Nobody would argue that Europe has become an American-style meritocracy, but the concept is no longer as alien as it once was. When I was in high school, 20 years ago, teachers went on strike for a salary increase. I mentioned a strange, American conceptâ€â€pay raises linked to performanceâ€â€and was accused of being a right-winger. Now this alien term appears in the manifestos of all would-be prime ministers for the next Italian elections. When a Communist MP, Rina Gagliardi, said in a talk show a few weeks ago that she didn’t understand what meritocracy meant, she was left alone in her wondering.
Life can still be difficult for someone like me, who has the political and economic views of an “Amerikano,†but in recent years things have been getting much easier. Meritocracy is catching on, and so is the principle of a consumer-based society. Things get harder when the United States becomes involved in awkward wars, such as Iraq, or when U.S. leaders won’t allow their soldiers to be tried abroad, or when a U.S. jet cut the wires of an Italian cable car at the Cermis ski resort in February 1998, killing all 20 people inside. Apart from these relatively isolated situations, anti-Americanism seems now more superficial than one would expect.
Related: European Anti-Americanism on the Wane?
Stryker McGuire… I don’t trust him. It’s not just the pron name, it’s that he’s writing this article for a European audience. You have to weed through euro-logic like this:
On Sudan, Europe hasn’t exactly been in pole position – we’ve been far more proactive than they, and they’ve been shrieking at us about global warming pretty darn ungrudgingly for 7 freaking years.
Europe may be trending to less anti-Americanism. oh yea. Yawn.
anonymous–
Really, more like the media trending toward Europe trending towards less anti-Americanism. Double yawn, I guess.
Head on over to medienkritik.typepad.com/blog to see just how incorrect you are, at least as far as the German media are concerned. Absent alternative sources of information, I’d figure this country was the wild wild west writ large also.
Balanced assessments based on the facts simply take too long to develop, and most people lack the access and insight. I won’t offer an opinion on how the average German thinks, I’ll just note my daughter spent several years there as a civilian dependent, living off base, mostly on the local economy. Her neighbors were nice, and helped her with the language and customs. In the end it’s all about individuals anyway.
That’s toward the end of the big piece.