Are Americans Still Welcome in Europe?
blog.ricksteves.com
blog.ricksteves.com
It's about your behaviour as a human being. Yes, there are different customs, and while the last few decades have steadily grinded to erode these, even today there are still stark differences between the different European people.
If you are going to be loud, opinianated and callous, people are not going to dislike you for being 'american', 'english' or 'dutch', just for being loud, opinionated and callous. Many americans visit here and are amical, culturally curious and respectfull. Nobody sane over here is going to go object to you because 'trump'.
Leave your maga hats as wel as your pronouns at home, and enjoy your trip.
It's hard not to point out how desperately sad the state of affairs is when wearing a political slogan and using a pronoun (I'm assuming there is an implicit premise you're leaving out) are on the same level of "being political". Shall we also leave our race and gender at home? How?
“I don’t want a Black History Month. Black History is American History. I’ll stop calling you a white man if you stop calling me a black man.”
— Morgan Freeman
You can leave race and gender at home if you stop talking about it all the damn time. Whatever passes these days for racial equality is anything but. I don’t hear people making so much fuss about including the correct quota of green eyes people in movies and work teams.
/rant
As an aside, every time I open Reddit, I cringe that two of the most popular and promoted subs are WhitePeopleTwitter and BlackPeopleTwitter. The American model of integration often just feels like a positive, corporate-friendly spin on apartheid.
So yes, it would be nice if everybody just somehow agreed to "stop", but once a society has cultural distinctions along a racial line with any negative connotations, there is no path to "stop focusing on it" aside from letting time pass.
E.g. my elderly friends and many of the people on the social internet aren't going to stop encouraging hatred of black people and encouraging beating or killing them for non-violent crimes, because of a call to "stop focusing so much on race"; and likewise other people aren't going to stop reacting to that hideous part of their own society (various reactions, that aren't all reasonable!) because of a call to "stop focusing so much on race".
It's not a "just stop doing it" problem. Only centuries of patience and luck can evolve a society past such a stark divide (both sides think there are decades-scale forced fixes, and they're both wrong).
Second of all: Your reply to me was tangential to the criticism I was making of the previous parent. You can and should choose not to rant about race/gender/sexuality abroad. You can't leave your own pronouns at home, like you can a hat. And even if you could, it would still be twisted and unfair to use it as an example of being "political" in direct comparison to wearing a political slogan hat - not to mention it being the slogan of one of the most politically antagonistic figures in the world's living memory. The comparison is emblematic of exactly the target of your rant: Misapplied focus.
The mid-century American civil rights movement was based on the former. The modern movement seems to want the latter. The problem is that these two positions are subtly in conflict with each other. The former erases identities, the latter reinforces them.
The both have similar goals, but they present very different ways of living and very different social norms, which is why I see them both as potentially high-conflict norms when visiting other cultures.
More importantly, you said:
- One side wants nobody to care about our differences, and that erases identity.
- The other side wants to celebrate everyone's differences, and that reinforces identity.
This seems unrealistic, and the wording is starkly one-sided (in terms of painting one side as "wrong" and the other as "right"). You're splitting on the right metric, but the wrong dimension.
One side wants nobody to care about our differences in negative contexts ("X people are bad in some way", "Y people are better than X people"), and wants to celebrate our differences in positive contexts (cultural exposure, diversity, etc). However, some of the details are often unrealistically idealistic.
The other side wants to neither ignore nor celebrate differences. This side is simpler, and has real benefits, but makes more room for the human tendency to express difference-based negativity, which ranges from understandable to horrifying. However, it doesn't suffer from as much of the complication of idealism.
There is an essentialism inherent with these contexts. Just like French"ness" or British"ness", we have white"ness" or black"ness", and it can be applied to any race, sexual preference, or gender identity, etc., etc. This view has practical limits, and where those are drawn is important, because we run into trouble with the "green eyes"-ness brought up by the previous poster. And, there is ultimately a conflict that comes from this.
Non-essentialists would argue that the attributes that make up these differences are effectively accidental, so eliminating the differences is arbitrary, and perfectly reasonable. This means that nothing is lost when one context is adopted by the other. Different people have different views on this though. This also means that for the non-essentialist, negative-based differences must also be accidental, which is an important difference, and while essentialists may want to eliminate the negative-based differences, there is a sense in which the essentialist view endorses the idea that they must exist.
Practically speaking though, when we have people participating outside of their context, does the essentialism evaporate? Should it? That is to say, if white people start moving into a Chinatown, does it ever stop being an "Asian neighborhood"? At what point does it stop? Should we try to preserve it? If we do, is it right to discriminate in doing that?
This is the conflict between acculturation, assimilation, and amalgamation? Essentialist views often see mass adoption as acculturation. Non-essentialists see it as amalgamation. These are subtle differences, but they yield vastly different policy prescriptions.
My amateur and unpracticed use of the French language has probably mis-pronouned plenty of folk across Europe and West Africa. Luckily everyone understood my motives and took it in stride.
We do not care of you support black live matters or trump or abortion. This is your thing and except if you are with people who want to discuss this you let keep it to yourself. There are plenty of people that are Ken to discuss, we are not prude.
This is so obvious to me that I feel I must be missing something.
I concur with Rick. In my experience travelling and living in Europe, Americans are well liked despite whatever politics the country as a whole may take on. As he says, it's extremely important for us to be good ambassadors -- deferential, open, and keeping it light.
And in particular if you are well educated or work at a university looking for new opportunities you will be more than welcome.
If you misbehave though you will probably be frowned upon as a MAGA. But not much more than a frown. No reason to invent any risk, most of Europe is still an open society and have not changed.
If you plan to go to Hungary or places like Serbia, I am guessing that you will more greeted.
And soon enough I guess you will be able to travel to Russia and Belarus (also Europe), but I would not recommend it.
I'm not European and don't speak for Europeans (or anyone but myself) however.
Another imprint thing is that this is vacation time for children in the Paris area. This is rather a good thing.
Besides that they're is nothing to worry about. Seriously. We discuss like crazy what is happening in the US but this is like a tv series. When we meet real Americans we don't care (well, someone may tease her a bit :))
With young Europeans, it seems to be a point of fascination with them that such stuff is happening in our country. And they will implicitly assume you're progressive because you're traveling in that part of the world.
The far-right is, ironically, very globalist. Almost like a rainbow coalition of fascists. The problem is that they all think fucking over each other is going to make them #1. You can't have a world where "America First", "Germany First", "Islam First", "Japan First", "Korea First", "Korea First", "China First", and "India First" all[0] coexist. They're far too egotistical to be satisfied with a tie. Someone has to be second.
We're seeing a lot of Europe and Canada rally around the current liberal establishment, because Trump started the global race war before every country was actually committed to it, and the fascists are realizing they might wind up on the losing end of it. But let's also remember that a year ago, the AfD was talking about deporting German citizens, and had even hoodwinked the liberal establishment into supporting shit like holding refugee claimants in Rwanda. Europe looked like it was about to fall to fascists that are smarter and more well-connected than the American equivalent.
The divide, of course, is not "European" vs. "liberal American" vs. "MAGA hat". It's "those who show humanity to others" vs. "those who see others as a tool to be consumed".
[0] If you're wondering, these correspond roughly to the MAGA wing of the GOP, the AfD, ISIS, all those idiots in Japan with sound trucks, Kim Jong-Un, , Xi Jinping, and Narendra Modi.
For context, Xi Jinping is very, very ethnonationalist, despite running a nominally Communist party.
Sure you can - see the Axis during WWII. The trick is to gang up on the rest of the world and win, then deal with each other. (Or perhaps jealously guard your respective spheres of influence.)
This is the first I'm hearing of this - do you have any context? Everything I've heard about China's policy (including having visited Beijing) is that everyone there is super open to foreigners and very respectful if you are likewise.
First, let's talk about immigration. This tends to be a better barometer of a country's attitudes towards foreigners and integration. East Asia in general tends to be extremely restrictive, but China is harder to get into by orders of magnitude. For context:
- Japan has 3.41 million foreign residents out of a population of 123.7 million (2.76%)
- China (PRC) has 0.85 million foreign residents (excluding HK/Macau/TW) out of a population of 1,411.78 million (0.06%)
This data is sourced from 2020 and 2024[0], which means it could have been lowered by COVID; so let's talk about permanent residents. Japan has about 900k permanent residents[1] compared to China's... 12k[2]. That's two orders of magnitude lower.
Ok, but who's trying to get into China? I mean, Americans would never want to emigrate to China, right? Well, sure, I'll give you that, but China borders plenty of countries that would consider moving to the PRC to be a material benefit (e.g. North Korea and Myanmar).
China has an immigration policy that would make Donald Trump blush. But so what?
Second, let's talk about the one atrocity Mao wasn't willing to commit: Han chauvinism.
China has a particular concern for territorial integrity. That's why they obsess over getting back control over Taiwan, an island full of people who want nothing to do with the mainland, and why they absorbed Hong Kong into themselves 20 years ahead of what they'd agreed to. The problem is that, especially on China's more ambiguously defined eastern borders, nobody there wants to actually be part of China. This terrifies Xi Jinping.
And what does Xi do when he's terrified? He builds concentration camps. The eastern part of China, Xinjiang, is full of concentration camps where the Uighur population was rounded up, enslaved, indoctrinated, and sterilized; in the name of "anti-terrorism". This alone is enough for me to slap the "ethnofascist" label on Xi regardless of what political ideology he claims to subscribe to.
[0] The Chinese data comes from the 2020 Chinese census, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Chinese_census and this article: https://www.intereconomics.eu/contents/year/2022/number/5/ar... via Wikipedia
For Japan's 2024 statistics, Wikipedia sourced them from:
https://www.moj.go.jp/isa/publications/press/13_00047.html
https://www.stat.go.jp/data/jinsui/new.html
[1] https://www.jcer.or.jp/english/japans-immigration-policy-de-...
Note that this excludes "special permanent residents", most of whom are victims of Imperial Japan's brutal occupation of Korea and Taiwan who got permanent residency in Japan as part of WWII peace treaties.
[2] https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3234679/chi...
I imagine you'll experience the same thing as an American coming to Europe right now.
In the case of Brexit, as someone who isn't British, I have no opinion one way or another. I might have a view of what the relative trade-offs are, perhaps te impact of Brexit on my country, but to claim to be pro- or contra-Brexit seems as ridiculous as supporting or opposing my neighbor's choice of furnishings or home building material. The question doesn't belong to the common good I share with the neighbor.
Brexit, like many issues, was more of a litmus test for gauging "political purity", whether someone is in the political in-group or out-group, kosher or treif.
In any event, I found they didn't want to tell me what they thought about it, they wanted to hear my perspective on why these things were happening. Obviously I claim no great political insight, but I could tell them what it looked like at ground zero.
AFAICT, they weren't opining, they were asking questions. I think that's very natural. "My media is telling me that there's some weird stuff going on over there, can you tell me what's really going on?"
I'm from the Netherlands, middle-aged and have never met a person in my circles with a genuine hate of America or Americans.
There's plenty of critique on the state of US society, but that doesn't translate to general hate for any random American, unless you're intentionally provocative.
Likewise, we do not hate US products. It's just that in the case of food and cars, we have plenty ourselves of an equal or better quality.
Should you be conservative and drop a few of those views in casual conversation, I can assure you that this doesn't shock the average European. In fact, counter intuitively you may find out that progressive Americans are far more progressive than progressive Europeans. Culturally that is, not economically.
Do avoid obnoxious patriotism or bragging about the US.
As your said, this is the behavior of an individual, tourist or local, that makes the man or woman.
Americans who travel to Europe (have a passport) are rarely the 'T%%' shirt or 'Maggi' Cap-wearing kind. If anything, traveling Americans have always been known for their ample smiles, friendly nature, unbridled enthusiasm, and positivity/sunny outlook.
[Recent actions by the current administration did help unify Europe, but they mostly feel sorry for us. Anyone part of the group stuck in the 'faux news' bubble may have a bad time, because nothing they've been told turns out to be true...]
Not sure how likely that will be (the bars where factory workers hang out tend to not be the ones in tourist areas, for one), but it seems plausible to me.
I wouldn't let that stop me from travelling though.
Americans pretending to be canadians while abroad to be treated better was already a thing before this happened.
Your reaction of ignoring this problem and acting as if all is normal because it doesn't affect you amplifies the problem.
There is a problem; it has existed for a long time and it's called complacency and stagnation.
One silver lining of the post-truth hellscape we live in is that it's far harder for the US government to directly manufacture consensus like this. In 2002 Bush had every US paper burying anything outside the narrative[0]. In 2025, if Trump so much as says the sky is blue, you'll see at least one clueless, schismogenic[1] idiot insisting that it's green, always been green, and that green is better. While that's an obviously stupid example, it's generally good that people are questioning ShitGovernmentsSay™.
Now if only we could get the MAGA hats to start questioning their chosen god-emperor...
[0] To be clear, most people in Europe knew Saddam wasn't buying yellowcakes, because the papers were reporting on the obvious falsity of the evidence over there.
[1] Schismogenesis is the process of social division, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schismogenesis
I talked to a guy in El Salvador that got deported for being in MS-13 and he just wanted to chill and talk about the US and sports. I talked to someone from Colombia that was struggling to get a visa to visit her brother and she was mad about the _situation_, but not mad at _me_ about it, she just wanted to vent.
Just listen more than you talk and be careful about how you talk about politics unless you're in the mood for an argument.
> While the Trump phenomenon feels unprecedented to many Americans, much of the world has seen figures like him before. Many Europeans have had firsthand experience — whether recent or generational — of chafing under a leader whose politics they find outrageous. In recent years alone, we’ve seen the rise of right-wing politicians across Europe who can broadly be described as “Trump-like,” from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi and Giorgia Meloni, and from France’s Marine Le Pen to the Netherlands’ Geert Wilders. Trump is merely our local manifestation of a global trend.
> While Americans tend to be idealistic, many Europeans are steely-eyed realists. A hard history has taught them that you can’t always judge a person by their current leader. And they recognize that more Americans voted against Trump than voted for him; even if they’re alarmed at the actions of America, they don’t paint all Americans with the same, broad brush.
I think the reason that the rise of Trump has been so painful for many Americans is that it has shattered our view of American idealism (or perhaps a slightly different type of "American Exceptionalism", if you will).
When I was a kid and learned about the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, I remember thinking "How could people be so stupid? Why would they want to support these autocrats?" I don't think that anymore.
And it is also lazy to put all reaction to these failures into the same bucket. MAGA is not the same as much of what falls under "postliberalism"[0]. There are serious thinkers who are responding, within a broader tradition, to the collapse of the liberal order by examining its causes and looking at possible exits from the situation.
Perhaps I think people are putting this into a "blame" framework. E.g. I've seen basically this argument online "I don't see how you can blame the Democrats for this, as Trump is a million times worse, especially of everything he accuses the Democrats of doing."
While I agree with that sentiment, "blame" is the wrong way to look at this. At the end of the day, it's self-evident that something caused the rise of Trump and other autocrats and a breakdown of the post WWII liberal order, and it behooves us all to investigate why that happened.
FWIW, I thought this recent article in NYT about liberals in Denmark (who, unlike many liberals elsewhere, take a hard stance against unfettered and illegal immigration) was excellent and offers some clues: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/24/magazine/denmark-immigrat.... This paragraph I think summarizes "what went wrong" with leftist policies in many areas:
> Leftist politics depend on collective solutions in which voters feel part of a shared community or nation, she explained. Otherwise, they will not accept the high taxes that pay for a strong welfare state. “Being a traditional Social Democratic thinker means you cannot allow everyone who wants to join your society to come,” Frederiksen says. Otherwise, “it’s impossible to have a sustainable society, especially if you are a welfare society, as we are.” High levels of immigration can undermine this cohesion, she says, while imposing burdens on the working class that more affluent voters largely escape, such as strained benefit programs, crowded schools and increased competition for housing and blue-collar jobs. Working-class families know this from experience. Affluent leftists pretend otherwise and then lecture less privileged voters about their supposed intolerance.
the real question is how many nationalities are now welcome in america?
Obviously, that means no MAGA hats (but who wears those outside of the US?), but also no USA flags on clothing, hats, or whatever (and definitely no flag of Israel). Tip: look more neutral by wearing camouflage, like a white sweater with a red 11-pointed maple leaf on it.
Don't try to pay everything by credit card (excepting tourist traps and museums).
If you voted Republican and consider yourself one: don't tell a soul. Ever.
Learn to say 'good morning/day/evening', 'thank you', 'please', and 'I'm really sorry about Trump' in the local language. A little effort is often appreciated.
I concur. Asking the question is weird. And contrary to the comments here, and despite my extremely leftwing views, I don't care if you voted MAGA or not, and I think most European, except maybe terminally online ones, is the same.
Half my friends have politics I don't like, as long as they aren't disrespectful and talking shit about people they don't know, I'm fine with it.
I met an elder couple from Arizona on a European cruise last year. (Seated at the table next to us at dinner) While they were very nice, I had no intention of involving any politics in our conversations, out of fear of having to listen to batshit insane rants. At some point, it became clear that they were not in any way pro-Trump, and it made our conversations just a tad nicer to have that out of the way.
On my other side there was a couple from Canada and a couple from the UK. The Canadians kept talking about how they wish the conservatives would get back to power and-for some reason-their love for the _previous_ pope, while the Brits repeatedly said they miss Boris Johnson.
I chuckled.
- hostility towards non traditional sexuality
- immigration being used as the scapegoat for economic problems
- strong feeling of national exceptionalism
- assault on women's productivity rights
- politicizing of science
- deportation for political reasons
- "Roman" salutes
Mind you, I am not mentioning which "side" nor which events in Europe. But if the shoe fits...
PS: Happy to show you around if visiting Barcelona.
Or do go and get splashed at with water pistols.
If you read farther they say: "When I asked each of our guests whether Americans would still be welcome in their country, they all said the same thing: Yes, of course! Why on earth wouldn’t Americans be welcome here? Some of them seemed perplexed, even offended, by the premise of the question."
The author does. Statistical significance has no definition in this context. You would ask the author what constitutes being asked many times if you wanted to know.
> If you read farther they say: "When I asked each of our guests whether Americans would still be welcome in their country, they all said the same thing: Yes, of course! Why on earth wouldn’t Americans be welcome here? Some of them seemed perplexed, even offended, by the premise of the question."
Do you believe this disproves any Americans spend time thinking about it?
Some Europeans I know would be offended by the question. I doubt any would be perplexed. And some feel less gracious than the American travel writer's colleagues.
I am sure if Americans are not welcome in Europe it isn't because they are an American, but that individual isn't very nice or polite around others. I haven't been to Europe in a long time, because Asia is so much more awesome.
It’s like asking if Africans are welcome, or are Asians welcome?
I think any tourism or hospitality industry will welcome anybody who is polite, courteous and spends money. That’s the bottom line, literally. Bonus: most Americans understand English and spend $USD!
Anyone who will check into a hotel, spend money on taxis, dining, and entertainment, doesn’t get into illegal shit, and purchases souvenirs? That’s a welcome tourist.
Of course, that’s assuming that Americans travel for conventional tourism. If you’re going to travel for a protest, or to smuggle drugs, or to advance some political agenda, then that’s not really tourism. Or if you’re a member of a women’s basketball team and you’re casually smuggling marijuana... all bets are off.
Please don't try to spend USD in Europe...
Personally I purchased a Travelex prepaid debit card ahead of time, with Euros ready to spend in Catalonia, but it was reloadable, and I also needed to do some snap ATM conversions to £ Sterling in London.
Most tourists head to an exchange window, turn their USD into the local currency, and therefore those exchanges have got our genuine Benjamins to do whatever with.
And USD is highly-favored, highly-negotiable money everywhere in the world, as of April 2025 anyway.
… Wait, really, in 2025? You’d likely be far cheaper using an ATM (tip: get a Wise or neobank account; they’ll generally give better rates on this. Revolut FX is _free_ except on weekends). Physical currency exchange has never been cheap, but these days it’s a serious ripoff.
> And USD is highly-favored, highly-negotiable money everywhere in the world, as of April 2025 anyway.
It fell 2.5% vs the Euro yesterday. Which is going to make the physical currency places into even more of a ripoff, because they’re going to have to significantly increase their risk premium; it has become rather volatile over the last month.