欧洲问题

n William Maxwell’s novel The Château (1961), a young Franco- phile American couple spends four months in Europe amid the United States’ rapidly growing political, eco- nomic, and cultural hegemony. Max- well, a fiction editor at The New Yorker, drew upon his own awed discovery of France in 1948; the novel’s opening paragraphs show one of the protago- nists weeping at the sight of the French shore. The reaction might seem excessive, but it is worth recalling to- day, during the brutal reconfiguration of relations between Europe and America, that several generations of educated white Americans saw Europe not only as their ancestral land, with a sociopolitical order more sophisti- cated than their own, but also as their training ground …