by Barry Rubin
Ironically, anti-Americanism actually subverted the kind of accurate and critical evaluation that would benefit both the United States and others. Confronted by so much distortion and hatred, Americans facing systematic hostility were more likely to disregard criticism as bias rather than as suggestions for improvement. Anti-Americans use that ideology to defend their own system's worst shortcomings rather than to improve their own societies. In addition, a doctrine of generally dismissing American ideas, institutions, or policies also made it harder for foreigners to pick and choose rationally what was worth copying, adapting, or rejecting from the United States.
Paradoxically, this situation also helps explain why those formerly engaged in the most direct, real conflict with the United States were often not very anti-American. From their own experience, they had learned that conflict with America was costly, that conciliation was advantageous, and that a stereotype of U.S. permanent hostility was not accurate. In Latin America, only Mexico's anti-Americanism could be said to be motivated by direct conflicts, and the same applies for most of Europe (except possibly Greece) and the Middle East as well (except possibly Iran). In Africa, which wanted more Americanization, the sins of slavery and U.S foreign policy had no impact.
Vietnam is not a hotbed of anti-Americanism, and neither is Panama, Nicaragua, or Chile. The U.S. defeat of Germany and Japan did not make them anti-American. Japan, after losing a devastating war with America, having two atomic bombs dropped on civilian targets and enduring an occupation (which includes the presence of American troops today, more than a half-century later), did not dwell on resentment. Instead, it absorbed huge elements of American politics and culture very effectively, reinforcing its own identity as it adapted to the modern world. But the most consistently anti-American country in Western Europe is France, the only major state there with which the United States has never fought a war.
In contrast, there was a great deal of continuity in anti-Americanism as an idea held by certain groups in specific places. The United States did pose a challenge to the world, an alternative model of society-long before its foreign policy was of any importance or its culture threatened to swamp the earth. And whenever people disliked any American policy or innovation, they had a 20o-year-old anti-American framework within which to fit and magnify their criticism.
Indeed, there is a strong link between nineteenth-century antiAmericans and those of the two centuries that followed. America has always been detested as the prophet, herald, and exemplar of modernism, democracy, and mass culture. It was-as the founders of antiAmericanism and each succeeding generation put it-the greatest threat to the existing order in modern world history. The criticisms of romantics and aristocrats were magnified and made systematic by fascists and Communists, nationalists and traditionalists who did everything possible to discredit America as their strategic and allegedly civilizational rival.
Beginning in the early 18oos, the United States was ridiculed as a place where culture was nonexistent, money was king, democracy was a farce, and the unwashed masses ruled. Even then, before the United States had done anything on the world stage, there was tremendous fear that it would transform the world by its example. By the i88os, this picture was sharpened considerably. The United States represented the forces of mass production, an assault on tradition, capitalism and advertising, the destruction of the individual, and the downfall of cultural standards. Especially after the U.S. victory over Spain in 1898, increasing attention was given to the idea that the United States was not only a role model but also a power developing the ability to force itself on others, conquer foreign lands, and even one day rule the whole world.
Being universally loved, Americans would constantly rediscover, was not such an easy goal to attain. A year after violent attacks on Vice President Richard Nixon during a tour of Latin America, George Allen, director of the U.S. Information Agency, tried to explain these trends by drawing on his agency's extensive public opinion polling abroad:
We continue to act like adolescents. We boast about richness, our bigness and our strength. We talk about our tall buildings, our motor cars and our incomes. Nations, like people, who boast can expect others to cheer when they fail.... There is considerable concern in many quarters lest they be swamped by American "cultural imperialism," by a way of life characterized by Coca-Cola, cowboys and comics.... If American tourists must chew gum they should be told at least to chew it as inconspicuously as possible.9
The central issue, however, was not how Americans chewed gum, but the fact that throughout the Cold War, the Soviet Union, Third World radical movements, and extreme left-wing Europeans saw the United States as the main enemy. In turn, Cold War battles led the United States into actions that greatly increased the scope of its international involvements that led to criticism, especially in Latin America. Antagonism to the United States was most often triggered by objections to its support for a given government, usually-sometimes accurately-described as a corrupt, unpopular dictatorship, or its opposition to a movement it identified as pro-Communist.
But the audience for anti-American slogans, especially in Europe, was limited since most people opposed Communism, viewed the United States as a protector against it, and often considered anti-Americanism as propaganda from those favoring not only America's enemies but their own as well. Some intellectuals were frustrated by the trampling of nonCommunist democratic forces in the battle, though others were more tolerant of misdeeds taking place in the context of a life-and-death struggle with totalitarian forces.
When the Cold War ended, however, the USSR vanished but its anti-American case was globalized. America, the victor and sole remaining superpower, could credibly be considered capable of world conquest. The new situation intensified all the factors that led to a historic fear, hatred, and resentment of America. The publishing magnate Henry Luce had called the twentieth century the "American century." Yet it seemed likely that the twenty-first would better merit that title. Those who liked or hated this idea could at least agree that it would be an era of U.S. primacy as the globe's principal power, role model, and cultural influence.
In addition, new developments in technology and business methodssatellite television, the Internet, global franchising-also increased the immediacy of its cultural influence, making U.S. power more visible to everyone on a daily basis down to their very choice of television watching or dining.
While the United States was riding high, however, it was a moment of psychological vulnerability for Europeans and Muslims. The former were going through the difficult transition from national identities to European integration in order to fulfill an age-old dream of peace, harmony, and prosperity. It was clear that a broader European identity could be built faster and stronger if Europeans as a group set themselves apart from the United States by conceptual distinction and rivalry. In that way, inter-European quarrels would be avoided, unity augmented, and hostility directed outward. After all, this was always xenophobia's great appeal: everyone united against the outsider as the best way to ensure internal social harmony.
Public opinion polls reflected the fact that anti-Americanism became, to an almost unprecedented extent, a sentiment held by the masses, even majorities, in many countries. In the opening years of the twenty-first century, it had become nothing less than a fad or fashion, a new conventional wisdom-though how transitory was not clear. And this was true not only for the left but also in nationalist and conservative circles. "Above all," observed the German publisher Mathias Dopfner, antiAmericanism has become taken for granted, the accepted premise "of intelligent conversation. "10 A British journalist wrote, "These days you cannot say anything too bad about the Yanks and not be believed."
The new look for anti-Americanism was a synthesis of ideas from each faction. From conservatives, it took a sense of superiority over the populist America of the antitraditional, secularized mass society and the democracy of grubby buffoons, which went back to the aristocratic antiAmericanism of the nineteenth
century. From the left, anti-Americanism provided a new mechanism for trying to extend European influence to the world, proposing that Third World countries see Europe as a counterbalance to America. A conservative like French President Jacques Chirac could thus mount a nationalist foreign policy that would appeal to the European and Third World left, while French leftists would be reconciled with capitalism and bourgeois patriotism that, since they were made in Europe, were far better than the American version.
Similarly, the Muslim and especially Arab worlds were also in need of a new worldview. Increasingly aware that they were behind the West and not catching up, the dictatorial regimes were unable to win victories or solve problems. As a result, rulers who wanted to remain in power, intellectuals marketing their failed ideology, and Muslim clerics fearful of secularist trends all found it easy and advantageous to blame the United States. The cause of all their problems was not their own deficient systems and the bad choices they had made but rather American interference and enmity.
On one hand, there was a fair degree of consensus-especially outside the Middle East-that the best type of society, economy, and culture resembled America at least in general terms. On the other hand, those dissatisfied with the contemporary world and horrified by its apparent direction saw America as the ultimate threat jeopardizing their beloved way of life. Those favoring the status quo denounced the United States as a force for subversive change; those who wanted to transform their societies attacked the United States as a defender of the existing order. Both could join in seeing that country as the problem, simultaneously the source of reactionary paralysis and dangerous innovations.
The far left in particular needed a new ideology. Marxism had failed to create utopia where it ruled or to inspire revolution elsewhere. Even socialism was a dead issue in Europe and Latin America. No one could credibly continue to argue that humanity's problem was a class system and the solution was a proletarian revolution or state ownership of the economy. Making America rather than capitalism the villain that one was fighting seemed an admirable solution for this dead end.
For the extreme left, as well as Arab nationalists or Islamists, this new approach revitalized their failed ideologies and broadened their appeal. Around criticism of America, entire countries could unite, bringing left and right into a new nationalist consensus. French capitalists and workers, ultraconservatives with radical ideologues, traditionalists as well as anarchists, and patriots as well as self-proclaimed internationalists would all be in the same camp. "Progressive" human rights activists could march in defense of Third World dictators; Islamists and pan-Arab nationalists could join hands. Those who persecuted revolutionary Islamists at home could justify Usama bin Ladin's deeds.
In the process, too, many of them did not hesitate to revitalize antiSemitism, another idea that had the power to unite people of widely disparate political views. That oldest xenophobic prejudice of all had been linked to anti-Americanism in the nineteenth century and again in fascist as well as later Soviet propaganda. As Bernard Wasserstein explains, both biases bring together disparate groups to vent "a hatred of the successful," are "fueled by envy and frustration," and attribute all problems to one main source, which is striving "to control and exploit humanity" in a "monstrous conspiracy."12
Indeed, the whole apparatus of anti-Semitism was borrowed to systematize anti-Americanism: the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was matched by materials "proving" that America sought world conquest, accusations that Jews performed ritual murder were modernized by tales of American genocide and homicide, medieval accusations that Jews had poisoned wells to cause plagues became a modern-day U.S. responsibility for the destruction of the environment, and the alleged Jewish murder of God was transmogrified into a supposed U.S.-led crusade to destroy Islam.
Some European and most Middle Eastern anti-Americans attributed the Bush administration's doings to a Jewish-Israeli cabal that was the true ruler of the United States.13 In Germany, neo-Nazis and radical leftists wearing kaffiyas marched together in anti-American demonstrations and chanted the same slogans against globalization and waving the same Hizballah flags. Horst Mahler, leader of a right-wing party and former member of the far-left Baader-Meinhoff gang, said on September 12, 2001, that the attacks "on Washington and New York mark the end of the American century, the end of global capitalism, and also the end of the Jehovah cult and of Mammonism." 14
In the context of all these developments, a growing group of people were prepared to see September 11 not merely as a terrorist act but also as a revolutionary deed against those responsible for the unjust global system. As Lee Harris wrote in evaluating this new ideology, "Here, for the first time, the world had witnessed the oppressed finally striking a blow against the oppressor ... the dawn of a new revolutionary era."15
Many rationalizations could be made for this new reading of history. In Russia, the revolutionaries had betrayed the masses, but in the United States the left could accuse the masses of being traitors to their revolutionary duty. Accepting that there would be no proletarian uprising, and that no economic collapse would force them to rebel, left two pos sible conclusions. If cultural hypnotism and material bribery had persuaded the masses to accept the unjust American system, then the United States, possessing such power, was a terrible monster that might create a global anti-utopia that would put the same stable and prosperous but soulless and banal system into effect everywhere. But if, instead, the American people as a whole were now a willing partner in the system because they benefited from it, this meant they were an equally guilty accomplice of imperialism and thus the enemy of everyone else in the world.
Although few were aware of it, this new doctrine for the far left, Arab nationalists, and Islamists had a long gestation in anti-American history as well as through certain developments in German philosophy, French postmodernist utopianism, and Third World political economy.16 Ironically, this doctrine's first part goes back to the "Frankfurt school," the gentlest, most open-minded of Marxists who rejected Stalinism. While they had little direct interest in America, their basic idea fit well with the classic anti-American argument that it was the epitome of a soulless machine society, buying off workers by useless gadgets and mental manipulation. Marx believed that progress would inevitably bring closer the day of revolution and a just socialist society. In contrast, the new view suggested that progress was an enemy that increased humanity's alienation and made it harder to attain the promised land of utopian communism.
Herbert Marcuse, one of this group's members who emigrated to America, developed the theory of "repressive tolerance" as an explanation for that country's success and the absence of proletarian revolution. He claimed that by discouraging people from wanting to overthrow it, the very openness and opportunity that bourgeois democracy offered was a form of oppression. Giving people rising living standards-the opposite of what Marx had predicted-was destroying them spiritually. The more freedom people had, the worse off they were. The true enemy, then, was not capitalism's failure but rather its success. Clearly, that conclusion pointed to America as the most dangerous society in the world.
The second layer came from French critical theory. Michel Foucault and other radical thinkers claimed that most intellectuals and cultural figures had participated in the cynical manipulations of ruling classes to keep down poor and repressed groups. Marxists had focused on the capitalists' monopoly of economic power; postmodernists pointed to their monopoly over information production. This set the stage for the argument that the main front of the U.S. threat, and where it must be fought, was over the invasion of its culture and ideas.
The third part of this doctrine was Third World political economy, which contributed the concept that underdevelopment was an artificial disaster created by the United States. America had become rich by making the rest of the world poor. It was not just responsible for exploiting the Third World but had actually stopped its progress. The United States was responsible for all the regimes that made people's l
ives miserable.
If these beliefs about the pernicious, powerful effect of America were true, then anti-Americanism was indeed the world's most important issue. It was vital to defend oneself against the American peril and to make a better future possible for humanity by defeating it. This worldview quickly replaced Marxism as the far left's ideology and simultaneously became a way to revitalize the nationalist or Islamist right. The enemy was American domination, not capitalist rule per se, and the battle against it must be waged by all people of other nations, not merely workers and peasants. This struggle requires an alliance of anti-American forces ranging from European intellectuals to Middle Eastern dictators.
At the same time, though, the new doctrine also provided a way to preserve traditional patriotic loyalty to one's own state as well, in a way that did not threaten continental unity. European countries could cooperate among themselves while at the same time could continue competing one on one with the United States in the battle for global cultural, political, and economic influence. Such a notion, however, had far less appeal in Britain or Germany than it did in France, for France was the only one of this trio that was not only the historic headquarters for European anti-Americanism but also saw itself both as the leader of Europe as a whole and as a better world leader than the United States."
As Denis Lacorne wrote,
The competing universalist pretensions of their two revolutions, the particular arrogance of the French intelligentsia, and the contempt of the American political class for neo-Gaullist posturing will ensure that France and the United States remain rivals. This rivalry can only be asymmetrical: we French would like to civilize the world, but we are instead being globalized by the United States, even as our "civilization" is rejected by our European neighbors as excessively Francocentric.'$
