[A-List] Germany: anti-US imperialism

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

The statistic quoted at the bottom of this article is very instructive,
especially given the likely readership profile of FT Deutschland, which, in
the German scheme of things, is very neoliberal in orientation (i.e.,
pro-US).

------

Media deploy 'Old-Europe' hauteur to counter furore
By Brian Groom in London
Financial Times: February 12 2003

In the transatlantic war of invective, "Old Europe" is responding with the
hauteur that so riles its US critics.

Faced with accusations in the American and British press that France,
Germany and other anti-war voices are an "axis of weasels" and a "chorus of
cowards", the continental media's riposte, especially in France, has so far
been marked by restraint tinged with world-weary irony. "What we are
witnessing," said Libération, the French leftwing daily, "is simply the old
American cocktail of missionary zeal and crude realpolitik. We've been there
before and we'll go there again."

For once, Old Europe's actions are speaking louder than words. By promoting
alternatives to immediate war and causing trouble in Nato, France and
Germany have got under the US's skin.

We have indeed been here before. In the 1950s, as a new book by US historian
William Hitchcock points out, "polls showed that a third to one half of the
public in Britain, France and Italy wished to remain neutral in the cold
war". General de Gaulle denounced the US in 1965 as "the greatest danger in
the world today to peace".

There were big protests in Europe against the Vietnam war and later against
deployment of cruise missiles on the continent under Ronald Reagan. Bill
Clinton, seen as an honorary European, won a partial reprieve. But President
George W. Bush, with his folksy talk, religious piety and unilateral
assertion of military might, grates on many European sensibilities.

This time, the stakes are frighteningly high. Divisions have undermined the
EU's common foreign and security policy. Nato has suffered a blow to its
credibility. Most worryingly of all, transatlantic splits over Iraq could
send the United Nations the way of the League of Nations.

Something ugly has crept in. Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, a staunchly
pro-European Democrat, put his finger on it at last month's Davos
conference. "We used to question each other's judgments," he said. "What is
corrosive is that now we question each other's motives."

The big difference is that with the cold war over, Europe and the US are no
longer united against a common enemy. Europeans feel threatened by Islamic
terrorism, but not by Iraq.

A poll yesterday in Le Figaro, the French conservative daily, showed 73 per
cent backed the use of France's Security Council veto and 60 per cent
thought the stand-off with the US was good for France's position in the
world.

Mr Schröder has had a rougher ride from the German media, which accused him
of undermining a good ethical case by poor handling. Germany, once on the
front line against the Soviet bloc, has moved from being staunchly
Atlanticist to instinctively neutral. In a poll this week in FT Deutschland,
the FT's sister paper, 74 per cent of respondents said the US had too much
power.