Z BIGNIEW L EWICKI American Studies: Divided Europe’s Last Stand? It seems that America is a very useful concept to manifest a presumed superiority over other nationalities: (we) the British, of course, understand Americans best, and (we) the Germans, almost as well; East Europeans, however, as next-of-kin of the “dirty emigrants” of the turn of the 19 th century, do not really qualify. I fully realize this is a politically incorrect statement, the verity of which is likely to be openly denied - and secretly confirmed. Does it also apply to the academia? Quite possibly so: being cut off from America, and from free academic life, for some 50 years (which was also when American Studies was formed) cannot be without consequences. I realize there is nothing personal about it (at least as a rule): my colleagues do not make a statement about me but about the whole group, defined in geographical, and first of all cultural terms. Even if the situation is similar in other fields of the humanities, this would not diminish the irony: it is through American Studies that the division of Europe can be clearly perceived. It is a very consequential paradox that the so-called process of European unification started at the time when Europe was divided: irrevocably, it seemed, and decisively. From its inception, therefore, the idea of unified, or united Europe concerned only one part of it, which came to be known as Western Europe, and included countries of western and southern parts of the continent (plus the British Isles). These countries owed their post-war prosperity to the Tehran-Yalta arrangements which put them out of Uncle Joe’s reach and within the scope of interest and assistance of Uncle Sam. The United States together with its funds, soldiers, and ideals have been very much a part of the (West) European reality for over six decades by now; in contrast these were all banned from the “Eastern” Europe for some fortyfive post-WWII years. However, the cultural division of Europe into two unequal parts is not a result of the WWII. For centuries, the eastern part of the continent was perceived as the domain of snow, vodka, Asian mentality and the ornately outdated Russian Orthodox church, while the southwest portion was presumably that of sun, wine, the Enlightenment, and Roman Catholicism with its dignified opposition, Protestantism. The post-1945 divide, however, differed from previous periods by its impenetrability. It was no longer a case of intuition, of perceived and interpreted signals, but of borders, guards and the iron curtain. It was onto such 250 Z BIGNIEW L EWICKI Europe that the United States descended, for the first time in its history. Its presence in Western Europe was real, for many all too real, with the “overpaid, oversexed and over here” catchphrase indicating the exasperation of at least some (West) Europeans at the hordes of young barbarians. Their Mid-Western manners, preference for the new and the mass-produced over the patina and historical significance was justifiably unnerving and soon produced another battle-cry of “Yankee, go home.” Or, to be more precise, go to your bases from where to protect us, but stay away from our streets and our women. And so was born the post-war anti-Americanism, one of the strangest sociological phenomena in view of what the (West) Europeans owed to American soldiers and John Marshall. The case of East Europe was equally irrational, though in reverse. There was no Marshall Plan money there, and no American soldiers, because our leaders and commanders had so decided. And yet this absence of the “real thing” produced a decisively positive, idealized concept of the United States, its might and its hope for the world. There was nothing wrong with imagined American soldiers, and life-saving UNRRA packages were stuffed with American goodies. Instead of being resentful at the Yalta sellout, the populace of these countries nurtured a naïve belief that very soon the good American President would annihilate Lords of the Kremlin and thus bring back happiness and prosperity to his faithful admirers on the Danube and the Vistula. In other words, Americans, who liberated France and many other countries, and freed Germany from Nazism, began to be perceived there as occupiers rather than liberators - while East Europeans, whom Americans had failed, continued to perceive them as potential liberators in whom all hope was vested. At the same time, crowds of Americans also arrived in Europe, which was being discovered not just by a Jamesean elite, but also by Lewisean goodnatured “simple folk.” Parallel to this, America encouraged Europeans to discover the New World - not as emigrants, but as observers and commentators. For much of its history, particularly in its early formative stage, anti-Americanism was fed by people who had never visited the country or who made just a perfunctory visit. The sentiment was thus fed by misinformation and/ or ignorance. After the WWII, even if America may have been a little too distant and too expensive for some Europeans, its domination of popular culture and mass media made the country an almost daily presence in (West) European homes. The reciprocal process of getting acquainted was democratic and portended an “era of good feelings” between the two worlds, once tension connected with the GIs diminished. The process was not always easy or sensible: the French parliament debated the menace of Coca-Cola and there were warnings in Italy that the American Studies: Divided Europe’s Last Stand? 251 drink would turn children’s hair white. Still, the other part of Europe could only hope for an opportunity to test those dangers. Instead of being subjected to the danger of Americanization in the form of Coca-Cola, chewing gum and Rita Hayworth movies, East Europeans were protected by several layers of almost impenetrable curtains. Deprived of real-life, tangible features, America became to them what it once had been for Thomas More: the land where Utopia could materialize. It is not that the process was homogenous throughout Western or Eastern Europe: feelings about America in Germany were different than in Great Britain. The United States was off-limits to Bulgarians until the 1989 events, while in Poland American literature started to be translated and published in 1956; soon after that, a Polish-language, U.S.-financed glossy monthly Ameryka entered the market, bringing stories and color pictures about American life and culture. But there were always limits: no political articles in the magazine, and no praise for the United States elsewhere. Still, there was progress. The first Fulbright exchange in American Literature took place at Warsaw University around 1960, and the first separate American literature section, with its own faculty and students, was created, again in Warsaw, in mid-1970s. Mimicking its history in the United States, though for different reasons, American Studies in post-communist countries started as studies of American literature. It was the only “neutral” field, and thus the only non-ideological academic venue to study the United States (though even this was not the case in countries such as the late GDR). To study political science, economy or even history involved identifying with the communist ideology, which for many was an unacceptable price. Still, when the concept of American Studies began to take shape as much more than enriched studies of literature, and as it made its way across the Atlantic, it reached only West Europeans, who had been in any case exposed to American values, and bypassed East Europeans, who would have profited most from the new holistic approach. There were, of course, many more significant areas where the iron-curtain division left one part of the divided Europe far apart from the other one, but this is no consolation. Catching up is always derivative: one does not start at the original point of departure but has to adapt to whatever part of the debate has already taken place - even if they do not agree with the results. And so, paradoxically, as Europe takes political decisions to enlarge and unite, our opinions about the United States and thus our approach to American Studies continue to keep us apart. Moreover, the role of American Studies in the United States has shifted over the last decade or so from being source-centered to being societycentered. Scholars are not satisfied with describing America, they aim at being part of the force that changes it; values are not only to be distilled and described, they are also to be improved. Soon after the 2004 election, I 252 Z BIGNIEW L EWICKI went to the annual American Studies Association meeting. Just about every session I attended included the ceremony, practiced far too frequently to be considered coincidental, of starting a paper by describing one’s dismay at Bush’s victory, or one’s despair over it which led variously to depression, refusal to read newspapers, or bursts of energy expended at organizing recount drives in Ohio. This came as no surprise to me, though. A few months prior to the 2004 election I visited several American Studies programs at U.S. universities and I was the only person at various meetings making a case for Bush. But the shocking element was that several faculty members approached me afterwards to say that they shared my views, but they felt they could not express them among colleagues for fear of being ostracized or worse. This is where the East European experience is particularly useful. The political correctness frame of mind, which informs so much of public and academic discourse nowadays, implies refusal to acknowledge the right to hold opinions considered inappropriate by the self-styled thought police. The intentions may be, and presumably are, noble and worthy: the need to educate, to eradicate prejudices, to improve the world. The results, however, are invariably censorship and, in one form or another, persecution: red-baiting style or social-realism style. The character of our profession is such that we frequently disagree with our colleagues - not only on trivial matters, but first of all on substance. It is too banal to state that there is nothing to discover in the humanities, but a lot to discuss, and it is of paramount importance to compare contradictory views. A colleague of mine, definitely not a Bush fan, recently spent some time at an American university, and reported his dismay at being unable to meet not just anyone who supported Bush, but anyone who would know someone who supported Bush. He described this not with glee, but with dismay because if there is something that scholars from “former communist countries” realize so much better than their colleagues, it is the danger of unanimity at the university. Whenever it happens, it is by definition forced and unnatural. Such concerns are rarely heard in the “Old Europe,” not because its inhabitants are less concerned with basic liberties, but because they may never have been subjected to the experience of being a silenced minority. And yet the question of the proper balance between the interests of the majority and the minority has been regarded as crucial by many theoreticians and practitioners of politics, including famous arguments in the Federalist Papers. We negotiate the American diversity “a la carte.” This is indeed where the true satisfaction with being an East European Americanist lies: in attempting to reorganize and improve one’s own society by suggesting it American Studies: Divided Europe’s Last Stand? 253 follows the best of American solutions and norms. Professional integrity, work ethic, community spirit, are among values that many societies would do well to adopt. We select what we believe is right, and reject what is not - not as “wrong” but as “irrelevant.” We project our hopes and fears onto America and react to these projections. Is this studying America - or creating it for the occasion? If it is the latter, then we deal with a process whose unfairness is the more blatant for the fact that Americanists can influence considerable home audiences with their interpretations of America - as well as with their misinterpretations of it. American Studies, as practiced abroad, is a tricky field indeed. Scholars and teachers of this discipline know much more about American civilization than anyone else in their respective countries, and can identify America’s ailments and imperfections much more easily than anyone else. Should we thus be trying to find faults with America and display them to those at home who would enjoy such spectacles - and who do not appreciate the broader context in which such imperfections complement, but do not dominate, the larger picture? But, then, if we hesitate to do so, would we not be exercising self-censorship, the vilest form of freedom denial? Or, reversely, is it our duty to try and explain America to America-bashers: perhaps a thankless task, but can we shy away from it? It is one thing, and an easy one, to join a crowd chanting “Down with Bush,” and another, and much more demanding, to try and explain why America and its duly elected president are doing what they are doing. We of all people know very well that the money America spends abroad could be used for any number of domestic programs. So - will America continue to be involved in the world, which means not only military interventions, but also various forms of assistance to foreign countries and individuals? I may have missed something, but I am yet to see a satisfactory European analysis of how to combine our need for America’s presence as the great equalizer (see Bosnia) with our desire to tie America’s hands whenever it suits a European country or two. The recent spate of controversy concerning American foreign policy deserves a closer analysis from the point of view of what our reactions to America tell us not so much about the United States but about ourselves. The western part of continental Europe is almost unanimous in its criticism of George Bush and his policies, while eastern Europe is significantly more supportive of his actions. If we disregard condescension, this difference will outline the fundamental difference in how we perceive our respective position in the global framework. Eastern Europe is much more uncertain about its position and future, much more aware of the instability of the present political situation. With obvious simplification we may say that it is the Cold War situation a rebours. Then, Eastern Europeans were convinced 254 Z BIGNIEW L EWICKI that whatever was, was permanent, while Western Europeans needed the United States to reassure them that there would be no change. Nowadays, the once insecure Westerners fear no danger from the East, and therefore are unwilling to put up with the inconvenience of following America’s lead and of hosting the GIs. Easterners, on the other hand, live in the state of flux: the Soviets are gone but Russians seem to enjoy applying various kinds of pressure, including the energy blackmail. The Western Europe, however, is perfectly oblivious to the plight of their Eastern neighbors. It is hardly surprising then that endangered countries, and people, turn to the United States. It is a rational alternative, and it corresponds very well to the naïve but real belief in the American Dream; besides, the United States has helped many of East European countries in the past and has built up considerable confidence credit with them. Still, this is perhaps where the views of Western and Eastern Europeans come close to each other: the fear of American domination which presumably leads to less than full sovereignty of countries that deal with the United States. In times of danger, recently as well as in a more distant past, countries have been willing to abdicate part of their sovereignty and trade it for protection. This was certainly true about Western Europe in the bipolar, Cold-War world. The fall of the Soviet Empire augured the era of peace and security with the resulting resentment of outside domination. What changed was the West European perception that American presence was no longer accepted as necessary for security, but resented as tantamount to domination. East Europeans, on the other hand, are not above accepting such pressure - perhaps because they have not seen much of it yet. East Europeans (Poles? ) and West Europeans (Germans? ) differ in their views on just about all aspects of America: arts, politics, security, economy; there is hardly an area where our perceptions are similar. And yet, even if a united Europe remains a vague notion somewhere on the horizon, our common historical experience (so what if sometimes on opposing ends) should call for a more unified understanding of an entity so much removed, in space and in historical time. It is not the case, however. This may be so because of the feelings of Europeans towards one another: some condescension, some resentment, inferiority and superiority complexes. Our respective attitudes towards the United States tell us a lot about how we, as Europeans, differ - at least Westerners from Easterners. The United States still commands considerable allure for East Europeans, which informs the general perception of that country by the population of former Comecon countries. Very frequently, it is not just the question of money: people continue to choose a risky adventure in the United States mostly because the American Dream is very much alive beyond the former Iron Curtain. The myth not just of making a bundle, but of limitless pos- American Studies: Divided Europe’s Last Stand? 255 sibilities, open space, a new beginning. One would be hard pressed to find Germans who would be willing to go down that road today, and the French have never been attracted to it anyhow - but many Poles, Slovaks or Hungarians still hope to start it all over across the Atlantic. This very positive vision of America also informs the public discourse of the subject. It is not that the general audience in those countries would accept only praise but that an excessively negative presentation would be looked at with suspicion, made even more pronounced by the fact that several decades of America-bashing by communists made people wary of such criticism. Particularly so that the attitude has carried over to the present Russian state, where a popular movie includes a hit song “Kill the Yankee.” Putting down America is perhaps understandable as a way to raise the self-esteem of one’s own nation; it also draws the attention of the criticized power. The case of France is particularly telling here. Apart from great many penetrating French studies of American colonies and the United States, the line of insensitive and plainly wrong French comments on everything American is unmatched. From early “arguments” (which Franklin and Jefferson tried valiantly, if also in vain, to refute) that both human beings and animals degenerate and shrink in size once they move to North America - to Jose Bove trashing a McDonald franchise. All this may of course be a result of the residual frustration of the French with their own culture - which they vent on Americans. But the Americans oblige by paying close attention to all this, much as one keeps touching an aching tooth: pain confirms we are alive. At the same time, does anybody care about East European views on the subject? To take just one example. The three most recent books on Anti- Americanism 1 discuss at length such attitudes in Germany and in France, in Latin America and in Asia, in Canada and in Africa. In none of them there is even a single mention of Eastern Europe as a cultural concept or of any of the constituting countries. The French or German attitudes are presented as “European perspectives,” with occasional sprinkles of Italian or Spanish views. One would think that Poland’s strong pro-American attitudes are sufficiently out of the ordinary to merit a least a brief discussion - particularly that they are frequently countered inside the country with a tendency to compare the U.S. to the former U.S.S.R as perpetrators of “equally” insensitive domination. But all this (and the same point can be made of other 1 Jean-Francois Revel, Anti-Americanism, Encounter Books, San Francisco 2003; Barry Rubin, Judith Colp Rubin, Hating America, Oxford University Press 2004; Understanding anti-Americanism, ed. with an introduction by Paul Hollander, I.R. Dee, Chicago 2004. 256 Z BIGNIEW L EWICKI East European countries) seems to matter so much less than one article by an obscure French essayist in a little magazine. Schade. Eastern Europe does not have a uniform history as regards its experience with the United States. There is Hungary, with its resentment of the American inaction in 1956; there are countries that were part of the Axis front, and there are countries, such as Poland, but also Czechoslovakia, that have never been enemies with the United States. Moreover, some of these countries owe their renewed national existence to the United States and President Wilson, while others may feel they had lost their status because of American intervention in Europe. But, then, Denmark and Portugal, or the Netherlands and Switzerland - or what grounds can we treat them as part of the same whole? The concept of Europe becomes more meaningful only when we imply its distinctiveness from, say, the concept of America. But the difficulty does not stop here. Is the European matrix, however different from its American counterpart, the same for Great Britain and Italy? And if not, how exactly do they differ? There is no question that such diversity continues to exist in Western Europe despite the fact that long membership in NATO has been a significant unifying factor. Can this diversity ever become a true unity? After all, the Pilgrims and Pennsylvania colonists differed by much more than they shared, and yet the adjustment process has been successful. This, however, may never happen in Europe - simply because while the American process was a classic bottom-up procedure, the European approach is just as clearly a top-down approach, whereupon governments agreed to bind together while populations of respective countries are much cooler to the idea of cultural unity and the unity of external goals. But the main problem is probably the lack of a unifying idea, of a common message that could help build the unity and dictate the attitude to the outside world. Not many colonists ever heard the phrase “errand into wilderness,” but great many of them knew that this was what they were doing; “no taxation without representation” and Manifest Destiny were the common denominators of how the country was born and grew. Unlike America, Europe is long on constitution but short on common and appealing concepts that could rouse people for trying and uniting common tasks. European Americanists, Eastern as well as Western, may not be able to do much about this particular fact, but there are fields where we can be most relevant to the topical issues of our countries and the United States. One such issue is immigration. The discussion of the problem is severely hampered by the constraints of political correctness. Nevertheless, Samuel Huntington is not shy about stating his views in his latest book, and goes straight to the heart of the problem, as so does Victor Davis Hanson in Mexifornia. American Studies: Divided Europe’s Last Stand? 257 How important is the issue of one common language for the unity of a nation as diverse as the United States? Is it also relevant for Europe as it tries to develop an alternative educational and professional system for those who refuse to learn the language of the land? And how about immigrants who insist on maintaining their own cultural and value systems, while disregarding or rejecting those of the country in which they have arrived? It seems that Americanists can be very relevant to their own communities if they partake in such discussions drawing on their knowledge of where the United States is headed nowadays. But also reversely: is it not an ideal place for European Americanists to become relevant for the American debate? It is unrealistic to expect Americans to draw on European experiences on their own - if only because of their understandable ignorance of a confusing multitude of such experiences. More than anybody else, we should be capable of translating and explicating how such dilemmas are handled, or mishandled, on both sides of the Atlantic. Another set of issues of cross-Atlantic relevance is racism, xenophobia, various ethnic prejudices. Not so long ago, after WWII and well into the 1960’s, Europe, having learned its lesson, seemed to be assuming more and more tolerant attitudes, while anti-Semitism, anti-Irishness, not to mention plain old racial segregation, were so much present in the American landscape. A generation or so later, such prejudices are absent from the public forum in America, and even in private they enjoy less and less acceptance, as proved recently by the fact that the Catholicism of Kerry or the Jewishness of Lieberman were hardly an issue in the voting booth. In the meantime, various European countries seem to move in the opposite direction. There is sufficient evidence coming daily from all corners of Europe to prove that instead of overcoming our prejudices we allow them to grow. Many features we admire in the growth of American civilization cannot be translated into the European reality. But this is one area that begs to be investigated, presented, implemented - and people best qualified to do so are the European Americanists. Too often, however, we allow ourselves to drift along with the easy adage that Europe is “traditionally tolerant” while America is “historically racist” and can offer nothing we can learn from. These may be some of the areas where we can, and perhaps should put more effort in acting as intermediaries between the culture we were born into and the culture we came to know professionally. After all, this cannot be said about politicians, or even diplomats, whose knowledge of other countries is more often than not merely perfunctory. Being familiar with both types of experience: as citizens of Europe, Eastern or Western, and as scholars of America we should be more engaged in debates on issues that are of common interest to both cultures.