POL: Anti-{American,European}ism

From: Christian Weisgerber (naddy@mips.inka.de)
Date: Wed Jan 29 2003 - 09:54:44 MST


>From David Hudson's Telepolis column:

...

An intriguing pair. Eric Alterman, an American, visits Europe and
writes a piece about Anti-Americanism in Europe[1] for The Nation,
while Timothy Garton Ash, a European, visits America and writes a
piece about Anti-Europeanism in America[2] for The New York Review
of Books.

Both have their highlights. Ash has a wonderful aside about the
sexual imagery that's been conjured up in the conflict, but perhaps
his most important insight is that while the focus is on Iraq at
the moment, in the long run, with US policy being shaped by an
administration chock full of fundamentalist Christians, and with
Europe all but thoroughly secularized, the Arab-Israeli conflict
is going to remain the tinder box of further US-European clashes
for years to come.

Alterman's thesis basically rests on the idea that there are four
demographic groups at play here: European "elites", US "elites",
everybody else in Europe and everybody else in the US. Polls show,
he argues, that three of these groups agree on just about everything
but the renegade group that doesn't--US elites--holds the reins of
global power.

...

[1] http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030210&s=alterman1
[2] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16059

-- 
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de


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