John points to Alex Massie’s post on growing dissatisfaction with European economic policy on some parts of the American left:

The President has told everyone what to do, so why won’t our friends do as they’re told? Once upon a time – and not so long ago neither – Democrats thought it was important fro friends to speak candidly to friends and stand up for what they thought was right. Now? Not so much. Now friends must remember that their independent analysis of the economic troubles afflicting the globe counts for nothing and they should fall quietly into line and accept their marching orders from Washington.

As I say, how times change. We’ve swapped a military and foreign policy sense of imperial entitlement for an economic one. How refreshing!

What is also worth noting is not only the repetition of the tropes of imperial entitlement and unreasonable expectation of lockstep obedience, but the same accusatory rhetoric that Europeans are not sharing the load. If Europeans (particularly the “old” ones!) were free-riding, dictator-loving weaklings (or whatever) in 2002, they are now supposed to be free-riding, self-destructive neo-Hooverites if they are not on board with dubious Washington remedies. The assumption is always that we propose, and the Europeans dispose, and there can be no backtalk. This was a crazy attitude before the war, when we should have listened to the French and Germans when they warned us that no good would come from invading Iraq, and it is a crazy attitude now when we could probably stand to learn from the German wariness of taking on massive new amounts of debt and spurring wealth-destroying inflation.

One of the great ironies in all this is that it is the fiscal straitjacket of the EU itself that compels leading European states to be less reckless in their deficit spending, and it is the same Union structures that Washington has been only too glad to encourage. This is also the same Union whose expansion Washington has been more interested in than some of its current members. The Turks might take note that their banking system appears to be much less adversely affected by the crisis, and this might not have necessarily been the case had their government had its way in gaining entry into the Union and Turkey participated in the free-wheeling financial bonanza that ate Iceland. While badly underrated during boom times, retaining relatively more national sovereignty can have its advantages.

There is a related misunderstanding that continental economies are somehow not as badly affected by the recession and the financial crisis, which some may want to cite as proof that continental models are preferable to the “Anglo-Saxon” one and others use as an excuse to demand that Europe put up much more than they can possibly afford in new spending. That is, even if European governments were inclined to pursue Washington’s route of stimulus spending, many countries have banks that are just as overleveraged as ours and some that are even more so, which constrains the resouces these states can devote above and beyond their existing welfare outlays. While economic integration will tend to lead to similar political responses over time, there is a lot to be said for sovereign states tailoring their policies according to conditions in their countries and not simply reproducing the responses that may be more appropriate elsewhere. Part of me suspects that some of the administration’s supporters would like to see European governments get on board with additional spending to provide cover and create the impression of a near-universal consensus on how to respond to the recession, so that even if they are wrong in their proposals they can, like the previous administration about WMDs in Iraq, declare haughtily, “Hey, everybody thought this was true!”