What Future for US - Europe Relations? By Fjordman

"The relationship Americans have with Europe has always been complicated. On one hand, it is the Mother Continent. On the other hand, there is a skeptical or rejectionist view of Europe in the US, as many European Americans left precisely to get away from the Old World. I sometimes wonder whether the best way to understand this paradox is that the early pioneers wanted to create an improved version of Europe: A country steeped in the best of Europe's cultural and philosophical traditions, but with less of its religious intolerance and elitism.

The most radical rejection of any relationship between Europe and the USA I have seen comes from writer Spengler of the Asia Times Online, who claims that: 'America never, in my surmise, offered fertile soil for the propagation of Western civilization. The founders of Massachusetts came to America because they rejected Western civilization as hopelessly corrupt, and conceived of a New Jerusalem. The Virginians, with their mock-classic temples and slave-based culture of leisure, identified with the Greco-Roman classics. We know who won that argument. America, such as it is, is not really a continuation of Western civilization at all, but a strange throwback to Hebraic rather than Greek origins.'"

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