Goodbye Uncle Sam, Hello Team Europe

[chlamor]

Goodbye Uncle Sam, Hello Team Europe

By John Feffer, AlterNet. Posted April 14, 2005.

Not only does the world hate us, a new poll shows that for the first time most countries want us to get the hell out of the driver's seat.


A new poll conducted by GlobeScan and the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) reveals that citizens in twenty out of twenty-three countries would like to see Europe become more influential than the United States in world affairs. The survey tested attitudes toward the five permanent members of Security Council and Europe as a whole. The majority of citizens in only six countries (including my friend's South Korea) view the U.S. role in the world as mainly positive -- a dismal popularity rating comparable only to that of Russia. Here's how bad it is: even China rated higher than the United States in popular assessments of its global conduct. The United States also took the top prize as the country most widely viewed as having a negative influence on the world (in 15 countries), with Russia coming a close second (14 countries). And this in a poll that did not include countries in the Middle East, who would have likely put us way ahead of Russia.

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But not this year. While the resentment of U.S. power and domination was the same as ever, according to Gordon, the students were no longer willing to give the United States its usual pass for its excesses. What's more, they were only too happy to contemplate the alternatives that Gordon offered. "And they would say, yeah, we'd take China. Germany? Yeah, Germany is fine. France? Yeah, that would be good," he said. "They were looking at me like, well, of course, we'd rather have those countries more powerful than the United States."

The most astonishing fact revealed by the new poll is that 34 percent of Americans agree that Europe should be running the show. Let me repeat this: one-third of Americans want Brussels, not Washington, to be calling the shots on the global arena. This trend is a good bit more significant than the six-fold increase in traffic to the Canadian immigration website immediately after the November elections. It buttresses the findings of previous polls that have shown clear majorities of Americans dissatisfied with U.S. unilateralism (and a much higher rate of disapproval of U.S. foreign policy in other countries).

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The difference between the Bush administration's military plans and that of the EU: Europeans want to use military force to avert catastrophe, rather than precipitate regime change. It's about peacekeeping not imperial expansion. This isn't to say that European governments are anywhere close to angelic. The French refusal to intervene to prevent the Rwandan genocide, British arms deals with repressive African states, and Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's chest-thumping remind us of that Europe has its own share of warts. But on balance, the Europeans do offer a distinct alternative to the United States' current slash-and-burn model of foreign policy.

http://www.alternet.org/story/21753/