Top dog and dogfights

The big idea behind this little book has been touted as ‘Americans are from Mars; Europeans are from Venus’. That’s not quite right. The real thesis is not that Americans are war-hungry and Europeans peace-loving, but that Americans deal with problems, and Europeans avoid them. If anything, Americans are from the planet Can-do, and Europeans from Can’t-face-doing.

Try conducting practically any transaction in America and compare it to the way you’re treated in Britain and you get the measure of what Robert Kagan, a Washington Post columnist and veteran of the State Department, is driving at. An American working in a deli, or shining your shoes, wants to make sure you get what you ask for and doesn’t mind being told to stick some extra Dijonnaise on or to give your brogues an extra buff.

Over here, you have the distinct impression that work is really beneath most people and that anything done for you in return for money amounts to the most tremendous favour. Bill Bryson, the American whose Notes from a Small Island has just been picked as the book that best evokes modern Britain, was asked last week what he loves about this country. He went for our politeness – particularly our tendency to ask shopkeepers, ‘I’m terribly sorry but could you help me find a shirt my size?’ – and the engaging squalor of British bed and breakfasts. He didn’t, though, make the connection between the two: British bed and breakfasts are horrible because no one bothers to complain.

And the same attitude, writ large, applies to the European approach to conflict, although Kagan gives Britain and Tony Blair a small get-out clause when it comes to criticising the European attitude to Iraq. What’s happening there – and what happened in Afghanistan – is classic Can-do stuff for the Americans, and Can’t-face-doing for the Europeans.