While many people will talk about the ignorance of the US (especially people in the US) I think a lot of the problems come from European ignorance and their accusations of the same thing from us. By and large Europe does not have a free press despite what the people living there might think, and their freedom of speech is far more controlled than most realize. Censorship, both politically and culturally is practiced in many parts of europe, this is what leads to a lot of the discussions about "National Firewalls", you have countries that are VERY concerned about their people having true, unfettered access to information.kiwi_poo said:
I look at things like the "Oil For Food" scandal as an example. France didn't support the "War On Terror" not for the reasons it claimed (the war is wrong, we love peace, etc...) but because they were breaking the embargos set by the UN through that program and making massive bank. When this was outed the French people were pretty much the last ones to know.
You also have situations like how we have "The War On Terror" called "America's War" yet one of the problems was that we had no real intelligence services at the time of the 9/11 attacks since Bill Clinton had largely disbanded them and/or tied their hands for political reasons. A lot of what we did was based on European intelligence which is what makes things sort of contreversial here. Yet even in strongly allied countries (like the UK) you have a lot of anti-war sentiment without any acknowlegement of the role they played in starting the war.
The European Union more or less starting a trade war with the US also doesn't help matters any, as it seems we've pretty much got a massive economic squabble going, and Wall Street and the European Common Market grappling with each other over who is going to be the dominant world power.
Pretty much for every Anti-American attitude in Europe, there is a Pro-American or Anti-European one here. The back and forth isn't especially surprising under the circumstances.
As far as the body odor thing goes, well let's just say that I've worked with a lot of Europeans coming in with work programs over the years, and it's been discussed. I think it has a lot to do with where in Europe (and where within a country) your dealing with. I've heard explanations ranging from a natural odor being "manly" and that only women shouldn't smell, to the explanation that it's not that Europeans are dirty, but Americans are ridiculously clean. The differance being one of taking a shower every 2-3 days and taking one or more every day not to mention intermittant washing. On top of this I've also been told bathing in large parts of Europe isn't easy because the water quality is REALLY bad with pipes the better part of a hundred years old (and which were never set properly). Being able to drink tap water being surprising to some people who have come into this country from accross the pond. Of course most of these people were from Eastern Europe.
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As far as how we treat immigrants, one of the big problems with the US is that a lot of people come here for the benefits of American citizenship, but do not want to actually become Americans. This leads to people acting like whatever they acted like back in their home country, not learning to communicate with english, continueing old grudges against other groups, etc...
The American attitude can be hard to understand for nations that have had more selective immigration for a very long time. In general in the US you can walk down the street and find people of a bunch of differant ethnicities, or using differant languages, with little problem. Throughout most of the world (outside of tourist areas) this is not the way things are. You go to say France and pretty much everyone you see is French, you go to China and pretty much everyone is Chinese. This is not the case with the US, and while this is one of our greatest strengths, it's also one of our biggest problems.
To put things into perspective, look at how France almost quit the EU before it formed due to concerns about people being able to come into France from other parts of Europe and collect French benefits, or even just stay there more or less indefinatly.
