Anti-Europeanism

Anti-Europeanism refers to rejection of the culture of Europe and Europeanisation, sentiments, opinions and discrimination against European ethnic groups, and criticism of policies of European governments and the European Union.[1][2][3][4] In practice, a broad range of attitudes and actions critical of or opposed to specific European countries or Europe generally have been labeled anti-Europeanism.

Range

Many anti-European attitudes are related to political foreign policy differences, either those of the EU or those of one or more European countries, and then broaden opposition to unrelated aspects associated with European society. When several European governments did not support the 2003 invasion of Iraq, their refusal prompted criticism from politicians and columnists in the United States.[3][5][6] In these cases, anti-European attitudes also reflected domestic policy concerns about the possible results if European policies were to be adopted there.[4][7]

A current example is Eurabia, a political neologism and portmanteau of Europe and Arabia. Some aspects of anti-Europeanism, in the United States and elsewhere, are rooted in the history of colonialism and its impact and aftermath in former European colonies.[8][9][10][11][12][13]

Anti-Europeanism has always had a strong influence in American culture and American exceptionalism, which sometimes sees Europe on the decline or as a rising rival power, or both.[14] Some aspects cover Europe's comparably weak defence budgets, an alleged lack of resolve against enemies abroad, welfare state and regulation, and a left-leaning political culture when compared with the United States. The ideological split between reverence for European refinery and classics and an emerging anti-French and anti-European sentiment played already a role between John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and their fellow Federalists and Thomas Jefferson and other Democratic-Republicans urging closer ties. It has in so far always been as well a projection of inner American conflicts and differences. While having some overlaps, Anti-Europeanism is distinct from Euroscepticism, which refers to uneasiness with some EU policies.[5] Especially some aspects of the Euroscepticism in the United Kingdom has been mirrored and parroted by US authors.[14] Its opposite concept is Europhilia.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Todd Gitlin (3 February 2003). "Europe? Frankly, America doesn't give a damn...". The Guardian. Rumsfeld's disdain is as old as America, an extension of Europe, which in a certain sense founded itself as the anti-Europe.
  2. ↑ Denis Boyles (29 October 2004). "Like, Wow". National Review Online. As Libération reports with some shock, after centuries during which the mere mention of la France was 'enough to evoke notions of elegance and refinement' (especially in American trailer parks) suddenly the word 'French' has 'become a dirty word.'
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Lexington (26 April 2007). "Anti-Europeanism is a bad response to anti-Americanism". The Economist.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Alan Elsner. "Anti-Europeanism Flourishes on U.S. Right". Common Dreams NewsCenter (Published on Thursday, June 30, 2005 by Reuters). On the economic front, the United States has produced consistently higher growth rates and lower unemployment than many nations in Europe. Some U.S. commentators blame the excessive regulations imposed by the European Community. Others say Europeans are plain lazy. "French voters are trying to preserve a 35-hour workweek in a world where Indian engineers are ready to work a 35-hour day," wrote New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman earlier this month.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Timothy Garton Ash. "Anti-Europeanism in America". Hoover Digest 2003 #2 (Earlier version in The New York Review of Books, February 13, 2003). We have to distinguish between legitimate, informed criticism of the EU or current European attitudes and some deeper, more settled hostility to Europe and Europeans as such… Anti-Europeanism is not symmetrical with anti-Americanism… [which] is a real obsession for entire countries, notably for France, as Jean-François Revel has recently argued.
  6. ↑ Daniel Pipes (14 November 2006). "Steyn's New Book Combines Humor, Accuracy, Depth". The New York Sun. Book review of Mark Steyn's America Alone.
  7. ↑ Scott McPherson (21 February 2003). "Healthcare Socialism". Future of Freedom Foundation.
  8. ↑ Eugen Weber (23 June 1991 review of The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830, by Paul Johnson. New York: HarperCollins, 1991). "Everything's Up-to-Date in 1830". The New York Times. The age of wars of national liberation, of massacres and countermassacres, of anti-European propaganda and anticolonial rhetoric dawned in Latin America around 1810. There, as in Greece — grave of many illusions — or later in Italy, nationalists depended on foreign aid, or on the incompetence of the power they challenged. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  9. ↑ Jussi Pakkasvirta (Professor of World Politics, University of Helsinki - Renvall Institute and El Norte - The Finnish Journal of Latin American Studies). "Nationalism and Continentalism in Latin American History". Continentalist definitions presented a fervent anti-European thinking.” Antenor Orrego: “European traditions in Latin America have been even more destructive for the well-being of the continent than US imperialism. European decadence and vices have to be replaced by 'authentic americanism.'” Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre: “Marxism was a too Eurocentric theory to be applied in Latin American circumstances. Check date values in: |date= (help)
  10. ↑ John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson. "The Imperialism of Free Trade". The Economic History Review, Second series, Vol. VI, no. 1 (1953). Mount Holyoke College. Foreign loans and predatory bankers by the 1870s had wrecked Egyptian finances and were tearing holes in the Egyptian political fabric. The Anglo-French dual financial control, designed to safeguard the foreign bondholders and to restore Egypt as a good risk, provoked anti-European feeling.
  11. ↑ Toyin Falola and Tyler Fleming. "Postcolonial Nationalism in Africa". Science Encyclopedia, The History of Ideas Vol 4. African nationalism of the 1950s and 1960s was overtly anticolonial or anti-European.
  12. ↑ Robert Craig Johnson (1998). "COIN: French Counter-Insurgency Aircraft, 1946-1965". The World at War. Algeria presented France with a set of tactical and political problems as different as the North African terrain differed from that of Indochina. Politically, Algeria was an integral part of the French Republic rather than a colony. Its native Berber and Arab people were technically French citizens. But discrimination was rife, and the European immigrants, the "pieds-noirs," had a stranglehold on local government, owned most of the arable land, and controlled the police. When Arabs and Berbers were belatedly allowed to vote for half of a constituent provincial assembly in 1948 and 1951, blatant fraud gave the pied-noir candidates a sweeping victory. The resulting anti-European riots were savagely repressed at a cost of thousands of lives.
  13. ↑ Ali A. Mazrui (1999). "Between Terrorism and Wars of Liberation". Swahili Online. If anti-European and anti-colonial terrorism in Africa had produced good results in the end for Africa, anti-American and anti-Zionist terrorism in the Middle East has not yet found its moment of triumph. Both the Middle East and Africa have been paying a price for the anti-American terrorism. The violent price which the Middle East is paying is obvious, especially in Palestine, Iraq and in neighboring Afghanistan. What is the price which Africa is paying for terrorism against the United States?
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Anti-Europeanism and Euroscepticism in the United States, Patrick Chamorel No 25, EUI-RSCAS Working Papers from European University Institute (EUI), Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies (RSCAS) 2004