The biggest story in Germany right now is the Asian tsunami and its deadly effects.

Every day stories about the floods, their victims and the need for help cover pages in the newspaper. TV talk shows focus on how funds and helpers are being sent across the world. While worldwide generosity will save many thousands of lives in the devastated areas, there is also some controversy over how much generosity is appropriate. Different nations have reacted to the catastrophe with widely varying pledges of financial help.

The largest governmental pledges of aid to tsunami victims have come from Australia ($810 million), Germany ($660 million) and Japan ($500 million).

Private contributions in Germany went over $200 million last week, and will surely go higher. The promise of $350 million by President Bush is about the same as those of Norway, Sweden and Denmark, which together have fewer than 20 million people, one-15th of the American population. Many of the victims were Muslims, yet other Muslim countries have offered very small amounts in comparison.

What accounts for the different sums of money offered by various countries?

Both Australia and Japan are neighbors of those countries directly affected. Responses of other countries across the world can be better understood with another set of numbers, those who died and are still missing. While these figures change every day, their relative sizes say much about the widely varying interest in this region. According to official information earlier this month, more than 500 people are still missing from Germany and Austria, with hundreds missing from Finland, United Kingdom and Italy. Sweden appears to have been the hardest hit country outside of the directly affected region. Perhaps 1,000 Swedes lost their lives, ranking this as the greatest catastrophe in Swedish history. In comparison, the United States may have lost fewer than 50 people.

Perhaps surprising from an American viewpoint, resorts on the Indian Ocean are especially popular tourist destinations for Europeans at Christmas. It is estimated that Germany, Great Britain and Italy each had more than 10,000 tourists on the shores of the Indian Ocean, while there were 20,000 Swedes in Thailand alone.

While for Americans, Southeast Asia is still far from our daily lives, many Europeans have spent time there. Europeans felt themselves struck personally by the remarkable photographs and reports of destruction which have appeared in newspapers daily since Dec. 26. On Jan. 5, Europeans observed a 3-minute silence across the continent. Trading paused on the Frankfurt stock exchange, air traffic halted at Heathrow Airport in London, traffic stopped here in Berlin.

The aid figures do not prove anything about relative generosity, except that people, and nations, give more money to those causes that affect them closely.

The emotional connection of Americans to that part of Asia is simply not as great as that of Europeans. The low level of importance of this area for our government was demonstrated by President Bush’s initially cool reaction to the floods. Only after being challenged by Jan Egeland of the United Nations did the U.S. government increase its pledge to an amount befitting our size and power.

The U.S. need not be the greatest giver to every crisis across the world. We can and should measure our response by our real interest in specific places, so that our humanitarian aid is most useful and efficient. In this case, European interest is simply greater, so it is right that their help is also greater.

But that also means that American pretensions to be the political watchdog over every continent are overblown. Our country does not have the capacity, interest or knowledge to be the leading power in every region of the world.

One of the reasons for our failure to create stable conditions in Afghanistan, and now in Iraq, is our relative unfamiliarity with these countries. I do not mean only that the CIA’s analyses were faulty. Americans simply do not know enough about much of the world for our country to invest billions of dollars and thousands of lives wherever we wish. In many places, we are far better off letting those peoples take the lead who have a closer historical and personal connection, who have more experience and knowledge, who enjoy more respect.

At the moment, the U.S. has more military power than any other country or combination of countries. We have not been able, however, to remake the world into our own image, nor to bring stability to crisis regions in Africa or Asia.

Giving more money won’t help either. In the long run, the best plan is to work together with other countries, meaning that we need to be able to compromise, to allow others to lead and to learn from our mistakes.

Steve Hochstadt lives in Lewiston and teaches history at Bates College. He is temporarily teaching in Germany and can be reached at [email protected].