Reflections on my European Adventure

Part 1, Europhilia

This is the first in an I-don't-know-how-many-part series in which I will attempt to bring coherence to my thoughts regarding my 11-month European adventure.

I recently looked back at my first few posts upon my arrival in Europe, and I was unsurprised to see how sophomoric my views of this continent were. It's impossible to view them as anything other than abject Europhilia. I was in love with this place for no reason other than fresh food, its general place on the political spectrum, and the coffee. But what a neophyte I was! You don't learn a culture on two weeks of vacation. Most likely, you don't even learn a culture in a lifetime. I've spent years in American culture, and I'd say I probably have learned more about it in the year I've spent away from it than in the previous 20 (with a two year hiatus) I spent living it. But here I want to focus more on Europhilia and how my opinion has become more nuanced.

It must be the case that I began to be a bit more realistic in my attitudes towards Europe earlier on in the time I spent here, but the research paper I wrote about racism in football really alerted me to some of the major problems. I had always been aware of the racism, and talked about it with a number of my American friends in Málaga where the lack of diversity was truly startling, even coming from a rather homogeneous background in the US, which I do. But what I found in my research was truly startling - that there was a fascist rally at a football match in December that featured 20,000 supporters of three clubs, none of which were playing (but a Jewish club and a Basque club were), that as late as 2006 there were incidents in Western European countries of fans throwing bananas and making simian at African players, that most teams' supporters sections feature at least one right-wing Neonazi or fascist group, etc., etc., etc. Everywhere I looked the data were more alarming. Eastern Europe, for which there isn't good data, is apparently even worse. More recently, the vitriol of the French public (specifically the right-wing supporters of the party of the Le Pens) at their team's ignominious exit at the World Cup shows how vibrant this racist streak continues to be.

If this understanding of Europe's greater degree of racism was the primary motivator behind my shift away from shameless Europhilia, there were other elements as well including a heightened understanding of the differences between European and American individualism. The US is consistently stereotyped as an individualist society in which each person/family looks out for himself/itself, and I by and large agree with that characterization. The US IS too individualistic, but the myth of European communalism is significantly overblown. It could more rightly be dubbed collective individualism. The rural Spanish farmer has just as much disregard for the urban Spanish lawyer as the rural American farmer has for the urban American lawyer and the small-town German shopkeeper has just as much disregard for the city Germany janitor as the small-town American shopkeeper has for the city American janitor. The difference is that in Europe, because of the greater strength of the unions, the rural farmer cares about other rural farmers and the janitor cares about other janitors. The idea, however, that this translates into some heightened sense of duty to act in favor of the collective good is utter nonsense. The frequency of strikes throughout these countries is high evidence of that.

This isn't to say that the US doesn't suffer from the same issues or that Europe doesn't have many great things going for it. I'm still hugely in favor of the state run system of medicine. Healthcare is a much smaller percentage of GDP in Europe and it's of a higher quality. City planning and infrastructure investment is another area where Europe far exceeds American standards. High-speed rail is now the norm in most of Western Europe, and the airports are newer and more efficient. And of course, the secularization is a treasure. It's lovely to have conversations in which you're not constantly beat over the head with the oddity of not having a standard set of religious beliefs.

And then there's the whole list of stereotypes that educated Europeans harbor about Americans while managing to conveniently overlook the fact that these same phenomena occur in their countries too. Americans are fat. On average we are fatter than Europeans, but not in all regions of the US, just like some European countries are fatter than others. Americans are stupid. There are plenty of stupid people everywhere. Just like those clips of Americans not knowing who George Washington or Abraham Lincoln is, El Intermedio, a Spanish satirical television program found Spaniards who knew nothing about their own country. Americans all eat McDonalds. Guess what one of the most popular restaurants is in Málaga. Americans are loud. Spain just got named the second loudest country in the world (Japan was first).

And yet, despite all of this, I still find something inherently attractive about Europe. I am left thinking that this must have to do strictly with me being able to be comfortable being an outsider. Before, I thought I wanted to be European. Now I realize, I want to be an ex-pat. If I were a European, I would suffer from Amerophilia. I am reminded of an American I met at the economics conference I went to last summer who was married to a German woman. He said to me one day, "the great thing about being married to a foreigner is that she mistakes all your eccentricities for national traits." This is the advantage of being abroad is that your eccentricities aren't important and where you're from is. I know that I would be unusual in any culture, so having this assumed about me from the start enables me to act more freely. This, I believe, is what I find so appealing about Europe. It provides all the accommodations of the developed world and yet I can be accepted as being unusual because I am by nature of my birth.

More to come tomorrow...