The human costs of D-Day were not insignificant: 6,603 U.S. casualties in all, 3,646 British and Canadian. But the numbers were lower than Eisenhower and his generals had feared. In the following months 53,714 Allied soldiers and airmen were killed–not heavy losses by 20th-century standards. Lest we forget: on the first day of the Somme, July 1, 1916, the British Army suffered 58,000 casualties–20,000 of them killed, a catastrophe from which neither the Army nor the country ever fully recovered. The 27 meticulously maintained British and American military cemeteries in Normandy are deeply affecting to even the casual visitor, with their 9,386 American, 17,769 British, 5,002 Canadian and 650 Polish graves. But they pale beside the hundreds of thousands of bodies scattered through the poppy fields of Flanders and Picardy.
The lasting impact of the Normandy landings was political. The Allied armies didn’t just liberate France and the Low Countries: they pushed deep into Germany, securing an armistice line–and the outer frontiers of the West in the coming cold war–much farther east than anyone had dared to hope a few months before. The landings also had, and still have, a powerful symbolic resonance.
World War II was the last “good war,” in which Europeans fought side by side with Americans and others against what everyone recognized as the forces of evil. Americans today are sometimes encouraged to believe that those “we” liberated back then, especially the French, have “forgotten” or are “ungrateful.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly 20,000 French civilians were killed during the Battle of Normandy, most of them by Allied bombing, but in 35 years of traveling in France I have met hardly anyone who doesn’t acknowledge the country’s immeasurable debt to its Anglo-Saxon liberators. When the French get angry with the United States, they rail against George W. Bush and eviscerate the occasional McDonald’s; but no one–no one–has ever vandalized an American war cemetery.
And yet, for all the shared memories, the ceremonies in Normandy will have a valedictory air, and not just because the old soldiers are dying off. Something decisive has changed in the relations between Europe and America. For four decades the postwar settlement was frozen into place. Reluctantly at first, but with growing enthusiasm, the United States underwrote the economic recovery of Western Europe and took on primary responsibility for its security. The Europeans, in turn, came to see themselves as part of a common “West,” happy to have Washington intimately involved in their affairs. It was a British foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who pressed hardest for the North Atlantic alliance–whose objectives, as summarized succinctly by NATO’s first secretary-general (another Brit, Lord Ismay), were to “keep the Russians out, the Germans down and the Americans in.”
But “Europe” is no longer a handful of exhausted nation-states clinging to the Atlantic shore, listening nervously for the sound of Soviet boots. These past two decades the European center of gravity has moved steadily east. As of May 1 the frontiers of the European Union now extend into the former Soviet Union, and the Atlantic has ceased to be the chief point of geographical reference. Europe today is bigger and richer than the United States. True, it lacks an effective defense force–but, then, since 1989 it has had no conventional enemies.
The United States, meanwhile, pursues an increasingly separate path. The American government’s stance on everything from biological weapons, climate control and the International Criminal Court to the regulation of child labor or the protection of women’s reproductive rights has alienated European allies while attracting an ill assortment of bedfellows from the nondemocratic world. Europe’s failure to address the Balkan tragedy in its midst led American policymakers to rethink their military calculations; “unilateralism” was on the agenda well before the advent of Bush. Today, in the wake of the ill-judged American foray into Iraq and the unaccommodating rhetoric that preceded it, the gap separating the American world view from that of most Europeans is larger than anyone can remember.
But we should not be so surprised at these developments. Before World War II, America and Europe were not natural allies. Few in the 1930s spoke of “Western values,” and “the West” was a purely geographical notion. To Americans and Europeans alike it did not seem odd, for example, that the United States entered World War II only in December 1941–and then only because Japan attacked it and Hitler imprudently joined in. In those days America and Europe were different worlds.
The two continents were separated by more than just an ocean. Within living memory America had been at war with various European states. It posed a serious economic threat even to its friends, notably Britain. The fact that Americans spoke English, or that their Constitution (like that of France) was rooted in the 18th-century Enlightenment, merely highlighted all the other differences. As for Americans, they typically regarded Europe as the past (their own or someone else’s) and understood themselves as moving away from the old Continent, not toward it. The contrast was sharply accentuated with the coming of the European welfare state, and only temporarily attenuated by the legislative programs of FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
In short, there was nothing inevitable about the transatlantic alliance. It came about because of the successive threats posed by fascism and the Soviet Union. Now, in the absence of these challenges, it is moribund and disintegrating. The alliance was the work of a generation of statesmen on both sides of the Atlantic whose shared anxieties (and common cultural backgrounds) trumped their countries’ deeper differences. Today’s policymakers share neither the common culture nor the common anxiety, and it is the differences that have moved once again to the fore. America looks anxiously at China; Europe worries about Turkey.
Both, it is true, gaze with dismay at the Middle East–but they see very different things. The secular and increasingly older Europeans are predisposed, from egalitarian tradition and decades of regional institution-building, to regard international crises as complicated social dilemmas to be mitigated through negotiation and cooperation. The United States, an increasingly unequal society whose domestic politics reflect an enduring religious heritage and a penchant for moral assertiveness, looks out on the world and longs for decisive resolution. Small wonder that the two sides pursue such different paths.
Can the Western Alliance be revived? For all the reassuring cliches we shall hear, I doubt it–certainly not in the short term. Does this matter? Yes. Without the United States, Europeans and their Union may retreat into self-obsession, fussing busily over the technicalities of an “ever-closer Union.” Without Europe, the United States loses not just its allies but also its international bearings. Already America is squandering its greatest asset: the credibility of its own example. Whatever one thinks of the current U.S. administration, this snuffing out of the American dream–and the dream of America that has sustained much of the world this past half century–is not good news.
The 21st century, then, has not begun well. For those of us who grew up after World War II, the ties that bound America and Europe were the best hope of a better world. It is a world we are losing even as I write–a world that may come in retrospect to seem a brief and uniquely fortunate parenthesis–and I fear we shall have growing cause to regret its passing. The men who landed in Normandy on June 6, 1944, did more than anyone to secure that world for us. We owe them a debt we can never repay.
