The United States of America makes a woeful impression on many Europeans. Of course this is partly because of the overwhelming, and more or less unbridled, way in which Americans exercise military and economic power on the international stage. It is inevitable that a dominant power like the United States should face resentment. But there is more to the distrust and dislike of the United States than that. Europeans are also frequently troubled by the internal structure of American society. America is a harsh place. This has to do in part with economics. American governments have largely abandoned the project of redistributing wealth, showing little commitment to social welfare states of the European type. Even inheritance taxes, which lie at the core of modern state socialism, are under heavy and largely successful attack in the United States.

Economics are only part of what can make American society seem harsh, though. ‘Human dignity’, as Europeans conceive it, is remarkably weak in the United States as well. The most striking evidence for this is the American record of rejecting international conventions on human rights, or accepting them with crippling reservations. To take only one dramatic example, until recently the United States continued to inflict the death penalty for crimes committed when the offender was a minor, in the face of the International Covenant on the Rights of the Child. Criminal justice offers many other examples of American practices that Europeans reject as not only harsh, but no less than barbarous.