fbpx
Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Anti-Europeanism And Languages

What seems to be missing from the reactions to the latest remarks from Romney and Giuliani is any acknowledgement that these two in particular have deployed anti-Europeanism for years.  When Clinton was the frontrunner, Romney was constantly blathering about the evils of Europe that she wanted to impose on us, and his campaign strategy specifically included bashing […]

What seems to be missing from the reactions to the latest remarks from Romney and Giuliani is any acknowledgement that these two in particular have deployed anti-Europeanism for years.  When Clinton was the frontrunner, Romney was constantly blathering about the evils of Europe that she wanted to impose on us, and his campaign strategy specifically included bashing the French as if the last several years had never happened.  The point is that these attacks are putting Obama in an already existing anti-European frame and taking it for granted that their target audiences will associate the perceived and imagined flaws of Europeans with Obama. 

To a degree, these two intend to portray Obama as less American, just as this sort has done to conservative critics of the war who were also against killing Serbs in unprovoked wars, but the important thing to bear in mind is that they believe that anything and anyone that does not hew to the GOP line on pretty much everything is vaguely French.  It is reflexive disdain for Europeans, which is not limited to the jingoists, that makes such framing possible.  In other words, the real problem with the remarks is more the thoughtless anti-Europeanism than just the use of anti-Europeanism to attack a particular candidate.  Any candidate at odds with the GOP will receive similar treatment, which is why focusing on how this affects Obama alone obscures the larger problem with this garbage.  I might add at this point that this is exactly how nationalism continues to distort our political life, but obviously I am trapped in the past and concerned with irrelevant problems. 

Viewed another way, associating Obama more closely with Europe does him a favour in a couple of that his own visit to Europe probably won’t do: it improbably aligns him with the history and civilisation to which Americans belong, and obscures the fact that he has rarely ever visited Europe before.  There is something very odd and ineffective about an attack that tries to make Obama seem strange and alien by saying that he is too European.  

It’s worth noting that Obama was right that more Americans should learn foreign languages, but in the context of addressing bilingualism among immigrants it was unusually clumsy.  As politically stupid things to say go, this is one of the big ones–over two-thirds of Americans support some form of English-only measures.  There are also perfectly good reasons why many Americans don’t bother to learn foreign languages.  For starters, many school systems inundate kids with Spanish classes, despite the far greater professional and scholarly value of German, French, Russian, to which you might nowadays add Arabic, Chinese and Hindi.  This is something of a vicious cycle: Spanish classes are most common, because there are more teachers available for them, and there are more teachers available for them because a huge percentage of beginning foreign-language students in the U.S. study Spanish.  Second, many Americans have no need to learn foreign languages to do their work, and obviously we live on a vast continent where English is the main language of communication for most people, which reduces the practical use of foreign language skills on a regular basis.  To some extent, you could say that I am multilingual, but my knowledge of most languages I have studied is fairly passive and oriented toward reading (which is mainly what I use most of my languages for), and this is partly a function of having few occasions Stateside to use any of them regularly.     

Update: Obama should be careful what he wishes for when urges people to study Spanish:

“Amigo! Amigo!” Mr. Bush called out cheerily in Spanish when he spotted the Italian prime minister. “How you doing, Silvio? Good to see you!”

Advertisement

Comments

The American Conservative Memberships
Become a Member today for a growing stake in the conservative movement.
Join here!
Join here