by Tony Judt
and everything “American,” to the point of denying that there even is
such a thing as an American culture or an American democracy.
Thus, when French philosopher Jean Baudrillard formulates a radical
death wish—the total destruction of America—simply because the
United States has become too hegemonic for his taste, his ressenti-
ment can in no way be compared to the refusal of President Chirac
or Chancellor Schröder to support the American decision to invade
Iraq. The French philosopher’s Americanophobia is so extreme that it
does not lend itself to rational interrogation. By contrast, Chirac’s and
Schröder’s strategic opposition to invading Iraq, however displeasing
to the Bush administration, belongs in the realm of reasonable and rea-
soned disagreement. It is important to distinguish between the two.
What is often disappointing about the existing literature on anti-
Americanism is its repetitive nature: old stereotypes are endlessly repro-
duced, as if nothing had changed for years, if not centuries, between
the United States and its critics, whether or not they used to be friends
or allies. We take issue with such an approach in our own contributions
to this book (chapters 1 and 2). Anti-American sentiments do change
over time and pro-American feelings exist as well, but are often
ignored because they weaken the arguments of those on both sides
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The Banality of Anti-Americanism
3
who see the world in black and white. There are indeed clashes of
cultures, conflicts of ideas, and strong political rivalries between the
United States and its critics. But expressions of friendship, support,
and sympathy coexist with these, even though they are rarely reported.
We have attempted to describe the full nature of Western and non-
Western perceptions of America, while respecting the ambiguities,
contradictions, and frequent reversals of these perceptions.
Anti-Americanism today, as Tony Judt argues in chapter 1, is the
master narrative of the age. It is also, by its nature, immensely diverse.
It finds its source in a variety of religious, cultural, political, and philo-
sophical experiences, which vary from one continent to the next and
sometimes divide entire blocks of nations within a single continent.
Such, for example, was the nature of the debate that opposed the mis-
leadingly labeled “Old” and “New” Europes at the time of the Iraq war,
as Jacques Rupnik demonstrates in chapter 5.
Such varieties of anti-Americanism are well documented by the
authors of this volume. Less obvious and perhaps more worrisome for
American policymakers is another pervasive phenomenon that one
might call, with due acknowledgment to Hannah Arendt, the banality
of anti-Americanism. This is nicely illustrated by the following com-
ments, made recently by some French high-school seniors to their
English teacher in one very well-regarded French lycée:5
America is an extreme country, a new country, where the reality is often
cruel and hard for more than half the population. It is the most powerful
country [in the world], but it is also the most dangerous.
America wants to look like God because they [the US government]
want to decide who must die or not.
George Bush wants to control the world. He is not a good
president. . . . There is very much racism because the society is con-
trolled by the WASPs . . . It’s not a democratic country.
I just hate the politics in the United States.
The United States is great, without the Americans . . . I hate their pres-
ident because he abuses his power, and makes war everywhere.
I hate America, because it makes war in Iraq for its oil.
These quotes suggest a sustained level of anger, resentment, and even
hatred—widely shared feelings among a new generation of European
high-school students. But these sentiments are quite detached from
anti-American rhetoric of even the relatively recent past: the Vietnam
War and the old anti-imperialist struggles of the European Left evoke
practically no memories or empathy among today’s teenagers, who
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D enis Lacorne and Tony Judt
simply do not like “America” and dislike President Bush and his
policies even more. The America they do like—and for them it is often
the real America—is that of Michael Moore, the beloved hero of
contemporary French, German, and Spanish moviegoers. There are,
of course, discordant voices—intellectuals who truly “love” America—
but they are few and isolated and their opinions carry almost no
weight.6
The banal universality of anti-Americanism is well documented in
the case studies presented in this volume. The emergence of anti-
American sentiment cannot be attributed to a single cause. It results,
rather, from widely different contexts, each with its own distinctive his-
tory. In Iran, for example, as Morad Saghafi demonstrates (chapter 10),
Americanophilia was the norm until the early 1950s. Post–World War II
America was seen as “liberating” the country from Soviet occupation.
But the 1953 CIA-sponsored coup against Mossadegh seriously
tarnished the reputation of the United States and transformed the
American ally into a “disloyal and deceitful” friend.
Later in the century, when the American-backed monarchy became
the enemy of the insurgent mullahs, anti-Americanism emerged as the
key slogan of the age, unifying two radically different discourses—
the traditional propaganda of the communist left and the religious
discourse of the Islamists—and lending a very particular and enduring
vigor to Iranian anti-Americanism. Today, the “Great Satan” is no
longer such a threatening demon, and in the aftermath of 9/11, the
Iranian middle class expressed a surprising level of sympathy for
their American counterparts. The Iranian case thus perfectly illustrates
the cyclical nature of pro- and anti-American perceptions. It also
suggests that anti-Americanism is often a reactive phenomenon and is
one that cannot be easily separated from the study of pro-American
sentiment.
Palestinian perceptions of America, as argued by Camille Mansour
(chapter 8), are in no way monolithic. What the population at large
resents to the point of enduring hatred is U.S. foreign policy (and par-
ticularly George W. Bush’s Middle East policy), which is perceived as
one-sided and “blindly pro-Israel.” But the opinions of the “Palestinian
street” should not be confused with those of the political elites.
American society and its culture are often greatly admired, particularly
by the educated middle class, whether they are in Palestine or in exile.
The anti-Americanism of many middle-class Palestinians allows for a
certain pragmatism: the realization that the United States is the only
superpower and therefore the only country that can have an influence
on Israel. Palestinians, concludes Mansour, do not see themselves in
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The Banality of Anti-Americanism
>
5
some grand clash of civilizations, despite the efforts of local Islamists
to “universalize their local anti-Israeli struggle.”
Anti-Americanism in Southeast Asia is inextricably tied to the region’s
colonial past and America’s involvement in the area, particularly in the
Philippines. The strength of anti-American sentiment is related to the
size of local Muslim minorities, their treatment by ruling elites, and
the respective influence of radical and moderate Islamists. Opinions are
not fixed, however, and they are directly related to the nature of domes-
tic policies. One of the most unfortunate (and unanticipated) conse-
quences of 9/11, as demonstrated well by Farish Noor (chapter 11),
has been the increasingly repressive policies of Asian governments
against Muslim minorities. This has had the predictable consequence
of exacerbating the anti-Americanism of “many Islamists and pro-
democracy activists,” who can now readily demonstrate the link
between U.S. interests and their own government’s authoritarian rule.
The effort to “export democracy” to Afghanistan and Iraq has, in fact,
strengthened authoritarian Southeast Asian regimes, which have been
only too pleased to clamp down on local democratic movements in
the name of an ill-defined struggle against terrorism.
The key to understanding Pakistani–American relations, as argued
by Mohammad Waseem (chapter 9), is foreign policy. America was
never a colonial power in that part of the world and is not perceived
as one. On the contrary, it cultivated friendly relations with Pakistan—
the most anti-Communist country of the region—particularly following
the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. There was thus a “convergence” of
outlooks between the United States and Pakistan. This convergence,
and the pool of sympathy that it generated, disappeared for a while
after the collapse of the U.S.S.R. With 9/11 and the subsequent U.S.
invasion of Afghanistan, the two countries were free to “rediscover
each other,” at least at the elite level. Pakistan had become a necessary,
if occasionally embarrassing, ally in the struggle against Al Qaeda.
But the divergence between elite and mass public perceptions of the
United States in Pakistan has remained substantial. Public opinion is
steadfastly and increasingly anti-American, particularly because it is
all too well informed about the conflicts that oppose the Muslim and
non-Muslim worlds. The Islamic media “explosion” of the 1990s,
according to Waseem, has greatly tarnished the positive image of the
United States, which is held directly responsible for the mistreatment of
Muslim populations throughout the world. By globalizing local conflicts
(and, indeed, giving local meaning to international developments), the
modern Islamic media—television above all—fuels the anger and resent-
ment of a public whom Waseem describes as “ignorant and gullible.”
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D enis Lacorne and Tony Judt
In Saudi Arabia, of course, anti-Americanism is endemic; this is in
part because here, too, public opinion is increasingly well informed—
albeit selectively—about the world, and is especially sensitive to the
violence unleashed by the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. But even here,
anti-Americanism, as Gregory Gause points out (chapter 7), is not
monolithic. It is highly segmented, reflecting the diverging views of
intellectual elites, governmental leaders, and salafi Islamist circles.
The salafis are clearly the most likely to denounce the United States,
for religious reasons, as an evil crusader that should be removed from
the region.
But a number of prominent salafis, together with certain liberal
intellectuals, have favored greater dialogue with the West in the name
of pragmatism and realism. In fact, Gause argues, the true nature of
the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia should
be judged only at the elite level: “On neither side is there a strong
public constituency for the relationship. It is a relationship between
elites, based on very clear understandings of mutual interest. There is
no sentiment in it. . . . It is on oil that the relationship began, and it
will be on oil that the relationship will in the future evolve.”
Does public opinion in Europe differ significantly from non-Western,
Middle Eastern, or Asian sentiment? As Gérard Grunberg demon-
strates in chapter 3, it certainly does not with regard to the American
invasion of Iraq. Europeans as a whole were hostile to the war in Iraq,
even when their leaders favored the American intervention. It is, in
fact, striking that two-thirds of the Poles, 90 percent of the Spanish,
and over 50 percent of the British declared their opposition to the
war. Once the war started, to be sure, Tony Blair was able to benefit
from a “rallying around the flag” effect, as nearly two-thirds of the
British expressed support for the intervention. But that support faded
very quickly, and in the absence of any evidence of Iraqi “weapons of
mass destruction,” it has now almost completely evaporated. In any
case, and notwithstanding the British exception, Grunberg’s conclusion
should be seriously pondered: “The Europeans are no longer certain
that they defend the same causes and strive for the same objectives as
the Americans.”
The new German anti-Americanism, as convincingly demonstrated
by Detlev Claussen (chapter 4), does indeed mimic older anti-American
narratives and revive older anti-American memories based on the strug-
gles of the 1960s and 1970s. But “new anti-Americanism” is not merely
a reprise of older political debates. It expresses a new phenomenon: the
social psychology of the new German middle classes in a reunified
Germany, eager, for the first time in six decades, to reaffirm their
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The Banality of Anti-Americanism
7
identity and willing to denounce America’s use of military force as the
manifestation of an unacceptable “arrogance of power.”
German anti-Americanism is well established among both cultural
elites and the public at large. It is reinforced and legitimized by what
many Germans see as their country’s distinctive approach to interna-
tional affairs, with its emphasis on peaceful engagement and a high
moral tone. This self-congratulatory and rather self-regarding outlook
helps explain, in Claussen’s view, why Europeans have not always
grasped the underlying significance of the events of 9/11—reinforced
by the Madrid train bombings of March 2004—that the attacks targeted
not just the United States, but the entire Western world: “Only when
the international community acknowledges that international terrorism
is a shared threat will anti-Americanism recede in strength.”
In examining the rather contrasting feelings expressed by East
European leaders (but, again, not their publics), Jacques Rupnik in
chapter 5 raises an uncomfortable question: was it just appreciation of
and admiration for
the U.S. “liberator” or were there other, less noble
motivations? Genuine gratitude, Rupnik argues, was mixed with more
opportunistic considerations, particularly on the part of the Polish
and Rumanian leadership: ex-Communist leaders, eager to erase the
memories of their own Communist past, eagerly seized the occasion
to cultivate friendship with America. As America’s most “trusted”
allies, they openly expressed the hope that their backing would, in
turn, generate tangible economic and military rewards. Above all,
friendship with America was cultivated for its “equalizing effect” on
Europe’s dominant economic and political partners—France and
Germany. “New Europe” plus America was supposed to counterbalance
the excessive influence of “Old Europe.”
Russian perceptions of America are truly distinct from Western and
Eastern European perceptions, partly because of the persistence of old
attitudes inherited from the Cold War, and partly because of Russia’s
“growing disenchantment” with the experience of market democracy
during the years of the Yeltsin presidency, as explained by Nikolai
Zlobin (chapter 6). In addition, Russia’s global loss of influence—the
fact that it can no longer claim to be a superpower—has had a trau-
matic impact on Russian political elites. As a result, the dramatic
events of 9/11 did not significantly alter Russian perceptions of
the United States. The revival of the Russian “national idea” and
Russian “pride” under Vladimir Putin’s rule, together with a certain
nostalgia for the “cultural values of Soviet times,” is well documented.
Paradoxically, this makes Russian public opinion less vulnerable to the
sort of resentful anti-Americanism of states and peoples who seek to
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D enis Lacorne and Tony Judt
escape from the shadow of American power. Russians don’t object to
the emergence of a “closer relationship” with America, as long as this
relationship is understood to be a relationship of “equals.”
*
*
*
The chapters in this volume, while covering considerable ground, are
not intended to be a comprehensive, country-by-country survey of
