Funny Talk

APRIL 26th found the Oxford Union debating the motion that “This House regrets the founding of the United States of America”. A silly motion supported by unrepresentative people: the proponents were to include a member of the Communist Party and a member of the Islamist group Hizb-ut-Tahrir. But anti-Americans do not possess a monopoly on idiocy. You don't have to spend much time with American conservatives to find them discussing the coming collapse of Europe, sometimes with glee. One of the opponents of the Oxford motion, Jonah Goldberg, did much to popularise “The Simpsons'” labelling of the French as “cheese-eating surrender-monkeys” in the run-up to the Iraq war.

America's anti-Europeans have three big complaints about the Old Continent. The first is that Europe is committing demographic and economic suicide: the European birth rate is well below replacement level, and the economy is hog-tied by regulations and overburdened by welfare commitments. The second is that, unlike America, Europe is a post-Christian society. George Weigel, a Catholic conservative and loving biographer of Pope John Paul II, deftly links Europe's “demographic suicide” with its collapse of faith in his “The Cube and the Cathedral: Europe, America, and Politics without God”, a theo-conservative bible on what has gone wrong with Europe.

The third complaint is that Muslims are filling Europe's demographic and spiritual void. Bernard Lewis, the White House's favourite Islamic scholar, thinks that Europe will turn Muslim by the end of the century, becoming part of the Arab West. Bruce Bawer, a gay American who fled his country to escape from “the foolishness of fundamentalism”, found Islamists far more frightening than Christian conservatives.

Anti-Europeans think these kinds of arguments have big implications for American diplomacy. They suggest, at the very least, that Europe will never be a vigorous ally against Islamic extremism. It is too diffident about its own traditions, too over-burdened by welfare commitments, too frightened of its Muslim populations. And it might even suggest something more than that. Tony Blankley, a journalist who once worked for Newt Gingrich, has decided that “the threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe is every bit as great to the United States as was the threat of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s.”

How much does this matter, though? It is tempting to dismiss it as nothing more than a mirror image of anti-Americanism—advanced by malcontents, fuelled by anger and based on prejudice. Europe-bashing is a passion of the right and the right is hardly in the political ascendant these days. The argument is based on a familiar sleight of hand: the bunching of worst-case scenarios. Do Europe's empty churches really mean that Europeans have abandoned their faith? Three-quarters of Europeans still claim to be Christians, and European sociologists talk of “believing without belonging”. Are European Muslims really poised to take over Europe? They constitute only 4% of the population and come from very diverse backgrounds. Have European countries really lost the will to assimilate newcomers? Several countries have introduced citizenship tests and ceremonies that are modelled on the American variety.

But anti-Europeanism is influential nonetheless. The end of the cold war has removed the glue that held the Western alliance together. The Iraq war has left a legacy of bitterness that extends beyond the Bushies. And the anti-Europeans have an important resource on their side: their disproportionate interest in matters European and their disproportionate willingness to publish books on them. American anti-Europeans have produced a steady stream of books with titles like “America Alone”, “Our Oldest Enemy”, “While Europe Slept”, “The West's Last Chance”. The foreign-policy specialists to whom one might look for a corrective are much more involved with other challenges, like the Middle East and Asia.

Let's stick together
Yet the case for learning to live with each other again is overwhelming. America and the European Union are still the world's two biggest trading entities. The Atlantic relationship has been the foundation stone of world peace from 1945 onwards. The EU, for its part, has at least as much interest in defusing Muslim terrorism as the United States, because of its large Muslim populations and proximity to Turkey and the Middle East.

And the current French election gives the lie to anti-Europeanism. France is the great Satan for American anti-Europeans—remember “freedom fries”? Yet the first round of the French presidential election went to a man who boasts of his admiration for American dynamism and popular culture. Nicolas Sarkozy is a frequent visitor to the United States and hob-nobber with American journalists and policymakers. He propounds American-sounding solutions to France's economic problems, such as tax cuts and ending the 35-hour week. His critics have dubbed him a “neoconservative with a French passport”.

The rise of Mr Sarkozy coincides with a growing determination in America to defuse global anti-Americanism. Even George Bush has tried to do this a little in his second term. But post-Bush politicians—particularly Democratic ones—will put this at the top of their priorities. Hillary Clinton has promised to make her husband an “ambassador to the world, because we have a lot of work to do to get our country back in the standing it should be”. Barack Obama, the other Democratic front-runner, stresses his ability to rebrand America, as a son of Kansas and Kenya whose father was born a Muslim. Curing global anti-Americanism primarily means repairing America's relations with the rest of the world; but it also means uprooting the anti-European weeds that have flourished in America in the past few years.