emerged, a succession of common threats which bound them into one alliance and one world view. But that date has now been eclipsed: in Europe by 1989, the crumbling of the great frontier that for more than four decades separated one half of Europe from the other; and in America by 2001, the cataclysmic moment when America came under murderous threat for the first time since Pearl Harbor. Those different dates are now driving us apart. "While we talk of peace, they talk of security," Mr Bildt says on behalf of Europe. "While we talk of sharing sovereignty, they talk about exercising sovereign power. When we talk about a region, they talk about the world." The real question is whether it is a rift that can be healed.

It seems to me that the question is whether it's even worth trying. What's becoming apparent is that the US and Europe share fewer and fewer basic values, or at least we share fewer and fewer values with the chattering classes and aristocracy who rule the Continent.

That kind of rift doesn't appear suddenly. But it often takes a crisis to make clear just how big it is, and the attack in September of 2001 was exactly such a crisis.

Since then, those Europeans which Boyle refers to as "cockroaches" have been acting in their own self-interest, as have we. If we come into conflict, it primarily demonstrates how little we have in common.

All successful alliances are based on shared interests, and if there are none, any attempt at alliance will fail. As long as the European political class sees it as being in Europe's self-interest for the US to be weakened, chastened, humbled and chained, it's hard to see how we can take them seriously as "allies", or trust them worth a damn.

And we don't tend to respect those who can do nothing but criticize and complain. Hate them? They're not worth hating.

Update 20031104: Cara likes the word "effete".

Update: Here's why the rift probably won't get healed. It's because the price is too high.

Update: Of course,