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I have been thinking about why Americans consider Europeans to be anti-American. I know the population in most countries isn't. And then I thought about several international treaties. Kyoto, where the US stood alone against all others. A permanent international court of justice for war crimes against humanity which has been blocked by (I believe it was) Congress. The amendment went as far as justifying the use of force to liberate any American should he be tried before that court. I.e. congress approved the use of force against one of their European allies to liberate Americans accused of war crimes. So, while our countries think similarly on society, and the population here is in favour of the US, our governments clash. What do they class about? Human rights, care for the environment. Why? It is not that we care more about for instance environment than the US, I know France doesn't for instance, still they signed. Similar things can be said about human rights. The US could have joined there, should they want to. But they didn't want to. Is this because they lack the diplomatic skill to negotiate? No way. Just look at the war in Afghanistan. They didn't screw up their diplomatic missions there. So my conclusion would be that the US either don't want to participate or don't care. They don't want to be a teamplayer but at the same time complaint that the rest of the team is against them. I know that being from Europe, my view is biased. That is why I am so interested in your take on this issue. Why do you think that Americans think that we are against them? And as Europe is probably more different than the US, I would like to restrict this question to the countries from which I know that the population is positive about the US, i.e. the North-West European countries. It's difficult to explain. There is a perception in the US that Europe takes the concept of "team player" to an extreme, where it becomes an end in itself instead of a means to an end. But more to the point is that Europe has been using pressure on the US to be a "team player" as a way of subverting the Constitution. Most of the treaties and agreements that the Bush Administration has rejected (and been castigated for) could not have been enforced in the US without infringing our constitutional rights. For example, the biological warfare convention required that inspectors be able to go anywhere and look at anything they wanted without warning. That's a violation of the Fourth Amendment; the government of the US does NOT have the right to make speculative searches. No way, no how. With that provision, the US could not sign that agreement. The Court of Justice: the problem is that the Constitution describes our court system, and there is no provison in it for the Congress to grant foreign courts those powers in the US. The courts in the US do not work for Congress and are not chartered by Congress; they get their grant of power directly from the Constitution and Congress does not have the power to change that short of passing a constitutional amendment. There was another one last year; I am wracking my brain but I don't remember what it was, but the US was not capable of signing it because it would have violated the First Amendment. (And there is nothing we in the US prize more than that one sentence. Nothing at all.) The President of the United States can not sign a treaty that would force the US to violate the Constitution without violating his oath of office, which itself is written in the Constitution. One of his paramount duties is to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States." It's not that a piece of paper needs defending; he's supposed to protect the governmental structure it created and in particular the rights it grants to the people of the US. Part of the difference in opinion, especially between the US and the UK, comes from the difference of having a real constitution, set out directly in words, which describes how the game is played. We've got that and it's served us damned well for more than 200 years. It's been amended many times (and it is a tribute to the wisdom of the Framers that they included an amendment process) but at its deepest level there was a great deal of wisdom in it. It's written on paper but it has power in this country as if it were etched in steel. We have things like our right of free expression not merely because the government sees fit to let us use it, but because it's written in that steel and the government cannot take it away even if it wants to try to do so. In the UK, there is no constitution as such. No-one in the UK actually has any rights, in the sense that we in the US use the term. There's centuries of common practice and precedent, but Parliament can override that at any time. We have a hard right of free press; in the UK, Parliament can revoke that (and has, in fact, partially done so in the last fifteen years). We have a constitutional right to not be held in jail without being charged for a crime; in the UK the government has the ability to lock up anyone it wants any time it wants for as long as it wants without even saying why. It doesn't do so; the government in the UK doesn't generally abuse this. But it could and would be completely legal doing so. We in the US are not willing to entrust something that important to the good will of our leaders; we want better guarantees than that. I'm not familiar with the foundation of the government of the Netherlands, so I don't know where you land on that spectrum. Amending our constitution is really hard, and it's only been done a couple of dozen times in the course of our history. In some nations, the constitution can be changed by plebiscite or even by an act of the Parliament, which I think is much too easy. Much of US skepticism about European policies and about solidarity comes from the fact that the Europeans don't seem to understand how Americans feel about the Bill of Rights, and the treaties they keep trying to get us to sign just sort of ignore the fact that they would contravene various portions of the Bill of Rights or other constitutional rights that we have and hold very dear. To us those are prized possessions; to the Europeans they're just obstacles to be surmounted. Or so it seems. After centuries of war, cooperation in Europe has become essential because too many times any kind of nationalism has resulted in bloody war. Europe can't afford individualism because the price is too high; collective purpose is the only way to survive. The US hasn't had to make that tradeoff, and we are fiercely independent. we're also proud of our accomplishments (and I think we're entitled to be). It's not just that we have the strongest economy on earth or the most powerful military; we also have done many glorious things. Who else could send a satellite to Jupiter and take pictures of its clouds? Who else could put men on the Moon? Who else can put a submersible at the very bottom of the ocean and discover that there's life down there? So we don't like being treated as young and stupid and in need of guidance. (Which is an ironic attitude in Europe because our government is older than any of the ones on the Continent.) The United States doesn't go as far in the direction of cooperation over independence because independence has served us well. But it's not just national independence; it also happens inside the nation. We are a nation which believes in diversity; we have a fundamental believe that government should largely be hands-off. This manifests in many ways: our labor and business laws are far less restrictive, for instance. We believe that things work better when they are managed and controlled as little as possible. We believe that two tons of ants can do more than one two-ton elephant. So far we've been proved right. This goes back a long way. Culturally, central control has been part of Europe for a thousand years. The general trend has been toward more and more concentration of power. While monarchy no longer rules Europe, the habit of obeying central authority remains in the culture, especially on the continent. During the age of monarchy nearly everything was run centrally. Now there are elected governments, but they still have powers comparable to what the monarchs had. Government in Europe is very paternalistic. The United States was a victim of exactly that kind of central control and that is what set off the revolution. "Taxation without representation is tyranny" -- that was the rallying cry which began the fight. And after it was won, the people of the United States decided that they didn't want to just exchange one master for another. So they decided to try something completely new: a minimalist government. Of all the extremely surprising things about the Constitution, the one which is the most surprising is how much of it is dedicated to listing things that the government is not allowed to do. In fact, most of the non-procedural amendments to the constitution placed additional limitations on the government. That may sound strange when the US government is the single largest institution on the planet, but it's really true. In terms of per-capita control, it's actually much smaller than most of the nations in Europe. Its budget per capita is much smaller t 
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