America was Europe’s future, but now what leads?
America was Europe’s future, but now what leads?
From President Donald Trump’s variable and sometimes halted trade war with the European Union to Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security’s extraordinary interference in the Polish presidential elections on Tuesday, signs indicate that this U.S. administration not only communicates very differently with its European partners compared to previous administrations but also holds a different view of them.
This is not the cool-headed Asia-focused policy of the Obama era; rather, it is something more aggressive. Washington’s new approach has caused concern across the ocean, where many may rightly ask whether the transatlanticism they grew up with has now become a thing of the past.
What is at stake for Europe goes beyond current temporary issues. This divide poses an unprecedented challenge to the way Europeans perceive themselves and their future.
The bond between Europe and the United States, which dates back more than two centuries, is one of the most enduring relationships found in international relations.
And also one of the most intimate. Each of these two partners owes something to the other and has become accustomed to using the other as a mirror to reflect on their own identity and values. Over the years, there have been ups and downs, and the balance of power between them has shifted.
But it is this massive accumulation of shared history that makes the current moment so exceptional.
For centuries, Americans had no knowledge of Europe, but this situation changed with the arrival of the first immigrants. The United States, as a political entity, emerged from the European imagination.
The Americans who established a new political order after 1776 were mostly of European descent, and the institutions they created to govern themselves, even when rejecting some European concepts, still paid homage to European intellectual traditions.
The U.S. Constitution’s debt to the Enlightenment era in the Old World is easily observable.
The first U.S. citizenship laws were also based on British colonial traditions, with the difference that, for the first time, a clear racial preference in favor of whites was included—an element that, like slavery, became a central feature of American politics.
Independence itself was a byproduct of the longstanding conflict among three great European powers—England, France, and Spain. Victory didn’t come quickly, as European colonial influence in North America continued into the 19th century and only ended when territories like Florida, Oregon, and Alaska were integrated into the United States.
As the century progressed, America shed Europe’s tutelage and became a model instead of a copy. According to Alexis de Tocqueville, the greatest European analyst of the American experience, nowhere in the world offered more instructive lessons.
European conservatives viewed the American Civil War as a warning of the dangers of representative democracy, while liberals saw its outcome as a step towards freedom.
America was more than just a political laboratory; it was an image of human destiny. Walter Bagehot, a Victorian-era jurist, described Americans as truly modern people. America became a way for Europe to think about its future, and it has more or less remained so since then.
The idea of the Old World and the New World has deep roots, going back at least to the time Europeans arrived on the American continent. By the 17th century, these terms had become common among cartographers, but it was only when North Americans began their struggle for freedom from British crown domination that this geographical distinction turned into an ideological one.
For many of them, the antiquity of European institutions was a sign that Europe was on the wrong side of history. Noah Webster, the prominent lexicographer, wrote in 1778 that Europe had grown old in folly, corruption, and despotism.
Thomas Jefferson’s four-year tenure as the American minister in France led him to a similar conclusion. He wrote that the people of Europe were crushed under misery and linked the experiment of the U.S. Constitution to the path to human happiness.
As the power and wealth of the United States grew, modernity became a shared story in the intellectual, technological, and above all, human exchanges across the Atlantic.
With the independence of South American republics in the early decades of the 19th century, Europeans themselves became aware of this political contrast. In their own land, they witnessed their continent under the rule of conservative kings and emperors who opposed the French Revolution and Napoleon’s legacy.
But when they looked across the ocean, they saw a vast expanse of republican freedom—the Western Hemisphere.
The Monroe Doctrine of 1823, institutionalizing the notion that the Atlantic Ocean protected American freedom from regressive European despotism, was a warning to European monarchists: Leave America to the Americans.
The streets of New York embraced political refugees fleeing European despotism. At least three cities in North America erected statues for Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian independence fighter. Giuseppe Garibaldi, who later became one of the heroes of Italian unification, called the American people the only fearless bastion against European despotism.
Eventually, the kings of the Old World abandoned the idea of destroying the revolution across the ocean, and with the growing power and wealth of the United States, modernity became a shared story of the exchange of ideas, technology, and above all, people across the Atlantic.
Mass migration to the United States extended its influence from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. Never before or since have immigrants made up such a high proportion of the U.S. population as they did in the late 19th century.
European values shaped the tastes and achievements of American elites and provided a model for the architecture of the country’s museums and research universities.
However, the United States’ role as the guarantor of republicanism’s future in the world was far from over; in fact, it was only in the 20th century that this role took serious shape.
After World War I, America seized the opportunity to rebuild the Old World based on the New World’s model. One of the first things President Woodrow Wilson did in 1919 upon arriving in Europe was to visit the port of Genoa, Italy.
This city was the birthplace of Christopher Columbus, but Wilson’s real aim was to pay tribute to another of the city’s sons, Giuseppe Mazzini, the theorist of nationalism.
Mazzini had devoted his life to a futile struggle against European autocratic forces. Wilson saw himself as the one who would complete Mazzini’s unfinished mission.
At the Paris Peace Conference, royal families that had been in power for centuries fell. Republics, constitutions, and the rule of law were recognized. America truly seemed to have brought the future to Europe.
The land of Henry Ford, mass consumption, Hollywood, and jazz, in the interwar period, embodied for many Europeans an exciting and innovative vision of society and culture.
However, in Europe, there were also doubts and a kind of elitist cultural disdain that never completely disappeared.
The Nazis were afraid of America, but for different reasons. Hitler saw the United States as an obstacle to his authoritarian vision for a German-dominated Europe, although he predicted that the struggle between America’s racism, which his regime admired, and the ideal of the melting pot of ethnic and racial convergence would inevitably weaken and decline.
At the same time, he mourned for the millions of German immigrants who had left Europe and settled across the ocean.
One of them was a man from Hesse named Johannes Eisenhower, who arrived in Philadelphia in 1741.
Two centuries later, one of his descendants became the architect of the Allied invasion of Europe and then became President of the United States. Dwight Eisenhower, through his family story, provided an American response to the Nazi dream of racial purity.
It was during the Cold War that America perhaps transformed Europe more deeply than ever before.
The presence of American forces during peacetime was an unprecedented sign of the United States’ enduring commitment to European freedom. American lawyers played roles in conducting war crimes trials and drafting European constitutions.
American diplomats designed new rules for international cooperation. Washington experts redesigned everything from industrial relations to advertising and urban planning.
But America’s influence went even further. Film, music, and fashion entered European homes. American taste became the norm, and in this process, European ideals and hopes did as well. This wasn’t a one-way street. Just like previous waves, jazz and blues musicians, African American artists, traveled to Europe and were met with admiration in Paris and London clubs, helping their music overcome the racial barriers of the largely segregated American music industry and be heard in their own country.
They were also part of America’s allure and energizing force.
In the 1950s and 60s, America seemed almost attainable to ordinary Europeans. With rising consumer incomes, the United States became the embodiment of a future they dreamed of—a source of the latest trends in art, music, and even plastics.
David Bowie once said, ‘America became a mythical land for me.’
The Soviet alternative was too heavy-handed and couldn’t compete in the Cold War market of taste.
Supraphon records of Tchaikovsky were recorded in the highest quality but lacked the allure of Elvis. Film portrayed this unequal competition.
In the 1967 film ‘Billion Dollar Brain’ directed by Ken Russell, Michael Caine’s character, Harry Palmer, cooler than James Bond, enters Soviet-controlled Latvia and is surprised to find a barn party in progress. The sound of military parades on TV is overshadowed by the smuggled version of The Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night.’
Is it possible that the Europe-America partnership has now simply entered a new phase—a phase that is no longer based on liberalism but on a kind of joint right-wing crusade?
And of course, there was another chapter in the Americanization of Europe. Even before the emergence of the unipolar order in the 1990s, a new wave of Washington-led legislation transformed European capitalism almost as much as the victory in 1945 transformed its political institutions.
This time the keywords were trade liberalization and financialization. Simultaneously, a new type of international human rights policy was also directed from Washington.
America’s security guarantee in NATO was reaffirmed. Eastern Europe, freed from Soviet domination, looked to Washington with the same eagerness that Western Europe did after 1945.
As a result, the end of the century witnessed the formation of a transatlantic partnership that seemed stronger and more extensive than ever, stretching to Russia’s borders.
President Reagan said in 1988, ‘These shared standards and beliefs link us to Europe today. They are the essence of the community of free nations of which we are a part.’
The doubt Europeans experience today stems from a sudden feeling of cooling in this long-standing and intimate relationship.
Undoubtedly, this relationship has been questioned in the past—from both sides—and during Trump’s first presidency, many warnings were issued. Europeans have not been indifferent to America’s mostly justified complaints about the unfair burden-sharing in NATO.
The tariff dispute also dates back to the formation of the European Common Market. They also understand well that the decline of Eurocentrism reflects global changes that have been ongoing for generations.
And of course, they have always maintained a kind of mental skepticism towards their American allies despite deep affection.
But today’s doubt arises from a feeling perceived as ideological contempt from this administration.
Political realism, Realpolitik, is one thing—Henry Kissinger theorized it with a language belonging to the 19th century that was understandable to Europeans.
But what they see now is something else—a display of a right-wing cultural war with distinctly American roots that suggests a reversal of the values Europeans thought America promoted and a rewriting of a shared history they thought they agreed upon.
Members of the Trump administration may speak the language of Western civilization and freedom of speech, but these are no longer the vague words of the past—they are something more extreme.
And while a quasi-fascist salute may be just a media game for Washington politicians, in Europe, it is a much more serious matter, as the immediate reaction of Jordan Bardella, the French right-wing leader, showed when he canceled his speech last February in protest against Steve Bannon’s gesture at the American Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), which he insisted was just a wave.
Undoubtedly, structural changes have also contributed to the cooling of U.S.-Europe relations.
The European Union has now become a serious competitor to Washington in the economic sphere, with extensive powers in areas such as health regulations, food safety, and data privacy, challenging the main concerns of powerful American industries and lobbies.
Its adherence to international law is part of its nature, and its coalition-based policymaking process contrasts sharply with the continuous issuance of executive orders from the White House.
But competition is one thing; enmity is another. In 2018, Trump said he considered the European Union an enemy. His new administration followed this message, and the result is that fewer people in Europe consider the United States a true ally.
Polls show that most Americans still consider Europeans their friends.
But the fact that the contempt for Europe is more a result of the dominance of cultural warriors in Washington than a change in public opinion is not particularly reassuring for Europe.
Mainstream America may not share the concerns of conservative think tanks, but it doesn’t really oppose them either. Attacking the European Union is just part of a larger anti-elite sentiment driving this administration.
Bashing allies is another way to attack the globalists on America’s coasts—those who are, in fact, the main targets.
Thus, we face a historical irony: two centuries have passed, and now the sides have switched places.
It is Europe that is now closer to Enlightenment values—secular rationality, distrust of organized religion, and commitment to measured dialogue—and it is America that has fallen into the hands of social conservatives dreaming of a return to traditional values.
However, is it possible that America is still a reflection of Europe’s future? Is it possible that the Europe-America partnership has simply entered a new phase—a phase not based on liberalism but on a kind of joint right-wing campaign to defend Western civilization against its perceived enemies, both internal and external?
The difference in historical experiences indicates obstacles. The European far-right may welcome Washington’s attention. When a U.S. Vice President openly sides with extremist candidates in European domestic politics, the supported party naturally won’t complain, even if this support leads to the ‘Canada effect,’ meaning that the definition coming from America has a reverse result instead of helping.
But the important question is what will happen when right-wing parties in Europe actually come to power?
Georgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, is already feeling the pressure of conflicting loyalties. Any future right-wing leader in France will feel this pressure even more.
Viktor Orban can only play the role of disruptor as long as Hungary remains a member of the European Union.
And the interests of the European Union will always reflect a different history and geopolitical position than that of the United States.
Many commentators speak of Trump’s alleged interest in deals, but a deal must be sustainable. Which European politician, whether from the left or the right, can trust a government prone to volatility and enjoying public humiliation of others?
In short, the current policy of ‘Capitalism in One Country’ leaves no room for past partnerships.
After two centuries of close coexistence, Europe and America now find themselves at a point of estrangement. It is clear that neither of them gains anything from a real rupture, and such a rupture is unlikely to occur due to the dense network of communications and shared interests that still exist between them.
However, whatever the future of this relationship may be, it will likely be very different from what we have seen until now. A formal divorce may never be declared, but separation is underway.
For the United States, the cost of this separation can be measured in terms of reduced soft power—an intangible but real power that Washington today overlooks with strange haste. For Europe, the challenge lies elsewhere: America is no longer the future that most Europeans want to follow.
Its values, historical memories, and institutions increasingly appear alien, and its society has become irreversibly and unfavorably polarized.
Tocqueville once wrote, ‘Let us look to America, not to create a slavish copy of the institutions it has established, but to gain a clearer vision of the political structure that is best for us.’
Now it is the Europeans who must chart the future they want for themselves.