Europe Is Not the Refuge That Americans Think It Is
A week or so ago, while reading through a breezy piece in Vanity Fair about Parisians’ embrace of American “wellness” culture, I caught a barbed aside that the author, the New York-based writer Hannah Seligson, slipped in. “In Paris’s most affluent areas,” she wrote, “it’s easy to think that the French simply look and feel better than the rest of us; they generally have lower rates of obesity, chronic illness, and longer life spans than people in New York City. I wondered, too, if there are fewer deep forehead lines there because the French live in a country that doesn’t randomly invade other countries or kill innocent civilians in immigration raids.”
Algeria? Never heard of her.
This blithe elision of France’s long and storied history of invading other countries, killing and maiming civilians and deporting undesirable elements — including their own citizens — right on up into the 2020s, is just one in a string of examples of a kind of cultural and historical amnesia that’s washing over Americans on the left as politics at home grow gruesome and folks are dreaming of an escape hatch. Last year, for the first time in almost a century, the United States experienced negative net migration — more people moving out of the country than moving in, and that includes thousands of Americans leaving the U.S. for foreign climes. For many, “Europe” — that is, a handful of Western European countries — is a shining, socialist city on a hill: a beacon of civility, publicly funded health care, progressive culture and perfect pastries, unmarred by extremism, racism or bad politics. A kind of EPCOT Center for the fatigued liberal imagination. But that Europe doesn’t really exist.
In many ways, Europe has done little to disabuse Americans of this notion. Mark Rutte, the Dutch center-right politician serving as secretary-general of NATO and a poster child for civility, has held his tongue admirably in front of the cameras as President Donald Trump threatens to upend Europe’s security apparatus. Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, has launched a charm offensive to persuade Netflix to keep its escapist hit series “Emily in Paris” in Paris, so profound has been the tourism boost. “Nothing to see here,” seems to be the message, as far-right rallies (and Nazi salutes) proliferate across the continent, and their champions win at the ballot boxes in Austria, Germany, Italy, Belgium and across Central and Eastern Europe.
And then, there’s France. On Sunday, the far-right National Rally party had its best showing ever in municipal elections that selected candidates in some 35,000 communes nationwide. Right-wing and far-right candidates outstripped their centrist, socialist and green party peers in many of the nation’s wealthiest areas. The affluent, wrinkle-free forehead class in the western half of Paris voted for the right-wing candidate, as did their more sun-kissed counterparts on the Riviera in Nice.
In Marseille, the National Rally candidate Franck Allisio sailed through to the runoff with 35.2% of the vote, the best turnout ever for the party in the immigrant-heavy, formerly left-leaning port city, once seen as the beating heart of diversity in France. (Allisio, the grandson of Italian immigrants who were raised in Tunisia, has focused his campaign on the National Rally’s law and order message, and has been less vocal on its vitriolic anti-immigrant stance.)
Despite all this, Google has registered a 170% increase in folks in the U.S. searching “moving to Europe as an American” in the last three years, and Reddit boards and Facebook groups for expats are bursting with queries about how to immigrate to the continent because of perceived threats to a certain identity, or gun violence or, simply, as one Facebook poster wrote, “::waves hand:: all this.” Many are surprised to find that there are onerous immigration requirements, even for those from America — a country cast as a “child of Europe” by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at this year’s Munich Security Conference.
Beyond strict and lengthy visa procedures, Americans may be shocked to find that the Europe awaiting them is not the one where James Baldwin roamed the cobbled streets of the Pantheon deep in conversation with Gertrude Stein, but a slightly altered version of what is happening at home. Aggressive immigration policy, attacks on human rights, crumbling cultural institutions and government inaction or corruption abide, even in the places we love to fantasize about.
But hey, at least the baguettes are cheap, and very, very good.