Disillusionment over Europe

One of the texts we're going to read this spring is a brief essay by Fareed Zakaria, "The Rise of the Rest", wherein he encourages Americans to embrace, rather than fear, the inevitable loss of global hegemony we face in this era of globalization (and economic crisis). We face grim economic times and the wealth gap in our country hasn't been so wide since the 1920s. What does that mean for a people who are accustomed to so much material wealth? What's more, a decade of war has drained our treasury and undermined our self-confidence. How could it be that we're bogged down Afghanistan, with no conventional "victory" in sight? At what cost? Finally, we now go begging to the Chinese, pleading with them to liberalize their currency. They ignore us.

From New York Review of Books

In "The Fading Dream of Europe", Orhan Pamuk seems genuinely melancholy to be waking from his "rose colored dream" of Europe. He reflects on his own childhood, when he and his Turkish classmates studied the history of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when their teachers emphasized the central importance of separating religion and the state. In the 50s and 60s, Turks wanted to adapt to Europe and assume its successful institutions, not to mention its growing prosperity. Now, however, fewer Turks (and my extension--non-Western peoples more generally) look to Europe as an ideal.

In accounting for his disillusionment, he points at European support for Bush's "illegitimate and cruel war" in Iraq (surprising since most Americans believe that the Europeans [France and Germany mostly] turned their backs on us) and the fact that France spearheaded an effort to block the Turks from joining the EU. The greatest source of frustration for Pamuk, however, is his belief that Europe is "destroying " its own "core values" by rejecting multiculturalism and embracing anti-immigration politics, policies, and prejudices.