The Foreignist

This week we took a mini-bus from Split, Croatia to Krakow, Poland. We traveled through Croatia, Slovenia, Austria, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and Poland. It was interesting to see the different attitudes toward European integration that could easily be seen from advertising, construction projects, and border patrol stations. Out of all the places we went, Austria, of course, was by far the most modern looking. Outside of Vienna there were wind turbines for producing electricity for as far as the eye can see. But you can see significant construction projects, new roads, new shopping malls, multiplex cinemas, McDonalds (unfortunately), and all the other signs of progress and unrestrained consumerism popping up all through the former Soviet satellites of Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia. I was very impressed with Slovakia’s border patrol, i.e. they didn’t have any. What used to be the very definition of the iron curtain, border patrol between the east and west, between the now-partitioned Czechoslovakia and Austria, between Bratislava and Vienna, doesn’t even exist anymore. The huge autoport with eight lanes of those little border guard stands stands completely empty. Maybe Slovakia doesn’t have the budget for patrolling their borders with all the new roads they are building. Maybe all of their border agents have to be deployed on the Slovakian border with Ukraine to keep the poverty-stricken on the outside looking in. Or maybe Slovakia has just given up or doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter to me, because this type of border control seemed more in the spirit of a European “Union” than any other country I have been to in Europe.

This drive to Poland got me thinking. Most Europeans, including the ones who already live in the EU, don’t trust the concept of the EU. The recent total defeat of the EU constitution was an expression of an underlying fear. I think the people of Europe want to preserve their unique cultures. The unelected bureaucracy known as the EU has been good for EU countries as far as deregulating trade, making uniform and fair banking standards, improving transportation, and allowing more foreign investment. However, the fear is that these Eurocrats are opening the door to a homogenization of Europe. Europeans are afraid of Europe becoming the McDonalds/Walmart/Home Depot/KFC/shopping mall landscape that America has become, where everything looks the same no matter where you go anywhere in the US. I saw this happening on the outskirts of Krakow. It stinks. It’s one of the reasons people in other countries resent America. In America we are told it is because Europeans hate our prosperity and are jealous. We are told that Arabs hate our freedom and want us all to live under authoritarian Islamic rule. Others hate our Christian values. Blah blah blah. None of these explanations for the anti-Americanism that exists all over the world ring true to me. Living in a somewhat xenophobic country, it’s easy for me to see what it is. They don’t hate America, per se. In fact, most of them like Americans. They don’t hate our freedom, they’re not jealous of our prosperity, and they don’t care about our so-called “Christian” values. They just feel like they are drowning in America. American media dominates all others because we have the richest and largest media market in the world. Now with cheap satellite and fiber-optic communications, it’s easy for us to just send our media to other countries. It’s unleashed a tidal wave of movies, sit-coms, CNN, Fox News, MS-NBC, MTV, NBA, Disney, and reality TV like the world has never seen. The rest of the world feels like it is being propagandized by America, and they can’t turn it off. And the communication is only one way. How many Swiss channels can you get from Comcast or Cox cable? How many German channels can you get on your satellite receiver? Most Americans will never understand where the Germans are coming from because we are hearing their side of story third hand, i.e. the German chancellor says something, the German news reports it, CNN translates it into English and reports it to you, and you listen to their analysis, never actually knowing what was said. I say all of this with skepticism towards both sides. Europeans could just turn off the TV or not go to the movies or could just stop buying Big Macs. But Big Macs are cheap, Hollywood has a budget to make much better produced films, and it’s much less expensive to buy the rights to a US TV series than to produce your own locally. Like I said, there’s no way to turn off the America media. So what’s the solution? How can we reduce the anti-American and even anti-EU sentiment in these areas?

More on that later…