"The USA dominates Europeans in their heads above all"
This is extreme softpower - as Henning Mankell showed in his book "The Troubled Man" - the last of the Wallander series.
Just read the last chapters and the epilogue - wiki etc. are, of course, silent about this aspect of the book - but it is really the main one.
Wallander thought about the Swedish soldiers who had been sent to Afghanistan. That would never have happened if the Americans hadn’t asked for them. Not openly, but behind the scenes, just as their submarines had hidden themselves in Swedish territorial waters in the early 1980s with the approval of the Swedish navy and Swedish politicians. Or as CIA operatives were allowed to capture two suspected Egyptian terrorists on Swedish territory on 18 December 2001, and have them returned in humiliating circumstances to their home country, where they were imprisoned and tortured. Wallander could imagine that if Hakan von Enke[1] were to be unmasked, he would be hailed as a hero, not as a despicable traitor.
[1] in the book, Von Enke was a spy for the USA.
@gilles geirnaert - original post
Désaméricaniser la France
L'anomalie américaine en Europe
Lire la suite à: https://lebondosage.over-blog.fr/2024/05/desamericaniser-la-france.html
De-Americanize France
Time is passing and we will soon celebrate 80 years since the end of the Second World War. It will be next year of course. As time passes, however, we have the impression that American influence in Europe has continued to grow since then, especially over the last twenty years. This is a phenomenon specific to Western Europe, as Emmanuel Todd very well underlined in his last book on our decadence. Indeed, in the rest of the world, we are witnessing a sharp decline in American influence. This is true on the level of international relations, but also on the cultural level. To tell the truth, this is completely normal since even if the USA is a large country it only represents a very small part of the world population. A share which is decreasing like that of Western countries in general. The generalization of education and the development of a growing part of the planet, removing the only advantage that remained to the old Western powers, the USA in the lead.
The current development is therefore not a tragedy, it is the consequence of a simple return to normal. It was the world of the 19th and 20th century that was abnormal. The steam power of industry and modern science having given disproportionate power to Western nations. This is probably not the first time that such a phenomenon has occurred, the great invasions or the great empires in history having often had at their base some innovations giving them the advantage against other civilizations allowing very rapid expansions. . The collapse of these empires is therefore often very rapid too, once these technical or organizational advantages are transmitted to other peoples precisely in part because of imperial domination. We are experiencing the end of the imperial era inherited from the early industrialization of the West and of which the American empire is the last representative. By subjecting the world to its domination, Europe then the USA transmitted their ideas and their science to the rest of the world, and now the wheel has turned and the center of the world has moved naturally towards the most populated area and also the best educated on the planet, Asia.
The de-Americanization of the world has therefore largely begun; it was preceded by the weakening of European influence and decolonization. This process is not really linked to a decline strictly speaking of our countries. Decolonization took place in a period of great prosperity in Europe in reality. It is simply that other peoples became aware of themselves, modernized themselves first on the mental level and chased out European empires which in fact only held together due to weak local national feeling. If the English held the much more populated Indies for so long, it was not so much by the quality of their weapons as by the still feudal mentality of the majority of these populations. Otherwise the approximately ten thousand British who then managed India would have great difficulty controlling lands already populated by more than 150 million souls. I insist here on this psychological point, because it is very important for the situation of Europe and of France today..
The world therefore got rid of European tutelage by copying its concepts, its ideas and its science. In this sense, we can say that ultimately colonization still had some positive aspects since it pushed peoples who were still quite backward to modernize. This sometimes violent process of interaction obviously has dramatic effects in human terms and certain peoples have never recovered from colonization. We of course think of the Amerindians, for example, who also had the misfortune of being victims of the vicissitudes of virology, the inhabitants of the New World having been largely decimated by epidemics from the Old World. We therefore cannot describe colonization solely as a cool phenomenon which transmitted Western knowledge to the rest of the world. But that also existed. This double sidedness with something dramatic on one side and something positive on the other is in some ways as old as time. France itself would never have been France if it had not been for Rome and its empire, then its religion and finally the Franks.
Human progress very often advances in this way with different actors going in one direction or the other, but also transmitting technical and organizational progress. Even the Mongol Empire which was extremely brutal, and caused millions of deaths like Baghdad, then the most populous city in the world, which was razed to the ground, had beneficial effects. Gunpowder reached us thanks to the Pax Mongolica and Marco Polo would have had the greatest difficulty traveling to China without the presence of the Mongol Empire. We see in history that everything is not black or white, but a shade of gray far from the Manichean speeches of the TV show talkers who serve us as politicians or journalists. It was therefore the same for Western domination and that of the USA or other powers tomorrow.
The American anomaly in Europe
The end of Western domination is therefore not a catastrophe, but a normalization of global balance of power through a rapid catch-up of the former dominated countries. The weight of nations tomorrow will correspond much more to their demographic weight than what we have known for two centuries. And given the low birth rate in Europe, and even now in the USA, our weight can only decrease very significantly. You have to get used to it, the center of the world is now in Asia. This is already largely the case in science as we have seen recently with patent filings in Asia now representing 68% of global production. If we look at the number of researchers, Asia is gradually gaining the upper hand over Europe and the USA. Once again, this is completely normal given the demographic balance of power. There is little doubt that in 2050 the majority of scientific discoveries and innovation will come from China and India for obvious reasons..
However, if I have just explained quite clearly why the USA is no longer able to dominate the least developed countries as they could still do 40 years ago, this does not explain the strange oddity that we are experiencing in Europe. Indeed, Europe itself has experienced a process of colonization since 1945. Indeed following the Second World War, we can consider that the USA established a colonial order in Western Europe. The great strength of this imperialism is that it has been able to advance in a very camouflaged manner by playing the liberators, at least in appearance. This is not about defending Nazi Germany. This regime was an atrocity and we can be happy to have been rid of it first by the USSR then by the English and the Americans. But it is a completely realistic observation to say that Western Europe was colonized by the USA exactly as Eastern Europe was colonized by the USSR. There is no difference between the two except that the domination of the East was much more assumed by Moscow and much more explicit.
In Western Europe, the USA has never wanted to state this openly. This happened covertly, using networks of influence, corruption and culture in particular as a means of domination rather than direct force. It was a very British method actually. Europe, like India of yesteryear, was under the more or less assertive domination of an Anglo-Saxon power. Washington only allowed itself to use direct force from the 1990s to expand its space of domination to the former space dominated by the USSR. The colonization of Europe was sometimes explicit. We remember the map of Amgot which aimed in particular to make France a direct colony using the dollar as currency. An episode rarely recalled to our fellow citizens who we prefer to make believe that the USA came to Europe to liberate us when it was mainly a question of preventing the USSR from controlling the entire continent, the Nazis having failed to break the communists. Would the USA have intervened if the Nazis had destroyed the USSR? An impertinent question which obviously will never have an absolute answer, but which deserves to be asked sometimes as the behavior of the USA was very troubled in this story. In any case much murkier than what official history tells a little too often.
It is therefore obvious to me that Europe has only been a colony of the USA for almost 80 years. The only exception was the Gaullist period which allowed France to free itself somewhat from US supervision, at least for a time. But this domination today is a little strange, because the USA no longer actually has the means to keep Europe under its tutelage. American domination is not the result of pressure or commercial and industrial domination. On the contrary, the USA has long had trade deficits with Western Europe. If the USA dominates in software and computing, or cinema, these are the rare areas where it actually dominates. The domination of Europe and France is achieved above all through the domination of local elites. This is where we could make the link with the colonization of India for example. It is above all a domination desired by the dominated themselves. Something that the USSR had not managed to do, which had to intervene militarily quite frequently on vassals, particularly in Hungary..
The USA dominates Europeans in their heads above all, it is like the famous phrase of La Boétie, voluntary servitude. The European obsession with America, which in turn is in reality extremely Europhobic, has something strange in a world that has finished with colonialism. Everything happens as if the French, Germans and other peoples of Europe no longer wanted to be themselves. The crisis our continent is experiencing is above all linked to this identity crisis produced by the denial of American domination. No, we are not Americans. The US doesn't care much about the interests of the continent and if they can sink it and drag it into self-destructive wars, they will happily do so. We must already accept the fact that we are French, German or Italian above all. It is by de-Americanizing our identities, by recovering our national spirits, that we can properly prepare ourselves for the world to come. As for the EU, it is the expression of this domination, just like the pathetic Eurovision contest or NATO. It is only by becoming aware of this that we will be able to bounce back and not by throwing ourselves headlong into creating an ersatz USA in Europe through a hypothetical federal Europe. The strength of our continent is its diversity of small nations with their traditions and their originality. Any project aimed at erasing and Americanizing them is only an anti-European work by nature.
#usa #france #europe #sweden #henningmankell #mankell #americanisation