SOURCE: Hollander, Paul. “Western Europe.” In Anti-Americanism: Irrational and Rational, pp. 367-410. New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1995.

I am one of the rare European intellectuals who has never been anti-American.

—Eugene Ionescu, 1985

I

European anti-Americanism has so far been limited to the Western half of Europe, to the countries outside what used to be the Soviet bloc. The absence of these attitudes in Eastern Europe helps us to understand their presence elsewhere.

The nationalism of Eastern European nations, although quite intense, has never been nurtured by a threatening image of the United States and thus could not stimulate anti-Americanism. The anticapitalistic ingredients of anti-Americanism have been similarly absent: Eastern Europeans—intellectuals and non-intellectuals—having been subjected to an official anticapitalism since the end of World War II (when the Soviet Union gained political control of the region) harbor no such sentiments. At last and most important the United States and “the West” are for the most part inseparable entities and held in high esteem by those who sought to cast off Soviet political, economic, and cultural influences.

If and insofar as East Europeans need scapegoats and simple explanations for their frustrations and collective misfortunes, it is, for obvious reasons, the Soviet Union and their own former pro-Soviet leaders which are the most inviting targets.

To be sure there has been official anti-Americanism in the region promoted by the local agit-prop institutions but—not unlike other forms of official propaganda—it had little impact on the popular attitudes. While East Europeans have been critical of specific American policies (or the lack of them) and in particular of insufficient American assertiveness in global politics and hesitation in confronting the Soviet Union, on the whole the United States, its political system, standard of living, and technological and scientific accomplishments have been widely and steadfastly admired.

By the mid-1980s there had been minor stirrings of the moral equivalence attitude in Eastern Europe as well. To the citizens of these small nations the imagery of “superpowers” had particular meaning since East Europeans could justifiably feel victimized by one (the USSR) and abandoned by the other (the U.S.). The moral equivalence approach also allowed East European intellectuals to see themselves as more autonomous and independent of each power bloc. George Konrad of Hungary has been among those occasionally expressing the East European version of moral equivalence [Konrad 1984]. Vaclav Havel of Czechoslovakia came close to the same outlook when he said that “… Soviet totalitarianism is an extreme manifestation—a strange, cruel and dangerous species—of a deep-seated problem that finds equal expression in advanced Western society. It is a trend toward impersonal power and rule by mega-machines that escape human control” [Havel 1987: 24].

Following the sweeping political changes of 1989-90 anti-Americanism may yet arise and intensify in Eastern Europe as the American cultural and economic penetration of the region gets under way and as the first halting steps reintroducing capitalism are unlikely to resolve rapidly the difficulties of these economies. Learning from more reliable sources about the social and cultural problems of the United States may also prepare the ground for at least milder forms of anti-Americanism. But it has also been argued that these processes will have a more limited impact in the former communist states. Martin Esslin wrote:

… the pop culture of the West, in all its manifestations, has attained an immense interest and popularity … among the broad masses of the Eastern-bloc countries. … This may be depressing to a Western intellectual. But the fact [is] that American pop culture, the product of the market economy in the field of entertainment—and thus, like it or not, a truly democratic expression of popular taste—has conquered the world …

… That the Western world is in the grip of spiritual malaise, expressed in drug culture, alcoholism, crime and mental accidie is a much more serious problem for the Eastern intellectuals to come to grips with … The [Eastern] intellectual elites will … have to come to terms with the fading of their over-idealized picture of the West—in so far as they entertained such an image.

[Esslin 1990: 59-60; see also Urban 1989]

Unlike East Europeans, those in the western half of Europe did not have the kind of historical experiences (including the presence of Soviet troops) that would have predisposed them to sympathize with the major global adversary of the Soviet Union, the United States. Western Europe since World War II—and in the course of the establishment of NATO—has come under American military, political, and cultural influence. On the other hand, unlike Mexico and some other Latin American countries, Western Europe has not been mistreated, humiliated, or exploited by the United States in the course of this relationship. (To be sure, some Western European critics would reject this proposition, as will be seen below.) And although the United States through the Marshall Plan and other aid programs provided substantial economic assistance to Western Europe, such aid did not become a source of resentment as it had in some Third World countries. Nor has Western European nationalism been as intense as corresponding attitudes in much of the Third World; the nations of Western Europe did not have to establish a sense of national identity by stressing what separated them from another nation, by cultivating the virtuous victim image. Conditions in Western Europe were far from wretched and did not call for a scapegoating mythology, of external explanations of collective misfortunes. Thus at first glance conditions for the development of anti-Americanism have not been especially auspicious in Western Europe. Nonetheless, as Paul Theroux, the American writer living in London, observed, the Europeans “feel put upon. There is a tremendous amount of anti-Americanism in Europe. There is a sense that they are in the front lines of a war that doesn't have to be fought” [Welles 1986].

Such assessments notwithstanding it has to be noted at the outset that the anti-Americanism in Western Europe, as in Latin America, has not been, generally speaking, the attitude of majorities but rather of substantial minorities and especially of important elite groups. A U.S. Information Agency Report examining “long-term trends” in these matters concluded in 1983 that “… favorable general opinion of the U.S. continued to outweigh unfavorable sentiment by considerable margins … [and] expressions of avowed anti-Americanism … ranged from only 14٪ in West Germany to 23٪ in Great Britain [Crespi 1983: 1].

Anti-Americanism is a response to a variety of circumstances which need not include gross insults to national dignity, bullying by American corporations, or the presence of restless and impoverished masses. In Western Europe anti-Americanism arose as a blend of envy of American power, contempt for American culture, and apprehension about American military might and presence. As in other parts of the world the anti-capitalism of intellectuals has also been a steady contributing factor. Former Prime Minister Papandreou of Greece, mentioned earlier, is an exemplar of an intellectual (college professor) turned into anti-American politician animated by a sturdy anticapitalism. It was his belief that “On a global scale, capitalism has to be held responsible for the more nefarious ills of human existence” [Papandreou 1987: 52]. Having spent decades of his life in the United States in academic settings such as Harvard and Berkeley, Papandreou personifies the cross-fertilization and confluence of the domestic and foreign critiques of the United States.

A perception of the United States as a custodian of immensely destructive nuclear weapons and a conception of cultural immaturity and political irresponsibility were the major ingredients of Western European anti-Americanism. In the early and mid-1980s in particular “fear rather than resentment … generated by apocalyptic visions of nuclear disaster” [Godson 1986] became a major factor in the hostility toward the United States. According to a British observer, “the American as a philistine has been supplanted by the image of the American as a monster” who threatens world peace [Walden 1989]. President Reagan and his symbolic identification with the wild West and cowboys has made a substantial contribution to such conceptions of the United States [“We Love You, We Love You Not” 1986].

For such reasons since the early 1980s anti-Americanism and a professed dread of nuclear weapons and war have become virtually inseparable in Western Europe. The peace movements have been important agents of anti-Americanism attracting both those fearful of nuclear war and others unfavorably predisposed toward the United States (as well as their own social systems) on other grounds as well. Data collected by the British sociologist Frank Parkin in the mid-1960s make clear, for example, that the majority of the supporters of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) were highly critical of existing social arrangements and institutions in Britain, indeed estranged from dominant social values. These “middle-class radicals” found in the peace movement a new vehicle for criticizing and indicting their social system. The very possession of nuclear weapons and the apparent willingness to use them (embodied in the doctrine of deterrence) provided vindication of their hostility and mistrust of their political system, the military policies of NATO, and by implication the United States. Most of these early CND supporters were also supporters of the Labor Party and state socialism [Parkin 1968].

A wishful thinking about the Soviet Union and determination to avert one's eyes from its contribution to the arms race and potential nuclear conflict were among the characteristics of these movements. Thirteen years after Parkin's book appeared an American observer of the British political scene noted that “the ‘better-red-than-dead’ argument is being put forward again with the same naivete and relentlessness that marked its use 20 years ago … like the feelings then, anti-nuclear sentiment today is heavily tinged with anti-Americanism” [Gelb 1981: 4].

Highly moralistic movements such as the peace and antinuclear movements of Western Europe (and for that matter their American counterparts) need a symbol of evil (or the profane) to juxtapose to their lofty moral strivings; the United States came to meet this need for reasons already alluded to and further examined below.

II

An article on American air bases in Britain published in Sanity, a publication of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, displays the characteristic components of anti-Americanism in Britain and in Western Europe as a whole:

To the observer outside the fences, a major U.S. airbase is a strange, different, alien and menacing world … [unlike other military bases presumably warm, friendly and inviting?—P.H.]

In the officer's mess at Mildenhall, a champagne brunch is laid on … a young pilot clad in a very zippy flying suit festooned with bright badges, flashes, emblems, decals, numbers and bars, sits at a table covered with fine linen eating a giant cream puff with a silver fork. He has champagne there and three other types of cream cake and, as he quaffs away at both, he is deeply absorbed in the pages of a child's comic.

[Campbell 1984: 16]

This little sketch of the American barbarian is almost a classic of the genre. There he is, the uncouth American oblivious to fine linen and silver fork, in the heart of Britain where he clearly doesn't belong. He is the stereotypical childlike American absorbed in comics and dressed in an equally childlike manner. Not only does he offend good taste but this immature creature wields awesome power: he flies the machines of destruction. The article also informs the reader that U.S. military personnel are beyond the reach of British law, that life on the U.S. bases is not unlike life “in the middle of Kansas” except for the abundance of cheap luxuries available in Britain for the Americans. It is, in short, a depiction of American presence in England calculated to provoke both nationalistic indignation about the overfed barbarians luxuriating on British soil and apprehension about their power.

From the pamphlet entitled “Greenham Women Against Cruise Missiles” (published in the United States by the Center for Constitutional Rights, set up by the well-known American radical social critics William Kunstler and Peter Weiss [see also Collier and Horowitz 1989: 182]), we learn that “Britain was becoming a nuclear dump for a foreign power,” that inside the base at Greenham Common

is a small American town in which the U.S. dollar is the currency and British criminal law counts for little,” [that U.S. troops] intervene around the world … stifling … the rights of people to determine their own destinies. In a world armed for nuclear war this tendency to intervention has an added sinister dimension. … The U.S. policy of developing and deploying more and more sophisticated nuclear weapons feeds the atmosphere of confrontation and distrust.

The vast increases in American military expenditures between 1982 and 1987, we are told, were taking place against a background of growing unemployment (“highest since the Great Depression”) and drastic cuts in vital services [“Greenham Women” n.d.: 4, 9, 10]. Illustrative of the survival of the spirit of the protest movements of the 1960s “in spring of 1983 … 20 women climbed on to the base dressed in teddy bear outfits and coated with honey …” [Ibid.: 6]. These protests also had in common with similar events in the 1960s an air of festive exuberance, a quest for community and new spiritual values unrelated to the manifest purpose of the specific event [see also Bethel 1983].

While the appeals of such offended nationalism were put to good use by left-wing groups, injured national pride has a broad constituency in Britain as elsewhere. According to an American observer these attitudes are linked to “nationalist fears that this former imperial power is in danger of becoming a client state to a superpower and envy stemming from the unmistakable decline of British power and influence. Both the nationalistic fears and envy contribute to a general sense that Washington rides roughshod over British concerns and interests …” [Lelyveld 1986].

Such concerns and an image of the trigger-happy irresponsibility of the United States help to explain the outburst of protest and criticism that followed the American bombing of Libya in 1986 in which British air bases were used. (There is a great similarity between the foreign sensitivity to the use of American power and the outrage of domestic social critics when such power is used.) The incident inflamed nationalistic passion and anti-American rhetoric: “… opinion polls … have consistently shown that a high proportion of Britons have come to believe that the United States in general and President Reagan in particular are inclined to the reckless use of military power.” Such suspicions of the United States and especially of its military forces and intelligence gathering agencies were also strikingly expressed in the conspiratorial theory of a Fellow of Magdalen College at Oxford who proposed on the basis of a highly speculative scenario that “the U.S. bears the major responsibility for putting KAL 007 [the Korean airliner downed by Soviet planes in 1983] at risk and thus for the deaths of its passengers” [Johnson 1984: 26]. As noted earlier this was also a belief readily adopted by American social critics.

Moreover “mistrust of the United States [in Britain] has remained almost constant …” A Gallup poll of January 1983 found that “70٪ of those questioned had little, very little, or no confidence at all ‘in the ability of the United States to deal wisely with present day problems.’” A survey taken a few months before the Libyan raid found that “54٪ of those questioned could agree to the proposition that the United States was either as great a threat to world peace as the Soviet Union or a worse threat” [Lelyveld 1986].

According to the Sunday Times of London, “Anti-Americanism has become strongly rooted in British attitudes …” A poll taken for the same newspaper found that “most British people resent the extent of American influence on British industry, the economy, defense policy and television …” There were also other findings similar to those cited above concerning American indifference to British interests and the dubious qualifications of President Reagan [“British Anti-Americanism” 1986].

English anti-Americanism has other roots as well, as it feeds on historical resentment especially among the upper classes and intellectuals including figures such as Bertrand Russell, Graham Greene, and E. P. Thompson, each of whom illustrates types of aversion to the United States and American culture. In the case of Russell, personal grievance (the loss of an appointment at City College in New York in 1940 due to political pressure) combined with other objections to American policies.

Russell, who after World War II favored American nuclear blackmail of the Soviet Union, first moved to a moral equivalence position that was followed by a most embittered hostility to the United States. Russell's anti-Americanism illuminates the affinity between hostility to the United States and the moral equivalence approach; Russell, as many other critics of the United States, began with a seemingly dispassionate equation of the two superpowers which gave way to a strongly felt condemnation of the United States. He held the United States responsible for an impending nuclear holocaust and became one of the most impassioned critics of the American role in the Vietnam war. (These attitudes might have been inflamed by Ralph Schoeneman, an unusually estranged American in his entourage.) Late in life Russell reached the conclusion that “the American government was genocidal, the police efforts pretty much on par with the camp guards at Auschwitz and black rioting a justified response to a campaign of extermination” [Goodman 1988]. His inclination to compare the United States or aspects of American life with those of Nazi Germany was long-standing. Thus in 1939 the faculty meetings at the University of California in Los Angeles and the behavior of the president of that institution “reminded [him] of a meeting of the Reichstag under Hitler [Russell 1968: 218]. In 1951, well before the Vietnam war, he wrote in the Manchester Guardian that the United States was as much a police state as Germany under Hitler and the Soviet Union under Stalin, and that in the United States as in those countries

nobody ventured to pass a political remark without first looking behind the door to make sure no one was listening … if by some misfortune you were to quote with approval some remark by Jefferson you would probably lose your job and perhaps find yourself behind the bars. … Any Englishman going to America at the present time has the strange experience of a population subjected to a reign of terror and always obliged to think twice before giving utterance to any serious conviction.

[Russell 1951]

He also bet Malcolm Muggeridge five pounds that Senator Joe McCarthy would become president of the United States [Hook 1987: 367]. During the Korean war he came to accept that the United States waged germ warfare [Hook 1987: 368]. He averred that “On a purely statistical basis, [Prime Minister Harold] Macmillan and [John F.] Kennedy are about fifty times as wicked as Hitler” [Johnson 1988: 209].

In a preface to a book by Corliss Lamont (a vehement critic of the United States and lifelong admirer of the Soviet Union [see Hollander 1988: 97-101], Russell wrote: “Anybody who goes so far as to support equal rights to colored people, or to say good word for the U.N. is liable to a visit by officers of the FBI and threatened with blacklisting and consequent inability to earn a living.” Elsewhere he explained these developments by noting that “The object of this persecution has been to impose upon the United States an acceptance of capitalism … After a time … the persecution of dissidents … became a career in itself and more and more victims were necessary to feed the inquisition and its victim-hungry administrators.” He also pointed out that “There are now [in 1965] … autonomous armies within the United States, armed to [the] teeth to fight anyone who shows any tendency to differ with them politically.” Unhappily, as he saw it, “irrational Americans are armed and rational Americans are not.” Capitalism was to blame for both domestic repression and the involvement in Vietnam: “Every food store and every petrol station in America requires, under capitalism, the perpetuation of war production.” American soldiers were sent to Vietnam “to protect the riches of a few men in the United States …” Addressing the G.I.s on a Hanoi (“National Liberation Front”) broadcast in 1966 he continued: “You are being used to enrich a few industrialists whose profits depend on taking the natural resources from other countries …” [Feinberg and Kasrils eds. 1983: 339, 356, 358, 387, 389, 396, 400, 401].

During the Vietnam war his anti-Americanism rose to a paroxysm prompting him to assert that the United States waged war in Vietnam in a manner indistinguishable from that of the Nazis in Eastern Europe and that

The United States today is a force for suffering, reaction and counter-revolution the world over. Wherever people are hungry and exploited, wherever they are oppressed and humiliated, the agency of this evil exists with the support and approval of the United States … [The U.S. intervened in Vietnam] … to protect the continued control over the wealth of the region by American capitalists … people have come to see the men who control the United States Government as brutal bullies, acting in their own economic interests and exterminating any people foolhardy enough to struggle against this naked exploitation and aggression.

[Russell 1967: 112, 117, 118]

Russell's anti-Americanism belongs to the most extreme, bizarre, and irrational type and unexpectedly enough appears to be fueled by the same kind of raging scapegoating impulses which make Mexicans believe that the United States was responsible for drought by manipulating clouds. Astonishingly in Russell's case the scapegoating impulse overwhelms an exceptional intellect and concern for precise language. On the other hand, if Orwell was right, intellectuals are no more immune to absurd beliefs than others and may even be more susceptible given a certain deficit of common sense. Perhaps Russell's attitudes—as those of many other intellectuals—were best explained by Paul Johnson: “When his sense of justice was outraged and his emotions aroused, his respect for accuracy collapsed” [Johnson 1988: 203]. In short Russell's anti-Americanism illustrates the compatibility of these attitudes—in their purest, most extreme form—with an otherwise highly rational disposition.

The manifest justification of Russell's anti-Americanism was the conviction that the United States and its aggressive, irresponsible leaders were poised to destroy the world. During the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 he said, “It seems likely that within a week you will all be dead to please American madmen …” [Johnson 1988: 212]. Unlike other embittered critics of the United States, Russell was not anti-Western, or especially preoccupied with capitalism (although he was contemptuous of commerce and business as one would expect given his social background). He could not be classified as an “estranged intellectual” in his own society or accused of being resentful for lacking in recognition—his anti-Americanism was not an extension of either of these attitudes. Instead, according to Paul Johnson, Russell's anti-Americanism “was propelled by old-fashioned British pride and patriotism of an upper-class kind, contempt for upstarts and counter-jumpers, as well as liberal-progressive hatred for the world's largest capitalist state” [Johnson 1988: 210].

Graham Greene's anti-Americanism was equally robust if less shrill, also rooted in some measure in an English upper-class background but more discernibly nurtured by an idiosyncratic sympathy for certain embodiments of the victim-underdog (which included at different times the communist guerillas in Malaya, Castro's Cuba, communist Vietnam, General Omar Torrijos of Panama, the Irish Republican Army, and most recently communist Nicaragua). Unlike Russell, who was capable of scathing criticism of the Soviet system, Greene rarely displayed critical sentiment in that direction. Greene even managed to admire Kim Philby, the master spy who found refuge in the Soviet Union [Pryce-Jones 1989]. In a letter to the London Times critical of the Soviet treatment of writers Yuli Daniel and Andrei Sinyavsky, Greene felt compelled to make the point that:

If I had to choose between life in the Soviet Union and life in the United States I would certainly choose the Soviet Union, just as I would choose life in Cuba to life in those southern American republics … dominated by their northern neighbor, or life in North Vietnam to life in South Vietnam. But the greater affection one feels for any country the more one is driven to protest against any failure of justice there.

[Greene 1967]

The latter point was made to explain his criticism of the treatment of these writers.

Greene's anti-Americanism (like Russell's) had a pronounced social-cultural thrust; he disliked not merely the policies of the United States but also Americans as a group; he regarded them as crude, coarse, undignified, and materialistic [Pryce-Jones 1989] and was contemptuous of what he took to be the American national character [Greene 1955]. He was appalled by Donald Duck figures in Panamanian villages and wished for their destruction [Greene 1984: 93].

Earlier in his life as film critic he made reference to “the eternal adolescence of the American mind, to which … morality means keeping Mother's Day and looking after the kid sister's purity … the same adolescent features, plump, smug, sentimental, ready for easy tear and hearty laugh and the fraternity yell. What use in pretending that with these allies it was ever possible to fight for civilization?” On his first visit to the United States he was oppressed by “the terrifying weight of this consumer society” [Finn 1990: 25]. Given his estrangement from English society, his disposition to a romantic view of non-industrial people, and his selective identification with victim groups, Greene's anti-Americanism was a more or less natural development, counterpart and complement of his attraction to colorful Third World countries and the spirit of adventure he associated with them.

More unexpectedly, Greene—unlike other Western social critics harboring similar political attitudes—included Panama among the countries he embraced among those victimized by the United States. His love affair with Panama and friendship with the late General Torrijos, its leader, unfolded against the background of a matter-of-course anti-Americanism. An all-too-discernible element in Greene's attitudes was his hero-worship of the general—a disposition with ample precedent among Western intellectuals similarly impressed by other powerful leaders and their way of life, as for example George Bernard Shaw was by Stalin, Edgar Snow by Mao, Sartre by Castro, and Gunter Grass by Tomas Borge of Nicaragua, among others. Although Torrijos was Greene's particular favorite, he also revered and considered among his friends a variety of Marxist guerilla leaders in Central America, including Borge and Salvador Cayetano of El Salvador, and he also maintained cordial personal relations with Castro [Greene 1984: 154, 158, 181-82, 191, 221, 236].

In the case of E. P. Thompson, the British historian and guru of anti-nuclear movements, the anti-American impulse was more controlled, indeed masked. As noted earlier Thompson insisted on being a friend of the United States and fondly recalled his American visits and academic connections. Nonetheless his writings make clear that he regards the United States as the major culprit for the perilous state of the world and especially the menace of nuclear war. He wrote:

The United States seems to me to be more dangerous and provocative in its general military and diplomatic strategies, which press around the Soviet Union with menacing bases. It is in Washington, rather than Moscow, that scenarios are dreamed up for theater wars; and it is in America that the alchemists of superkill, the clever technologists of … ultimate weapons, press forward …

[Thompson and Smith 1981: 40]

Unlike Russell or Greene, Thompson regards himself as a Marxist, hence his anti-Americanism is also reliably nurtured and reinforced by an abiding concern with the ineradicable evils of capitalism (“… I know that the beast [capitalism] is not changed: it is held in the fragile but well-tempered chains of our own watchfulness and actions” [Thompson 1978: 392]).

A fairly typical British, indeed more generally Western European cultural anti-Americanism, is also captured in the musings of a fictional English character, a journalist living in New York: “Like more than one Englishman in New York, he looked upon Americans as hopeless children whom Providence had perversely provided with this great swollen fat fowl of a Continent. Any way to relieve them of their riches … was sporting … since they would only squander it in some tasteless and useless fashion …” [Wolfe 1987: 164].

III

West German anti-Americanism is a richer and more complex variety than the British and a more integral part of a far more profoundly critical view of Western values and institutions. It is probably also more widespread and probably more deeply and uniformly entrenched among intellectuals than is the case in Britain.

The intensity of West German anti-Americanism derives from several sources. Its most proximate cause is probably the overwhelming and long-standing American presence—several hundred thousand troops, their families, and numerous large military bases—bound to offend nationalistic sensibilities. The combination of this large military presence with the geographical location of the German Federal Republic has made the country especially vulnerable in the event of an armed conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact countries. This may also best explain why Germany produced the most active and widely supported peace movement in Western Europe and the most intense popular apprehensions not only of nuclear weapons but also nuclear power generation. Nor is it a coincidence that Germany boasts of the largest and best organized political force in Europe—the Greens—dedicated to unilateral disarmament, neutralism, pacifism, unqualified rejection of nuclear power, an uncompromising environmentalism, and anti-Americanism [see also Herf in Laqueur and Hunter 1985: 366-69].

As in the case of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in England noted earlier, the antinuclear concerns of the Greens are only a part of a far broader anti-establishmentarian agenda and disposition, of a deep and diffuse aversion to modern industrial society, and particularly its capitalist version. Over three million voters gave electoral support to the Greens in recent years, two-thirds of them under thirty, and the movement, transformed into a party, had considerable impact on West German politics. “All parties in the Federal Republic have become a little bit Green,” according to a German academic [Bering-Jensen 1988: 34, 35]. The spread of these attitudes was illustrated by a protest demonstration against then Secretary of State Haig in Berlin 1983 organized by the Youth Wings of the Social Democratic and Free Democratic parties, featuring “A photo montage of the Secretary of State … with his hand over his heart, as if taking an oath, while napalm deformed children stood at his side.” Contingents of homosexuals, anarchists, and artists were among the active participants in the demonstration. No reference was made to Soviet contributions to the arms race or world problems; “All the guilt was America's” [Vinocur 1981 September]. Identical attitudes were in evidence at a mock trial organized by the Green party in Nuremberg, called a “Tribunal Against First Strike and Mass Destruction Weapons in East and West.” Once more hardly any criticism was directed at the Soviet Union. Symbolizing the affinity between the American and foreign critics of the United States was the presence of Daniel Ellsberg and Philip Agee at this “tribunal,” not surprisingly they accused the United States and its allies of preparing genocide against humanity [Markham 1983].

The influence of the hardcore left in Germany (such as the Greens) has been somewhat similar to the impact of the less organized American protest movements of the 60s which left behind a huge adversarial culture and gave new meanings to concepts such as liberal, conservative, and moderate, although did not give rise to a functioning political party.

In Germany anti-Americanism and critiques of German society have been especially closely integrated in a framework of anti-industrialism, rejection of materialism, affluence, and consumerism, and a generalized questioning of the moral foundation of the Western world. According to a thoughtful German writer,

… a profound change of consciousness … took place [in the 60s and 70s] … Western industrial society began to question itself … The tangible expression of this change was the wave of protest movements that, kindled by a variety of causes, burst upon the political life of many Western countries, the Federal Republic in particular, toward the end of the sixties. … It was not until the rapid emergence of the ecological movement in the seventies that industrial society's protest against itself found an authentic form. A new existential sense arose … of living in the shadow of impending catastrophe … a fear of the self-destructive power of a civilization created by human beings but no longer controlled by them; a … feeling that … the established order and existing institutions had nothing more to offer …

… a disposition to protest, to reject, to say no to a world to which one no longer feels one belongs … [emerged].

[The rapid rise of the ecological and peace movement reflected] the self-doubt, the self-disgust by which Western industrial society has been gripped for a decade and a half. As far as the Federal Republic is concerned, the peace movement could never have become what it has if from the late sixties a politically active subculture of protest had not developed that was receptive to any cause able to spark resistance against existing reality.

[Kielmansegg in Laqueur and Hunter 1985: 321, 322, 323]

Thus the peace movement in West Germany drew its strength from three groups, each of which had its own motives for aversion to the United States and what it stood for: the environmentalists, the nuclear pacifists, and the traditional left.

In Germany too American cultural influences broadly defined were among the factors provoking anti-American sentiments. In many ways West Germany has been the most Americanized of all European countries and its national identity most threatened by the multiplicity of American influences (and the widespread receptivity toward them), hence there has been an especially virulent reaction against these processes. As John Vinocur, for many years a New York Times correspondent in Germany and France, put it, “… in West Germany … the idea that the United States is in the way of the country's finding a truer, purer identity now has … institutionalized roots” [Vinocur 1984: 62].

At last there is the factor of the memories of Nazism and the unease among the younger generations over its widespread past acceptance by the German people. Attitudes of guilt, shame, and anger over such a past indirectly contribute to a vocal anti-Americanism once the United States is identified as a source and symbol of political evil in our times. Guilt over such a past deepens outrage over perceived political injustice in the present and lends a compensatory intensity and moral fervor to public protest and social criticism. Besides the intellectuals the other group particularly susceptible to these attitudes has been the clergy: “Haunted by its failure to resist Nazism, wounded by its lost resonance in national life, the clergy has sought, perhaps unconsciously, to run ahead of all the ‘progressive’ trends in West Germany over recent years” [Vinocur 1981 November: 122]. If so their social and political activism resemble those of the mainline churches in the United States, although they did not have to atone for Nazism.

Guilt over the past is also likely to play a part in embracing the current symbols of victimization: the Third World in general, Marxist guerillas in Latin America, Palestinian Arabs, and for some even members of the violent terrorist groups which were more active in the 1960s and 70s, such as the Bader-Meinhof gang.

But there is yet another possible connection between certain aspects of Nazism and anti-Americanism: both represent in some measure protests against modernity and a nostalgia for a more authentic and fulfilling past. If for the Nazis the Jews were the most visible and reprehensible agents of modernity (and capitalism), for the recent generation of left-wing social critics it is the United States, which represents corresponding unwelcome social forces.

West German detractors of the United States excelled in the moral equation of the Superpowers—an equation that in their case too tilted toward the Soviet Union ostensibly because of a belief that the United States has become a more dangerous, aggressive, irresponsible, and erratic country, even one with “the most perfect police apparatus in history, probably more perfect than the Russians',” according to the playwright Rolf Hochhuth [Hochhuth 1970: 26]. Whereas the Soviet Union is more stable, peace-loving, and predictable. As Vinocur wrote, “… a picture has been created of the Russians as difficult but basically reasonable, while the Americans have been seen as living with the injustice, decomposition and confusion of Vietnam, Watergate and the Carter Presidency” [Vinocur 1981 July and November].

Another interpretation of this attitude is fear: the Soviet Union is more feared and therefore to be propitiated whereas the United States can be attacked and vilified without adverse effects. More than that, the United States is more responsive to protest and pressure than is the Soviet Union. (As a Dutch journalist put it: “If people shout at the United States, it is because only the United States might listen” [Caarten 1981].)

It is especially in its incarnation as trigger-happy warmonger that the United States has been most frequently attacked in West Germany (as in much of Western Europe). A cover page of Stern, “the country's largest general interest magazine, showed an American nuclear missile piercing the heart of a dove of peace” [Vinocur 1981 July]. Earlier Stern has written about the American sense of mission “degenerat[ing] into naked imperialism” [Liedtke 1976: 32]. Prominent West German politicians also freely expressed such attitudes. Oskar Lafontaine, deputy co-chairman of the SPD (Social Democratic party), called the U.S. “an aggressor nation.” Rudolf Hartnung, chairman of the youth organization of the SPD, accused the United States of “ideologically inspired genocide” in Central America, among other places. Another SPD politician, state legislator Jurgen Busack, had this to say: “The war-mongers and international arsonists do not govern in the Kremlin. They govern in Washington. The USA must lie, cheat and deceive in an effort to thwart resistance to its insane foreign policy adventures. The USA is headed for war” [Keithly 1990: 68-69].

Thus among the vanguard of the West German detractors of the United States even the pretense of moral equivalence has been abandoned. At the time of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan Gunter Grass, perhaps the most vocal among the well-known German critics of the United States, insisted that “the United States was disqualified from making moral judgements about anything” [Vinocur 1984: 73]. He also drew a parallel between resistance to the deployment of American medium-range missiles (in 1983) and resistance to the rise of Nazi power [Markham 1985]. For Grass, as for many other critics, the rejection of the United States and rejection of his own society became intertwined; he detested West German society primarily because it was becoming Americanized, that is, materialistic, greedy, and polluted physically as well as spiritually. Grass also typified the Western intellectual fiercely critical of and cynical toward his own society but remarkably credulous of the claims of political systems he regards as victims of the West. This was well illustrated in his reactions to the tour of a model prison in Nicaragua (chaperoned by police minister Tomas Borge) quoted earlier when he rhapsodized about the influence of Christ on the policies of the Marxist-Leninist authorities [Grass in Diskin ed. 1983: 246-47].

Grass was by no means unique in holding the United States responsible for the danger of nuclear war and more generally the ills of the world. “A petition called the Krefeld Appeal, sponsored by left-wing organizations, including the Communist Party, judges the United States to be the sole cause of global insecurity … It has been signed by 1.5 million people.” Those who signed included other prominent intellectuals such as Noble Prize-winning writer Heinrich Boll, as well as popular entertainers [Vinocur 1981 November: 116].

German aversion toward the United States had less political expressions as well. “A full-page advertisement in a West German national magazine … said, right in the first paragraph, that ‘almost nothing that is sold or used in our restaurants comes from America.’ Their enterprise was German, the advertisers insisted, with German interests, German management, German workers and German suppliers” [Vinocur 1981 July]. Ironically the advertisement was placed by McDonald's, which had been attacked in the official newspaper of the Social Democratic Party for its “primitive American nourishment,” for “recreating USA hegemony,” and for “gastronomic conservativism” [Ibid.]. A soft-drink manufacturer, Afri Cola, likewise sought to increase sales by advertising its non-American origin [Vinocur 1984: 60].

For many Italians too McDonald's became a symbol of American cultural penetration, and the opening of one of its restaurants in Rome in 1986 was greeted with widespread protest:

several thousand people rallied in the picturesque piazza. … The gathering organized by the “Save Rome” committee featured Italian singers, actors and politicians speaking out against the coming of the all-beef hamburger. … They proclaimed the “degradation of Rome” and the “Americanization” of Italian culture if McDonald's was allowed to continue doing business here … a local politician called McDonald's “the principal cause of degradation of the ancient Roman streets” …

[Suro 1986]

The German rejection of and mistrust toward the United States (and the associated neutralism and pacifism) have been especially pronounced among the younger generation. Surveys show that the younger the people the less they support NATO. Moreover, “The image of the United States beset by economic decline, limited social opportunities, excessive materialism and given to interventionism … has increased rapidly in recent years especially among young adults.” Some 38٪ of the postwar generation regards these domestic problems as serious enough to disqualify the United States from a leading role in world affairs [Kramer and Yago 1982].

West German anti-Americanism—and its counterparts in the rest of Western Europe—have been closely associated with the political movements and beliefs of the 1960s, although, as noted earlier, it had more distant roots as well. According to a German commentator the direct stimulants of German (and West European) anti-Americanism included the civil-rights conflict in the United States, Vietnam, and Watergate. At the same time “to many Germans all three events had a very special meaning, for they seemed to vindicate those who liked to whitewash their national honor by pointing at the shortcomings of others” [Siemon-Netto 1981: 47]. The German sociologist Erwin Scheuch made the same point a decade earlier [Scheuch 1970: 19]. If so the burden of the past helps us to understand the particular relish with which some Germans dwell on the flaws of the United States.

As in most other countries, in West Germany too the well-defined and clearly articulated anti-Americanism, as distinct from ambivalence, has been more characteristic of intellectuals than the general public. This should be no cause for surprise given the general propensity of Western intellectuals to be in some degree estranged from their societies and suspicious of capitalism and of the United States, regarded as the mainstay of the global status quo. As was pointed out earlier these general predispositions have been strengthened in Germany by the problems of the past, an exposed geographic-military position, and a tradition of romantic antimodernism. The outpouring of warmth toward Gorbachev on his visit to West Germany in 1989 and survey results showing that he was far more favorably regarded than President Reagan are further indications of anti-American sentiment.

Anti-Americanism occasionally also provided the psychological basis of more specific and damaging actions against the United States and the Western alliance as in the case of Arne Treholt, the Norwegian spy for the Soviet Union. He was described as a member of the student generation that “grew up on anti-Americanism because of the Vietnam War” and it was also observed that “his strongest ideology was anti-Americanism.” Like many foes of the United States he too succumbed to rationalizing Soviet misconduct, “saying that Moscow was forced to protect its borders because of constant threats from the West” [Nordheimer 1984]. In turn a group of Western European peace activists touring the United States insisted that the whole “idea of an enemy must be removed. … The world must be built on human trust.” This suggestion apparently did not apply to the U.S. as one member of the same delegation voiced dark suspicions of the United States, claiming that the missiles the United States was going to install in Western Europe “would be aimed at the Middle East to ‘defend the petrol routes’ for American business” [Hartman 1984].

IV

French anti-Americanism, greatly diminished in the 1980s, used to be intense throughout the entire post-World War II period and especially during the 1960s and 70s. It was closely associated with the influence of the French Communist party, sympathy toward the Soviet Union, and the attitudes and beliefs of a largely monolithic stratum of leftist intellectuals. Its most prominent feature was a disdain for American culture. It is this cultural anti-Americanism that has remained the most pronounced among the manifestations of French anti-Americanism, persisting even at a time when its political roots atrophied.

The decline of French anti-Americanism that combined both nationalistic and Old Leftist elements may be traced to two factors. The first was de Gaulle's assertion of French political independence culminating in France leaving NATO [see also Gnesotto in Laqueur and Hunter 1985: 246-47]. The second was the upsurge of anti-Soviet feeling resulting apparently from the publication of the works of Solzhenitsyn and the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. The progressive discreditation of the Soviet Union among French intellectuals and public opinion went hand in hand with the dwindling influence and popularity of the French Communist party.

There have been no American troops or military bases in France since 1967 and no American or NATO nuclear weapons. (Nor has there been public opposition to the creation of a French nuclear force.) The departure of American troops removed a major insult to national dignity that could nourish anti-Americanism. But the departure of American troops was welcome on other grounds as well, reflecting once more the cultural roots of these sentiments. Chronicling the closure of the largest American base in France, an Italian newspaper wrote:

… what will Americans leave behind after fifteen years of residence? … Inside the battlements, the American way of life; outside the mysterious, mythic, disturbing entity which is France, where they speak a language so incomprehensible it isn't even worthwhile trying to learn it. “They don't want to learn anything at all, not how to drink wine, not even to eat as we do,” says one French lady. … “And then some of them complain that in fifteen years not one person in Chateauroux has invited them to dinner. How can we ask them to dinner? They have never had opinion soup, steak à la madeira; and if at the end of the dinner, you offer cognac they ask for soda pop!” …

Only the electricity and sewers [on the base] are French …

All the rest—conditioned, frozen, cellophaned and boxed—comes from the States. Even the bread …

The truth is, the Chateaurousians do not like the Americans. They nourish the primordial feelings of the cultivated poor confronted by the rich barbarian.

[Monicelli 1966: 34, 35, 36]

A French journalist summed it up: “The idea that American values are taking over … is, rightly, unbearable to the French” [Suffert 1967: 19].

Aversion to American cultural influences has survived from the 1960s and in the 1980s became a particular concern of France's Minister of Culture Jack Lang. At a UNESCO conference in Mexico in 1982 he took a leading role in attacking American cultural imperialism:

The dominance of American pop songs, movie and TV serials, he said, was due to “an immense empire of profit.” He called for “real cultural resistance, a real crusade against—let's call things by their name—this financial and intellectual imperialism which no longer grabs territory, or rarely, but grabs consciousness, ways of thinking, ways of living … We must act if tomorrow we don't want to be nothing but the sandwich board of the multinationals.”

[Lewis 1982]

A reporter noted that these remarks were made a week after Lang had a cordial visit with Castro in Cuba [Vinocur 1983].

Similar critiques of American culture were also a major topic at an international conference in Paris organized by the French government in 1983 which sought “to explore the role of culture in resolving the world's economic crisis.” Besides the theme of cultural imperialism (there was particular consternation about the popularity of the television serial Dallas) the United States was criticized for the lack of federal support for the arts. Susan Sontag said, “In our country we don't have a Minister of Culture, and if we did, we wouldn't have someone like Jack Lang. We'd have Clint Eastwood”—a remark which once more illustrates the confluence of the foreign stereotypes of the United States with the criticism of its native intellectuals [Dionne 1983]. In turn “Lang declared war on ‘the invasion of fabricated images, prefabricated music, and standardized productions which are destroying national cultures.” Even an Israeli participant complained about American cultural domination of Israel [Echikson 1983].

In a letter to the New York Times several American participants defended the Paris conference against what they regarded as unfair criticism and pointed out that if Dallas was a preoccupation at the conference it was because it “became a symbol of the sort of cultural levelling that leads to the overwhelming of local cultures by worldwide film and television distribution networks” [Bishop, Mailer, Sontag, and Styron 1983]. The aforementioned were impressed by the fact that Mitterand, “an intellectual himself,” addressed them, and contrasted wistfully the munificence of the French government in matters cultural to their own—a long-standing grievance of estranged intellectuals in the United States.

The penetration of American cultural products is also troublesome for the conservative voices in France. The conservative magazine Le Point asked: “Is European culture in danger, and is American culture supplanting it?” The paper also expressed concern over the impact of American satellite transmissions, the dominant position of two American news agencies, the Associated Press and United Press International, and the prevalence of American television programs among those imported from abroad [Billard 1985: 34]. In 1989 France led the campaign (headed by Minister Jack Lang) to impose quotas on the number of American television programs shown in Western Europe “to stop the advance of … American cultural imperialism and to preserve European values” [Greenhouse 1989]. In late 1990 “… 11 socialist deputies attributed France's troubles to its ‘progressive Americanization,’ which they described as growing individualism, the impoverishment of the state, the omnipotence of television, untempered consumer spending and the emerging power of lobbies” [Riding 1990].

Western European concern with the effects of the American media and television in particular was not limited to France. Small countries such as Iceland were also apprehensive at least from the early 60s. According to a Danish newspaper,

In the past two and a half years American TV has become an increasingly serious problem. There are no native TV stations … The American TV station … threatens not only the movie houses in Iceland but even more important, the Symphony Orchestra, the National Theatre and the local legitimate theatres … In March 1964 sixty intellectuals and professors, all pro-NATO, sent an appeal … urging that the station's broadcasting be limited to the base itself.

[Magnusson 1965: 308]

One year later an Icelandic newspaper wrote: “The most troublesome issue today in Icelandic cultural life is bound up with the fact that a great foreign power has pushed its way into Icelandic society with the help of the most powerful propaganda instrument ever invented. I refer to the American television station which has brought a more mischievous influence into our national life than we have ever experienced before” [Lindal 1966: 241-42].

Despite the concern with American cultural penetration, anti-Americanism in France is at a far lower level than in Germany, Britain, the Netherlands, and some of the Nordic countries. Moreover in France “the most pro-American group consisted of those between the ages of 15 and 25.” In another poll of French students 56٪ thought that European values were superior to Soviet values but only 26٪ believed that they were superior to American ones; 44٪ thought they were equal to American, and close to a quarter regarded American values to be superior [Dionne 1984].

Variations in Western European anti-Americanism can be traced to either the anti-Americanism of the Old Left (linked usually to established communist parties) or to the generation of the 1960s that used to be known as the New Left. The anti-Americanism of the former was a direct outgrowth of its support for the Soviet Union and Soviet policies. A former Jesuit, Francisco Garcia Salve, and organizer of a pro-Soviet communist party in Spain, conceded that “… the Soviet Union is capable of making mistakes but … American imperialism is far worse than all of the Soviet Union's mistakes” [Markham 1982]. Mikis Theodorakis, the popular Greek composer and longtime supporter of the Soviet Union (and the pro-Soviet Greek communist party), explained his pro-Soviet attitudes by the quaint argument that “The Western worker strives hard and eventually gets the so-called modern comforts. But he is never free of anguish, unlike the Eastern European worker who has all the basic needs in life secured for him by the state” [Anastasi 1979].

While supporters of the New Left also disdained “the so-called modern comforts” which the deluded masses of the West strove for, such attitudes did not rest on pro-Soviet beliefs. The New Left was attracted to the postulate of moral equivalence between the Superpowers and inclined to a benefit-of-doubt approach toward the Soviet Union, perceived as the weaker and more peace-loving of the two and consequently the lesser evil. It was the more advanced technology and the capitalist, consumer economy of the United States that alienated the New Left and allowed it to be marginally more sympathetic toward the Soviet Union (even before Gorbachev).

It is among the puzzling aspects of anti-Americanism in Western Europe that France and Italy, two Catholic countries, apparently display the least, whereas all the Protestant nations seem to have higher levels of it in conjunction with far more popular and active peace movements and other adversarial groups. Perhaps these attitudes are interrelated; in the Protestant countries of Western Europe there may in general be higher expectations regarding public rectitude, the body politic, and the attainability of lofty moral principles. The frustration of such aspirations may in turn contribute to higher levels of moral indignation and criticism directed in equal measure at domestic institutions, the evils of capitalism, and the United States.

The cultural anti-Americanism of Western Europe, stimulated by the public receptivity toward American mass culture, has its counterparts around the globe. A Jamaican cultural adviser to the government complained, not without reason, about American “cultural penetration” of the entire Caribbean region in which the media played an “ominous” part, enhanced of late by cable television and satellite dishes. Such developments in his view posed “the threat of conscious conditioning of important segments of the population away from a Caribbean sensibility” [Singh 1986]. More recently an Australian author noted that Australian television features more than 60 American programs a week, that “Australia has by far the highest number of McDonald's restaurants per capita outside North America,” and, more generally speaking, “Australia has thus become an advanced laboratory of the accelerating global homogenization … The U.S. has come to hold … an insidiously elevated place in the Australian consciousness” [Sheehan 1990].

If this is the case we must further inquire into the sources of receptivity toward things American which are apparently as deep as the animosity and ambivalence the same receptivity and its visible results provoke.

V

The preceding limited regional overview of anti-Americanism focused mainly on the symptoms and more accessible explanations of the phenomenon. Less was said about the deeper sources of each particular variety although it was clear enough that anti-Americanism has regional patterns and causes. The Third World variety is different from what we find in Western Europe and further distinctions can be made within both Western Europe and the Third World. Arab anti-Americanism is nurtured for the most part by different motives and grievances than Latin American. Even within the Arab world different variables sustain the same phenomenon: American support of Israel is one thing, the modernizing influences emanating from the United States another. The latter alarm and antagonize all those who seek to protect the Islamic heritage, far removed from the immediacy of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Anti-American and anti-Israeli sentiment do of course converge since both countries are justifiably seen as agents of modernization and Westernization.

Western Europeans are less concerned with the American subversion of their traditional religious beliefs but are far more apprehensive of their countries becoming potential nuclear battlefields due to American military strategy, while the Arabs are not preoccupied with the threat of nuclear annihilation or blame the United States for it. Nor is it easy to detect either in Arab countries or in much of Latin America the kind of romantic anti-industrialism which gives rise to a militant environmentalism that flourishes in Western Europe and is rich in anti-American themes and implications.

Since anti-Americanism has many forms and originates in many disparate conditions and parts of the world it would be unrealistic to attempt to propose a single theory or explanation. What holds its varieties together is that it is a response to some kind of collective or group frustration or grievance which finds relief in holding the United States (or a particular aspect of it) responsible for the grievances in question.

We may get closer to the core of animosity the United States arouses by examining a few characteristic personal statements of prominent critics which amplify and highlight the essential attributes of the anti-American mindset and impulse.

Jan Morris, the British author, wrote:

Something snapped in me, and I faced up to a conviction I had been trying to stifle for years: the reluctant and terrible conviction that the greatest threat to the peace of humanity is the United States …

… I can no longer stomach America's insidious meddlings across the face of the world … wherever I go I find myself more and more repelled by the apparently insatiable American urge to interfere in other people's business …

… nowadays I hardly believe a word official America says. I didn't believe your spokesmen about the Korean airliner … about Grenada and certainly do not believe them about Soviet intentions … the Soviets are less likely to trigger a World War III than you are yourselves.

Of course you are both paranoiac—two ideologically stunted giants … whose preposterous dinosaurian posturings menace the survival of everyone. But the Russians have cause to be paranoiac! … they are a grand and tragic nation …

But you! The most powerful, the most enviable, the richest, the most fortunate nation of the world. You have no excuse for paranoia …

[Morris 1983]

Morris provides an impressive summary of the major grievances against the United States shared by many intellectuals around the globe. As other impassioned critics she evidently harbored excessively high expectations of the United States which no country can live up to. Disclaiming anti-Americanism bolsters the credibility of the critic: since anti-Americanism implies a prejudiced state of mind, the critic hastens to make clear that he is free of it. The critic may even confess—as in this case—that she brings herself with great reluctance and pain to criticize this great country.

Morris is enraged because she reached the conclusion that the United States is led by dangerous maniacs motivated by a wholly irrational fear and loathing of the Soviet Union and communism, ready to destroy the planet she lives on. She is also disturbed by what she sees as the omnipresence of the United States. She cannot resist two venerable stereotypes of all things American: “vulgar and naïve.” Equally revealing and stereotyped is her metaphor of the dinosaur: a huge, awesomely powerful creature guided by a pea-brain, just as the frightening American military and technological colossus is inadequately controlled and guided by a suitable intellect and values. (This imagery has been popular with other critics of the United States as well; another English author called American society “one of the least reflective on earth,” adding that “many foreigners … behold the U.S. in the image of some great college football player—a vast and imposing mountain of muscle and power from the neck down, surmounted by a head that would never have got on the team if academic prowess came into the selection” [Hastings 1986: 37].)

Morris makes explicit what underlies much of the hostility toward the United States but is rarely acknowledged: that it is a rich, unscathed, fortunate, and enviable country. Morris (like other critics) holds it against the United States that it has not suffered enough, that lacking such experience has impoverished its people and culture [see also Fairlie 1975: 36].

Her version of moral equivalence, as is often the case, shades into a charitable view of the Soviet Union and a bitterly critical one of the United States. The Russians are a tragic nation, they earned their right to paranoia and sympathy; the Americans are lucky, bloated philistines undeserving of compassion. She has not been the only critic of the United States, American culture and character irritated and antagonized by the alleged naïveté and shallowness of Americans that assume especially frightening proportions when associated with the custody of nuclear weapons. (Graham Greene's portrait of the “Quiet American” has been a major contribution to the archetype, or myth of the naïve but exceedingly dangerous American.) Underneath these stereotypes lurks a social determinism familiar from other contexts of social criticism: the forces of evil (the rich, the capitalists, the West, or the United States) are in full control of their destiny; they don't deserve sympathy. On the other hand the underdogs, the true victims (the poor, the minorities, the Third World, the Russians, and so on) merit compassion; they are buffeted by the winds of history, helplessly tossed about by social forces; they may err but cannot help it. Through the prisms of such a selective social-cultural determinism compassion and contempt are allocated in a highly selective and idiosyncratic way.

Morris like most other critics of American society believes that the profit motive and the corruptions the love of money bring are uniquely American deformities; she also expects Americans to live up to their principles:

… if in theory the American nation is devout, in practice there can hardly be a society more riddled with insincerity and opportunism … Watergate was not a phenomenon, only an example. Every day in America, every city, every ward, knows its own corruption. The bribe, the bug, the lie, the evasion, the double-talk are strands of the American texture, part of life, part of the system.

For good measure Morris adds, “I write only out of love” [Morris 1975: 32, 33]. If so her remarks illustrate the displeasure and bitterness of the disappointed lover whose object of ardor did not (and could not) measure up to her expectations. Similarly unrealistic expectations (or double standards) may account for the sentiments of another English writer who reported on “the essential pointlessness and dreary similarity of many American lives”—attributions which invite the question, Compared with what? With the essential meaningfulness and variety of the lives of English factory workers? Indian peasants? French shopkeepers? [Winchester 1981: 45].

If American corruption, hypocrisy, dreariness inspire such loathing it is because the indignant critic had believed that this was or was going to be a superior society without the flaws of others known in history. Apparently American culture has succeeded in inculcating such destructively high expectations in not only its own members but also in its critics abroad.

Anti-Americanism is the most seamless and coherent when the withering critiques of institutional arrangements and policies are joined to a correspondingly negative and scornful view of American culture and even individual Americans, perceived as hopelessly deformed by their system, by the culture. For example, Nehru of India observed in 1953: “As far as I can see … there is neither breadth nor depth about the average American … The United States is hardly the place where one would go at present in search of the higher culture” [Hutchins 1990-1991: 96]. This has been a type of criticism that often predates the more recent animosity stimulated by the global influence and power of the United States.

America as uncivilized, lacking in culture, and obsessed with things material and economic are long-standing critiques. Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer, was struck (in the second half of the 19th century) by the United States as a country “where everything is so torn up and inharmonious.” He also observed:

… America is a very backward country culturally. …

A way of life has evolved in America that turns exclusively upon making a living, acquiring material goods, a fortune. Americans are so absorbed in the scramble for profit that all their faculties are devoted to it; all their interests revolve around it. Their brains are trained exclusively to grapple with monetary values and columns of figures …

… a commercial nation devoted to buying and selling, not an artistic or art-loving nation.

… a country in which art means dining-room decorations.

[Hamsun 1969: 15, 19, 78, 88]

Hamsun also found Americans invincibly and smugly ignorant of “foreign peoples and foreign achievements,” “a nation so taken with itself [that it] knows curiously little about others,” where “a justifiable national pride [is transformed] into an unjustifiable arrogance …” [Ibid.: 8, 9, 20]. While the specifics of these century-old critiques are dated, their spirit survives in the image of the basically unsophisticated, immature, naïve, and insensitive nation. “The garish vulgarity” of American civilization in particular has remained a favorite commentary among foreigners, especially from Western Europe [see for example Clement 1976: 36].

Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer, visiting the United States in the early 20th century, a few decades after Hamsun, came away with similar but still darker images and impressions:

… the passionate idealism of the young democracy had … become covered with rust, like the bronze statue, eating away the soul with the corrosive of commercialism. The senseless craving for money … is a disease from which people suffer everywhere. But I did not realize that this dread disease had assumed such proportions in America.

… It is the first time that I have seen such a huge city monster; nowhere have the people appeared to me so unfortunate, so thoroughly enslaved to life, as in New York … nowhere have I seen them so tragicomically self-satisfied …

… It seems to me that what is superlatively lacking to America is a desire for beauty, a thirst for those pleasures which it alone can give to the mind and to the heart.

[Stearn ed. 1975: 174, 176, 178]

The contrast between material wealth and spiritual poverty is another venerable theme in the critiques of the American way of life. Bertrand Russell observed half a century after Gorky: “When I look at the faces of people in opulent cars … I don't see that look of radiant happiness … In nine cases out of ten, I see instead a look of boredom and discontent and an almost frantic longing for something that might tickle the jaded palate” [Feinberg and Kasrils eds. 1983: 335]. Such “cheerless luxury” has been an attribute of the American way of life many visitors have detected [see for example Sullerot 1967: 47].

If the presumed cultural superiority of the European critics is a major source of the kind of reproaches quoted above, in more recent times it has been the impoverished condition of countries in the Third World which has stimulated similar condemnation. It may come naturally to those who find few sources of pride in the material accomplishments of their society to emphasize its more intangible spiritual assets and benefits. This leads to a “stress on feeling, soul and depth vis-à-vis the cold rationality of an imperialist civilization,” also seen as “the perennial response to the experience of inferiority and backwardness of one society towards more powerful rivals” [Kroes 1984: 4, 3].

It is safe to say that anti-Americanism is almost invariably more intense when it originates in traditional or partly traditional societies, or modernizing societies anxious to preserve some of their traditional attributes. A visitor to the United States from communist China spoke for many Third World critics displeased with the American way of life that challenges and violates traditional ways and values:

So you have your car and your house and your position … but what is it all for? Spiritually, you are quite poor. You don't have a sense of belief … It seems young people are mainly concerned with sex, and the society lacks beautiful and noble love between men and women.

… Your young people learn quickly, but they learn selfish goals. In China, young people put their country first … the younger generation should give their hearts to better their country—and it is the responsibility of the older generation to give their children such a sense of purpose.

[“China's Epic Novelist Looks at the U.S. …” 1982: 75]

Thus the familiar critique of individualism—and that of modernity which is inseparable from individualism—merges with the critique of American society and culture.

It takes little effort to discover that a large portion of all critiques of the United States and American society are as much critiques of modernity as they are of American foreign policy or economic rapaciousness. And there is a convergence in these matters too, between the voices of the domestic and foreign critics.

George F. Kennan, better known as an architect and subsequent critic of American foreign policy after World War II, personifies the type of domestic social-cultural criticism that is also widespread abroad among those who are offended by American culture and threatened by the onslaught of modernity:

What was in England an evil of the upper classes seemed to have become the vice of the entire populace [in the Untied States]. It was a sad climax of individualism, the blind-alley of a generation which has forgotten how to think or live collectively … I could not help but feel that one ought to welcome almost any social cataclysm … that would … force human beings to seek their happiness and their salvation in their relationship to society as a whole rather than in the interests of themselves …

[Kennan 1989: 43]

Kennan also shared with foreign critics the concern over the human consequences of American affluence, opportunities, and permissiveness:

Here it is easy to see that when man is given … freedom from both political restraint and want, the effect is to render him childlike … fun-loving, quick to laughter and enthusiasm, unanalytical, unintellectual … given to seizures of aggressiveness, driven constantly to protect his status … by an eager conformism … Southern California together with all that tendency of American life which it typifies, is childhood without the promise of maturity.

[Ibid.: 149-50]

Kennan describes the American character as “one-dimensional” (as had Herbert Marcuse), unreflective, lacking in the capacity for anguish, casually cheerful, immersed in the present [Ibid.: 169-70]. Aesthetic, environmentalist concerns add to a far-reaching indictment of American culture and life (as is often the case in the writings of many visitors from abroad). Thus from his comments on the ‘“asphalted desolation” unfolding outside the windows of his motel Kennan is led to observe that in this “lonely, air-conditioned world” there is

Not a touch of community; not a touch of sociability. Only the endless whirring … of the air conditioners, the wild wasting of energy, the ubiquitous television set, the massive bundle of advertising pulp that masquerades under the name of a Sunday newspaper. All unnatural; all experience vicarious, all activity passive and uncreative. And this wasteland extending, like a desert, miles and miles in every direction.

[Ibid.: 289]

That Kennan sounds like a sensitive European touring the United States probably has to do with his being something of a stranger in his own country, having spent the best years, decades, of his life in Europe as a diplomat—a career choice in itself reflecting some discomfort with the home setting, one may conjecture.

Another American critic of American culture and character whose outlook resembles that of both Kennan and the critics abroad (Western Europeans in particular) is Dwight Macdonald. Returning to New York in 1957, he wrote,

after a year in London and two months in Tuscany, I felt I had crossed a boundary wider than the Atlantic. We are an unhappy people (I felt), a people without style, without a sense of what is humanly satisfying. Our values are not anchored securely, not in the past (tradition) and not in the present (community). There is a terrible shapelessness about American life. These prosperous Americans look more tense and joyless than the people in the poorer quarters of Florence. Even the English seem to have more joie de vivre.

… There: a community, each person differentiated by status and function but each a part of an orderly social structure. Here: everybody “equal” in the sense that nobody respects anybody else … There: continuity with the past. … Here: no bottom, no continuity, no level: a jungle in which anything can happen without anybody's thinking it out of the ordinary. Each individual makes his own culture, his own morality …

… Americans appear to other nations to be at once gross and sentimental, immature and tough, uncultivated and hypocritical, shrewd about small things and stupid about big things.

[Macdonald 1974: 44, 47-48, 49]

There is a certain logic to connecting the critiques of political and economic institutions to those of culture and national character. Yet many of the less consistent critics of America insist on liking individual Americans and contrasting them favorably with the corrupt institutions of their society, the influence of which they mysteriously escaped.

Inauthenticity is another theme in the critiques of American society endlessly dwelt upon by its native critics which has found ready acceptance abroad. It is the divergence between word and deed, theory and practice, of which Americans were found uniquely guilty. Freud upon his visit in 1909 lamented the “prudery, the hypocrisy, the national lack of independence! There is no independent thinking in America, is there?” He also advised his interlocutor, Max Eastman, that he “write a book about the monstrous thing that America turned out to be. … The word is ‘miscarriage.’ The Miscarriage of American Civilization—that shall be the title of your book … find out the causes and tell the truth about the whole awful catastrophe” [Stearn ed. 1975: 222].

The theme of the gap between aspiration and achievement also looms large in a historical summary of the critiques of America,

… as a land of contradiction and hypocrisy, where whites enslaved blacks under a supposedly democratic constitution; where violence and instability reigned in place of kings; where feudal degradation gave way to capitalist oppression; where corruption became synonymous with universal (white) male suffrage; where feminine idiosyncrasies counterpointed male vulgarity; where culture was frail and mediocrity dominant.

[Stearn 1975: xii]

Stanley Hoffman of Harvard University (himself a longtime critic of American foreign policy) claims that “Much of the ambivalence toward the U.S. stems from the contradiction between official U.S. ideology—the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights—and American actions at home and around the world. Many see what the U.S. is doing and conclude it does not practice what it preaches” [Powell 1985: 27]. While it is not easy to separate what Hoffman thinks of such matters from what he attributes to other critics (abroad), his remark highlights, once again, the high expectations which underlie much of the criticism of the United States.

One may wonder why people abroad have accepted at face value the promise of America and come to judge the United States by higher standards (based on its ideals) than most other countries. The Soviet Union too generated vast amounts of impressive rhetoric about the ideals and promises of its social system yet it has not become a country of which huge numbers of people around the world expected a great deal, not even in its revolutionary heyday. (Only relatively small numbers of Western and Third World intellectuals harbored high expectations of the Soviet system, and, as a rule, not for long.) Nor did high expectations toward the Soviet system ever find expression in vast numbers of people seeking to live in that country, as has been the case with the United States.

High expectations of America certainly have endured for a long time and with them a tendency to ambivalence (when tested against reality). Ambivalence in turn has often been transformed into fierce rejection. A study of British writers' views of this country captures the contradictory nature of these expectations. Peter Conrad writes:

Geographically America was imagined in advance of its discovery as an arboreal paradise, Europe's dream of verdurous luxury … the political founders of the United States … constituted America as a promised land, a conjuration of the liberal hopes or aristocratic fears of Europe. They saw the new kind of state … not a natural growth of history but the actualization of an idea.

… To the European, the enchantment of America is the variegation of its reality … America is centerless, not a claustrophobic, centripetal society like those in Europe … but a chaos of disparate realities … In England these writers would have had to share the same congested, incest-ridden space. America disperses them, relegating each to a location aptest to his imagination.

The reality for America is selective, optional, fantastic: there is an America for each of us.

[Conrad 1980: 3, 4]

These reflections help to grasp the depth of feeling and ambivalence America inspires especially in artists and intellectuals, in people of high expectations in search of self-realization and nonmaterial fulfillment. America, as Peter Conrad put it, has for them become a state of mind rather than a country or society. In a similar spirit William Pfaff, an American writer who lives in France, has written that “What these successive visions of America have had in common is the conviction that America is a place where constraining reality—indeed history itself—is defied and the limits of Europe do not prevail …” [Pfaff 1989: 181]. If so, it is easier to understand why at least a certain type of anti-Americanism is a response to disappointment bred by high expectations.

But if the promise of America has been taken so seriously this suggests that the American experiment has not been a total failure or fraud, that it has not been written off, that there remains something that continues to attract and intrigue, a promise partially fulfilled that continues to fuel ambivalence.

In more recent times it has been the political failures (real or alleged) of the United States and especially those of its foreign policy which aroused the most critical attention and have been found to provide the favored explanation of hostility abroad. Stanley Hoffman has not been the only American commentator focusing on the sins of the United States in seeking to account for such negativity. The editor of a collection examining the putative estrangement of the United States from the rest of the world posed these questions:

How much of our dilemma is our unconscious ethnocentrism, grating on the nerves of those whom we are presumed to lead and instruct?

How much is traceable to our economic and social failure at home measured against our frequently self-righteous stance abroad?

… How much of our estrangement proceeded from America's military misadventures and defeats of recent years?

How much of it reflects our reemerging know-nothingism, the atavistic stirrings on our political-cultural scene?

How much derives from our styles of presidential leadership and the confusions these create abroad?

[Ungar ed. 1985: xi]

The burden of these rhetorical questions—and of the answers they elicited—was that the United States is ultimately responsible for its unpopularity in the world.

A somewhat similar line of argument is pursued by William Pfaff. He suggests that an excessive interventionism, prompted by missionary zeal and an all-too-serene belief in the superiority and exportability of American values—the United States “as model for mankind, source of idealism, seat of justice”—are responsible for American unpopularity abroad. He is properly critical of “the breathtaking conviction [of Americans] that people everywhere shared the fundamental ambitions and values of Americans” [Pfaff 1989: 10, 13].

A more specific form of such reproaches is the claim, embraced with particular relish by both domestic and foreign critics, that the United States and American policy-makers are “insensitive” to foreign nations and especially those in the Third World. Ali Mazrui, a professor both at the University of Nigeria and the University of Michigan (mentioned earlier in Chapter 3 as a star academic chased by many institutions), wrote:

… because Americans are bad listeners, they have resisted being humanized, in the sense of learning to respond to the needs and desires of the rest of the world.

… the Reagan administration has not listened to the groans of the world's poor … Using its power to reduce [the World Bank] International Development Association's effectiveness is an instance of singular American insensitivity. Similarly the United States withdrew from UNESCO, having decided that it does not want to listen to some of the messages emanating from UNESCO. …

… The messages from abroad that the United States has been least prepared to listen to during the postwar era are those of Marxism and Islam.

[Ungar ed. 1985: 181, 182, 189]

Similar indictments of the alleged American “failure to understand the political, cultural and socioeconomic realities of other societies” [e.g., Hamid in Rubinstein and Smith 1985: 108] have often been put forward both abroad and in the United States by those predisposed to the criticism of American policies on other grounds as well. Implicit in this line of argument is the premise that the United States unlike most other nations is under a special moral obligation to various countries and especially those regularly berating it and make various demands on it. In this therapeutic model of international relations, countries (or some of them) are presumed to listen carefully to one another, anxious to understand the other's point of view and respond positively. It is a belief most assiduously cultivated in the United Nations, where it is promoted, indeed institutionalized, by the Third World majority. A somewhat similar position used to be taken among American policy-makers and specialists in years past toward the Soviet Union—a point of view which stressed the need to listen, understand and avoid being “judgmental.” This author called it the “therapeutic approach” to American-Soviet relations [Hollander 1988: 59-62].

The charge of American insensitivity toward foreign nations ranges all the way from scholarly critiques through the standardized denunciations in the U.N. (discussed earlier); it also found literary expression in the once famous novel, The Ugly American (number 6 on the best-seller list in 1959), a thinly fictionalized chronicle of American insensitivity, ineptness, and bungling in Southeast Asia. It was the highly popular message of the book that Americans abroad, and officials in particular, were both totally ignorant of local customs, social norms, and culture and cheerfully insensitive to the feelings and beliefs of the peoples they were seeking to patronize and defend from the communist threat. “The Ugly American” became a stereotype of the American abroad universally disliked. It was a novel that did much to popularize and illustrate the notion of ethnocentricity that has since become enshrined in popular sociology and psychology courses. (Ethnocentric Americans judged other cultures in terms of their own and preferred their own to others; this too was presented as a singularly American failing.) The novel also conveyed that the few Americans who were knowledgeable of and interested in foreign countries are systematically weeded out from foreign service. The novel's Ambassador Sears thinks of the natives as “little monkeys” and had no idea where the country was located in which he was given the job as a political reward. He was among the American officials described by one of the articulate natives as people who cannot grasp the power of ideas (unlike the communists) and who were sent over to “try to buy us like cattle.” Another American official “drives a big red convertible which he slews around corners and over sidewalks. And he's got exactly the kind of loud silly laugh that every Asian is embarrassed to hear.”

Americans are recruited to these posts abroad by the prospect of an easy life, surrounded by servants and perks of many kinds. In the words of another native critic, “A mysterious change seems to come over Americans when they go to a foreign land. They isolate themselves socially. They live pretentiously. They are loud and ostentatious” [Lederer and Burdick 1958: 12, 24, 69, 145]. It is the message of the book (supported by “a factual epilogue”) that the failures of American foreign policy are rooted in the ignorance, incompetence, insensitivity, and arrogance of Americans who represent this country abroad as well as of those making policy at home.

In The Quiet American, Graham Greene develops the same theme in a more serious manner and on a higher literary plane. This time the American abroad is a far more appealing character full of good intentions (determined to “improve the whole universe”) which unfortunately have deadly consequences. He is above all innocent and naïve, totally lacking in intellectual sophistication but overflowing with an insipid earnestness. Once more this American innocent meddles destructively in the affairs of the natives (the Indochinese) whom he is incapable of understanding; he is equally “incapable of conceiving the pain he might cause others.” He and his people “are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren't interested.” He is “impregnably armoured by his good intentions and ignorance” and makes “the mistake of putting his ideas into practice.” In doing so he personifies the hopeless ineptitude of the United States in world affairs [Greene 1955: 10, 63, 99, 183, 186]. Greene's barely concealed contempt and condescension are especially aroused by what he takes to be the puritanical core of the American character.

It is noteworthy that the charge of “insensitivity” has also become extremely popular at home, one of the major critiques of domestic policies and institutional arrangements, especially in the context of the alleged mistreatment of minorities. “Insensitivity” has virtually displaced “oppression” or “exploitation” as the major trait of the social order and its rulers. Presumably this development has something to do with the easier applicability of the concept to a wider range of more intangible grievances which surfaced in the 1980s and replaced more observable and clear-cut forms of mistreatment or deprivation.

The gist of present-day anti-Americanism is captured in the observations of a Dutch author who locates it in the discontents of contemporary life, an attitude that has some elements in common with the vehement anti-modernizing hostility the United States (“the Great Satan”) arouses in Islamic societies.

Rob Kroes argued that “‘America’ [is] a construct of the mind, a composite image based on the perception of dismal trends which are then linked to America as the country and culture characteristically but not uniquely displaying them” and that “the ‘America’ which one now rejects is really a code word—a symbol—for a much wider rejection of contemporary society and culture” [Kroes 1984: 1, 12]. At the same time Kroes also sees anti-Americanism as a “highly defensive” response to threats to national and national cultural identity in Western Europe [Ibid.: 3]. It was the European reactions to the Vietnam war followed by the fears of nuclear conflagration on European soil that gave a clearer focus to all such diffuse sentiments and crystallized disaffection from the United States.

Another Dutch author, Jan Van Houten, characterized Western European anti-Americanism as in large measure a response to the anti-Americanism of Americans, and intellectuals in particular. He also suggested that anti-Americanism, although stimulated by Vietnam and the deployment of intermediate missiles in Western Europe, has been on the rise ever since the death of President Kennedy, and that

The fiercest denunciations of America have been home-grown. In the past 20 years, the U.S. exported anti-Americanism just as it did Coca-Cola, … hamburgers and “Peyton Place” … only a small number are infected with the anti-American virus … The problem is that the minority consists of the people in the consciousness industry—the churches, the schools, the universities and the mass media.

Van Houten also sees anti-Americanism less a response to specific American policies and actions (which nonetheless can increase it) than a symptom of “the disease of intellectuals” which is the rejection of Western society: “As the leader and symbol of the West, the U.S. is naturally their No. 1 enemy … The root of the matter is the alienation of the intellectuals from the institutions and values of their own society” [Van Houten 1983].

It should be emphasized that this argument is quite different from that which explains anti-Americanism as a defensive response to some type of American enchroachment—economic, political, or cultural. The intellectuals in question have little interest in protecting the values and institutions of their own society which they also reject as part of the complex of Western values and institutions. Rather than separating the values of their own society from those of an encroaching United States, they see continuity between the despised values of their own social system (e.g., “consumerism”) and those of the United States, which represents the furthest development of the trends they abhor. These homegrown attitudes are in turn enriched and certified by similar sentiments and critiques radiating from American social critics equally unhappy with their own social institutions and values.

In a single article a British writer reporting from the United States benefitted from the vision and opinion of several American social critics such as Congressman Ronald V. Dellums, arguably the most radical elected official in office; E. L. Doctorow, the writer; John Kenneth Galbraith, the economist (and sometime admirer of Mao's China [see Hollander 1981: 306-7, 320]); and Grace Paley, another left-of-center author identified in the article as “a veteran of good American causes” [Webb 1983: 26]. J. B. Priestley, the well-known English writer, disclosed that “We also dislike the society they [‘disillusioned young Americans’] dislike.” He thought that “Americans weren't better than most people; they were mostly much worse; they were in no position to teach other people anything except advanced and dangerously suspect technology. It is now time the U.S. started all over again and did much better” [Priestley 1980: 18].

Kenneth Minogue, one of the handful of authors who explicitly addressed the phenomenon of anti-Americanism, has made a similar point:

… a great deal of anti-Americanism in Britain is picked up from Americans themselves, for whom the sentiment is the local modification of a long-standing Western tendency towards civilizational guilt and self-dislike … Indeed the point of departure for anyone who wants to understand anti-Americanism is that it is most intense … in America itself. What foreigner could match, for sheer intensity of hatred, the response of many left-wing Americans to the Vietnam war? It is Americans themselves who supply most of the materials of anti-Americanism.

[Minogue 1986: 44, 47]

Minogue suggests that (as is also the belief of this author) “the most familiar and recognizable anti-Americanism [is] that of the left.” Its hallmarks are the proposition that the United States is a “profit-crazed country blinded by hatred of progressive or left-wing governments”; it is “dangerously unpredictable” (an especially powerful argument when the United States has so many fingers on the nuclear trigger); and always “on the wrong side of any liberation struggle”; the U.S. is, furthermore, obsessed with technology while incapable of solving human problems at home or abroad [Ibid.: 47].

Such sentiments on the part of left-wing intellectuals are an integral part of the type of estrangement alluded to by the Dutch authors cited; its American forms were discussed at some length in the first part of this book. Left-wing anti-Americanism is permeated by anticapitalism since the intellectuals in question regard capitalism as the most repugnant social-economic system (holding it responsible for the corruption of human nature and character), and they correctly identify capitalism with the United States. Left-wing anti-Americanism is also more conspicuous and consequential because it is widely disseminated in the mass media which in Western Europe as in the United States is very accessible to these intellectuals and their followers.

Arthur F. Burns, U.S. ambassador to West Germany in the early 1980s, also reached the conclusion that “… America—with its untiring propensity for self-criticism—exported to Europe its own version of anti-Americanism.” He noted that the American mass media and television in particular provide much of the raw material for the critiques of the United States by concentrating on “violence, exploitation and bigotry.” He too found the root of the phenomenon in the broader anti-Western disposition of “Europe's educated classes.” In their eyes “America is seen correctly as the bulwark of everything they despise—parliamentary democracy, dynamic capitalism, modern technology and robust anti-Communism” [Burns 1983].

Not only does anti-American sentiment abroad derive sustenance from similar critiques at home, the United States also suffers from an inability to project a more attractive image even on the part of those who are not its habitual detractors. George Urban, an English writer, made this point forcefully:

It is a political curiosity of our time that the nation that invented Madison Avenue should be so poor conveying the truth … about the real nature of American society, the values Americans cherish …

Sitting among delegates at the United Nations or listening to the Dutch or Mexicans talking among themselves, one is struck by a puzzling phenomenon: the totalitarian world has succeeded in … defining the terms in which American society is described and often describes itself.

America, in this light, is rapacious, exploitative, imperialistic, vacuous and lacking compassion.

[Urban 1984]

Urban believes that this situation arose in part because American political culture is basically democratic and defensive and Americans are inexperienced in articulating American values and the positive features of American society; they are also handicapped by “a lack of self confidence in dealing with foreigners.” Moreover, American elite groups lost confidence in American society and institutions. If so the estranged critical sensibility at home and hostility abroad reinforce one another. A social system continuously engaged in self-denigration (or apparent self-denigration) inspires little trust and confidence abroad. Anti-Americanism not only feeds on the lurid television programs and trashy movies produced in the United States, it also derives support and justification from the rejection of American institutions produced by the flourishing industry of more scholarly social criticism (sampled in Chapter 1).

The late Henry Fairlie, an English author transplanted to this country, was among the few who paid attention to the phenomenon here discussed. He wrote:

I am not speaking of the steady criticism that any nation—and particularly its intellectuals—ought to maintain of its own society, but of a virulence of tone … which seems to spring from self-doubt into self-hate.

… during the late 1960s and to some extent since then, whatever the provocations, the repulsion of many Americans from their own country … has not been merely virulent, not only monotonous, but itself a kind of sickness, which in turn needs diagnosis.

… the higher up one goes the more searching becomes the self-criticism …

[Fairlie 1975: 29]

Fairlie identifies among the features of this self-critical disposition the readiness of individual Americans to feel personal guilt for the historical past:

No American alive today enslaved the Negroes … just as no Englishman alive today carried on the slave trade … Yet whereas no Englishman today feels any guilt or other responsibility for the deeds of his ancestors, the American is apparently expected to go on—and on—crying mea culpa for every misdeed that has been committed in his land since Christopher Newport turned his three ships into James River almost four hundred years ago.

[Ibid.: 30]

Such feelings of guilt seem to increase with education, and the elite institutions appear to be the most committed to inculcate and nurture them.

While anti-Americanism abroad is nourished by the self-laceration of American social critics it is also a response to other processes set into motion by the United States. The latter has been successfully, if unintentionally, exporting to many parts of the world—along with television programs, fast food, and blue jeans—by-products of modernization which are far more disturbing. Fairlie is right in suggesting that it is “the impact of Americanization that is at the core of anti-Americanism” [Ibid.: 48-49]. But what is at the core of Americanization?

Most obviously Americanization amounts to the export of American cultural products, consumer goods, and recreational activities; it does indeed entail a degree of cultural homogenization (as the critics say) and threat to traditional values and social distinctions. But as one digs deeper Americanization and modernization begin to shade into one another. Unhappily modernization means more than the introduction of machines, mass production, and new ways of communication; it also produces social and geographic mobility, the growth of individualism, social isolation, problems of identity, the decline of community, secularization, and the unthinking acceptance of change.

In the late 1970s I wrote [Hollander 1983: 308-10] that what many foreigners despise and dislike most about American society and regard among its most threatening or distasteful aspects (as the case may be) is the confused groping for values and standards, at once admirable and pathetic. The American spectacle of a moral, ethical, aesthetic free-for-all (the most recent expression of which is a somewhat mindless veneration of “diversity” in higher education [see also Shanker 1991]), the rapid changes in moral fashions; the determined and self-conscious quest for self-expression, self-realization, as well as popularity—these are among the more intangible aspects, the fruits of America and Americanization which are often met with dismay, unease, bewilderment, or at least ambivalence abroad. The unqualified “openness to change” in particular—regarded as a self-evident virtue in American culture—inspires incomprehension or apprehension and is frequently associated with suggestibility, instability, inability to discriminate, and moral confusion—all of which are abundant in American society. Hence Americanization of other countries and cultures also means the export of confusion, high expectations (easily frustrated), ethical relativism, insecurities which have no discernible material origin, and a shapeless spiritual malaise.

These objections too have deeper roots and were aptly voiced by a fictional representative of French aristocracy in an Edith Wharton novel published in 1913:

… you lay hands on things sacred to us … And you're all alike … every one of you … You come among us from a country we don't know … a country you care for so little that before you have been a day in ours you've forgotten the very house you were born in—if it wasn't torn down before you knew it! … you come from hotels as big as towns, and from towns as flimsy as paper, where the streets haven't had time to be named, and the buildings are demolished before they're dry, and the people are so proud of changing as we are of holding to what we have—we're fools enough to imagine that … you understand anything about the things that make life decent and honourable for us!

[Wharton 1987: 485]

My own impressions of and objections to some of these more intangible aspects of American life and culture are relevant here. In my first years in this country over thirty years ago (during 1959-60) I certainly qualified as a hostile critic of American society and what I took to be the quality of personal and social relations and the values guiding the lives of people. In a plaintive article written for the student magazine of the London School of Economics (my alma mater) I thus complained:

What bothered me more [than my encounters with academic bureaucracy at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana] was the much talked about blend of superficiality, conformity, lack of spontaneity and the “other-directedness” which characterises a good deal of … relationships in this country …

… There is no question about the proverbial American friendliness and hospitality. It does exist but it strikes me as having one regrettable flaw: it is wholly casual and impersonal … Americans have hundreds of “friends” … Knowing somebody for one week or one year does not seem to alter the quality of these relationships …

I do not want to be on “friendly” terms with the whole world because I consider this impossible and meaningless. Americans do not …

… I am yet to understand why of all nations the USA is the most haunted by … insecurity, why, for example should going to college in this country be a “traumatic” experience for many students …

… what I least like in this country and on the campus … is what strikes me as the total lack of spontaneity in human relations, in social activities, in the attitudes towards learning [or] leisure …

[Then] There is of course conformity, in some ways more deadly than that which is enforced by the security police in totalitarian states, because to all intents and purposes it seems to be spontaneous and consequently more efficient and penetrating. Its root lies in the fact that people … feel more at ease if … if they resemble each other in attitudes, ways of dressing, hair style, interests and conversational techniques.

Having rediscovered (and exaggerated) Tocqueville before I read him I proceeded to confess to these rather dated expectations:

… I not only expect the USA to have better … missiles than the USSR … but I also expect her to have a society and culture morally … superior in every respect to that of a police state …

[Hollander 1960: 44, 45, 46]

Even if one makes allowances for factors which colored these youthful critiques (the social isolation felt in the new American setting and the rather dramatic contrasts between life in London and Champaign-Urbana), a core of criticism remains that has been the familiar staple of the reproaches directed at American life and values. This is not political criticism, but social and cultural. What precisely did I (and others) mean about the lack of spontaneity and other problems of personal relations? I think I had in mind certain pragmatic-practical aspects of the ways in which Americans relate to one another; for example the “mixing of business with pleasure,” the deliberate policy not to antagonize others by expressing opinions which deviate from those prevailing in a given sub-culture or setting, the policy of doing small favors to others in the expectation that they will reciprocate (Tom Wolfe called this “the favor bank” [Wolfe 1987]), and other ways of trying to be well liked by all. At the time I wrote about these matters I did not realize that these forms of behavior and manners are promoted by the relentless geographic and social mobility that prevails, that they are forms of adaptation to these processes. (But thirteen years later I recognized more fully the forces shaping and misshaping friendship patterns in this society [Hollander 1973: 282-88].)

I had of course vastly exaggerated in that early article both the quantity and quality of conformity and was largely unaware at the time that American society and culture encompassed a wide range of variation in people's beliefs and values, even if in particular subcultures—be they of teenagers or college professors—there is indeed conformity.

The long-standing critiques of American society and culture gather a special force as the critics recognize that their own society is not immune to the influences of Americanization, that the trends conspicuous in the United States are inexorably spreading. Arthur Koestler wrote:

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, neon and subtopia, the Organization Man and the 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 against us to force their revolting “coke” down our throats. Europe bought the whole package because it wanted it. The Americans did not Americanize us—they were merely one step ahead …

[Koestler 1961: 277]

A French writer asked, “Could this America, this other world looming on the horizon, be our own future? … The taste for imitation is so strong today in Europe that … we may also inherit Americanism and all its sorry products … the United States projects on the screen of our future a universe of appalling ugliness” [Royer 1965: 306, 307]. More matter of factly, an English commentator noted, “The great interest for a foreign visitor to America today is that he is able to peer forward through a priceless telescope at the economic forces that are most likely to influence all other countries' futures” [Macrae 1969: 20]. Italian analysts of American culture reached similar conclusions: “The fact that the United States is the most technologically advanced country, and thus in some ways prophesies our future, tends to increase Europeans' aversion. Modern life at times seems to profane what we were yesterday … America's degenerate aspects … are created by something much more vast: modern industrial civilization” [Fornari and Luraghi 1968: 50, 51]. Herbert Soderstrom, a prominent Swedish journalist, wrote: “America is a country where we can find most of our problems blown up and exaggerated … It is a country that is somewhat ahead of us in testing and marketing both problems and solutions.” He also concluded that “I have tried to find some critiques of the United States that is uniquely Swedish, but I have not found a single opinion, a single nuance that has not already been expressed by American critics …” [Soderstrom 1974: 36, 35].

It may now be possible to summarize the most likely explanations of anti-Americanism abroad without rank-ordering them.

Clearly a precondition for the development of these attitudes is a certain amount of information about the United States which can become the raw material out of which hostile critiques can be constructed. By any comparative historical standard more people know more about the United States than has ever been known of any country by people not living in it; that much of this information is shallow, stereotyped, or distorted does of course help to account for the phenomena here examined.

Such a widespread awareness, if not genuine familiarity with the United States or things American, has its roots in the pervasive global presence of the United States that combines economic, political, military, and cultural forms. The cultural presence in particular, conveyed by the mass media, is most apt to provoke criticism at any rate among elite groups of the countries affected. (“‘America’ stands for a threat to the autonomy of traditional elites. To be anti-American is to defend one's right against the presumptiveness of the marketplace psychology …” [Scheuch 1970: 20].) Resentment over such cultural penetration can rest on various political values. Most commonly, as was shown earlier, it reflects nationalistic concerns over the undermining of what is felt to be the uniqueness of a national culture, its “levelling” or “homogenization.” Such concerns may be intensified by both a leftist hostility to the products and tentacles of American capitalism and the distaste of traditional elite groups for the new competitor in the marketplace of ideas, art forms, and values.

One aspect of the United States that is the most readily grasped abroad is its wealth. In combination with other attributes of American society—especially its social problems, aesthetic and educational deficiencies—affluence becomes a potent source of envy and derogation. It is among the major unacknowledged sources of anti-Americanism. As Erwin Scheuch, the German sociologist, pointed out, “… the most powerful industrial nation in the world (and the richest society the world has ever known) naturally attracts the resentments of the less successful countries … Sociological research … shows that anti-Americanism becomes shriller in a country when its own conditions become more insecure …” [Scheuch 1970: 19].

That the United States is also subject to a steady barrage of domestic criticism is another powerful factor in the growth and persistence of anti-Americanism abroad. To emphasize this factor is not to suggest that anti-American critiques abroad are no more than echoes or imitations of the domestic ones or that without the themes and information provided by the domestic critiques the foreign ones would not emerge or would wilt. At the same time there is little doubt that the domestic critiques deepen the confidence of the foreign critics (in their own judgment) and help to authenticate their aversion. (“The self-hate of many Americans is giving West Europe's cultural intelligentsia grounds for new arrogance” [Scheuch 1970: 21].) But even when Americans are not bitterly critical of the failings (real or imagined) of their culture and institutions, they are still susceptible to criticism from abroad. It is a susceptibility that can coexist, peculiarly enough, with the belief in the goodness of American ideals. Not only is there an acute awareness of the difference between ideal and reality at the bottom of this self-critical propensity, there is also “a sense of national incompleteness as we constantly change our lives … [a] lack of inner security when our optimism begins to seem unfounded or betrayed. Our optimism is perhaps a necessary compensation for a pervasive insecurity, which derives from the physical and economic origins of American society …” [Pfaff 1989: 51].

There is at last a further stimulant of anti-Americanism, namely that the United States can be abused and vilified without adverse effects—a condition that stimulates and benefits both native and foreign critics. This state of affairs has the most tangible connection with the post-Vietnam image of the United States, a “paper tiger” image of a powerful country with a weakened will to use its power and a long list of failed foreign policy objectives. In this perspective the United States is a nation which suffered a string of national humiliations ranging from a major one, such as the defeat in Vietnam, to the recurrent manifestations of impotence in the face of hostage takings and other forms of terrorism. The military power of the United States has failed to translate into political power during the past quarter-century. As a British journalist put it, “Militarily the U.S. is a musclebound giant. You deploy nineteen warships off the coast of Lebanon and a couple of aircraft carriers—but you cannot use that force … The U.S. is unwilling to take casualties, so you have soldiers all over the place but won't use them for fear one may get shot” [Dale 1984: 23]. Since these observations were made, the level of military assertiveness of the United States has risen considerably, as reflected in the dispatch of troops to Grenada, Panama, and the Persian Gulf.

A final reminder of how high expectations, disappointment, and ambivalence blend in attitudes toward the United States was recently expressed by Martin Amis, the popular English writer:

Countries go insane like people go insane … America had her neuroses before, like when she tried giving up drink, like when she started finding enemies within, like when she thought she could rule the world; but she had always gotten better again. But now she was going insane …

In a way she was never like anything else … America had to mean something … hence her vulnerability—to make-believe, to false memory, false destiny.

[Amis 1989: 366]

Anti-Americanism encompasses a great variety of attitudes, beliefs, and circumstances. It may arise out of nationalism, anti-Western sentiment, anticapitalism, the rejection of science, technology, and urban life, fear of nuclear war, general disgust with modernity, the defense of traditional ways of life, and the cultural condescension of established elites. Whatever its origins it tends to acquire an irrational dynamic of its own that springs from the need of human beings to explain and reduce responsibility for the misfortunes in their lives.

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