The Germans Have a Word For It

Welfare States, Immigration and Schadenfreude
Europeans’ continental pastime is lecturing Americans on the sins of our policies and our culture. Too fat, too warlike, too rich, too unequal, too boorish–the stereotypical American is an obese foreigner-hating SUV driver who listens to “Rock the Casbah” as he drives to his job at Expoiters-R-Us. On his way home (via the Klan meeting), he probably spits on a poor person before adjusting his massive belt buckle and his ten-gallon hat.
After being confronted with this view once, or twice, or three hundred times, one’s attitude toward anti-American screeds (like this hysterical article in the Independent (U.K.) that blames the U.S. for all Haiti’s wrongs) turns from interest in a new theory, to patient toleration of a broken record, to kneejerk recitation of European sins (imperialism, appeasement, Rwanda, Boy George). It is difficult to believe, after all, that Europeans have solved all the world’s problems, and done so while somehow maintaining that haughtiness, arrogance and ignorance that–as one believes if one reads only, say, the Independent–only Americans possess.
Two articles about Europeans’ reactions to the demise of ethnic homogeneity have caught my eye recently. Weekly Standard discusses the changes to Sweden’s famed welfare state, which the Standard links to increased immigration from countries where nobody is tall, blond and blue-eyed. Today’s New York Times discusses the increasing emigration from the Netherlands, which the Times’ reporter hypothesizes is linked to the immigration to the Low Countries by people from countries where they do not traditionally build dykes and wear wooden shoes.
Stories like these warm the cockles of the expat heart. At last! The Europeans are getting some of their own back! All those years of yearning to have someone expose the underside of the happy Euro-welfare state have not been in vain. It turns out that those Europeans are as bigoted, self-centered and miserly toward people who don’t look like them as … well, as people from Alabama, but let’s pass that over.
But sober thought reveals that it is precisely correct that the Europeans are getting some of their own back. Just as articles like the Independent’s are grossly unfair, and just as that genre of article is persuasive only to someone already indoctrinated in the idea that the United States is Amerikkka, the White House occupied by corporate puppets, the machine something to be raged against, so is my reaction to these Eurobigot articles conditioned by my own desires about what I want to be factual.
The Times article, for instance, mentions that emigration from the Netherlands has reached about 40,000 people per year. From a population of approximately 16.5 million, that leaves a mere 16.5 million Dutch who have stayed in their home country. And the problems with Sweden’s welfare states (as with all welfare states) likely have far more to do with the size of the commitments the social democrats made in building their social programs and the shrinking resources with which to meet those commitments. In both cases, of course, it’s true that the precise manner in which societies reconcile themselves to new challenges is telling–but that is far from confirming the most anti-Europe interpretation of events, that the whole continent is inhabited by racists and xenophobes. There is undeniably a pervasive racist and xenophobic streak in Europe, but on the other hand, many Americans drive SUVs and vote against social welfare programs.