If you’re interested in learning why Europe has cast a more critical eye on American policies in recent years, you could just blame George W. Bush.

Or you could exercise your brain and read Pierre Manent’s Democracy Without Nations?: The Fate of Self-Government in Europe (ISI Books, 2007). This short book explores the manner in which the post-war construction of Europe has transformed the politics of the Old World.

Among the more interesting discussions is the modern-day friction between Europe and Israel:

European democracy today can see virtue only in what is “general” or “universal.” But the Jews testified to the limits first of Christianity and then of the liberal nation-state. And while their destiny seemed to call for the advent of a unified humanity, one not broken by any internal division or separation, they could build Israel only with a constant, even daily struggle; today, this struggle calls for the construction of a long fence. For Europeans, the Jewish state thus displays the limits of a universalism they believed to have deduced, in part, from the longtime misfortunes of the Jews. That state obliges Europeans to recognize the following: empty ? hollow and vain ? is any humanism that claims to detach itself wholly from all responsibility toward or for a particular people, or from any distinctive view of the human good. Empty and vain is a Europe that wants simply to meld into the growing body of “humanity in general.” The fully national existence of little Israel questions enormous Europe, as well as each nation that composes it. It invites them not to hide behind Humanity.