Rift With Europe Runs Deep

PARIS — Europeans think Americans are ignorant, bullying, greedy, trigger-happy barbarians. Americans think Europeans are snobbish, cowardly, bureaucratic, decadent, traitorous wimps.

That, at least, might be the conclusion drawn by a visitor from another planet these days. The Iraq crisis has brought the relationship between the United States and Europe to new lows, unleashing ugly instincts and shrill voices on both sides.

U.S. congressmen and comedians have rediscovered the joys of French-bashing. Antiwar marchers in Spain last weekend declared that President Bush was worse than Hitler and that the United States kills for oil.

It seems hard to believe that the United States and Europe are actually old friends and partners and that their alliance is at the heart of a Western culture based on personal liberty and political democracy.

Optimists, including White House officials, predict that this spat between Europe and the United States will prove temporary -- like their disagreements over Vietnam, or NATO missile deployments during the Reagan era -- and is inevitable among democracies.

But others wonder if the dispute over Iraq is a symptom of a schism that has deepened since the end of the Cold War. Some Europeans foresee a split with the United States, as increasingly hostile cultures disagree over fundamental values and issues: war, guns, the death penalty, the role of religion in everyday life.

"The biblical references in politics, the division of the world between good and evil, these are things that we simply don't get," said Francois Heisbourg, director of the Foundation for Strategic Research, a Paris think tank. "In a number of areas, it seems that we are no longer part of the same civilization. You have a fairly religious society on one hand and generally secular societies on the other operating with different references. What would unite us does not seem to be in the forefront."

Similar sentiments could be heard on the streets during last weekend's huge antiwar marches in Europe. The chants and picket signs denounced the Bush administration with a venom that even outdid the longtime tradition of anti-American rhetoric here.

Andrea, a 24-year-old activist among the million-plus marchers in Rome on Saturday, said he was protesting against the government in Washington, not the people of the United States. The demonstrator, who declined to provide his last name, followed that distinction with the opinion that the Sept. 11 attacks resulted from unjust U.S. policies.