The U.S. Helped Make Europe. Can It Break It?
After the end of the Second World War, every major city in the U.S.-occupied zone of Germany had an Amerika Haus. People who might be lucky to have a roof over their heads gathered there to read American books and periodicals, watch American movies, listen to lectures about America, tap their toes to jazz from America. This enterprise, funded at first by the U.S. Office of Military Government, and later by the U.S. Information Agency, was obviously meant to present America in a positive light to men and women who had been fed Nazi propaganda for more than a decade. It was another propaganda exercise, then, but not a heavy-handed one, propaganda under the mantle of liberty and democracy.
Unlike in the aftermath of the First World War, when the Allies decided that the defeated enemy had to be punished for its sins, the goal this time was to educate the former Axis powers on how to be good democrats who would learn to embrace such vaunted American values as individual freedom and free enterprise. Much store was set on culture. This was not without its absurdities. A zealous young U.S. Army education officer in Japan believed that teaching locals the art of square dancing would contribute to their democratization. In the same spirit, the American occupation government instructed movie studios in Japan to show a Japanese couple kissing onscreen, as a public display of affection, American style. The resulting sensation was such that May 23, 1946, the première date of this film, “Twenty-Year-Old Youth,” came to be celebrated as Kiss Day.
Europeans who had lived under Nazi occupation did not have to learn how to kiss in the movies. But America’s effort to create a global alliance of democracies under U.S. tutelage and military protection involved a great deal of cultural and political education, or reëducation, and the endeavor became even more pressing once the Cold War began. There was concern that demoralized and impoverished Europeans—artists and intellectuals especially—would be drawn to the blandishments of the Soviet Union. So the C.I.A. financed reliably pro-American political parties for decades, along with arts festivals, exhibitions, concerts, and literary magazines such as Der Monat, in Berlin, and Encounter, in London. Much of this was done with an American mixture of political self-interest and idealism. (Intent on countering “Reds” in the C.I.A. and other U.S. foreign-policy institutions, Senator Joseph McCarthy sent his trusted lawyer, Roy Cohn, to Germany at the height of the Red Scare to weed out subversive books from Amerika Haus libraries.)
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One of the great creations of Pax Americana was what the political scientist Glyn Morgan calls the American Europe. (He shares his discipline’s fondness for denoting concepts with italicized phrases.) In his short and punchy new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Europe” (Polity), he argues that American Europe was a new order imposed by the United States. British, Dutch, French, Belgian, and Italian empires had to be dissolved, the thinking went, to make way for an integrated, democratic Europe. This would also address the perennial German problem: embedded in a federal Europe, Germany would become a country its neighbors could safely live with.
To bring all this about, and to counter the allure of Communism, European economies first had to emerge from the rubble of war and regain their strength as quickly as possible. Hence the Marshall Plan, which was designed to encourage European integration. The diplomat and foreign-policy thinker George Kennan wrote, “We considered that one of the long-term deficiencies of the European economy as a whole was its excessive fragmentation . . . the lack, in particular, of a large consumer’s market.” But Kennan’s vision for Europe wasn’t merely economic. To overcome the nationalist rivalries that had caused two devastating wars, he urged the United States to help depressed Europeans recover their “spiritual vigor” as a self-confident collective entity. As Morgan explains, this meant that “U.S. support would force the British, the French, and other nations to think of themselves as Europeans rather than as nationalists inhabiting separate nation-states.”
The originality of Morgan’s book lies in its claim that European unification—first the European Coal and Steel Community, in 1951, then the European Economic Community, in 1957, and finally the European Union, in 1993—was more an American creation than a European one. Postwar Europe, he argues, was made in America’s image.
The conventional view holds that the main architects of European integration were the Frenchmen Jean Monnet, a mild-mannered, mustachioed Cognac merchant and banker, and Robert Schuman, an austere, devoutly Catholic statesman from Lorraine. The Schuman Declaration of May 9, 1950, which proposed placing French and German coal and steel production under a common authority, is still commemorated by the E.U. as Europe Day. The Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany Konrad Adenauer, the Italian Prime Minister Alcide De Gasperi, and the Belgian Socialist statesman Paul-Henri Spaak are likewise counted among the European founding fathers.
Winston Churchill himself favored some form of European unification, though without Britain, which, like the United States, was to remain outside it, as a benevolent and, naturally, superior power. This became a sticking point in the much hyped (especially in Britain) “special relationship.” From Churchill onward, many British leaders clung to fantasies of global power and splendid isolation from Europe, fantasies that culminated in the disaster of Brexit. By contrast, most American Presidents, the current incumbent aside, preferred Britain snugly embedded in Europe, where it could serve as a dependable American ally.
Morgan sets out to revise this familiar genealogy of European integration. In his telling, Monnet and Schuman did not originate the idea. Franklin D. Roosevelt had long opposed European imperialism, much to the chagrin of his wartime ally Churchill, and Morgan maintains that members of the Roosevelt and Truman foreign-policy establishments were devising plans for a unified Europe well before European leaders embraced the project. In 1943, William C. Bullitt, a senior U.S. diplomat, argued in a letter to Roosevelt that the United States would “be obliged . . . in setting up administrations in occupied and liberated countries, not only to set up democratic administrations but also to lay the groundwork for a combination of democratic governments in Europe strong enough to preserve democracy in Europe and keep the Bolsheviks from replacing the Nazis as masters of Europe.”
Walt Rostow, who became Lyndon B. Johnson’s national-security adviser during the Vietnam War, had also been working on postwar plans to incorporate Germany into the rest of Western Europe by means of economic coöperation. Morgan believes that Rostow came to that idea first, before Monnet, and, indeed, that Rostow passed his views on to the Frenchman, who spent much of the war in Washington, D.C.
Morgan is right that Americans played a hugely important role in shaping postwar Europe, but he underestimates the European contributions, not least when he casts Monnet as Rostow’s pupil. The idea of pooling natural resources to prevent another war between major European powers, especially Germany and France, had been championed at the end of the First World War by a French politician named Étienne Clémentel. He called for a “new economic order” based on interdependence. His assistant was Monnet, who had suggested combining the British and French economies to defeat Germany in the Great War. In 1940, when France was invaded once again, Monnet went further and suggested a Franco-British union. None of this came to pass, but it’s clear that Monnet didn’t need Rostow to fire his pan-European imagination.
Nor were the Frenchmen alone. One of the more interesting and eccentric unifiers was the half Japanese Austro-Hungarian Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi. His book “Pan-Europa,” published in 1923, sparked the “Pan-Europa movement.” In his dream of pan-European leadership, those in charge would not necessarily be men of high birth but gentlemen imbued with an “aristocracy of the spirit”—an idea that was perhaps not so very far removed from Kennan’s notion of “spiritual vigor.” Coudenhove-Kalergi’s movement, too, came to little. But his proposal that Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” serve as the European anthem endured; it is still played on official E.U. occasions.
In 1941, Italian antifascists produced the Ventotene Manifesto (named for a small island where they were interned), calling for a federal socialist Europe. German dissidents inside Hitler’s Reich, such as the Kreisau Circle, associated with Helmuth James von Moltke, who was executed by the Nazis, in 1945, for “treason,” also drew up plans for a postwar European union. Many members of his circle were fellow-aristocrats, some of them kindred spirits of Coudenhove-Kalergi. And the Nazis themselves had pan-European ideals, albeit under the firm rule of the Herrenvolk.
There’s another side of postwar pan-Europeanism that is hard to associate with the twentieth-century American establishment: the deep Roman Catholic background of most of the founders, which made them receptive to a supranational order. Adenauer, De Gasperi, and Schuman were all devout Catholics, and Monnet, though not a religious man, was born into a pious Catholic family. Adenauer was also a Rhinelander who loathed the largely Protestant and Prussian eastern part of Germany. He is said to have muttered “Asia again” whenever his train crossed the Elbe on the way to Berlin. For him, the West ended at the old borders of the Roman Empire, which had cut through the Teutonic territories. Ancient Rome was not his only model. John McCloy, the U.S. High Commissioner in Germany from 1949 to 1952, recalled that Adenauer spoke of the Holy Roman Empire as if it were recent history.
This Catholic genealogy helped arouse British suspicions of European integration. The journalist Hugo Young, himself brought up Catholic, observed in his book “This Blessed Plot” that such “feelings were not limited to superstition. They acquired a strong political formulation among people who saw in the Schuman Plan the beginnings of a Vatican conspiracy, or even more luridly, an attempt to recreate the Holy Roman Empire.”
In Germany, however, the strongest opposition to Adenauer’s efforts to anchor the Federal Republic in an American-led Western alliance, through European integration and NATO, came from the left rather than the revanchist right. The Social Democrats, led by Kurt Schumacher, a prickly figure who had suffered horribly for resisting the Nazis, were mistrustful of the United States and hoped to reunify Germany as a neutral state at the center of Europe. A defense pact with America was anathema to Schumacher, since it threatened to make permanent the country’s division into two hostile states. Adenauer reached the opposite conclusion. Membership in NATO, he believed, offered the surest route to restoring West German sovereignty and the right to rearm. That it also cemented the division of Germany suited him fine.
German rearmament remained alarming to the French, and for a time a European Army seemed to offer a solution. In 1950, Monnet helped devise the Pleven Plan, which would place West German troops within a supranational European Defense Community. The project foundered in 1954, when the French parliament, still haunted by German militarism, refused to ratify it. West Germany joined NATO the following year.
NATO thus became one of the main pillars of American Europe. Formally separate from the European Economic Community and, later, from the European Union, it strengthened European coöperation while securing American leadership. The Marshall Plan and European integration helped produce three decades of rapid growth and rising prosperity, the period the French call les trente glorieuses, the thirty glorious years. This achievement rested on an American security guarantee. In Asia, the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, signed in 1951, established a comparable arrangement for Japan.
Whether Morgan is right to see postwar Western Europe as largely an American creation, or whether Europeans played a more important role than he allows, American Europe was clearly an élite project. Monnet, Kennan, Schuman, Rostow, and McCloy were the opposite of populists. Some may even have thought of themselves, in Coudenhove-Kalergi’s term, as “aristocrats of the spirit”: highly educated internationalists, accustomed to believing that they knew what was best, who took it upon themselves to design a new world order. American Europe came from the top, and that is why populists in the United States, led by President Donald Trump, and many right-wing politicians in Europe can’t stand the E.U.
Trump has described the E.U. as a “decaying” group of nations, many of which “will not be viable countries any longer.” He has warned that “both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe,” and his National Security Strategy darkly evokes “civilizational erasure.” In a speech commemorating the D Day landings, the Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, proclaimed, “Sadly, today, different European beaches are stormed by different, dangerous ideologies. Beaches in Spain, Italy, Greece, and Bulgaria, boats and men arrive. When will European capitals do something about that invasion, or is it too late?” He was speaking, of course, not of Nazis or Russians but of desperate refugees.
Some of Trump’s chief backers among the tech oligarchs have joined MAGA’s campaign against the E.U. Elon Musk proclaimed on X that “the EU should be abolished and sovereignty returned to individual countries.” He has also called the far-right Alternative für Deutschland Party “the last spark of hope” for Germany. The AfD, like other far-right parties in Europe, shares MAGA’s hostility toward the E.U., and its rationale that an élite supranational project is destroying national identities.
The U.S. President’s disdain for NATO matches his views on America’s European allies. In 2024, Trump quoted an unnamed European leader who had, he said, asked him whether the U.S. would help to protect a NATO ally if it were invaded by the Russians, something the North Atlantic Treaty obliges every member to do. “No, I would not protect you,” Trump had replied. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.” This amounted to more than disdain; it was a repudiation, from Washington, of a central premise of American Europe.
Morgan identifies various reasons for this turn of events. Elements of the American right have long had a soft spot for Russia. He mentions Pat Buchanan, who approvingly quoted Putin’s claim that Russia was defending “traditional values” against a “so-called tolerance” that was “genderless and infertile.” Then, there is the rise of China, which has shifted Washington’s strategic focus away from Europe and diminished NATO’s centrality to American concerns. But the main reason, according to Morgan, for the current Administration’s war on American Europe lies in the domestic culture war. What’s happening in the U.S. today, he argues, “is an intra-elite struggle waged by populist nationalists and technological accelerationists against a Brahmin Left that they seek to topple.”
The principal targets, then, are less European institutions and NATO than the American élites associated with them. “Europe” serves as a shorthand for immigration, welfare states, and free-speech laws that seek to limit the power of new-media moguls to spread disinformation. Morgan calls the emerging MAGA ideology Civilizational America (again, his italics) and argues that it is poised to supplant American Europe. The “social-liberal values of American Europe,” he writes, “will be jettisoned in a new Civilizational America.” It’s an odd phrase; “civilization” usually suggests a broad and pluriform cultural inheritance, whereas Morgan’s Civilizational America combines Christian zeal, economic libertarianism, and ethnic chauvinism. Still, one can see what he means.
The visceral class resentment directed at highly educated élites, whether liberal or classically conservative, especially those who built the institutions of Pax Americana, is real. It also extends well beyond the United States. Right-wing populist parties in Europe—including the AfD, in Germany, the Party for Freedom, in the Netherlands, the National Rally, in France, and Reform U.K.—draw on much the same resentment. This affinity helps explain why J. D. Vance used the Munich Security Conference to lecture Europe’s political establishment on the twin dangers of immigration and the “threat from within,” then met privately with Alice Weidel, a leader of the AfD.
American culture wars are clearly part of the story. European right-wing populism, however, was gaining strength long before MAGA appeared. Since the nineteen-seventies, far-right parties have exploited anxieties about the arrival of former colonial subjects and migrant workers in countries such as France, Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Richard Bessel, in his useful little book “Postwar Europe: A Very Short Introduction,” writes of Belgium’s most extreme Flemish-nationalist party: “By focusing during the late 1980s on immigration, the Vlaams Blok more than trebled its popular vote between the general elections of 1987 and 1991.” In Britain, as Bessel also reminds us, a Labour M.P. was unseated in 1964 by a right-wing Conservative amid a campaign notorious for the slogan “If you want a n—— for a neighbor, vote Labour.”
The nationalist, anti-immigrant, blood-and-soil right returned to the mainstream of postwar European politics only in recent decades, as rabble-rousers on both sides of the Atlantic began spreading panic about a Muslim threat to what they like to call “Judeo-Christian civilization,” and about white Christians being “replaced” by sinister aliens whom liberal élites supposedly coddle to win votes.
Yet this conflict long predates Civilizational America or American Europe. Since the nineteenth century, the Western world has been divided between two rival conceptions of nationhood: the nation as a community of blood and faith, and the nation as a democratic state of citizens with equal rights. Liberals, from Thomas Jefferson to Aristide Briand, championed the separation of church and state. Right-wing nationalists, stronger in some countries than in others, detested liberalism, secularism, and racial equality. In France, the Dreyfus Affair, in the eighteen-nineties, brought the conflict into especially sharp relief. After Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish Army officer, was falsely convicted of treason, the so-called Dreyfusards, secular republicans defending the civil rights of a French Jew, faced anti-Dreyfusards, who rallied around church and soil.
This schism cut right across the West. Indeed, many German nationalists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries didn’t even consider themselves to be part of the West, which they associated with French republicanism, British liberalism, and American capitalism. Thomas Mann—who later changed his mind on such matters—believed that Germany in the First World War was fighting for its unique national soul against a shallow materialist Western civilization corrupted by rationalism. The country that German and other European reactionaries associated most with that idea of the West was the United States. Germans have Kultur, the French have civilisation, and the rootless Americans have only cash. America’s relative openness to immigrants looked like decadence; cosmopolitanism and internationalism were objects of contempt. Now the roles have reversed. America First ideologues, backed by the government in Washington, condemn Europe in pretty much the same terms that European reactionaries once used against the United States. And the U.S. State Department is sponsoring European right-wingers who hate European integration with the largesse it once directed toward Europeans who were in favor of it.
So who represents the West today? Morgan’s Civilizational America? President Emmanuel Macron and others who regard Europe as the last bastion of liberal Western values? Or the right-wing populists in Europe and the U.S. who claim to be defending Judeo-Christian civilization against Islam and other alien creeds? Which vision is most likely to prevail? Morgan’s sympathies are clear. He is a liberal who despises MAGA. But his prognosis for Europe is bleak. “American Europe is over,” he writes. “If Europe is to flourish, it must come to terms with Civilizational America.”
Yes, but how? The Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, spoke in Davos in January about the end of Pax Americana, without once mentioning Donald Trump. His answer was that “middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” What this togetherness would entail was left unclear. Europe is already trying to reduce its dependence on the United States for its security. German arms-makers are expanding production, and defense budgets are rising across the Continent, if unevenly. Yet Germany’s military buildup has stirred anxiety in France, while industrial rivalries have repeatedly frustrated joint projects. And, as Morgan observes, the United States remains so far ahead of Europe financially, militarily, and technologically that “any significant degree of strategic autonomy is clearly a distant and multigenerational goal.” The question is: How is Europe to protect its liberal institutions in the meantime?
If Civilizational America leaves NATO a hollow shell, the E.U., too, might not survive as a viable entity in an age of populist nationalism. Europe could revert to a collection of nation-states ruled by illiberal nationalist governments content to accommodate Civilizational America. Morgan describes this as the “Japanification” of Europe—“single party domination led by corrupted politicians” who will do whatever the U.S. wants in exchange for American protection.
This assumes, of course, that MAGA will continue to dominate American politics and that right-wing populists will gain power across much of Europe. But, even if MAGA does not outlast Trump, future Presidents are unlikely simply to restore the status quo ante and revive Pax Americana under the stewardship of a liberal élite. Nor would such a restoration be desirable. Europeans, and the Japanese, have good reason to reduce their dependence on the United States: the kind of subordination Morgan calls Japanification is humiliating in itself and, by relieving political leaders of responsibility for their own security, corrosive of liberal democracy.
Perhaps all is not lost. The Trump era may yet provoke a backlash like the one produced by Brexit. In 2016, Brexiteers imagined that other European countries would follow their example and cheerily recover absolute sovereignty as liberated nation-states. None did. Brexit instead became a warning against taking the same path. The spectacle of Trump’s America might do something similar. Even some of Trump’s European admirers, including the right-wing Italian Prime Minister, Giorgia Meloni, have begun to distance themselves from him. Trump, in his bellicose and blundering way, may yet end up doing what liberals in the U.S. government once tried so hard to achieve—make Europeans think of themselves as Europeans first. ♦