Europe s Anti Europeans

New and True Europeans

Europeans like to drink wine.

Europeans like to drink wine.

Europeans tried to civilise the tribe.

White Europeans were subject to the plague.

Indeed, when today s Europeans peer into the future, they see only prolonged recession and austerity. Europe means nothing but sacrifice northern Europeans paying for southern Europe s woes through large transfers, or southern Europeans repaying onerous and maybe impossible levels of debt.

Europeans are the world's largest consumers of alcohol.

Europeans resumed their full place among the nations.

PARIS Are non Europeans much less pessimistic about Europe than Europeans themselves? Could distance be a prerequisite for a more balanced view of the continent s predicament?

But knowing how Europeans work less is one thing knowing why Europeans work less than Americans is another. One view is that Americans are perceived (and like to see themselves) as Calvinist workaholics, whereas Europeans like to think that they know how to enjoy life's pleasures.

Perhaps Europeans could vote for members of the European Commission, with candidates campaigning in other countries, rather than just in their own. Perhaps Europeans could elect a president.

So, are Europeans and Americans simply more compassionate than Asians?

Europeans are the largest consumers of alcohol in the world.

Europeans drink, on average, 12.5 liters of pure alcohol per year.

Europeans resolved never again to go to war with one another.

The Europeans think that the American budget is going to explode tomorrow.

We can say, Oh, these funny Europeans, of course it would influence them.

Thus, many Europeans continue to be nostalgic for America as a model. For these Europeans, Barack Obama, campaigning under the banner of hope, is the ideal choice to restore, as if by magic, America s soft power.

So, being I'm in the United States, I'll have a dig at the Europeans.

The bubonic plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages, killed one out of four Europeans.

As Europeans, we identify deeply with our nations, traditions, and histories. These are Europe s roots.

BERLIN For most Europeans, the Mediterranean is an annual object of longing the holiday idyll where they spend the best weeks of the year. But many Europeans sunny view of the region has yielded to lowering clouds of pessimism.

If Europeans merely invoke the lofty mantra of an ever closer union, their institutions will atrophy.

At the same time, 8 May is a day of liberation for Europeans, including for Germans.

Africans and Indians, as usual, South Americans, and Eastern Europeans in particular are on our buy list.

There are twice as many Europeans studying in the US as there are Americans studying in Europe.

Only by embracing their shared values can Europeans prevent their Union from becoming a spiritless machine. Together, Europeans must find what connects them, and derive new enthusiasm, new spirit from what they find a spirit sorely needed to tackle the great issues of today.

Discipline and morality may well be key to reinforcing trust and credibility to Europe s social fabric a point that northern Europeans never tire of making. But, unless all Europeans accept responsibility for saving the euro and, with it, the EU everything else is shallow rhetoric.

But, whereas only half of Europeans now aged 55 64 finished secondary education, four in five 25 34 year olds have done so, and they naturally aspire to better things. Even Europeans with few or no qualifications increasingly shun dirty, difficult, and dangerous jobs.

But for Eastern Europeans, the sudden availability of all these consumer products on the marketplace was a deluge.

It should be possible to mobilize a pro European silent majority behind the idea that when the status quo becomes untenable, we should look for a European solution rather than national ones. True Europeans ought to outnumber true Finns and other anti Europeans in Germany and elsewhere.

A pessimist would say that Europeans are unable or at least unwilling to rethink their defense policy, because the US ultimately ensures their security through NATO. According to this view, France s efforts to encourage both transatlantic integration and autonomous political action are insufficient to change most Europeans minds.

When US officials say to the Europeans, We need you, what they mean is quite minimal Please do not collapse and bring down the global economy with you. Europeans have become the Japanese of the West financial contributors who at best play a supporting role in global strategic affairs.

Yet, the European Commission still encourages young Europeans to learn as many different languages as possible. It would be politically lethal to acknowledge the real state of affairs, even if the official policy merely increases the chances that Europeans, after all their efforts, still may not understand each other.

It will be business pretty much as usual as Europeans prepare cheerfully in the years ahead for the Winter Olympics in Sochi, just up the road from the Russian missiles and tanks on Georgian soil. Meanwhile, Europeans will continue to talk about their crucial role in world affairs.

Religion is not likely to become a major factor in European politics opinion polls show that religious observance marks one of the few major differences between Americans and Europeans. Guns also have a different place in the European mind it is their absence that most Europeans regard as important.

And we know that most of it is currently owned by people we might call Westerners Europeans, North Americans, Australasians.

You see increasingly that the world now looks actually, for us Europeans, much more like Europe in the 19th century.

Many Europeans see themselves as champions of global fair play. But Europe s opinion of its integrity is not always shared.

Perhaps initially Europeans should be cautious. But I doubt whether anything tougher than strongly worded communiqués will ever be employed.

In a way, that is the story of the settling of the Americas, the supposedly inexhaustible frontier to which Europeans escaped.

Latin Americans and North Americans dream of creating a free trade zone. Europeans speak of building a United States of Europe.

Given the gravity of the economic crisis, the time has come for the EU to demonstrate its strengths whenever possible. The aim must be not only to win back the hearts of Europeans who have become skeptical, but also to convince them that the Union is indispensable to meeting the challenges Europeans face.

President Bush was in Moscow today to honour the common sacrifice of millions of Americans, Europeans and many others during the war.