Transatlantic Perceptions - a conference
CONFERENCE - TRANSATLANTIC PERCEPTIONS
PROGRAMME
9.00 Introduction and welcome - Anette Villemoes, (Head of the Department of International Culture and Communication Studies (IKK), Copenhagen Business School).
9.10 Workshop 1 –
Perceptions of Europe: a historical perspective
Gry Thomasen (Denmark),
American Perceptions of Europe 1945-1949
This paper argues that the American perception of Western Europe stems from the idea of American exceptionalism in the field of international relations. This meant the belief that the US held the key to the post war settlement of international relations, thus leaving not only the responsibility for creating a lasting peace, but also the right to do so, to America. The perceived threat from Soviet communism had a massive impact on how America was able to exert this responsibility and right, since parts of Europe, in the eyes of the US, was inclined to think of Soviet communism as an alternative to the American way. Furthermore, America looked upon Europe not only as an invaluable part of US national security strategy, but also as the cradle for power politics which caused the two world wars. Therefore Europe was seen as a potential firetrap if not treated properly.
Rikke Schubart (University of Southern Denmark),
European War Theatre, American Heroics: Europe as Cinematiac War Site for American Soldiers
In the American war film, Europe has acquired the status of being the site of war which, viewed from an American perspective, always presents the United States with a motive to go to war, which always presents American soldiers as heroic and the US as a savior nation. It is significant, however, that in almost any other geographical location the participation of the US in war is represented as highly problematic, unwanted and connected to imperialism. This paper compares the representation of American soldiers and American war politics in Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Jarhead (2005), the first a Second World War film on European ground, the second a Gulf War film. The paper is part of a book on the American war film after 1991.
Carl Pedersen (Copenhagen Business School),
The Transatlantic Discord: A History
American exceptionalism is to some extent based on the premise of difference from Europe. In the twentieth century, it has taken the form of a conscious effort to avoid the taint of socialism in domestic policy and an animus against internationalism in foreign policy. This paper will examine how the fear of social and political contamination from Europe has influenced the course of US domestic and foreign policy in the twentieth century. Conservative attitudes toward FDR’s New Deal and liberal internationalism (particularly the Good Neighbor policy toward Latin America) in recent years are to a large extent rooted in the idea that the Roosevelt administration was in the process of initiating a creeping socialism in economic and foreign policy that constituted the Europeanization of American society. A recent example is Amity Shlaes’s revisionist history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man that argues that New Dealers sought to impose a Soviet-style collectivism on the US.
Niels Bjerre-Poulsen (Copenhagen Business School),
Conservative visions of post-war Europe: the Mont Pelerin Society and the reconstruction of Germany
In 1947, economist F.A. Hayek took the initiative to the founding of a transatlantic gathering of advocates of classic liberalism. The society provided an informal forum for economists, politicians and intellectuals with a firm belief in the virtues of the free market. In the following years the Society played an important role in the development of a conservative “counter-establishment” in the United States. However, its greatest influence was probably on the other side of the Atlantic, where it helped formulate ideas for the reconstruction of the German economy. This role was not least due to the membership of German Chancellor Ludwig Erhardt. The paper considers the view of Germany’s role for the future of Europe that was developed at the society’s gatherings, just as it assesses the actual political implementation of its ideas.
Discussant: Pertti L. Joenniemi, (Senior Research Fellow, Danish Institute for International Studies)
10.40
Coffee
11.00
Parallel Workshops
Workshop 2 –
American reflections on Europe
Inger H. Dalsgaard (University of Aarhus),
Defective Mirror: Early American Reflections on Progress and Tradition in Europe
In the 19th century Americans were steaming ahead, laying down railroad lines and putting up telegraph lines and record rates. They had every hope that their new nation could measure itself well against Europe. Their national self-identification with “the practical arts” was meant to result in industrial progress and technological superiority to put especially the English to shame. However, this period also provides evidence of a latent, American inferiority complex, seen in their great defensiveness when making comparisons between their new country and the old world. Well into 19th century Americans habitually republished and avidly digested English books and journals on everything from the newest inventions in “mechanics” to the latest fashions from Paris. Their early contrastive representation of European characteristics (backwards looking, oldy-worldy) - as opposed to the national spirit in the USA (the “go-ahead” nation) - is therefore complicated by a practical experience of the old world as a dominant source of new knowledge.
Ole Helmersen (Copenhagen Business School),
The US and the Governance of Britain
This paper will focus on developments in new public governance and political participation in the United Kingdom and offers a contribution to how people outside the UK are able to understand and interpret the UK’s political development and actions in relation to its partners in the EU and the US. In September 2007, Gordon Brown told the TUC Congress that the UK is in a position to make the 21st century Britain’s century. The ambition of this paper is to try to analyse aspects of the extent to which there is coherence between the presented image of the country and the political underpinning and background to this image.
María Luz Arroyo (Spain),
American Perceptions of European History: the Case of Spain.
This paper considers a book written by the American Ambassador in Spain Claude G. Bowers, My Mission to Spain: Watching the Rehearsal for World War II. He criticized the “narrow course” policy, which the United States and the European democracies adopted towards the Spanish Civil War. Bowers considered that it was an error to sacrifice democracy in Spain in order to seek peace elsewhere. The essential message that Bowers wanted to transmit in his book was that democratic nations ought to defend democracy abroad as well as at home, and not be indifferent in cases such as the Spanish one.
Discussant: Joseph Goddard (Assistant Professor, University of Copenhagen)
Workshop 3 –
The US, Europe and NATO
Asle Toje (Norwegian Institute for Defence Studies),
The end of the post-Cold War era - renegotiating the Transatlantic Bargain 2001-2008
The paper offers a concise, provocative analysis of relations between Europe and America during the tempestuous years between 2001 and 2008. It examines some of the main trends such as NATO’s shift towards becoming a pool for potential coalitions of the willing; the American withdrawal of armed forces and political attention from Europe and the re-emergence of Russia as a first rank factor in European geopolitics. At the same time we are witnessing a momentous transfer of capital and manufacturing capacity away from the transatlantic region which, combined with increased consumption are driving Asian challengers faster, higher, stronger. With the failed US occupation of Iraq and complex situation in Afghanistan, 2008 is a year to take stock of the future of the transatlantic bargain, whether we want to or not.
Roberto Domínguez (Suffolk University, US),
Perceptions and Intellectuals in U.S. Foreign Policy towards Europe
From the beginning of written history, there has existed curiosity towards the role of the so-called “wise-men”, “experts”, “advisors” or “intellectuals” in society. In large part, this interest is linked to the key notion of power and knowledge, the network of socio-political relations and the influence that certain individuals and their ideas exercise on those who possess such power. Based upon this underlying idea, a simple question is pertinent for the purpose of this paper: What are the arguments and debates among some of these “wise” men about the role of Europe in the making of U.S. foreign policy?
Ellen Williams (University of Reading, UK),
US Perceptions of NATO: Before & After 9/11
Following NATO’s war in Kosovo in 1999, US political and military leaders expressed a weary frustration with European members of NATO, many of whom had made only marginal contributions to Operation Allied Force. US perceptions of its European allies in NATO were such that it emerged from NATO’s mission in Kosovo with a firm belief that US operational freedom and flexibility had been hampered by operating within alliance constraints and that for future operations, “no-one is going to tell us where we can or can’t bomb.” Such perceptions were in large part responsible for the US decision following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 to bypass NATO in preference of a strategy based on ad hoc coalitions for the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Despite numerous European offers of help and support following 9/11, the perception of NATO as an inefficient and unwieldy alliance that conducted “war by committee” proved critical to the decision to bypass NATO. Such a decision was greeted by many in Europe with disdain and did little to improve European perceptions of a Bush Administration determined to pursue a unilateralist foreign policy. This paper – which will draw on interviews with key current and former US and NATO officials – argues that US perceptions of NATO following Kosovo were largely – though not entirely – correct.
Discussant: Trine Flockhart, (Senior researcher, Danish Institute for International Studies)
12.15
Lunch
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13.00
Keynote lecture
Stan Sloan -
The Bush administration and Europe
In the wake of the invasion of Iraq, much has been said about a transatlantic rift. Commentators have emphasised what they see as the profound differences between the US and some of the core European countries. In this session, Stan Sloan will look at the realities of transatlantic relations since President George W. Bush took office.
Stan Sloan is the founding Director of the Atlantic Community Initiative and a Visiting Scholar at the Rohatyn Center for International Affairs at Middlebury College. His most recent book, NATO, the European Union and the Atlantic Community: The Transatlantic Bargain Challenged was published by Rowman and Littlefield in August 2005. He began his more than three decades of public service at the Central Intelligence Agency in 1967, serving as NATO and European Community desk officer, member of the U.S. Delegation to the Negotiations on Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions, and as Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Western Europe. In recent years, he has lectured widely on US foreign and security policy and Euro-Atlantic security issues in Europe and the United States.
We are very grateful to the US Embassy in Copenhagen for their generous assistance and support in arranging this event.
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2.30
Coffee
2.50 Workshop 4 –
“Anti-Europeanism”
Bruce Pilbeam (London Metropolitan University),
Eurabian Nightmares: American Conservative Intellectuals and the Islamization of Europe
A key theme in recent America conservative intellectual discourses is the belief that Europe is undergoing a process of Islamization. The purpose of this paper is to examine this fear. Although American conservatives are by no means the only ones to worry about this trend, their particular understanding has some notable features, such as the belief that America might be left standing alone as the last defender of liberal, democratic values. Furthermore, raising the alarm about Islamization is very much a displacement activity for American conservatives - after years of protesting about the threat posed to American identity by unchecked immigration and the influence of doctrines such as multiculturalism, turning the spotlight on the possible undermining of European identity is a way of avoiding their own domestic difficulties.
Helle Porsdam (University of Southern Denmark),
Deconstructing the Enlightenment: the ultimate American anti-Europeanism?
'Human rights? That's what you have in Europe. In the US, we have civil rights.' One area of American politics - domestic as well as foreign - that is directly influenced by American anti-Europeanism is human rights. The long American tradition of 'rights talk' and the American emphasis on the importance of creating a United Nations human rights framework alter the Second World War notwithstanding, the United States has been a most reluctant player on the international human rights scene over the past many years. The U.S. did sign the 'The International Convention on Civil and Political Rights' in the early 1990s, but to this day has still not signed the other major international convention, 'The internacional Convention on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights'. The paper will consider transatlantic dialogues on human rights and the way in which these reflect American attitudes toward Europe.
Mads Fuglede (Copenhagen Business School),
American conservatives and visions of Europe
In the eyes of several American conservative analysts, Europe is in for, at best, a slow gradual decline or, at worst, a rapid collapse. There is a cluster of interlinked factors focusing on European immigration policy that leads to this conclusion: A falling birth rate, uncontrolled immigration of especially Muslims with no wish to be integrated into European societies, a generous welfare state system whose social services are being misused by immigrants, ghettoization by immigrants creating social and political divisions all over Europe and a rise of xenophobia among native Europeans. On top of that conservative analysts argue that a widespread failure of the European education system to educate young immigrants has led to massive youth unemployment and religious or ideological disdain for the host country, which again has spread extremist views among Muslim groups in Europe. This paper analyses how American conservatives are writing the epitaph for Europe.
Edward Ashbee (Copenhagen Business School),
Dissecting “Anti-Europeanism”
In recent years, some influential commentators associated with the conservative thinktanks in Washington DC have painted a profoundly negative and deeply critical picture of the European continent. This has gone far beyond the celebrated descriptions of the French that became familiar as the Iraq war approached. The critique pointed to falling population levels, the failure of assimilation policies, a lack of economic competitiveness, as well as a sense of 'decadence' that it was said recalled the 1930s insofar as it failed to acknowledge the scale of the threat posed to the democratic order. Although the countries of eastern Europe held initial promise they had done little to reshape the overall character of the continent. The paper will consider conservative perceptions of Europe and the extent to which they influenced White House policy.
Discussant:
4.15
Conference ends
Registration: Participation is free; if you wish to attend please send an email to csa.eng@cbs.dk no later than February 18th. Tea and coffee is provided but lunch is at the participants' own expense.
Conference organizer: Edward Ashbee, Center for the Study of the Americas / Department of International Culture and Communication Studies (IKK) - Copenhagen Business School, Dalgas Have 15, DK - 2000, Frederiksberg, Denmark. Email: ea.ikk@cbs.dk. Tlf: (+45) 3815 3073. Mobile: (+45) 6076 5489
Website: www.transatlanticperceptions.com