Nick Denton has also been blogging on the EU-US spats going on the blogosphere and elsewhere. He notes

Some people wrote in to complain about the American arrogance typified by Glenn Reynolds. That’s not the point at all. The current criticism of Europe is far from arrogance; it’s chippy cultural cringe, more akin to the way Australians thought of England last century. Embarrassing, coming from the superpower.

I agree, though the comparison with Australia had not occurred to me. The cultural cringe regarding England was pretty much killed off by the early 70s. It dominated the attitudes of the age-cohort of people like Germaine Greer, Clive James and Donald Horne, many of whom ended up as expats in Britain. By the time I was an adult, Australia’s crucial relationship was clearly that with the US. Although often fraught, this relationship never involved the same cultural ‘chip on the shoulder’ as that with England.

In June last year, I observed the change in the tone of US discussion of Europe. [This piece was written before S11, but the fact that it needs no real change is striking. Just about everyone in the world has taken S11 as proof that they were right all along] Here is a condensed version:

Bubbles can be filled with all sorts of noxious gases and, when they burst, the resulting smell can be unpleasant. This point was illustrated by the bursting of the Japanese bubble of the 1980s, which was accompanied by a good deal of breastbeating about ‘the Japan that can say no’ and chauvinistic revisionism about World War II. We have seen similar effluvia from the rapidly-deflating US economic bubble…

Trans-Atlantic verbal sniping has been going on ever since the Declaration of Independence. What is remarkable is the rancour with which American commentators have responded to European criticism of US policies on such issues as global warming, missile defence and the death penalty…During the boom of the late 1990s, US commentary on Europe was characterized by a tone of complacent triumphalism, while European discussion of the US bordered on panic….All of this has changed in 2001. While European discussion of Bush has been condescending, even patronising, American commentators have been almost apoplectic…

This change in tone may be explained by the fact that sentiment about national performance is closely attuned to the ten-year business cycle. Over the last decade, the US economic cycle has led that in Europe by two or three years. So while GDP per person in the US is already declining, the European business cycle is just beginning to turn down….

In addition to timing differences, the amplitude of the current business cycle in the US has been very high. An exceptionally strong boom has been followed by a very rapid deceleration. The resulting shift from absurd optimism to renewed pessimism has clearly soured many tempers.

Eighteen months later, the cycle has moved on but only a little. The European downturn I noted then is well under way, but the US economy has bumped along, with neither a sustained recovery nor a further downturn becoming evident as usual. The result is that tempers are now frayed on both sides.