by Barry Rubin
Jealousy is a potent force here, focusing the anger, resentment, and disbelief of people for whom nothing was going right against those who seemed to prosper so effortlessly. European intellectuals and artists had the added pain of knowing that their American counterparts have far larger audiences, resources, and income. The British historian Paul Johnson explained that the envy for "American wealth, power, success ... [was] made all the more poisonous because of a fearful European conviction that America's strength is rising while Europe's is falling."19
This former attitude is most pronounced among intellectuals and cultural figures, always the main group promoting anti-Americanism. "Scratch an anti-American in Europe," said Denis MacShane, Britain's minister for Europe, "and very often all he wants is a guest professorship at Harvard, or to have an article published in the New York Times."20 A left-wing British journalist confessed, "Everybody in our business here wonders whether he didn't make the mistake of a lifetime by not moving to the United States when he was 22."21 Revel points out that "the news that America has accomplished something is the signal for us to say that that accomplishment is worthless."22
Even worse was the fear that the model of a society so anti-intellectual would catch on.23 European political leaders may have honest disagreements and differing interests with America or even use anti-Americanism to whip up support occasionally. But it is the intellectual sector far more than the politicians who feel frightened, angry, and highly motivated. Anti-Americanism has been a class ideology for intellectuals just as surely as capitalism was that of the bourgeoisie. In terms of variety and living standards, American products and methods benefited British, French, and German consumers, but in cultural terms they threatened the monopoly over the market that had always been the main asset of the local intellectual and cultural elite.
Blaming things on America rationalizes their situation. In that case, the critics of mass society were not snobs protecting their interests but rather progressives and patriots. Instead of ridiculing British soap operas or greasy fish and chips, they could decry imported American equivalents-especially since workers who vote for the Labour Party consume American junk culture more than do wealthy people who vote Conservative. It thus becomes possible to assert that the masses are not fools without good taste but rather victims of inferior imported American products and values. Not only does this avoid a clash between elite and masses, but it also gives hope that the people might be won to better things if they are persuaded to reject the true, foreign culprit.
In this connection, too, anti-Americans can always fall back on the powerful myth of a "popular" elite culture, the same logical fallacy used for 200 years. The pretense is that being "French" for everyone-including all that country's workers and peasants-means consuming classical culture and eating haute cuisine. The tastes of the average American, who is presumably a Texas cowboy or Arkansas hillbilly, are compared to those of the top 1 percent of the European elite and predictably found less intellectually oriented and culturally sophisticated. If like would be compared to like, the average European's cultural level is probably close to that of his or her American counterpart, while the intellectual elites in both places probably also have similar preferences.
All in all, this battle over cultural control seems reminiscent of the nineteenth-century struggle between the aristocracy and its client intelligentsia against the rising business/manufacturing class. The former favored the handmade, higher quality work of artisans against the lower quality, cheaper, factory-produced goods that would raise the masses' living standards but purportedly lower society's overall tone. Today seems like a new round in this competition, which thus brings a revival of the old aristocratic-romantic cultural critique of America.
The real problem, however, was not the quality of American exports, which varied greatly, but the fact that they competed with all aspects of the local intelligentsia's work-books, movies, music-as a threat to success and commercial survival. Anti-Americanism was a way out for those fearing that they would lose any war of choice with American products, values, ideas, or institutions.
Worst of all was the fact that America is a place where intellectuals have a lower status and less exalted public role. Rather than being seen as respected minds given deference as representing humanity's highest impulses and greatest consciousness, they were viewed as a bunch of nerds who couldn't get dates. If Europe became more like America, the status of intellectuals there would take a nosedive.
No wonder European intellectuals shuddered and denounced such a place. Many of them had once turned to anticapitalism and now embraced anti-Americanism out of disappointment with what liberty had brought. Once the masses had more freedom and money, they were eager to satisfy material hungers and chase after cheap thrills. Relatively few wanted to be like the intellectuals or spend their time pursuing the "finer things of life."
As Arthur Koestler pointed out in 1951, this was merely the process of free choice at work:
I loathe processed bread in cellophane, processed towns of cement and glass, and the Bible processed as a comic-strip; I loathe crooners and swooners, quizzes and fizzes ... the Organization Man and Reader's Digest. But who coerced us into buying all this? The United States do not rule Europe as the British ruled India; they waged no Opium War to force their revolting "Coke" down our throats. Europe bought the whole package because Europe wanted it.24
Still, this situation was profoundly disillusioning to all those who had hoped for something better. If the masses truly wanted this stuff, there would be no utopia in the future but merely a growing surfeit of material goods and pleasures keyed to the lowest human lusts. Would one have to be resigned to the fact that this was human nature and thus inevitable, or could it be that some system was deliberately making people frivolous and foolish, buying things they did not need and watching sports or situation comedies rather than devoting their time to the latest philosophy book or art exhibit?
Yet this was precisely the portrait of the United States drawn by nineteenth-century European anti-American stereotypes, long before Americans invented or mastered the arts of mass production, advertising, marketing, franchising, and packaging. If the problem was merely coming from the American model that was being exported, there was still hope that it might be rejected and that a better alternative was possible than a lowest-common-denominator culture based on junk and base desires.
In their hearts, though, the European intelligentsia feared it impossible to win the battle, at least not by fighting fairly. "I don't think," explained the British writer Ian Jack, "there will be many people queuing up to heap their [American-made] clothes (or books) on bonfires" to reverse the flow of influence.25
It almost seemed as if America discovered some strange subliminal secret about mesmerizing the masses. American civilization is considered to be so potent that it has the alleged ability to take over people's brains and make them want to boogie. The pull of its music, films, and gadgets seemed irresistible, rendering everyone helpless to fight their attraction. Even the intellectuals could not trust themselves to resist. The Swiss philosopher Jeanne Hersch put it this way:
The Americans make us uneasy because, without wishing us ill, they put things before us for taking ... so convenient that we accept them, finding perhaps that they satisfy our fundamental temptations. Masses of American products are imposed upon us by artificial means, especially where films are concerned.... Even when we can make a choice between products, we are influenced by a sort of force within ourselves, which we fear because it is indeterminate and indefinable.26
This is precisely what the ancestors of contemporary European antiAmericans feared as early as the 1830s. No wonder many in the Middle East think America has made a pact with the devil.
Yet the myth of a steadily advancing cultural imperialism is as misplaced as that of the conspiratorial designs of American political imperialism. Moreover, the battle to avoid being swamped by the worst of American culture-even within the United St
ates itself-is far from unwinnable. Some, like Japan, adjust successfully through a combination of borrowing, adapting, and preserving their own tradition.
Of course, not only was the quality of American life and culture consistently underestimated-by pointing at the worst rather than the bestbut so was the system's most enduring characteristic: its ability to improve itself and fix its problems. One of the main ways this happened was the fact-ignored by anti-Americans-that American culture and society were always ready to borrow from others.
Ironically, this willingness to import ideas included an eagerness by many Americans to seize on the trendiest forms of anti-Americanism produced by Europe and the Middle East. What could be more ironic than the fact that a postmodernist, America-faulting theory that the United States was taking over the world culturally and intellectuallyinvented mainly in France and the Middle East-gained hegemony among much of the American intelligentsia? What more graphic proof could there be of the multidirectional reality of cultural influences?27
Equally, America imported many other cultural products, goods, and ideas from other countries, or had them available on its own soil through large immigrant communities. To give a simple example, if people in European countries want to eat "American" food, they may go to a McDonald's, but if people in America want to eat French or Italian food, they have a choice of many thousands of such restaurants all owned by Americans.28 Americans also listen to British popular music and watch British television shows, drink French wines and eat French cheeses, and buy Japanese electronic goods and cars, yet the United States is also a major producer of music, television shows, wine, and high technology, without living in fear of a foreign psychological takeover.
Another basis for anti-Americanism had been an additional double standard, the contrast between the ways in which U.S. and European foreign policies are portrayed. For centuries, Britain and France ruled the world, seizing colonies and massacring "natives" while, then and later, unapologetically imposing their distinctive ideas and institutions on Third World victims. In the twentieth century, the USSR played a similar role.
Despite these facts, there was never any phenomenon of antiBritishism, anti-Frenchism, or anti-Russianism (as contrasted with antiCommunism). A distinction was always made between policy and state, state and society. Third World insurgents against British and French rule usually arose from among those who had most absorbed and accepted their ideas and cultures. The terrible French brutality in Indochina and Algeria is barely a memory in those countries, while Paris's continuing interventions in Africa to install new regimes and prop up dictators are not held to discredit it as a flawed state or society. Even Germany is forgiven for plunging the world into two wars and engaging in genocide. Meanwhile, though, the United States continues to be chastised for far more distant historic actions-its treatment of Native Americans, slavery, and ancient interventions in Latin America-which supposedly reveal its true imperialist and brutal essence.
While, of course, pro-American thinking in European countries often exceeded the contrary view, this, too, became a factor that stoked antiAmericanism. The more some people advocated copying, borrowing, or buying from America, the more others were horrified by this prospect. The real secret of the debate over America is that it was usually about what people should do within their own countries. Many people in the most anti-American places, like France or the Arab world, saw no contradiction between an acerbic view of America and admiring it as a society with a high living standard or good educational system. What they didn't like was the possibility that America's example or power might change their own lives or societies to an extent or in a direction that they did not want.
These arguments were so passionate because people were choosing what to accept or reject for themselves. Was copying particular features from America a road toward happiness or disaster, destroying one's identity or attaining a better life? If the stakes were not so close to home, what happened in America itself would have been an issue of only academic interest, like economic reform in Argentina or cultural trends in Zimbabwe. No one would get so heated, angry, and disputatious about something so remote from home.
Ironically but inevitably, the ones born in other lands who best knew America and were most favorable toward that country were those who had chosen to immigrate to the United States. For them, America was a land of opportunity, despite the setbacks and disillusionment that life there sometimes gave them. Gradually, they transmitted these positive impressions to those left behind, for example among relatives and home villages in Italy and Ireland. Over time, there may be a similar effect from those who have migrated most recently from Latin America, South and East Asia, and Africa.
But the main anti-Americanism-producing countries are less influenced by such factors. Mass emigration from Germany and Britain ended long ago. France never produced many immigrants to the United States, and perhaps the lack of such personal links and the lack of a sense of contributing to the shaping of America has been a significant factor for that country's general miscomprehension of it. The same problem applies to Arab and Muslim states from which few immigrants came until very recently and for whom the assimilation process has just begun.
What are some of the particular American traits that have produced so much misunderstanding and derision? First, there is an idealism bordering on enlightened altruism. In a cynical world, it nonetheless remains true that the United States is a country that wants to do good.
To Americans-and, yes, even American leaders-the idea of spreading democracy and proving that they are genuinely helping others is a major factor in foreign policy. Based on their own national experiences, Americans believe that improving peoples' lives is the key to stability and see gaining their goodwill as the route to peace and success. Once the small number of villains in another nation-Kosovo or Somalia, Iraq or Afghanistan-are killed or captured, they believe, the silent majority would prefer moderation. The American politicians' task is to persuade the public that they can do all these things. This was how the United States was to be made secure after September ii, 2001.
Second, Americans passionately embrace a powerful optimism. They expect that goodness will triumph, the world will improve, and everything will turn out right in the end. This is a progression that follows the pattern of their national experience. They did not learn that idea from seeing so many happy endings in Hollywood movies; rather, it was this trait that forced directors to meet the audience's demand for them.
Such optimism allows and encourages Americans to undertake great actions and tremendous risks. Often, they brush aside the endless advice that something cannot be done. Naturally, this led to mistakes and costly losses but hardly ever led to any real or lasting disaster. And U.S. history has repeatedly shown that this attitude succeeds in the end, producing stunning successes.
Third, the United States has a pragmatic, problem-solving mentality. Rather than muddling through or living with difficulties, Americans want to resolve them. In this search for solutions, ideology does not enchain Americans. And yet here, too, when failure does take place, there is a willingness to change assumptions and methods. Every time in U.S. history when there have been problems that anti-Americans defined as implicit in the country's nature-slavery and later racism, the need to develop culture and education in the early nineteenth century, and the uncontrolled capitalism of the late nineteenth century, for exampleAmerica has altered itself to solve them.
Finally, there must be mentioned a reluctance to engage in foreign entanglements. While it is easy to exaggerate an American preference for isolationism, there is no country in the world less interested in empire or world conquest. This was the tendency of the United States after the Cold War's end, when American foreign policy became focused on a series of humanitarian missions in places like Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. But September 11, 2001, like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, forced Americans into a very different era against their preferences.
&n
bsp; Whatever America's faults, its unique characteristics point to one important conclusion that runs in the opposite direction from what anti Americans claim: this is not a country that wants to rule the world. And yet such a claim is the mantra of anti-Americanism.
Thus, to cite one example among millions, France's respected Le Monde Diplomatique published articles purveying conspiracy theories that identified globalization as an American attempt at world conquest, making the United States at least as bad as Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia and worse than bin Ladin. The real axis of evil is said to be a U.S.-dominated economic system, an ideological "dictatorship" of American media and think tanks, and a post-September ii military offensive that treats Europeans as "vassals" that are ordered "to kneel in supplication [as] the United States aspires to exercise absolute political power." Those taken prisoner in Afghanistan while fighting for bin Ladin and imprisoned in the "cages" of Guantanamo are examples of what the United States intends to do to Europeans who defy its imperial will.29
What is actually taking place, suggested Robert Kagan in his essay "Power and Weakness," is merely a division of labor between Europe and America.30 Since America was now protecting Europe from the world's disruptive forces, Europe was then free to emphasize its high morality and opposition to using force because the United States dealt with threats that Europe did not have to confront.
Kagan explained, "Europe is turning away from power ... into a selfcontained world of laws and rules and transnational negotiation and cooperation. It is entering a post-historical paradise of peace and relative prosperity." The United States is left to deal with "the anarchic Hobbesian world where international laws and rules are unreliable and where true security, the defense and promotion of a liberal order still depend on the possession and use of military might." Thus, the Europeans could stereotype America as enjoying that role due to its "culture of death" and warlike temperament that was "the natural product of a violent society where every man has a gun and the death penalty reigns.""
