In recent weeks, many have found that the transatlantic axis is damaged. But can the noises from the new Trump administration also affect Europeans on a deeper level?
Sales of Tesla cars have collapsed in Europe. At the Reddit discussion forum, Swedish users have started to tell each other about how they replace American products, and in a newly started Facebook group is invited Swedes to boycott And to choose European alternatives instead. A similar group in Denmark has over 35,000 members.
Criticism of Europe
The speech that US newly appointed Vice President JD Vance held at the Munich Security Conference in mid -February shook the European leaders in place. And the unexpectedly harsh attack on Europe and the continent’s democratic system has caused more people to react.
President Donald Trump and his right hand, Tesla owner Elon Musk, have also criticized European politics on various occasions.
On Wednesday, Trump said that the United States will introduce tariffs at 25 percent on goods manufactured in Europe, and In addition, claimed that the EU was formed to “put in the United States”. In fact, what we today were founded the European Union in 1957 with the aim of “promoting peace, its values and the welfare of the people”.
Mats Andren is a professor of history of ideas at the University of Gothenburg and linked to the Center for European Research. He believes that Russia’s war against Ukraine has already affected European identity – and how we are thinking of Europe in the future.
US “something else”
What US downgrading of Europe will mean is perhaps too early to say. But the Andren places it in a pearl band of crises that have hit EU cooperation for the past 15 years-from the financial crisis and the refugee crisis to Brexit and the Coronapandemia.
– Again, this is such a crisis that strengthens the European identity. After all, each of these crises has strengthened European purely institutional cooperation. This should obviously do this too.
– I imagine that it strengthens the feeling that Europe is a unit and is connected.
Frida Beckman, professor of literary science at Stockholm University, with a special focus on American culture and identity issues, says that we have probably never been as the United States as we have imagined.
-We have been shaken a little in our picture as small mini-Americans. We don’t want to be anymore, many of us. And then we also have to think about: What are we imported and not?