Second paragraph of third chapter:
Hollywood’s hold over Europe was just the beginning. Next, American music started dominating European charts. Then, American TV shows took over European screens. In the early days of the Internet, narratives set by American news media took over Europe’s editorial offices. And over the past decade, social media has spread the American culture wars to the far corners of this continent. With each passing year, the US cultural hold over this continent has grown. Hollywood rolled into Europe in the 1920s like a snowball at the top of a mountain, and now that snowball has become an avalanche.
I’ve known Dave Keating for a long time, and have heard him speak about this book a couple of times. Although originally American, he has become a passionate advocate of the European ideal, and here he not only diagnoses the malign consequences of American domination of Europe, he offers policy solutions to overcome it.
He starts very strongly, by pointing out how American domination of popular culture – film, television and popular music – has crushed the ability of Europeans to compete. Part of this is the natural gravitational effect of art produced by a large, linguistically homogenous market, but he also shows how American policies, both of the government and of the entertainment industry, have contributed to an externally dominated popular culture in Europe. (Oddly enough I felt some resonance with the observations of George Bilainkin about Penang, Malaysia in 1929-30.)
He then goes on to the economic dimension, with subsections on tech and energy policy. He is deeply sceptical of the Turnberry agreement between the EU and US. Looking at the comparative results gained by Canada and China from standing up to the Trump administration’s bullying more firmly than the EU did, it’s not hard to see his point. I have friends who are tech and energy experts who could probably have written books at least as long as this about their respective domains, but Keating sensibly covers them off in a chapter each.
Thirdly, the military / security dimension, where his analysis is that Europe has willingly become a US security protectorate with NATO as the key instrument of it. Here for once I feel that events are moving ahead of Keating’s analysis. A lot of American-based analysts do not comprehend just how seismic Trump’s threats of annexation to Canada and Greenland have been to European perceptions of the USA as a friendly actor. The Ukraine war has also played an important role here. Keating points out that the old European Defence Community treaty, rejected by France in 1954, remains on the table. I would be a bit surprised if future security arrangements go down that particular route, but it’s good to think creatively.
Finally, he has a number of firm policy proposals, most of which are eminently sensible. Picking on the one that doesn’t work for me, I am still not entirely convinced by calls (including his) for a more federal Europe. I want to see a way of convincing the smaller member states, and their people, that pooling sovereignty with their neighbours, especially their larger neighbours, is a win-win situation, and I haven’t seen that argument yet from the federalist side. But the rest is sound enough.
Anyway, this is a good, passionate and largely convincing analysis of what’s up and more importantly what’s down with the EU-US relationship. You can get The Owned Continent here.
