That's no femme, that's my wife!
Matt Welch had an "enough already with the French-bashing" post last week, concluding with "...if you want to keep condemning all the French, realize that you are, in fact, condemning my wife." *Blush* For my part, I've been meaning to issue some kind of apology to Matt, his lovely wife, and anybody else's French wife, for flagrantly indulging in this guilty pleasure from time to time-- sometimes, you just can't help yourself. The fact is that the EU, being ridiculous, is easy to ridicule. It has become increasingly clear that the elite groups which control it are more or less completely out of step with the public they supposedly represent, which is all the more reason to question these elites. But ridiculing the "sophisticated" pretensions of the French foreign minister when he lectures the US is one thing. Denouncing "the French," or "the Europeans" en masse is quite another, though doing so has a long and illustrious history in Anglo-American culture, and is never going to go away. It is, indeed, a great deal of fun. But it doesn't make much sense, strictly speaking.
Matt points out that, for the first time, "the American 'street' is noticeably pissed off by what they’ve usually ignored with a chuckle." This is indeed a significant change. One of the complaints often lodged against Americans from overseas is that we don't know or care about the world outside. This has been broadly true. Now circumstances have forced us to pay attention, and, if the results are not the wave of Euro-philia that Euro-elites feel they deserve, they have only themselves to blame. My own transatlantic family ties (my fiancee is English) have taught me a thing or two about elite opinion versus that of ordinary people. From the Guardian, the BBC, Chris Patten, et al., you really get the impression that Britain is a seething cauldron of vehement anti-Americanism and unreconstructed Leftist hostility to Western civilization. The fact is that the vast majority of ordinary people in the UK feel an enormous affection for America and Americans, and by any measure there is tremendous support for the US and the war on terror. The grandstanding of columnists and politicians, the cultural-chauvinistic pot shots fired back in response to our own cultural-chauvinistic pot shots (or even on their own account) shouldn't obscure this fact.
Finally, in regard to the common "surrender monkey" topos, that is also, to borrow a Euro-locution, "simplistic." The tepid response to Hitler's threat was not a French monopoly. Indeed, when the French proposed vigorous resistance (whether they meant it sincerely or not) to Germany in the thirties, they were often undermined by the British, who were suspicious of French ambitions and power in the east and tended to agree that many German grievances had merit. Both French and British leaders, having experienced firsthand the horrors of World War I, were so eager to avoid war at any and all cost that, by some accounts, they made it inevitable. The French would not or could not act without British support; the British would not give it in any practical sense. All the "great powers," including the US, share the blame for what in retrospect can be seen as a plain failure of will, nerve, and understanding. Yes, the French politicians and high command were shockingly inept. Yet the lesson here is not that the French are craven gourmands who constantly demand surrender for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It is rather a lesson against appeasement, and, perhaps, against "multi-lateralism" itself. (In that regard, it is certainly fair to point out the ironic parallels when French and EU leaders, in the current situation, make arguments for appeasement and effective multi-lateral paralysis: they do it regularly.)
Matt says journalist William Shirer's "The Collapse of the Third Republic" is the "best book written about France's 1940 fold." I haven't read that one, so I can't comment. My nomination for the best book on the subject is "Strange Defeat" by the great French historian Marc Bloch, who wrote the book in 1940 before giving his life in the cause of French resistance. It is solemnly inspiring. Vive la France.
Anyway, read Matt's homily. He makes many good and chastening points.
Update: Charles Austin has posted a response on his cool new Sine qua non blog. He makes a good point about the UK "street" being largely ignorant of what it's really like in America. Boy is that ever true. Most people I know in England envision all of America as an enormous suburb like those depicted in movies like ET and Poltergeist; plus, we're all wearing backwards baseball caps and we all have handguns stuck in our jeans, barely hidden underneath our van Halen T-shirts. Hey, wait a minute-- that's pretty accurate... never mind...
Posted by Dr. Frank at February 20, 2002 05:03 PM | TrackBack