It's More Than Us They Hate

Angst swirls unobstructed through most of the global village. Yet a modern Diogenes would not need to go far if he were to set out to find a happy man.

That is not as true elsewhere: Disgusted German voters severely rebuked Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder last weekend. The French electorate prepares to embarrass President Jacques Chirac this weekend. The Dutch argue bitterly over Europe and Muslims in their midst. Arabs and Afghans riot over a specious Newsweek item about the Koran, even as Saudi authorities quietly confiscate and destroy Bibles brought into the kingdom.

And through all this, the Greek prime minister has the nerve to be cheerful, optimistic and even soothing about Turkey, the Balkans, Greek-American relations and other subjects that have provoked verbal thunderbolts and mass marches in Athens in the past.

"We have to live together and make the best of it," Costas Karamanlis replies when I ask about the Greeks' primordial enemies, the Turks. "They should eventually be permitted to join the European Union. A Europeanized Turkey is in everybody's interest."

Tactical considerations are obvious in Karamanlis's remarks, made over coffee shortly before he met with President Bush here last week. As opposition to Turkey's E.U. membership hardens in Germany and France, Greece can afford to be magnanimous. A genuine detente between Athens and Ankara makes such equanimity politically possible for a Greek leader.

But listening to this affable center-right politician, in office for a year, I hear something larger than tactics at work. On a checklist of difficult topics, Karamanlis provides an implicit description of the one thing a political leader must know above all: the mood of his people toward the world and toward themselves.

His message is more powerful for not being put in so many words: Greeks feel pretty good about themselves these days, especially in comparison with their Balkan neighbors, European countries to their north and west, and Muslim nations to their east and south.

This is the music that lingers after an interview, after the specific words have faded and been carted off to the journalistic boneyard. In this case, there is also a powerful subtext that bears on the United States' battered image abroad.

Greeks bearing good feelings about themselves or others have not always been conspicuous on my frequent visits to Greece since 1974 -- the year a military regime was ousted by the public for gross incompetence and repression. The popular mood can be remarkably brittle and bitter.

Greece is one of many countries where governments of different political stripes have to struggle to maintain good official relations with Washington while public opinion frequently rages against the United States. It was (accurately) said that America backed the deposed military regime and, worse, the Turks, with whom the Greeks had nearly gone to war twice in the past half-century.

They liked the Arabs and the Serbs while we championed the Israelis and the Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims. Fomenting anti-American rallies was child's play in an era when Greece lagged far behind the United States and most of Europe in economic progress and social cohesion.

But that era fades. While the French and Dutch argue over endorsing the European Union's draft constitution, Greece has quickly and happily ratified that document. No fools the Greeks: E.U. budgetary support over a decade helped them nearly double their gross domestic product and raise per capita GDP (about $20,000 last year). The E.U. subsidies helped finance the successful 2004 Olympics, which also lifted national morale.

The Greek economy grew 4.3 percent last year and is expected to lead the euro zone with 4 percent growth this year -- far ahead of Germany, where morose workers humiliated Schroeder in state elections last Sunday, and France, which may reject the Chirac-backed E.U. draft constitution this Sunday.

Karamanlis can afford politically to be upbeat on a trip to Washington. Resentments about Turkey or the United States, while hardly erased, are not the festering wound they once were in Greece -- even as anti-Americanism has soared in much of the world recently.

Americans have been quick to ask, in the wake of Sept. 11, the Iraq war, the Newsweek riots and much else: Why do they hate us? "They" can mean Arabs, Afghans, Turks, Germans and many others whose worlds have been turned upside down by globalization, economic malaise at home and America's fiery assertion of military power abroad.

But it is also legitimate and useful to ask if projection of "their" own woes and frustrations is a factor in the unrelenting vilification by some of American motives and acts on any pretext available. Even as we struggle to understand their grievances, we need to ask also: Why do they hate themselves?

jimhoagland@washpost.com