MiF pointed me to a Chicago Boyz post by French expat Sylvain Galineau, who has some advice for the French on how to think about America. It also is a good summing-up of why a lot of Americans are leery of any kind of pan-European political entity:
"And remember every time you babble about it: the UN is an American creation; and the right to punch well above our [French] weight in that venue has been granted to us by them and their allies, those who actually won World War II by obliterating a tyranny the like of which Americans are incapable of. Because Americans are people who escaped tyrannies, famines, political persecution, imperialism, colonialism, intolerance, communism, genocide and all the other wonderfully sophisticated things Europeans engineered over the past few hundred years. And they built a unique nation out of their deep, first-hand, collective understanding of what not to do. So listen. Carefully."Posted by Chris at August 23, 2003 04:08 PM