by Barry Rubin
The entire world had to view the United States in this context. As the Soviet Union's main adversary, the United States was now central to the antagonisms of Moscow, Communist states or parties, and radical movements. It was now the United States, not England or France, that was the world's chief "imperialist" power that must be discredited and defeated. Promoting anti-Americanism was a way to weaken the U.S. side in the global Cold War battle and to undermine its local friends. Those hating America would not side with her, and those hating the United States intensively enough might either join the Soviet camp or become neutral.
For its part, Western Europe and its peoples had to decide whether to support the United States, support the USSR, or try to become a "third force." Suddenly, the country so long decried as inferior became Europe's leader; nations so long used to primacy had to take a back seat to the American upstart. While most states, except France, made this adjustment relatively easily, the power shift left lasting scars that would encourage more anti-Americanism in the future. It was understandably hard for Europeans to put their very survival in the hands of a country they often differed with about policy, style, and ideas.
The Third World underwent a parallel experience. Outside of Latin America, few peoples or countries previously had important interactions with the United States.2 Now U.S. decisions and actions would affect their fate. As their dealings with the United States increased, it was also hard for these countries, too, to understand an unfamiliar American society and strange U.S. system with a history, institutions, and worldview so different from their own.
Moreover, whatever the United States stood for or advocated would inevitably offend some and threaten others. And the more that some people in any given country wanted to copy America or cooperate with it, the more that others would be antagonized. As the United States sought allies among governments, oppositions might see America as their enemy as well. Whether the United States did or didn't act, spoke or didn't speak, gave help or did nothing could provoke resentment.
In 1957, the Paris-based American humorist Art Buchwald placed an ad in the London Times personal column that said that he would like to hear from people who disliked Americans and their reasons why. He received over a hundred replies and concluded:
If Americans would stop spending money, talking loudly in public places, telling the British who won the war, adopt a pro-colonial policy, back future British expeditions to Suez [a reference to the 1956 attack on Egypt], stop taking oil out of the Middle East, stop chewing gun, ... move their air bases out of England, settle the desegregation problem in the South ... put the American woman in her proper place, and not export Rock n'Roll [music], and speak correct English, the tension between the two countries might ease.3
Of course, there were far more than frivolous issues that led to controversy and friction. Many aspects of U.S. policy during the Cold War both abroad (notably, support for Latin American or other dictators and the Vietnam War) and at home (especially the McCarthy era and civil rights) would draw foreign criticism.
Again, though, it is important to emphasize that mere criticism of a U.S. policy or aspect of American society did not in itself constitute antiAmericanism. Rather, anti-Americanism required a view in which par ticular objections became systemic. In the eyes of such people, the United States could do-or at least would do-nothing right. They portrayed it as bad or inevitably misbehaving, misrepresenting its policies, slandering its institutions, and distorting its motives. Or, to put it most simply: the good make mistakes; the evil act deliberately or according to their nature.
It was in this spirit of questioning American motives and the country's nature that anti-Americanism could be found. A good example of such thinking is provided by the British playwright Harold Pinter who complained that from 1945 onward the United States "has exercised a sustained, systematic, remorseless, and quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide, while masquerading as a force for universal good.... [The United States has been] the most dangerous power the world has ever known. "4
The origins of such a systematic response to the United States lay less in the details of U.S. behavior than in the accusers' motives and misunderstandings. Moreover, their beliefs and claims rested firmly on two centuries of well-established anti-American traditions. As always, antiAmericanism-as distinct from criticism-arose from such factors as other nations' ignorance, jealousy, class or partisan interest, ideology, and conflicting goals.
Of course, the second half of the twentieth century was also an era of great popularity for the United States in the world, and at times antiAmericanism fell to relatively low levels. Following the end of World War II, there was a great deal of gratitude toward the United States among non-Communist Western Europeans. They appreciated the U.S. role in first helping to save them from fascism, then giving so generously to rebuild their countries, and also preserving them from Communist takeovers or Soviet aggression.
Clearly, too, it was harder to deny that the long-derided U.S. democratic and economic system had worked pretty well. In contrast to Europeans of earlier times, the Italian writer Luigi Barzini meant it as a compliment when he explained in his big-selling 1953 book on America, "The United States has created the greatest organization for the production and distribution of goods in history."5
Finally, one could argue that at least part of the old predictions about the spread of the American model, or at least aspects of it, were becoming true. Western Europe was far more similar to the United States than it had been a half-century or century earlier. Since Europeans generally tended to adopt the things they preferred, most were comfortable with these changes. The left and intellectuals might worry that this was merely the beginning of a slide toward full-scale Americanization, but most people were less horrified or unsympathetic to the United States as the gap between their and American society narrowed.
For a time, anti-Americanism in Europe, outside of Communist circles and France at least, was in eclipse. While some resentment and grumbling resurfaced, these would remain minority viewpoints. In Germany and Italy, where the people were liberated from fascism and treated well by the United States, anti-Americanism was unacceptable among non-Communists. An exception was the novelist Hermann Hesse, who told his colleague Thomas Mann, "In Germany the dangerous criminals and racketeers, the sadists and gangsters are no longer Nazis, nor do they speak German, they are Americans."6
But most of the defeated West Germans did not want or could not afford to slander America. Their own great power pretensions were shattered, and they had made too many mistakes of their own to retain the old snobbish dismissal of American institutions. Not only was selfconfidence in their own civilization's superiority eroded, but they also knew that only U.S. willpower and forces had saved them from Communist occupation.
In Britain, too, anti-Americanism was largely defused or driven underground by the close alliance between the two countries. Since 1945, the British debate has been over whether to look toward America or Europe, a division of loyalties not fully shared by any other Europeans.
Even while England could be jealous of American success and sorrowful about the loss of empire, it was able to cope with this relative decline. Given its common language and "Anglo-Saxon" (as the French and Latin Americans put it) heritage, Britain was already close to America. Now it institutionalized a "special relationship" and "Atlantic alliance." Britain could soften the blow of being junior partner by seeing itself as America's tutor (playing Greece to America's Rome, as some put it). In short, Britain's attitude to the United States could be patronizing without being antagonistic or hostile.
Tired of a long postwar austerity, the British masses saw no disgrace in wanting the gadgets and luxuries they knew were enjoyed by their American counterparts. For the left this posed a problem, though the difficulty was smaller since the left was largely non-Communist and even non-Marxist. On the political side, the British left knew that pro-Soviet or neutralist sentiments on the Cold War were political s
uicide. But the United States could still be derided as a land of lynching and McCarthyism.
On the cultural front, it could criticize the Americans in traditional terms as a people whose material goods only made their lives emptier. When the working-class literary rebel Kenneth Tynan wrote a sarcastic letter in 1957 on how to be successful in British cultural life, one of his recommendations was "adopt a patronizing attitude to anything popular or American."7
The main British expert on America was Harold Laski, a London School of Economics professor and leading Labour Party intellectual. Laski reflected the ambiguity of British attitudes that were more critical than anti-American. He had taught at Harvard in the 1920s and had many American friends, including Franklin Roosevelt. This love-hate relationship was shown by his 1949 book, American Democracy, which mixed a doctrinaire Marxist condemnation of the United States with affection as well. Some of his distortions were extreme. For example, he portrayed the North as treating the South like a colony and promoting racism among poor whites in order to keep the working class divided.8
A few on the left diluted their vitriol more sparingly. The novelist J. B. Priestly was so antagonistic to U.S. mass culture that he was dubbed by journalists "the man who hates America."9 His fellow writer Graham Greene held similar views. He wrote in 1967, "If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States I would certainly choose the Soviet Union." He viewed America as a mindless consumer society based on an "eternal adolescence ... to which morality means keeping Mother's Day and looking after the kid sister's purity." It was useless to pretend "that with these allies it was ever possible to fight for civilization." 10
These old cultural critiques were displaced to more exotic climes as American behavior in the Third World came under scrutiny. Greene was perhaps the first European writer to focus on this issue, which would assume tremendous importance in later years. In Greene's novel, The Quiet American, set in South Vietnam, the American figure is an idealistic but greatly naive young man determined to promote democracy but actually causing widespread bloodshed to innocent people. The book's hero, a worldly wise but cynical British journalist, says of the Americans: "I was tired of the whole pack of them with their private stores of CocaCola and their portable hospitals and their too-wide cars, and their not quite latest guns.... My conversation was full of the poverty of American literature, the scandals of American politics, and the beastliness of American children.... Nothing that America could do was right.""
Others maintained the old aristocratic conservative strain of ridicule about America. "Of course, the Americans are cowards," Evelyn Waugh cheerfully told Graham Greene. "They are almost all the descendants of wretches who deserted their legitimate monarchs for fear of military service."12 But this kind of talk was mainly restricted to private social conversation and jokes.
As so often happened, anti-Americanism became more significant when it became caught up in local disputes, for example the Labour Party's factional battles of the 195os. The party's left wing, led by Aneurin Bevan, criticized the United States because it did not want to follow so closely America's Cold War leadership and saw that society as an unwelcome alternative to the socialist future that the Labour Party wanted for Britain.
In the context of the British internal debate, to imitate America's success meant to put more priority on making capitalism work than on promoting state ownership of industry. Thus, if the United States was highly regarded and became a model, traditional Labour Party goals would be watered down into merely managing the existing society better rather than transforming it. This is precisely what the rival party faction, led by Hugh Gaitskell, wanted to do by moving Labour toward the political center. It would be better, he argued, to make Britain more like America, which he saw as a place with greater social equality, no aristocracy, and, in the words of Gaitskell's chief intellectual ally Anthony Crosland, a "natural and unrestrained" atmosphere.
Gaitskell's faction also favored a close alliance with the United States in the Cold War, a stance that Bevan's group saw as undermining Britain's independence and the party's leftist orientation. Of course, the more pro-American were the party's moderates, the more incentive radicals had to bash the United States in order to discredit their foes and gain support for themselves. In response, Crosland complained in 1956 that anti-Americanism was a "left-wing neurosis, springing from a natural resentment at the transfer of world power from London to Washington, combined with the need to find some new and powerful scapegoat to replace the capitalists at home," whose power Labour had already diminished by promoting the "welfare state." 13
George Orwell, the great British intellectual who never felt intimidated into conformity, agreed with this assessment and thought antiAmericanism was a marginal phenomenon. Those who advocated it were a minor, though vocal, mob. "I do not believe the mass of the people in this country are anti-American politically, and certainly not culturally." In attacking the United States, the intellectuals were merely uttering their own group's "parrot cry." Indeed, as would so often happen regarding anti-Americanism, such people were "indifferent to mass opinion" but trembled at the orthodoxy of their peers.14
Orwell was right about both the causes and limits of anti-Americanism in his country. Generally in Britain, anti-Americanism was usually voiced by a minority that knew it to be an unpopular idea. Even in the Labour Party, the moderate left maintained control. By 1961, the Bevan faction had been defeated and even revised its own views. Future Labour prime ministers, like Harold Wilson in the 196os and Tony Blair in the 199os and early 20005, were strongly pro-American in the Gaitskell tradition.
It was, of course, the Communist bloc, a state sponsor of antiAmericanism, and the many in the West it influenced directly or indirectly who carried the banner of anti-Americanism in the postwar world. But there was one other country-France-where that attitude continued to be powerful despite the central role the United States played in its liberation and postwar reconstruction.
Ironically, France-unlike Britain and Germany-had never been at war with the United States. On the contrary, American troops had fought on French soil to protect that country in two world wars. Few issues had ever actually created friction between these two countries. Many antiAmerican attacks in France came from the Communists or others repeating Soviet propaganda. But this alone is not a sufficient explanation, since the Communists were even more powerful in Italy without having an equivalent impact.
Yet France's primacy as the world center of non-Communist antiAmericanism is easy to understand. The idea had a long, continuous history in that country, where it had always been mainly cultural and civilizational rather than policy-driven in origin. Only France, among Western industrialized states, still believed it should have global primacy. It was the sole such country that saw itself as a political and cultural rival to the United States.
France also had a powerful class whose practical interests were well served by anti-Americanism. The country's intellectual circles, dominated by the left, were skeptical about the justness of the U.S. cause in the Cold War. In material terms, French cultural and intellectual producers were economic competitors of American products. They were especially horrified by a country whose system devalued the importance of intellectuals. If France became Americanized, the intellectual and cultureproducing sectors would suffer the greatest loss of status and influence. One way to put it was that the United States was often seen by intellectuals in general, and especially French intellectuals, the way capitalists perceived the USSR: as a direct danger to their power, prestige, and way of life.
There were many other factors, too. France-unlike Britain-had a different language from America and a cuisine more worthy of a spirited defense against fast food than did England or Germany. It was dedicated to a policy of propping up a disproportionately large peasantry in order to preserve the country's traditional character, making it vulnerable to the import of American food or technology that could displace these people. In sh
ort, France simultaneously felt culturally superior and better qualified to be a superpower yet threatened by an inferior American hegemony on both political and cultural grounds. As General Pierre Billotte, Charles de Gaulle's wartime chief of staff, explained, "France has an inferiority complex." But it also had a superiority complex toward America and the combination made for a great deal of antagonism."
Rather than diluting French anti-Americanism, as one might expect, the U.S. role in liberating France during World War II actually intensified it-as had happened with World War I. The need to be saved by the United States offended the country's sense of greatness. As it declined from world power to supplicant for U.S. help, the bitterness intensified.
At the same time, the French had rather ungrateful complaints about the way the United States had rescued it. De Gaulle and his colleagues felt the Americans had mistreated them during the war by making their Free French movement only minor partners and carving up Europe with the Soviets without consulting France. A decade later, explaining France's withdrawal from NATO, de Gaulle added the criticism that it had taken too long for U.S. help to arrive in both world wars.16
Even when the United States paid for France's reconstruction with the Marshall Plan, Communists said-and many were convinced-that this was merely an American plot to dominate the country. Other left-wing parties were hostile, and center-right parties were suspicious.
As one study of French perceptions put it, this resentment at feeling overshadowed, undervalued, and ignored was made all the worse by their actual need for U.S. help and protection. "If only the Americans hated the French and were open enemies, as the Germans once were, something could be done about it," as one observer wrote."' The U.S. government was aware of this problem. Between 1948 and 1952, it launched a massive cultural and informational campaign to improve its image there, with radio programs, films, libraries, cultural exchanges, and organizations to encourage mutual understanding."' None of this solved the issue. Indeed, the McCarthy era in America convinced many Frenchmen that the mob mentality and low intellectual level they expected to find really was dominant. The United States was unfit, they believed, to lead the Free World, especially since France could do so much better.
