by Barry Rubin
European critics claimed that Americans see the world divided between good and evil, while Europeans perceive a more complex picture. Americans favor coercion by force; Europeans prefer persuasion through benefits. Thus, Europeans consider themselves more "tolerant, patient, peaceful and attuned to international law and economic attempts to encourage cooperation." Kagan suggests that the different roles are not a result of national character but of Europe's "retreat from responsibility" in the world, leaving the task of maintaining international order and dealing with dangerous threats to the United States. Yet far from being a recent development, these basic European stereotypes of America-as being violent, materialistic, morally simplistic, unsophisticated, too quick to act, and too wedded to change-are identical with its traditional antiAmerican themes going back to the early nineteenth century at a time when Europe was pleased to rule the globe and made no apologies for doing so.
At any rate, today Kagan points out that this European vision of America is a misleading image. For example, the portrayal of America as aggressive and unilateralist is contradicted by U.S. eagerness for Europe to take the lead in such crises as Bosnia and Kosovo. Only European failure to act decisively forced the United States to do so itself, since only American leadership could turn official European unity into actual cooperation. The attempt to prove that America was systematically driving for control and disregarding European feelings also ignored much evidence that belied its claims: the U.S. effort to build a wide coalition in the i99i war against Iraq; its patient cooperation with other states in the decade-long UN sanctions program on Iraq; its long, strenuous work to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict; its support for European unification; its sensitive handling of the USSR's dismantlement; and a dozen other matters. Even in the Iraq War, which seemed to fulfill all the nightmares about the United States dragging Europe into crisis, the U.S.-led coalition included support from Britain, Spain, Italy, and many central European countries, as well as from Germany's main opposition party.
Finally, of course, the most extreme anti-American exaggeration was that the United States might use its power against the Europeans themselves. The ultimate fear was not that the United States had bad policies but that it had bad intentions.
September ii and the subsequent events were the first tests of the enhanced new anti-American doctrine. There was nothing intrinsically anti-American in opposition to or criticism of any specific U.S. policy, for example, the war on Iraq. The issue was not whether individuals or countries rejected what the United States wanted but whether in doing so they used anti-American stereotypes, distorted U.S. motives or actions, or tried to raise hatred against the United States itself. The anti-American interpretation was that this crisis provided additional proof that the United States sought world conquest and behaved badly because of deepseated, chronic shortcomings in American society.
This assumption was held to be equally true in Europe and the Middle East, as well as elsewhere in the world. Once set alight, anti-Americanism became a fad spread by the very technological innovations supposedly abetting American-dominated globalism. Suddenly, Japan's former prime minister Yasuhiro Nakasone demanded that the United States "renounce an arrogance that makes them behave as though they are the masters of the universe."32 In China, a poll showed that 3o percent thought the United States was responsible for the SARS epidemic there 33 And in 2004, Islamic leaders in three northern Nigerian states blocked critical polio inoculations for children, denouncing them as a U.S. plot to spread AIDS or infertility among Muslims."
Incredibly, by adopting his false ideas, this reaction gave victory to a terrorist who had attacked America and murdered almost 3,000 people. Of course, most said, this was a regrettable crime. Many Europeans sympathized with the United States; others supported it even regarding the war in Iraq. Yet suddenly bin Ladin's basic concept of what was going on in the world was accepted by a significant European minority and by a majority in the Middle East.
The fact that George W. Bush was a conservative made him a far more credible target for being labeled by the left as a mad emperor bent on world domination. The fact that he had no intellectual pretensions, to say the least, fueled the intellectuals' contempt. The fact that he launched a war on Iraq without first obtaining world support was taken as proof of accusations already being fostered. Many Americans agreed with the most critical assessments of foreigners at a time when domestic partisan passions had been raised to a high level.
In short, Bush's personality and policies seemed to fulfill precisely the role that the anti-Americans were predicting and warning against. Signs of the new situation were already visible during Clinton's terms, the time during which the September ii attacks were being planned, after all. But, combined with the post-Cold War situation of American power, the evolution of anti-Americanism itself, and September u, the Bush era made for a critical mass that made anti-Americanism an explosive global phenomenon. The terms of abuse for Bush (a stupid cowboy, religious fanatic) and the United States (ignorant, brutal, arrogant, violent, erratic) were all from the classical texts. Whether or not this U.S. policy was wise or foolish, necessary or not-an issue completely outside the scope of this book-it neatly fit into existing hostile assumptions and some groups' interest in spreading them, guaranteeing that there would be a heightened anti-Americanism in response.
If these factors had not been in place, anti-Americanism would still have been a significant yet less noticeable and endemic factor. But the fact that U.S. positions fit with the preconceptions of an antiAmericanism that was ripe for rapid expansion, does not mean that its view and analysis are accurate. Anti-Americanism is not reinvented each time there is a president or policy others do not like. Thus, while criticisms of the United States or its leaders can be quite valid, antiAmericanism itself is based on a false, irrational case.
Over the course of history, there have been many variations of it ranging from the humorous and frivolous all the way to the murderous and dangerous. At a 1974 world food conference in Rome, Senator Daniel Moynihan recalled, "The scene grew orgiastic as speakers competed in their denunciation of the country that had called the conference, mostly to discuss giving away its own wheat."35 Almost thirty years later, in the Gaza Strip, a U.S. government convoy was deliberately ambushed by Palestinian terrorists and three Americans killed as its passengers traveled to interview Palestinian candidates for Fulbright scholarships to study in the United States.
Certainly, anti-Americanism's overall impact should not be overstated. For much of its history, it was a curiosity found in the writings of travelers and novelists. There was almost always a pro-American side and anti-Americanism usually was just talk, with little effect on events. But after becoming systematized and augmented during the Cold War's battle of ideas, anti-Americanism's concepts finally took global center stage at the outset of the twenty-first century. In an age whose main symbol and shaping influence has become September ii, the lethality of such ideas is all too evident.
Certainly, any doctrine of such power and durability has a basis in reality. But anti-Americanism was a mixture of two different aspects of reality, drawing both from the nature and behavior of the United States itself and that of its critics. In the end, anti-Americanism was a response to the phenomenon of America itself, precisely because of that country's uniqueness and innovation, the success it has achieved, and the challenge it poses to all alternative ideologies or existing societies.
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NOTES
Preface
i. The Carlyle quote is from his book Latter-Day Pamphlets, http://jollyroger .com/library/Latter-DayPamphletsbyThomasCarlyleebook.html. The Heine quote is from Wagner, "The Europeans' Image of America," in America and Western Europe, 24. The rest of the quotations about America can be found in "Nonstop English," http://nonstopenglish.com/reading/quotations/ index.asp?page =4o&searchword= &search =America&author= &length.
Chapter 1
i. Commager and Gior
danetti, Was America a Mistake?, 26.
2. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 381.
3. Crevecoeur, "Letters from an American Farmer" http://old.jccc.net/- vclark/doc8-i-i.htm.
4. Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 102.
5. Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 7.
6. Montesquieu, Spirit of Laws, 135.
7. For a biography of Buffon, see Jacques Roger, Buffon: A Life in Natural History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).
8. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 4.
9. Ibid.; Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 30.
io. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 47; Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 3.
11. Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 3o; Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 5.
12. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 58-59; Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 31.
13. Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 32; Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 7-8.
14. See Robert Leckie, A Few Acres of Snow: The Saga of the French and Indian Wars (New York: J. Wiley and Sons, 2000).
15. Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 32-33.
16. Benson, America of 1750, Vol. i, 56.
17. For example, in 1761, Abbe Arnaud in Journal Etranger; Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 35. Like others, Kalm later changed his views of Americans and said that people multiply more quickly than in Europe. He praised the lower taxes and personal freedoms offered by the United States. Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 34•
18. Commager and Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake?, 85.
i9. Ibid, 93-102.
20. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 99; Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 36.
21. Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 14; also Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 64; Commager and Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake?, 129-130.
22. Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 36.
23. Commager and Giordanetti, Was America a Mistake?, 12-14.
24. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 330. See also Ceasar, Reconstructing America, 20.
25. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 331.
26. Hegel, Introduction to Philosophy of History, 81; Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 425, 428-430.
27. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 436; Diner, America in the Eyes of the Germans, 9.
28. Hegel, Introduction to Philosophy of History, 86.
29. Ceaser, Reconstructing America, 170.
30. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 457-459•
31. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 16o; Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 38-39.
32. Commager, America in Perspective, 22.
33• Franklin, "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries," http://bc.barnard.columbia.edu/-Igordis/earlyAC/documents/ observations.html.
34• Ford, Works of Thomas Jefferson, Vol. 3, 458.
35. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 268, 55.
36. Ford, Works of Thomas Jefferson, 268, n28.
37. Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 64-65.
38. Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 36.
39• Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 154-156; Chinard, "18th Century Theories on America as Human Habitat," 37-38.
40. Moore, Complete Poems of Sir Thomas Moore, http://sador.gutenberg.org/ etexto5/7cptmlo.txt.
41. Moore, "To Thomas Hume Esq, M.D," http://sailor.gutenberg.org/etexto5/ 7cptmio.txt.
42. Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, quoted in Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 491.
43. Darwin, Journal of Researches, 173.
44. "Der Amerikamude," cited in Nordholdt, "Anti-Americanism in European Culture," 16.
45• Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 375-376.
46. Ibid.
47. Nordholdt, "Anti-Americanism in European Culture," 15.
48. Ceasar, Reconstructing America, 170.
49. Diner, America in the Eyes of the Germans, 36.
5o. Ibid.
51. Keats, "To (What Can I Do to Drive Away)," http://www.4literature.net/ John_Keats/To_What_can_I_do_to_drive_away_/.
52. Hollyday, Anti-Americanism in the German Novel, 1841-1861, 34.
53. Saustrup, "Hoffman von Fallersleben, August Heinrich," http://www.tsha .utexas.edu/handbook/online/articles/view/HH/ffio88.htnil.
54• This variety of anti-Americanism is discussed at greater length in chapter 2.
55• Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 217.
56. Strauss, Menace in the West, 205.
57. Roger, L'Ennemi Americain, 17.
58. Auden, "Introduction," in James, American Scene, xiv.
Chapter 2
i. Fairlie, Spoiled Child of the Western World, 50.
2. Nordholdt, "Anti-Americanism in European Culture," 12 m9.
3. Schlesinger, "America Experiment or Destiny?", 512-513.
4. Tatum, United States and Europe 1815 1823, 219.
5. Roger, Reves et cauchemars America ins, 24.
6. Quoted in Berger, British Traveler in America, 18361860, 107.
7. Nordholdt, "Anti-Americanism in European Culture," 13.
8. Ibid., 10.
9. Fay, American Experiment, 4.
10. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 326-327.
11. Fay, American Experiment, 239.
12. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 330.
13. Ceaser, Reconstructing America, 78.
14. Nordholdt, "Anti-Americanism in European Culture," 10.
15. Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 128.
16. Ibid.
17. Diner, America in the Eyes of the Germans, 38.
18. Louis Marie Turreau de Linieres, Aperfu sur la situation politique des EtatsUnis d'amerique (Paris, 1815), 137-138, quoted in Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 247.
19. Ceasar, Reconstructing America, 78.
20. Beaujour, Sketch of the United States of North America at the Commencement of the Nineteenth Century, from 180o to 1810 (London, 1814), described in Stearn, Broken Image, 14-15.
21. Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 248.
22. Roger, Reves et cauchemars Americains, 25.
23. Nordholdt, "Anti-Americanism in European Culture," 9.
24. Wagner, "Europeans' Image of America," 24.
25. Hollyday, Anti-Americanism in the German Novel, 1841-1861, 153-160.
26. Ibid., 27.
27. Ibid., 29-31.
28. Ibid., 53-61.
29. Ibid., 61.
30. Quoted in Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 252.
31. De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1, http://xroads.virginia.edu/ -HYPER/DETOC/chi-17.htm.
32. Ibid., http://xroads.virginia.edu/-HYPER/DETOC/1-ch'5.htm.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. Ibid.
37. Ibid.
38. Ibid., Vol. 2, http://xroads.virginia.edu/-HYPER/DETOC/ch2_l3.htm.
39. Ibid.
40. G. D. Warburton, Hochelega (London, 1846), cited in Berger, British Traveler in America, 1836 1860, 106.
41. Sinclair, History of New Zealand, 60-62.
42. Ibid.
43. Ibid.
44. Marryat, Diary in America, Series i, Vol. i, "Introduction," http://www .blackmask.com/books74c/diaryone.htm.
45• Ibid., Series 2, Vol. 2, Chapter 2, http://www.athelstane.co.uk/marryat/ diaramer/diaru/diaruio.htm.
46. Ibid., Series 2, Vol. 2, Chapter io, http://www.athelstane.co.uk/marryat/ diaramer/ diaru/ diaru18.h tm.
47. Op cit.
48. Ibid., Series 2, Vol. i, Chapter 5, http://www.athelstane.co.uk/marryat/ diaramer/diarz/diarzo6.htm.
49. Op cit.
50. Ibid., Series 1, Vol. 3, Chapter 48, http://www.athelstane.co
.uk/marryat/ diaramer/diary/diarY48.htm.
51. Ibid., Series 1, Vol. i, Chapter 22, http://www.blackmask.com/books74c/ diaryone.htm#1_o_23.
52. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 484-485.
53• Echeverria, Mirage in the West, 252; and Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 342.
54• Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 326-327.
55. Francis Grose, Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (London, 1785), quoted in Heilman, America in English Fiction, 348.
56. Marryat, Diary in America, Series i, Vol. 2, Chapter 23, http://www .athelstane.co.uk/marryat/diaramer/diary/diary23.htm.
57. Discussion of this issue, which does not indicate anti-Americanism as such but repugnance with that indefensible institution, is not included in this book.
58. Dickens, American Notes, 91-92; Nevins, America through British Eyes, 207208.
59. Diner, America in the Eyes of the Germans, 38.
60. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 12.
61. Gerbi, Dispute of the New World, 478, n133.
62. Conrad, Imagining America, 32. Although Trollope gave lip service to there being many positive things about America-nine hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand, she said at one point-she did not seem to find many.
63. Schama, "Unloved American," http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/ ?03o31ofa_fact.
64. Sadlier, "Introduction," Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, xiixiii.
65. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 39
66. T. Wemyss Reid, Life of Lord Houghton, Vol. i (London, 189o), 158f, as quoted in Pelling, America and the British Left, 4.
67. Conrad, Imagining America, 4.
68. Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, 363.
69. Nordholdt, "Anti-Americanism in European Culture," 13.
70. Saint-MSry, Moreau de St. Mery's American Journey 1793 1798, 281-287.
