In Defense of America (5 page)

Sheer Size

The most banal reason for the mutual incomprehension is size. The European Union, even now that it has twenty-seven members and has stretched out to the borders of Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, is less than half the area of the United States. If you are flying back to Britain from northern India or Pakistan at night, more than two-thirds of the flight passes in complete darkness, punctured only by a dim, occasional glow from the scattered cities of Central Asia and Russia. Then suddenly there is Europe: large pockmarks of bright lights linked by illuminated roads —improbably orderly and shockingly small.

Many people from countries smaller than the United States (that is, most countries) have little sense of this. They have been to the East Coast and perhaps the West Coast as well: if they have children, then Florida; if they are on the academic circuit, then perhaps Chicago. An official from the American embassy in London, talking to a group of British officials, gently used the stock phrase “flyover states” to describe the phenomenon of the unvisited heart of the United States, and the laconic shorthand was greeted with delight by some of his audience, glad to know that their behavior had a recognized label. “That’s exactly what we do!” said a colonel. “We fly over them!”

Nor do European visitors always grasp the emptiness of America. The Netherlands, the most densely populated country in the European Union, apart from the tiny island of Malta, has nearly a thousand people per square mile, about the same as Puerto Rico (although the UK is set to overtake the Netherlands in density). The United States overall has only eighty people per square mile.
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I admit to having felt some claustrophobia in, of all places, the wilderness of Canyonlands National Park, Utah, on seeing that the map handed out by the National Park Service was drawn to exactly the same format as that for every other national park in the United States —marked with visitor centers, campsites, drinking-water points —even the wildest bits of the continent neatly mapped, it seemed. But then, as I looked out over miles of untracked emptiness, it was clear you could die and not be discovered for months; it might all be meticulously mapped, but so is the Moon.

The Melting Pot

But Europe’s incomprehension goes beyond mere size: it is the American enterprise itself that is alien —the notion of welding a nation together by ideals, not shared history or culture. It can produce a sense of vertigo in those across the Atlantic to find that the United States has no single dominant city, religion, cuisine, newspaper, television channel, sport, school curriculum, health plan, welfare system, or set of national laws on the apparently fundamental issues of access to abortion and the application of the death penalty. As one academic study put it, “Establishment of a ‘nation of nations’ . . . presented a serious challenge to national self-perception of European countries that were largely based on founding myths of ethnic homogeneity and century-old traditions.”
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You are born British or French; you do not have to justify that by adherence to a set of ideals, swearing allegiance to a flag, or proclaiming patriotism in the way which seems so heavy-handed to European eyes, from the American flags in front of houses to the weighty self-consciousness of those in public office. British politicians, relieved of that burden also because the Queen is the head of state, can seem informal to the point of insubstantiality to American eyes. Jack Straw, when foreign secretary, dressed in airline pajamas and socks on a flight back from Tehran in 2005, wandered back along the plane to talk to reporters; the man from the
Washington Post
cringed, saying, “I guess it’s cute, but you wouldn’t get Colin Powell wearing that, or if he did, there would be epaulets on it.”
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Of course, Europe contributed the great waves of emigration to the United States in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. But even though countries can still glimpse their own culture in parts of America, the project of weaving all those strands together remains alien. The scale of the arrivals accepted by the “nation of immigrants” has no parallel in European experience: from Ireland, 1.7 million men, women, and children between 1840 and 1860; from Germany, 1.4 million just from 1880 to 1890; from the UK, at least half a million in each decade from 1860 to 1890; from Italy, 3.7 million between 1890 and 1920; from Russia, 1.1 million between 1910 and 1920.
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Britain aside, many European countries are now shrinking and are wrestling with whether to rely on immigrants to do the work that their own aging populations cannot —and to pay for the pensions. With a sense of nationality so heavily based on shared history and culture, these countries can find it very hard to accommodate the new arrivals, particularly if they are from Muslim countries with very different customs and values.

Even now, the United States’ future continues to be shaped by immigration, on a scale which European countries would find hard to accommodate. America is the fastest-growing country in the developed world. According to the U.S. Census Bureau’s estimate for 2005, 45 percent of American children under the age of five belong to minority groups.

So, generalizations about “Americans,” particularly when based on brief experience of one or two states, are the cultural equivalent of the blind man and the elephant: an extrapolation over 300 million people which is nonsense when the principle on which the country is founded is the uniting of diversity.

One Person Against the Government

If there is one criticism above all others which Europeans hurl at the United States, it is that America embraces a harsh individualism. There is no government safety net for the poorest, they argue, and there is, unfortunately, no lack of ugly examples of American poverty to illustrate their claim. Americans, the logic continues, care only for themselves and decline to lend a helping hand except when doing so benefits the donor.

This charge does capture something of the countries’ different attitudes toward the responsibility of government for the individual, although in practice, the details can be less than the bald philosophy suggests. To take one example, Giles Whittell, a colleague of mine at
The Times,
in an article criticizing Michael Moore’s film
Sicko,
pointed out that the much-lauded National Health Service in Britain costs taxpayers $1,155 a month for a family of two adults and two children, about $400 more than a good private health insurance package in the United States for the same size family.
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The NHS’s pride is that it covers everyone, but for taxpayers, it is not cheap. The criticism also ignores the part America’s communities, churches, and charitable giving play in taking on the role that, in Europe’s social democracies, is borne by the government.

States’ Rights

As a journalist writing about the United States, I find that the hardest things to explain to a British readership are Congress and the states. People often assume that the president can do whatever he wants, and attribute actions to him alone which in fact represent a constraint imposed on him. In presidential elections, the appearance of governors as candidates is a reliable source of astonishment outside America; these unknowns have appeared from nowhere, it seems, and yet pitch for the presidency with all the confidence of someone who has been running the equivalent of a small country for years.

Americans do not tend to realize, for their part, how much they are oriented toward local decisions —on taxes, schools, and employment rules —whereas people in other countries find their sense of direction by looking toward the center. The strength of the United States’ federal system is that it tolerates much more difference between the states —say, on application of the death penalty or environmental law —than Europe allows in its own union.

Critics of America would say that a country which cannot agree within itself on those matters does not deserve to call itself a country, but its tolerance of enormous variation within its federation has given it the flexibility to sustain a democracy over three hundred million people and three thousand miles.

Religion

Perhaps the greatest difference of all between one side of the Atlantic and the other is the attitude toward religion. There are, of course, regular surveys that show Europeans do not go to church while Americans do, and marvel at the starkness of the difference. However, the American picture is more complicated than the usual caricature; a recent survey noted both the huge diversity of American religion and its fluidity. More than 40 percent of Americans had left the faith in which they were raised in favor of another religion, a different church, or no religion at all, the Pew Research Center found in February 2008.
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The difference in religious commitment on either side of the Atlantic reflects a deeper difference about the relationship between religion and the state. In America, the Constitution protects a person’s freedom to practice religion —any religion —from the state. In contrast, the European Union has been heavily influenced by France, implacably opposed since the 1789 revolution to any role for the church in state affairs. The European Union’s attitude, enshrined in its 2007 constitutional treaty, is that the state should be protected from the potentially malign influence of religion; deeply Catholic Poland mounted a fierce challenge to that secular principle but lost. George Weigel, a Catholic theologian at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC, discussing his book
The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics Without God
at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, DC, recoiled from what he saw, in the European Union’s decision, as a “curious view of history that had a political program behind it, and that was the idea that the only European public space . . . was a thoroughly secularized space.”
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These subtle differences in attitude toward religion are a fruitful source of friction and misunderstanding between America and Europe. Abortion will never, in Europe, generate the heat that it has for decades in the United States. And Europe’s emphatic rejection of the death penalty did not spring from religious principles of preserving life but from secular notions of the values a civilized state ought to uphold. In foreign policy, as I shall discuss in chapter 5, America’s Puritan roots have instilled in some of its leaders a conviction of their special mission to shape the world that jars, to say the least, with the targets of their efforts.

A Better Kind of Democracy

It would be too indulgent of the shortcomings of European democracies to say that they have simply followed a different model. They frequently fail to uphold the rights and freedoms in which they say they believe. Britain, in the casualness with which Tony Blair’s government set aside individual rights and protections that have lasted for centuries, could head the line of offenders. Blair could do this because British constitutional law provides few checks and balances on the executive. The phrase “elective dictatorship” has been used to describe the way a British prime minister with a majority in the House of Commons can write legislation and count on it being passed.
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When Tony Blair decided to take Britain into the Iraq war by the United States’ side, he faced a challenge from his own Labour Party in the Commons, but having survived that, he faced no constraints, not needing even the approval of the budget which the U.S. president requires from Congress.

Blair strengthened the power of the prime minister even further in 1999 when he removed the 700-year-old right of “hereditary peers” to sit in the House of Lords and to vote on legislation, replacing them with people nominated mainly by the governing party of the day —that is, those sympathetic to his Labour Party. It is impossible to defend the principle of hereditary members of a legislature, holding their position simply by birth, but they did have a stubborn independence from the government of the day, a quality that is hard to come by. A Saudi diplomat, observing Blair’s move, said, “If that is what he means by democracy —getting rid of one house of parliament and replacing it with his friends —we could do that tomorrow.”
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British governments have only recently considered seriously the notion of an elected House of Lords, which would give that chamber more legitimacy and allow it to challenge the Commons. They worry that it would produce gridlock. The example of the United States, which has managed to be the world’s most successful economy and its dominant power and yet avoids paralysis, cuts no ice —but it should.

Nor is France, for all the self-conscious idealism of its own republican roots, in a better position to defend the health of its democracy. The president is hugely powerful; the authority of the office was designed to suit General de Gaulle, not French citizens. Although the president is directly elected, the government he chooses is answerable to parliament, which has comparatively little power. The lack of accountability means that, too often, people feel that strikes or riots are the only ways to have a voice.

The point is not that American democracy is perfect —far from it. The political process in the United States is distorted by disenfranchisement, gerrymandering, and lobbying. But in obliging the president to work with Congress and local leaders, the system respects the rights of individuals and reflects their beliefs and desires.

Democracy on the Grand Scale

It is worth defending not just American democratic principles but the ambition of putting them into practice on the grand scale, not in miniature. European countries are not just smaller than the United States; they are getting smaller. Their proposed solution to ethnic or cultural tension is to break up: Kosovo from Serbia; Scotland from the UK; Belgium into its Dutch-speaking and French-speaking parts; Spain shedding the Basque Country; Ukraine into its Russian and European halves.

This prescription is now often suggested wherever there is ethnic tension —in Pakistan, say, or in Iraq. As Fareed Zakaria, the
Newsweek
columnist, put it, “With the end of the battle of ideologies —communism, socialism, liberalism —human beings’ oldest identities have moved to the core of politics.”
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Europe’s own painful struggles to form a union show the inescapable difficulty of trying to knit together different groups —the impossibility, even, if there is no real urgency behind the project. Lord Kerr, the former top civil servant of Britain’s Foreign and Commonwealth Office who took on the job of drafting the European Union’s own constitution in 2001, said in 2005 that the project had been too ambitious. “We tried to do it all,” he said. “It got out of control.” He added that his next job, of writing a constitution to knit together the twin arms of the Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell, was “the one that’s going to work.”
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No wonder that it often seems easier not even to try, and to break up fractious territories into small cells in the hope that homogeneity will bring peace.