OXFORD, ENGLAND -- I was recently standing in line at a McDonald's here, when a drunk Englishman began harassing me. "Is George Bush your hero?" he demanded. I tried to ignore him, but he followed me and a few of my American friends outside. Then, as we walked down Oxford's central street, he grabbed one of my friends by his scarf, turned him around and exclaimed, "If I could get a bomb and get over to the U.S., I'd blow myself up to kill you all."
It's not always easy being an American in Europe these days. But despite the harassment and name-calling we Yankees inevitably endure, I am convinced that anti-Americanism is not nearly as prevalent in Europe as media accounts suggest. Generally speaking, I have been overwhelmed by the friendship of my European peers -- from their outpouring of compassion when I came here just after the September 11 attacks to their concern for my safety now. It is true that a distinct, and unfortunately visible, minority do virulently hate us -- but they are the headline-hogging exception, not the rule. Indeed, the vast majority of Europeans continue to embrace American ideas, American culture and American people.
That is why I am troubled by the recent tendency to lump together all Europeans who oppose any facet of U.S. foreign policy under the one-size-fits-all banner of "anti-Americanism." No doubt there are extremists -- and drunkards -- here who deserve the label. Yet they are the very reason that we must use the term sparingly. When we see all Europeans -- from those who reasonably disagree with us to those who senselessly hate us -- as part of the same phenomenon, we blur the critical distinction between Europe's mainstream and its fringe.
Mainstream Europe shares American values. In the aftermath of September 11, Europeans overwhelmingly supported our common war on terrorism. Today, most Europeans still agree with our campaign to end terrorism and promote world security. Eighty-five percent of Brits, 67 percent of French and 82 percent of Germans believe that Saddam Hussein is a dangerous threat, and majorities in each of these countries support removing him. While many moderate Europeans are against war in Iraq under the current conditions -- primarily because they want more time for inspections -- they fundamentally share our principles.
By contrast, European extremists resent the United States and our beliefs. To extremists, every American icon -- from Starbucks to Britney Spears -- represents a form of American imperialism. And no matter what we achieve, whether in Kosovo or Afghanistan, they fault us. They call Americans bullies even as they seek to bully us. They call the United States a terrorist state even as they romanticize true terrorists.
Distinguishing between Europe's mainstream and extremes is essential to American security. European countries have been central to our war on terrorism -- helping us gather intelligence and working with us to keep the peace in Afghanistan. If we write off Europe's mainstream now because of our frustration with its extremes, it will be at our own peril: America will not have European allies to help fight terrorism or shoulder democratic reconstruction at the very time when al-Qaeda is proliferating in Europe and we are planning to invade Iraq.
But writing off Europe appears increasingly to be a dominant strategy in the United States. At the government level, Bush administration officials such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have inflamed French and Germans by calling them "Old Europe" -- and by declaring Germany to be in the same league as Cuba and Libya in opposing a war on Iraq. At the popular level, columnists such as George Will have contended that European "moral infantilism" towards war on Iraq is a "measure of their monomania -- anti-Americanism."
Europe has certainly been complicit in the recent squabbles that have strained the trans-Atlantic alliance. From the comments of Germany's then-Justice Minister Herta Daeubler-Gmelin, who compared George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, to the recent statement by London Mayor Ken Livingstone that "George Bush has never given a damn about human rights," Europe has matched America's tactlessness with a nastiness very much its own.
We all have a stake in seeing this trans-Atlantic spat end. Americans and Europeans have too much common ground to agree on so little. And our history together -- from liberating Eastern Europe to liberating Afghanistan -- illustrates that the world benefits when we work in tandem.
Mainstream America and mainstream Europe must join together to demand that our leaders abandon the rhetorical ploy of vilifying each other. The Bush administration's criticisms of Europe as a continent of appeasement, and French and German leaders' insistence that Americans are war-hungry cowboys, have widened the rift. The result is a Western civilization divided at the very time when a united front is critical.
No doubt, a minority of Europeans are anti-American, just as a minority of Americans are anti-European. But vast majorities of both share mutual values. Mainstream Americans and Europeans must demand that their elected officials not allow reasonable policy differences to negate larger common bonds. Most of us, after all, are not drunkards at McDonald's.
Seth Green is a Marshall Scholar at New College, Oxford University. He is founder of Americans for Informed Democracy, a group of Americans abroad that seeks to raise awareness in the United States of world opinions.
