Free thinking for U.S. Independence Day

Hugo Young, Guardian News Service, London

Between Sept. 11 and July 4, this Independence Day in America, I've written 22 Guardian columns devoted one way or another to what grew out of that infamous September moment. For sure, these pieces contained their share of mis-spoken words and fragile judgments. But here was the big subject.

It raised so many issues of global concern, from Euro-American relations, through all the Blair-Bush encounters, into the Middle East process, on to civil liberties. How to forestall and suppress global terrorism is the greatest of all contemporary challenges, subsuming many others about economic and territorial justice on a grand scale.

Independence Day, however, is the moment to note an unhappy trend. Discourse and relationships have narrowed, not broadened in 10 months. There's a hardening of tone between Europe and America. It becomes ever more difficult to discuss these colossal problems, rife with potential for prudent skepticism, in words that don't call forth instant labeling as to their categoric loyalty or treason.

At the beginning, President George W. Bush stared at the world and said you are either with us or against us. Time hasn't worked any refinement of his message, rather the reverse. We are all anti-Americans now, unless we happen to be pro.

Each side has made its contribution to this starkness. The Europeans began it, with the voices that refused to address what had happened. A seam of vindictiveness exposed itself. Anti- American paranoia enjoyed its finest hour, in some quarters, at the hands of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the plane-bombers.

This lack of empathy, though no longer so pitiless, is still apparent in Europe. Despite the best efforts of some reporters, the European mind, which includes the British mind, recoils from what America has embraced. It does not understand the enormity of what happened not only to New York but to the psyche of a once invulnerable nation. Most of Europe still tends to take its own experience of terrorism as a reason to disdain Americans' over- reaction to their own first taste of it. Ultimately, there's a difference of caring and a want of rage.

This has led Europeans into some amnesiac generalizations. They speak about Americans without remembering history, or distinguishing between the people and the Bush regime. They overlook American generosity both as a world power -- which nation was it that saved the world from German and Soviet tyranny? -- and as a nation of open doors and open hearts. Though the government, even one with a mandate as doubtful as George Bush's, can be said to be acting for the people, it seems important to be as careful in vaporizing about Americans as about, say, Jews or blacks. Ethnic monoliths are a curse at every level of humanity.

But some Americans are moving down the same slope. Europe has been smeared as generally anti-semitic, on the basis of a microscopic number of voters in two or three countries. Europe is stigmatized as wimpish if not cowardly, because it does not place the same faith as America in the military response to terrorism.

To some extent, each continent is reacting according to the facts of geo-politics. Lesser powers have always sparred with great ones, as jealousies collide. No formerly lesser power knows this better than America. In 1795, John Adams, on the brink of the presidency of a new country still suffering under the transatlantic yoke, wrote to his wife Abigail: "I wish that misfortune and adversity could soften the temper and humiliate the insolence of John Bull. But he is not yet sufficiently humble. If I mistake not, it is the destiny of America one day to beat down his pride."

Now Europeans may never be sufficiently humble, but they should at least be clear. Neither the most pro- nor the most anti-American European governments, including this one, are unambiguous about what they want America to do or be. Sometimes, as in the Middle East and Afghanistan, they want intervention of a certain kind. Other times, they rail against American interventionism as if it were an ideological disease. There is justice in the Pentagon's scorn for a continent that wants America to do the heavy lifting against terror, while it dithers on the side.

Americans also need to consider some unlearned lessons. In power politics, the present period cannot be characterized as one of their magnanimous phases. Donald Rumsfeld is as insolent as John Bull used to be. And while it's true that more anti-Bush voices are starting to surface, the vocal majority have become more inflexible, more righteous and more harshly scathing of European critics than they were at the turn of the year.

And now we hear their British echoes, from people drawn towards the same stark analysis. Iraq is being prepared for its role as this generation's Vietnam. Long before an invasion happens, adamancy is beginning to prevail. Positions about pre- emption are being pre-emptively demanded: Will you be with us or against us, whatever we choose to do? To give the wrong answer is to face certain ignominy from one side or the other, for failing or passing a simplistic loyalty test on an issue no longer to be treated as amenable to honest argument.

It would be another simplistic error to think these attitudes can be reconciled. Good will is not enough to bury such visceral differences as exist on a familiar and lengthening list of issues. The continents are without doubt drifting apart. They have interests in common, but also interests around which America, as now led, has the power and the hardness to insist on non-negotiable policies that we can take or leave. There are few cosy solutions to anything much, which the allies in the old western alliance will any longer unanimously sign up to.

But it only demeans things further to pre-stigmatize all debate with the mark of "anti-American". Only few Europeans deserve the label. Most want to share in a dialog where they are listened to, especially when they disagree. The crisis is far, far too serious for its terms to be entirely colored by that convenient, thought-killing smear. The U.S. will do what it wants anyway. But I don't think it's anti-American to say so. The real anti-Americans -- anti-worlders, in fact -- are those who don't want a serious discussion.