by Tony Judt
anti-American sentiment in the contemporary world. Certain impor-
tant countries are not discussed in detail—the United Kingdom, to
take one example—and, as noted above, we have not attempted to
cover every part of the world. Thus, Latin America, whose various
nations have complicated and differing relationships with both the
idea of “America” and the policies of the United States, is not covered
here. We have sought, rather, to engage with anti-American sentiment
in certain regions that are key to America’s own foreign policy dilem-
mas and interests, and in countries, such as France and Russia, where
the sources and varieties of attitudes to America are not always well
understood—not least by Americans themselves.
As volume editors, we have not sought to impose a single interpreta-
tion or perspective upon our contributors. On the contrary, we believe
that one of the distinctive merits of this collection is that it not only
reflects a range of scholarly opinion but also captures rather well the dif-
ferent approaches to the subject itself, as they emerge from very different
national and cultural angles. It is also perhaps worth noting, in view of the
highly contentious and sensitive nature of the subject itself, that we have
not tried to align the views of our contributors. These cover quite an
eclectic range, as readers will discover—and that is as it should be.
This book, then, is decidedly not a contribution to the anti-American
“case,” nor is it a defense of the United States in the face of its many
critics. In both categories, there is a voluminous and growing literature
that casts diminishing light upon the subject. If, as we have suggested,
“anti-Americanism” is the banal but decidedly widespread discourse
of our age—the rhetorical form through which much of the world
organizes its understanding of the age we live in—then what is called
for is sustained attention to the sources of this new master narrative, to
its present variety and likely trajectory. The chapters in this book may
thus serve as an analytical introduction: a prolegomenon to what we
hope will be a growing body of scholarship on a subject destined to
play a crucial role in twenty-first-century public affairs.
July 22, 2004
* * *
The Banality of Anti-Americanism
9
Notes
1. Michael Portillo, “There’s only one way forward for America—Vote
Democrat,” The Sunday Times, July 4, 2004.
2. As cited in Jackie Calmes, “Chinks appear in Bush’s pro-business armor,”
The Wall Street Journal (Europe), June 29, 2004.
3. Philip Gordon and Jeremy Shapiro, “An alliance waiting for November,”
International Herald Tribune, June 29, 2004.
4. Most of the authors in this volume present one definition or other of anti-
Americanism. We have not tried to impose a single definition to be used
throughout: each author assumes his own choice and theoretical justification.
5. The name and exact location of the school have not been provided to
preserve the anonymity of the students and their teachers.
6. See Yves Berger, Dictionnaire amoureux des Etats-Unis (Paris, Plon, 2003)
for a rare example of such Americanophilia.
* * *
1
A N ew Master Narrative?
R eflections on Contemporary
A nti-Americanism
Tony Judt
“A nti-Americanism” is the master narrative of the age. Until quite
recently, political argument—first in the West, latterly everywhere—
rested firmly, and, for most people, quite comfortably, upon the twin
pillars of “progress” and “reaction.” The idea of progress encapsulated
both the moral confidence of the Enlightenment and the various and
ultimately conflicting political projects to which it gave rise: liberal-
ism, democracy, socialism, and, in the twentieth century, communism.
Each of these heirs to the Enlightenment project had a confident story
to tell of its own origins, its desirability, its necessity, and ultimately its
grounds for confidence in impending victory. Each, in short, was not
merely a narrative of human progress but a master narrative, aspiring
to contain within itself and, where necessary, explain away all other
accounts of modernity.
Reaction—beginning, quite literally, with the reaction of certain
early-nineteenth-century thinkers to the Revolution in France—was
thus in this sense a counter-narrative: a denial, sometimes epistemolog-
ical, often ethical, always political, of the projects and programs born
of the optimistic eighteenth century. The political forms of reactionary
politics were almost as protean and diverse as those of its nemesis:
Catholic, paternalist, nostalgic, pastoral, pessimistic, authoritarian,
and, ultimately, Fascist. But reactionary accounts of the human condi-
tion shared one common evaluative conclusion with progressivism:
they tended, in every case, to the view that the modern world was, or
would soon be, divided into two opposed and irreconcilable camps.
The end of the Cold War appeared to close this centuries-long cycle of
* * *
12
T ony Judt
Manichean political and intellectual apposition. Not only had capital-
ism and communism, the West and the East, democracy and authori-
tarianism, apparently become reconciled—largely through the
unambiguous victory of the former in each case—but the very intel-
lectual premises on which the distinctions rested, broadly associated
with Marxism and its various heirs, seemed to have crumbled. If “cap-
italism” was no longer a passing and regrettable stage on the historical
high road from backwardness to socialism (a core article of radical
faith since the 1840s), but rather the default condition of well-regulated
societies, as free-market liberals had long asserted and even social
democrats now conceded, then even the distinction between “Left” and
“Right” was unclear. “History,” as some pundits unwisely announced,
had come to an “End.”
A mere 15 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is clear that such
pronouncements were a little premature. The wretched of the earth
and their better-heeled sympathizers and spokesmen in the rich world
have once again found common cause. Capitalism, to be sure, is no
longer the avowed target of opprobrium, though it is worth noting
that it is much less universally admired or desired than many fondly
suppose—or than was the case two decades ago. And outside of unre-
constructed Trotskyist groupuscules, the prospects for a radical transition
from present discontents to future idylls—the dream of revolution
and socialism—are not widely discussed. And yet, there is, once again,
an international rhetoric of rejection that binds politics, economics,
and ethics into a common story about how the world works and why
it doesn’t. And those who invoke this language, even if they have
yet to find a common sense of purpose or even a common strategy,
have chanced upon something much more
important, at least in the
medium term—a common target. That target is the United States of
America.
It is tempting to dismiss out of hand the new politics of anti-
Americanism. For what, after all, can this “America”—a huge and
differentiated society, as ethnically and culturally diverse as any other
and whose constituent peoples have diasporic ties to most of the rest
of the world—stand for? Capitalism? Sweden, Spain, New Zealand,
Nigeria, and Brazil, along with dozens of others, are all “capitalist”
countries. Imperialism? The United States of America is without doubt
the only empire of our times. But “anti-imperialism,” albeit a well-
established radical politics in its own right, is hardly a self-sufficient
account of the world—a “master” narrative. It is beholden to other
narratives—theories of race and anti-racism, socialist explanations for
capitalism’s voracious search for foreign markets, and so on.
* * *
A New Master Narrative?
13
If anti-Americanism were indeed just the latest anti-imperialism,
appropriately adjusted to the latest empire itself—in the manner, say,
of the 1960s—it would hardly be so interesting, or so appealing to so
many. America today is the object of suspicion and fear—mixed as
ever with an element of fascination and seduction—because its global
reach goes well beyond political or economic power, though it rests on
these. Stretched to a planetary scale, the American way of modernity—
globalization, to acknowledge the shorthand account if it—threatens
local interests and identities in ways that no past empire could ever
have imagined.
A world apparently busy remaking itself in what Americans all too
readily claim is their own image stands challenged in many intersect-
ing spheres: the decline of indigenous language; the dilution of high
culture; the internationalization of popular culture; the uncontained
risks to environmental health; the virtual disappearance of economic
autonomy; the etiolation of public policy, and the apparent diminution
of national sovereignty. Local commentators can hardly hope any
longer to explain or address such concerns within their own borders.
They are obliged to look beyond; and what they see there has become
material in many people’s eyes for a new, all-embracing explanation of
our current woes. If America is the fons et origo malorum, the source
and origin of all miseries, then it is America—whatever that is—that is
the problem. If you want to understand how America appears to the
world today, consider the sport-utility vehicle (SUV). Oversized and
overweight, the SUV disdains negotiated agreements to restrict atmos-
pheric pollution. It consumes inordinate quantities of scarce resources
to furnish its privileged inhabitants with supererogatory services. It
exposes outsiders to a deadly risk in order to provide for the illusory
security of its occupants. In a crowded world, the SUV appears as a
dangerous anachronism. Like U.S. foreign policy, the SUV comes
packaged in sonorous mission statements; but underneath, it is just an
oversized pickup truck with too much power.
In short, America is everywhere. Americans—just 5 percent of the
world’s population—generate 30 percent of the World’s Gross Product,
consume nearly 30 percent of global oil production, and are responsible
for almost as high a share of the world’s output of greenhouse gases.
Our world is divided in many ways: rich/poor, North/South,
Western/non-Western. But more and more, the division that counts
is the one separating America from everyone else.
The United States, by virtue of its unique standing, is exposed to
the world’s critical gaze in everything it does or fails to do. Some of the
antipathy the United States arouses is a function of what it is: long before
* * *
14
T ony Judt
America rose to global dominion, foreign visitors were criticizing its
brash self-assurance, the narcissistic confidence of Americans in the
superiority of American values and practices, and their rootless inat-
tentiveness to history and tradition—their own and other people’s.
The charge sheet has grown since the United States took the world
stage, but it has not changed much. This “cultural” anti-Americanism
is shared by Europeans, Latin Americans, and Asians, secular and
religious alike. It is not about antipathy to the West, or capitalism, or
freedom, or the Enlightenment, or any other abstraction exemplified
by the United States. It is about America.
To foreign critics, these contradictions in American behavior sug-
gest hypocrisy—perhaps, the most familiar of the accusations leveled
at the United States. They are all the more galling because, hypocritical
or not, America is indispensable. Without American participation,
most international agreements are dead letters. American leadership
seems to be required even in cases—such as Bosnia between 1992 and
1995—where the British and their fellow Europeans had the means to
resolve the crisis unaided. The United States is cruelly unsuited to play
the world’s policeman—Washington’s attention span is famously
short, even in chronically troubled regions like Kashmir, the Balkans,
the Middle East, or Korea—but it seems to have no choice. Meanwhile,
everyone else, but the Europeans especially, resent the United States
when it fails to lead, but also when it leads too assertively.
The position of the European Union is, on the face of it, a paradox.
Fifty-five percent of the world’s development aid and two thirds of all
grants-in-aid to the poor and vulnerable nations of the globe come
from the European Union. As a share of GNP, U.S. foreign aid is
barely one third the European average. If you combine European
spending on defense, foreign aid, intelligence gathering, and policing—
all of them vital to any sustained war against international crime—it
easily matches the current American defense budget. “Europe” is not
inherently weak.
But decades of American nuclear reassurance induced unprece-
dented military dystrophy. The Franco-German condominium of
domination was sooner or later bound to provoke a backlash among
Europe’s smaller nations. The inability of the European Union to
build a consensus on foreign policy, much less a force with which to
implement it, has handed Washington a monopoly in the definition
and resolution of international crises. No one should be surprised if
America’s present leaders have chosen to exercise it. What began some
years ago as American frustration at the Europeans’ failure to organize
and spend in their own defense has now become a source of satisfaction
* * *
A New Master Narrative?
15
for U.S. hawks. The Europeans don’t agree with us? So what! We
don’t need them, and anyway what can they do? They’re feeling hurt
and resentful in Brussels, or Paris, or Berlin? Well, they’ve only them-
selves to blame. Remember Bosnia.
Moreover, in the shadow of the recent invasion of Iraq, the present
and future member states of Europe fell to internecine squabbling,
unable to agree on a common response to America’s martial activism.
Some, like Britain, Spain, and Italy, chose to line up with their long-
standing American protector. Others, like France, Germany, and
Belgium, asserted a “European” difference that certainly reflects
public opinion across the continent, but may lead them into a strate-
gic cul-de-sac. The East Europeans buckled under unprecedented
American diplomatic pressure and bribery; for those in Brussels, Paris,
and elsewhere who didn’t want them in the Union anyway, that
will not be forgotten soon. If this squabbling, uncoordinated “Union”
is indeed the only geostrategic challenger America now faces,
Washington ought to be able to rest easy. America, it would seem, is
not just the sole surviving super power, but the only sure source of
international initiative and well being.
And yet, in little more than two years since 9/11, President George W.
Bush and his advisers managed to make America seem to the over-
whelming majority of humankind as the greatest threat to global
stability. By staking a monopoly claim on Western values and their
defense, the United States has prompted other Westerners to reflect
on what divides them from America. By enthusiastically asserting its
right to reconfigure the Muslim world, Washington has reminded
Europeans, in particular, of the growing Muslim presence in their
own cultures and its political implications. In short, the United States
has given a lot of people occasion to rethink their relationship with it.
Resented for what it is, America thus stokes further antipathy by
what it does. Here, things have indeed changed for the worse. The
United States is often a delinquent international citizen: it is reluctant
to join international initiatives or agreements, whether on climate
warming, biological warfare, criminal justice, or women’s rights; it is
one of only two states (the other being Somalia) that have failed
to ratify the 1989 Convention on Children’s Rights. The present
