In last year’s film Irish Wish, Lindsay Lohan stood on the Cliffs of Moher, stared out to sea and said she felt as though she had “stepped into a James Joyce novel”. Not an obvious leap, as our film critic Donald Clarke said at the time, but expected in a US-made film about a 21st century encounter with St Bridget, one that trades in stereotype and kitsch “hello-der!” accents.
Even Joe Biden can’t resist turbo-Hibernian pageantry: he walked out in Ballina, Co Mayo, in 2023 on to an emerald green carpet to a soundtrack of the Dropkick Murphys. For all the talk of the American-Irish bond, the Ireland of America’s imagination is synthetic and unreal. It suggests the cultural distance between the two countries is bigger than we like to imply.
In summer 2000 Mary Harney, then tánaiste, set up what seemed to be a defining binary for Ireland: Boston or Berlin? A common language, an influential diaspora, artistic exchange and a low-regulation economy all pointed towards Ireland’s stronger bond with the US. Europe’s sluggish bureaucracy seemed at odds, too, with the spirit of the Celtic Tiger years. When everything went awry in 2010, Ireland cleaved to Europe. Brexit later proved the logic of closer association with the European Union, too. But Ireland’s economy remained firmly in the hands of American investment.
All of this is to say the Boston vs Berlin binary was never really a binary at all – Ireland was good at playing both sides and didn’t accept the zero-sum calculation.
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In a matter of weeks, though, that has changed and, finally, 25 years later from when the conceit was first established, Ireland has a decision to make. (Berlin, if it weren’t obvious.)
As recently as two weeks ago, Europe was clinging on to an optimistic version of Donald Trump. It went something like this: he is a transactionalist; what he says and what he does doesn’t always cohere; he views ally and enemy nations as a locus for profit or loss; he is shorn of any moral dimension; the hot emotion of his block-capital’d written statements is superficial and unserious; if Europe is nice to him and makes him money then it can be expected to be treated accordingly.
That may have been a salve then – that the antagonism was a political show for a domestic audience (please!). But we know now that the contempt for Europe in Trump’s administration is a deeply held thing.
It was first obvious when JD Vance dressed down the Continent on matters of speech and migration at the Munich defence conference in February. When details of a group chat between the US vice-president and other senior US officials were leaked last month, the suspected antipathy was revealed to be outright loathing (“I just hate bailing out Europe again,” the vice-president said, emphasising his disdain for Europe’s “freeloading” on the US for defence capacity).
The anti-European turn is visible elsewhere: “The UK Thought Police owe Orwell royalties,” one American author said, piling cliche upon cliche, of the UK government’s response to the summer riots. Canadian author Jordan Peterson suspects that Britain is about to enter a Venezuelan nightmare. Elon Musk’s adventures in Germany led him to give vocal support for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD): “I think you really are the best hope for Germany,” said a man barely able to conceal his contempt for the centre European status-quo.
I remember when this used to happen in reverse. And that is not as far back as the haughty Jacques Chirac’s fondness for telling colleagues: “I have a simple principle in foreign affairs. I see what the Americans are doing and I do the opposite.”
No, far more recent than that. In my adulthood I have borne witness to a broad-stroke, impressionistic anti-Americanism, typified by disdain for the national character (so gauche!), the direction of its politics (neocons once, neolibs after that, protectionist lunatics now – all met with similar disdain), and its cultural production (Hollywood has flattened the artistic realm world-over, so goes the claim).
And don’t take it from me: in 2017 the BBC found 14 of 17 countries surveyed had an overall negative impression of the United States.
That anti-American reflex was as unfair as JD Vance’s anti-European prejudice now. The US vice-president’s breakout book Hillbilly Elegy derives its title from Ancient Greek and modern American vernacular – which would have served as a neat romantic metaphor for the enduring bond between the two continents had he not been happy to smash it to pieces.
Counterfactuals aside, as these two continents turn their back on each other Ireland, a nation prone to “both side-ism”, has to choose.
And perhaps that choice should be routed back in the first principle of this column. There is plenty Ireland owes the US in recent history; that the Democrats see the Belfast Agreement as a key part of their legacy is fair and worth celebrating.
But the cultural chasm between the two places is wider than it is convenient to admit. Berlin, Paris and London meanwhile are not ones to overstate their Hiberno-philia. They have been much better friends for a much longer time.
