East Meets West

The Narcissism
of Minor Differences

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How America and Europe Are Alike
by Peter Baldwin
Oxford, 336 pp., $24.95

At last, we have the essential complement to Robert Kagan’s Of Paradise and Power, and its subtitle—“How America and Europe Are Alike”—will surely evoke protest from those on both sides of the Atlantic who have become vested advocates of the differences between the United States and Europe and the manifest superiority of one side over and against the other.

Kagan encapsulated his provocative dual thesis, propounded at short-book length in 2003 as transatlantic relations were blowing up over the Iraq war, in the phrase, “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” Critics have been trying to chip away at him ever since, but he really did pin down something essential about how power shapes attitudes and attitudes shape power in the United States and Europe. His argument remains the lodestone for debate over transatlantic relations and will continue to do so until the underlying configurations of power and ideas about power change.

It is hardly on questions of power alone that the op-ed pages on both sides of the Atlantic bristle with accusations predicated on a sense of self-superiority amidst fundamental difference between Europe and the United States: “Jungle capitalism” vs. a strong social safety net, American moralism vs. European sophistication, religious believers vs. the secular heirs of the Enlightenment.