Ever since 9/11, I’ve been gloomily predicting the European powder keg’s about to go up. ”By 2010 we’ll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,” I wrote in Canada’s Western Standard back in February.

Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule.

He continues with well thought out considered analysis like:

The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up trans-Atlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans?

So that’s the reason France didn’t think the war was a good idea. I thought it was their fingers in the Oil for Food programme, oh wait American companies were involved too. I thought it was that they supported the Ba’ath party and al-Qeada. But no, now it’s because of their Muslim populations.

Steyn then mentions in passing the battle of Poitiers, an era of Europe I coincidentally am studying at present, and a time that featured on a BBC documentary over the weekend. What he fails to mention was that the Muslim foothold in Spain at the time was the only Muslim colony that failed to remain permanent. Nor does he mention the civilising aspect of that Muslim world, their culture, architecture and inter-marriage with Christians in Spain - something that was written out of the history books by Christian families later on. But that’s all to complicated for Steyn, better to be black and white I suppose.

Says Hammel, advising Americans on living in Europe:

*Don’t brag to other people about how hard you work. If you go up to someone in Europe and say “I work 10 hours a day, six days a week, 51 weeks a year. Look how much I achieve!” you’ll get the same reaction you would in America if you said “I wash my hands exactly 169 times a day. Look how clean they are! Look! Look!!!”

*Learn your environment. Take into account how much work you can really expect from Europeans. Don’t expect anything to get done in August, don’t expect a response to your email the same day. If you really need to get in touch with someone while they are on vacation, or on the weekend, you won’t be able to. Which means not that they are being irresponsible. It means you don’t really need to get in touch with them.

*Change your standards. Realize that when someone complains about being horribly overworked, even though you know they are working about 40 hours a week, accept it. By their standards, they are working very hard. Helpful thought-experiment: Europeans pay about $5/gallon for gas. Wouldn’t you want them to display compassion for you when you complain about paying $2?

Thoughts on this folks? I honestly think there is more to life to working every hour god sends, we all need time to blog don’t we? I have often had this conversation with cousins in the US, and they always envy the level of vacation time we get here in Ireland. Indeed when they visit it’s almost always for a very short time, because they have to get back to work. While here companies offer so much paid vacation time people sometimes don’t know what to do with it all.

I know it has been discussed at length before on BSD.

In Britain, almost two-thirds of Britons, 65 percent, saw China favorably, compared with 55 percent who held a positive view of the United States.

In France, 58 percent had an upbeat view of China, compared with 43 percent who felt that way about the U.S. The results were nearly the same in Spain and the Netherlands.

The United States’ favorability rating was lowest among three Muslim nations which are also U.S. allies — Turkey, Pakistan and Jordan — where only about one-fifth of those polled viewed the U.S. in a positive light.

Only India and Poland were more upbeat about the United States, while Canadians were just as likely to see China favorably as they were the U.S.

Why is China seen in such a good light?

Unless Europe reverses two trends — low birthrates and meager economic growth — it faces a bleak future of rising domestic discontent and falling global power. Actually, that future has already arrived.

A weak European economy is one reason that the world economy is shaky and so dependent on American growth. Preoccupied with divisions at home, Europe is history’s has-been. It isn’t a strong American ally, not simply because it disagrees with some U.S. policies but also because it doesn’t want to make the commitments required of a strong ally. Unwilling to address their genuine problems, Europeans become more reflexively critical of America. This gives the impression that they’re active on the world stage, even as they’re quietly acquiescing in their own decline.

I agree with Glenn Reynolds on this one, it is too early to say. Any number of factors could come into play, especially with advancements in technology, changes in trade patterns, war, disease - just because it’s been like this for a number of years does not make it written in stone.

I will be putting more effort into posting starting from next Monday - and will aim to boost my number of posts past my monthly averages.

Gerard Baker, writing in the current Weekly Standard, the neoconservative journal, criticizes the administration’s olive branch and warns that Europe is seeking to become a counterweight to the United States in world affairs. The real European goal, writes Baker, is to undermine NATO, America’s greatest source of trans-Atlantic influence, and to initiate policies of its own that are less bellicose than Washington’s.

A prime example is the joint German-British-French initiative on Iran, which would offer economic incentives in exchange for Iran’s agreement to dismantle nuclear weapons capabilities.

American conservatives have relentlessly disparaged the Iran initiative as naïve or opportunistic.

In fact, the initiative is actually making some headway and may spare us a military confrontation. Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who provided crucial cover for President Bush’s effort to portray the Iraq invasion as the work of a broad coalition, is with the Germans and French this time.

Other neoconservatives take an even darker view of Europe. In National Review Online, Andrew Stuttaford attacks Europe’s proposed new constitution as “an unreadable mish-mash of political correctness” and faults Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice for being “either delightfully insincere or dismayingly naïve.”

Some on the right believe that the United States should explicitly oppose Europe’s new effort to have a common foreign and defense policy, as antithetical to American interests, and want to actively contain Europe.

Others applaud Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s effort to divide the “new” Europe of former Soviet satellites from the “old” Europe of major states that have been our most steadfast allies except on Bush’s dubious Iraq policy. (This divide-and-conquer tactic won’t work. It’s the new European nations that look most closely to Brussels rather than to Washington.)

Especially with EU structural funds on their way. He continues:

European integration has been a core U.S. goal since the Truman administration. President Harry Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall blessed the antecedents of Common Market, which eventually became the European Union.

The original policy goal was twofold. First, contain Soviet expansionism. Second, anchor Germany within a larger, democratic European collectivity. The policy worked, magnificently. Europe, viciously divided against itself for centuries, has knit together into a democratic and civil society.

Of course, Europe developed its own social institutions - universal health care, generous retirement systems, free or subsidized child care for working parents, less commercialized and more robust elections, far less extremes of wealth and poverty, less militarism. And much of the world sees this as a more attractive model than the one the Bush administration is promoting. America, statistically, is slightly richer on average than western Europe, but more than 80 percent of western Europeans live better than their U.S. counterparts because our wealth is so concentrated at the top.

How like the neocons to see Europe’s success as a menace! In the 1990s, the American right disparaged the project of completing a single European market, and the effort to build trans-European social, parliamentary and regulatory institutions. American conservatives ridiculed the idea of a common European central bank and currency, but the euro is a phenomenal success and Bush could take some lessons from Europe’s fiscal discipline.

But Bush has kind of been successful on Egypt, perhaps Syria in the future, and Libya with the help of the UK. Europe has been successful in taking in and 10 countries in one go. Yes the EU economy is semi-ok at the moment, but growth is slow, and the looming crisis with an aging population is not easy to ignore, while the US strides ahead with fiscal ‘indiscipline’, but has meant growth since Bush took office. The deficit now seems set to narrow in Bush’s second term. Europe isn’t getting any younger though.

Now that the given reasons for going to war in Iraq have proved bogus, the Bush administration has deftly turned the table away from weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s Al Qaeda links toward the new horizons of spreading freedom in the footsteps of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. Thus the reason we went into Iraq is now portrayed as a fight for democracy. Osama bin Laden is seldom mentioned, and somewhere along the way the war on terror has become the war for freedom.

Deftly indeed. No longer is it simply an effort, as Richard Clarke would have wanted, to rid the world of al-Qaeda and stop the fundamentalist Islamic teaching in Saudi and Pakistan. But it is an effort to spread ‘freedom’, using either the threat of force, or actual force. I worry that Bush is using the word so much that it will make it a by-word, and therefore a useless word, for Republican or Neoconservative thinking. And perhaps then become a dirty word in the eyes of many.

Greenway continues:

Prior to the invasion of Afghanistan - which, unlike Iraq, was absolutely necessary for the struggle against Islamic terrorism - Bush told the Taliban he would not attack them if they disgorged Al Qaeda. In short, it was not a war about expanding freedom. It was a war against Al Qaeda. But you wouldn’t know that to hear the administration today.

President George W. Bush has found what his father used to call the “vision thing,” and it is being pulled like a rug over all the mess of Bush’s wars.

Right after the president’s inaugural speech, aides fanned out to say he didn’t plan to enforce too much freedom. And the president doesn’t seem ready to destabilize Pakistan, Egypt or Saudi Arabia for their democratic failings. The big question remains Iran, but Rice did her best to put European invasion fears at ease without taking the use of force off the table.

As did Bush today, saying that it was ‘ridiculous’ to suggest that the US was planning an invasion of Iran, but that all options were on the table. But with Syria and Iran increasingly on the PR radar of the administration, are we not likely to see at least the threat of military force on either country in the lifetime of Bush’s presidency. I would say so.

It is not necessary for France and Germany to send soldiers there if they do not wish. What is needed is that the Europeans raise the tone of the dialogue far above the nickel-and-diming over such issues as where NATO should train Iraqis, and whether a few more trainers should be added. It is time to show genuine, overarching political support for what Washington is trying to achieve in Iraq and the broader Middle East, without petty, nit-picking reservations.

Washington has now concluded it erred in building a coalition against Iraq by assessing the value of allies simply in terms of the number of countries participating and the number of troops contributed. It ignored the vital importance of winning broad political and psychological support, even from countries that did not send troops, so the world could see the West united behind America.

That is what France, Germany, Spain and other European critics of the United States must now offer. Their governments say they want to put past disagreements behind them. If they mean it, they should not be calling for better relations one minute, and fomenting anti-Americanism the next.

Elevating the discussion and supporting America’s broad goals, such as freedom and democracy, need not mean “pledging allegiance” to the United States, which Michel Barnier, the French foreign minister, scornfully rejected this week. It means acknowledging that Europe and the United States face a wide range of common global dangers that they can best - perhaps only - tackle together.

That sense that America is now so powerful that it influences everyone else’s politics more than their own governments - so everyone wants to vote in our elections - is something you hear more and more these days.

Elizabeth Angell, a 23-year-old American studying at Oxford, told me that a Pakistani friend at school had asked her if he could just watch her fill out her absentee ballot for the U.S. election. “He said to me, ‘It’s the closest thing I am going to get to voting. I wish I could vote in your election because your government affects my daily life more than my own.”‘

The one concrete result of the U.S. election will probably be to reinforce Europe’s focus on its own efforts to build a United States of Europe, and to further play down the trans-Atlantic alliance.

“When it comes to emotions, the re-election of Bush has reinforced the feeling of alienation between Europe and the U.S.” Moïsi said.

“It is not that we are so much against America, it is that we cannot understand the evolution of that country. This election has weakened the concept of ‘the West.”‘

Funnily enough, the one country on this side of the ocean that would have elected Bush is not in Europe, but the Middle East: It’s Iran, where many young people apparently hunger for Bush to remove their despotic leaders, the way he did in Iraq.

An Oxford student who had just returned from research in Iran told me that young Iranians were “loving anything their government hates,” such as Bush, “and hating anything their government loves.” Tehran is festooned in “Down With America” graffiti, the student said, but when he tried to take pictures of it, the Iranian students he was with urged him not to. They said it was just put there by their government and was not how most Iranians felt.

Iran, he said, is the ultimate “red state.” Go figure.

I believe a lot of people work longer hours to look good. I’ve past experience of that too.

I really need to simmer down because ultimately, this doesn’t really matter. I don’t work in America, I don’t want to work in America. I can just about cope with the fact that trouble shooting a problem with them is almost unbearable, because they don’t know their network but they expect me to know their network. Meanwhile, I’ll just calculate how many days annual leave I’ll need to use for my exams, cos I don’t get exam or study leave for this Masters relevant to my job I am doing part time.

Putting out his stall, he points out that Bush is one of the most disliked US presidents in European history.

According to a poll conducted by Globescan and the University of Maryland, 74 percent of Germans wanted to see John Kerry beat Bush in November, while only 10 percent favored the president. Even in the United Kingdom the public backed Kerry over Bush by 47 percent to 16 percent.

But, Ferguson argues, the gap between the US and Europe has been widening for 15 years - but it has much more to do with changes in Europe than in the US. He continues:

This is not a fashionable view, least of all in academic circles. A clear majority of those who think, write, and talk about international relations for a living believe that the transatlantic alliance system - what used to be known simply as “the West”- can and must be restored, by means of adjustments in U.S. policy.

The Oxford historian and journalist Timothy Garton Ash argues in his new book, Free World, that the United States and the European Union have too many common interests to become permanently estranged. He sees “no inexorable drifting apart of two solid continental plates” but, rather, “overlapping continental shelves.” In a recent article in Foreign Affairs, Robert E. Hunter, a senior adviser to the Rand Corporation and a former U.S. ambassador to NATO, also called for a shoring up of the Atlantic alliance. The Bush administration’s “experiment in unilateralism,” he wrote, had merely revealed “the limits of such an approach.” Kenneth Pollack, a member of the National Security Council under Bill Clinton and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, urges the Bush administration to work in tandem with the Europeans to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

But Ferguson doubts that any mending of relations between the two sides is possible, for three reasons:

1. The primary reason for the transatlantic alliance was the Cold War. During the Cold War we should be aware that the French, Germans or British were not particurlarly pro-American. Unity with America was practical not ideological. Once the Soviet bloc collapsed incentive for parternship have all but disappeared.

2. Islamic extremism is viewed in different ways by both sides. Europeans don’t see Islamic extremism as a threat comparible to Soviet Russia, while to the US, Islamism have replaced commumism as its mortal enemy. In fact, since Madrid, Europe has seen distancing itself from the US as a partial solution to the Islamist problem. Added to this, 3-5% of Europe is Muslim, and this figure is growing. If Turkey joins in 2015, Muslims will account for 14.5% of Europe’s population - more Muslims than Protestants. The recent murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh demonstrates that criticising Islam can be politically incorrect and life-threatening. This means that Europe is vulnerable to demographic as well as political changes.

3. Christianity is declining in Europe. Almost half of Western Europe no longer attends church. The decline of European Christianity helps explain why European conservatism has little in common with the conservatism of the American right.

Ferguson concludes:

In the absence of the Soviet Union, in the presence of increasing numbers of Muslims, and in light of their own secularization, European societies feel more detached from the United States than at any other time since the 1930s.

In a recent Gallup poll 61 percent of Europeans said they thought the EU plays a positive role with regard to “peace in the world” (while just eight percent said its role was negative). But a remarkable 50 percent took the view that the United States now plays a negative role. Compare that with American attitudes: 59 percent of Americans regard the United States as making a positive contribution to world peace, and just 15 percent think the EU plays a negative role.

In the face of this kind of asymmetry it is well nigh impossible to turn back the clock to those halcyon days when there was just one West, indivisible. John Kerry would have tried, but he would have failed. George W. Bush has lower expectations of transatlantic relations. But he should not be blamed for their deterioration. His much exaggerated “unilateralism” is not why the Atlantic seems a little wider every day. It is Europe, not America, that is drifting away.

But the crisis in Ukraine shows what an enormous and vital role Europe can play, and is playing, in shaping the politics and economies of nations and peoples along its ever-expanding border. This is no small matter. On the contrary, it is a task of monumental strategic importance for the United States as well as for Europeans. By accident of history and geography, the European paradise is surrounded on three sides by an unruly tangle of potentially catastrophic problems, from North Africa to Turkey and the Balkans to the increasingly contested borders of the former Soviet Union. This is an arc of crisis if ever there was one, and especially now with Putin’s play for a restoration of the old Russian empire. In confronting these dangers, Europe brings a unique kind of power, not coercive military power but the power of attraction. The European Union has become a gigantic political and economic magnet whose greatest strength is the attractive pull it exerts on its neighbors. Europe’s foreign policy today is enlargement; its most potent foreign policy tool is what the E.U.’s Robert Cooper calls “the lure of membership.”

Cooper describes the E.U. as a liberal, democratic, voluntary empire expanding continuously outward as others seek to join it. This expanding Europe absorbs problems and conflicts rather than directly confronting them in the American style. The lure of membership, he notes, has helped stabilize the Balkans and influenced the political course of Turkey. The Turkish people’s desire to join the European Union has led them to modify Turkey’s legal code and expand rights to conform to European standards. The expansive and attractive force of the European Union has also played its part in the Ukraine crisis. Had Europe not expanded to include Poland and other Eastern European countries, it would have neither the interest nor the influence in Ukraine’s domestic affairs that it does.

Cooper, unlike many Europeans, acknowledges the vital role of U.S. power in providing the strategic environment within which Europe’s soft expansionism can proceed. Employing America’s “military muscle” to “clear the way for a political solution involving a kind of imperial penumbra around the European Union,” he suggests, may be the way to deal with “the area of the greatest threat in the Middle East.” In the Balkans, Europe’s magnetic attraction would have been feeble had Slobodan Milosevic not been defeated militarily. And undoubtedly American power provides a useful backdrop in the current diplomatic confrontation over Ukraine.

Cooper is not alone in his expansive European vision. Among leading European policymakers, Germany’s Joschka Fischer seems the most dedicated to using enlargement and the E.U.’s attractive power for strategic purposes. Before Sept. 11, 2001, Fischer was suspicious of bringing Turkey into the European Union and inheriting such nightmarish neighbors as Iraq and Syria. But now he regards Turkey’s membership as a strategic necessity. “To modernize an Islamic country based on the shared values of Europe would be almost a D-Day for Europe in the war against terror,” he argues, because it “would provide real proof that Islam and modernity, Islam and the rule of law . . . [and] this great cultural tradition and human rights are after all compatible.” This “would be the greatest positive challenge for these totalitarian and terrorist ideas.”

Americans could hardly disagree. Unfortunately, Cooper’s and Fischer’s vision of an expanding E.U. empire is not shared across Europe. It finds most support in Tony Blair’s Britain, as well as in Poland and other Eastern European countries, and among the current German leadership (though not among the German population). It has least support in France, where even the recent inclusion of Poland and other nations to the east is regarded as something of a disaster for French foreign policy and where the admission of Turkey is considered anathema. Modern, secular, forward-looking France still insists that Europe must remain, in the words of Valery Giscard d’Estaing, a Christian civilization. In this and other respects, France is part of what one might call “red-state Europe,” a pre-modern bastion on a postmodern continent.

Americans are generally skeptical of or indifferent to the European Union. They shouldn’t be. The United States has an important interest in the direction the E.U. takes in coming years. It may actually matter, for instance, whether Britain votes to support the E.U. constitution, as Blair wants. A Britain with real influence inside the E.U. is more likely to steer it in the liberal imperial direction that the E.U.’s Cooper, a former Blair adviser, proposes. That could prove a far more important strategic boon to the United States than a few thousand European troops in Iraq.