FES Analyse The End of Atlanticism: America and Europe beyond the U.S. Election Michael Lind October 2004 • The claim that the U.S. and Europe are diverging in their values and social structure is a myth. Several factors – the exaggerated power of the American South in national politics, great numbers of poor immigrants, and the role of employers in administering the American wel fare state – make the U.S. appear to be more conservative, unequal and ungenerous than it is in fact. In reality the U.S. is becoming more like Western Europe in its growing secularism, liberalism, and high proportion of the aged to the young. • The long term convergence between the U.S. and Europe in social values and social structure will not produce a transatlantic consensus in foreign policy. In the absence of the Soviet threat, the geopolitical interests of Europe and the U.S. are different in the Middle East and Asia. • In addition to defining U.S. interests differently, Americans will continue to disagree with some Europeans about questions of world order. The U.S. tradition has been one of uni lateralism in the Western Hemisphere, Asia and the Middle East. And Americans traditionally have assumed that liberal democracy can best flourish in a world of sovereign nation states, rather than in a world with supra national structures like the European Union. • Recognition of the geopolitical differences between the U.S. and Europe will lead to the ero sion of the idea of a transatlantic“West.” The decline of the older Atlanticist establishment, the rise of a monolingual foreign policy elite, and the disappearance of the European ethnic diasporas in the U.S. are reinforcing the diminishing interest of Americans in continental Europe. Britain and Israel will continue to be the foreign countries that Americans know best. Herausgeber und Redaktion: Hans Mathieu, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Internationale Politikanalyse, 10785 Berlin, Tel.: 030-26935-838, Fax: 26935-860, e-mail: hans.mathieu@fes.de