Barry & Judith Rubin on Antiamericanism

[Mediocrates]

http://www.fpri.org/enotes/20040820.west.rubinb.antiamericanism.html

E-Notes
Understanding Anti-Americanism
by Barry Rubin

August 20, 2004
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and Senior Fellow of FPRI. He is co-author, with Judith Colp Rubin, of the just-published book Hating America: A History (Oxford University Press). This essay is based on his FPRI BookTalk on August 12, 2004.

One of the most contentious issues of this presidential election is the high level of anti-Americanism in the world today. Is the problem due to an understandable reaction against the policies of President George W. Bush or rather the product of forces opposing freedom and democracy?

Like many partisan disputes, this debate misses the point and mashes the facts to suit a predetermined objective: whether Bush is the architect of hostility against the United States or the champion of a free world against totalitarians and whether Bush or Senator John Kerry would be a better president.

If one examines anti-Americanism apart from these set arguments, though, a much more accurate picture emerges.

Anti-Americanism is a phenomenon as old, actually even older, than the United States itself. Although it has gone through various periods and emphases, the main themes have remained remarkably consistent, long predating either the influence of Hollywood or America being a great power internationally. Two of the most important are the vision of the United States as a bad society, which threatens to become the model for the whole world, and that of America as seeking global conquest.

For example, the first clear statement of anti-Americanism came from the French lawyer Simon Linguet in the 1780s. The dregs of Europe, he warned, would build a dreadful society in America, create a strong army, take over Europe, and destroy civilization. If one were to be talking about the spread of notions like democracy and liberty, Linguet’s fear was something of a personal premonition. A few years later, he was guillotined by the French revolution.

Similarly, the first use of the word “Americanization” has been traced to an 1867 article in a French journal which warned that the import of American agricultural machinery would end with the elimination of French culture. It is no accident that France has long been the global capital of anti-Americanism. Indeed, the level of hatred toward the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, as well as other decades, has been arguably higher than today.

In considering the roots of anti-Americanism, a dislike of U.S. policies has often been set off against a disdain for American values. Yet there are problems with both explanations. Regarding values, withering criticism and even hatred often arise among people who share those values in broad terms. Europeans are also pro-democratic.

Sometimes, of course, criticism may be on target but what is often being ejected so passionately is either the details of how America interprets those values or a notion of American life based on bizarre stereotypes. For instance, America is seen as typified by capital punishment, yet most states do not put people to death while many Americans oppose this. Thus, capital punishment does not typify America.

By the same token, Americans do not spend all their meals eating pizza and hamburgers. There is a greater variety of culinary experiences available in the United States than in any other country, not to mention the high quality of food that can be found. Another anti-American technique is to compare the average or even lowest level of culture or society in the United States with elite habits in Europe. The average Frenchman does not spend his time reading philosophy and eating haute cuisine.

Most important of all, however, may be the fact that the United States has always been a symbol of modernity. Whatever people did not like about the way the world was heading — urbanization, secularism, mass culture, and so on — was portrayed as a specifically American characteristic. In the Middle East, the nature of American society is even more distorted and misunderstood than in Europe.

The same basic points apply to U.S. policy. One can like or dislike any given American action in the world but what marks the difference between respectful criticism and contorted, even murderous, hatred? If it is assumed that American motives are evil (wanting to steal Iraq’s oil and rule the world), then obviously antagonism will prevail.

One question is whether actions are viewed as mistakes or crimes proving the evil nature of America as imperialistic and aggressive. Another is if a systematically negative vision is portrayed, in which anything positive done by the United States is deliberately ignored while other actions are made to seem negative or worse than they are.

As to the timing of this particular wave of anti-Americanism there are different causes. In the Cold War’s aftermath, the United States is the world’s most powerful country whose political, economic, and cultural influence seemed ever-spreading. It is not surprising that many would perceive that such a strong power was the great threat to their own societies and countries. In a real sense, the current situation is the realization of the two-centuries’-long nightmare of anti-Americans.

In this context, Bush also seemed to fit long-standing anti-American stereotypes in every detail of his life and deportment. The negative image of America is closely tied up with those who could be portrayed as cowboys, religious, conservatives, and unintellectual. Being unpopular doesn’t mean being wrong, however, and only the American voters can determine how they feel about his record and global image.

There is, however, one more extremely important factor that is virtually always omitted in discussions of anti- Americanism: self-interest. Those purveying anti-Americanism have always been those who benefited from doing so, whether promoting their material well-being or ideas.

Dictators use anti-Americanism to convince their subjects to support them. Intellectuals and cultural figures have been the main carriers of anti-Americanism as a weapon against a country whose products compete with their work. Moreover, the spread of the American model would greatly reduce their power and prestige. For Europeans and Middle Easterners, albeit in far different ways, anti-Americanism seems a good slogan to unite around.

Come to think of it, the issue is often used similarly within the United States, as a political tool or a partisan bludgeon. Actually trying to understand the phenomenon in its complexity, however, is the only way to respond successfully to the very real problems it presents us with today.

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[Mediocrates]

http://www.fpri.org/enotes/20040904.americawar.colprubin.5stagesantiamericani sm.html

E-Notes
The Five Stages of Anti-Americanism
by Judy Colp Rubin

September 4, 2004

Judy Colp Rubin is co-author, with Barry Rubin, of Hating America: A History, just published by Oxford University Press. This essay, and an earlier one by Barry Rubin on “Understanding Anti-Americanism,” are based on an FPRI BookTalk delivered on August 12, 2004. Information about the book appears on www.us.oup.com. Also see www.gloria.idc.ac.il, the website of the Global Research in International Affairs Center, which is headed by Barry Rubin. A C-SPAN interview with the Rubins appears on www.c-span.org.

We are constantly reminded nowadays of how much the world hates America. According to polls, many Chinese believe that the United States deliberately started the SARS epidemic; Islamic leaders in three Nigerian states blocked critical polio inoculations for children, denouncing them as a U.S. plot to spread AIDS or infertility among Muslims. And best-selling books in France and Germany claim that 9/11 was a propaganda stunt by American intelligence agencies and the military industrial complex. While anti-Americanism came most sharply into focus with the most horrific act of anti-Americanism the world has ever known — the 9/11 attacks — it is important to remember that ever since there was a America to love, there was an America to hate.

The kind of attacks encountered today would have been all too familiar in tone to Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, who had to spend as much time and energy as current leaders proving to Europeans that their country was not inherently bad. Many of the best-known public figures in Europe over the last 240 years simply could not resist bashing America. They include such a diverse lot as British author Samuel Johnson, who said “I am willing to love all mankind except an American,” to George Bernard Shaw, who quipped that “an asylum for the sane would be empty in America,” to Sigmund Freud, who called America “a mistake, a gigantic mistake.” The criticisms are so varied, so numerous and at times so improbable that it has long seemed as if America can never overcome them. Almost fifty years ago, American humorist Art Buchwald placed a classified ad in the London Times asking those who disliked Americans to let him know why they felt that way. He concluded from the results that their dislike would only be solved “if Americans would stop spending money, talking loudly in public places, telling the British who won the war, adopt a pro-colonial policy, back future British expeditions to Suez, stop taking oil out of the Middle East, stop chewing gum, . . . not export Roll n’ Roll music, and speak correct English.” Wouldn’t the results likely be very similar today?

In order to really understand today’s anti-Americanism, we must consider its deep roots in the past. In our book, we have identified five phases in this anti-Americanism, and even now, in this most recent phase, the historical continuity and repetition of the themes from each of the different eras remains striking.

The Early Years
The first phase began in the eighteenth century with the argument that there was something inherently wrong with America that made animals there smaller and people physically and mentally inferior. Both animals and humans who came here from Europe were due for the same fate. The so-called degeneration theory, propounded by leading 18th-century European scientists such as Georges Louis LeClerc, Comte de Buffon, found support among such prominent thinkers as Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel. and Friedrich von Schlegel, and in the 19th century, even the father of evolution, Charles Darwin. The degeneration theory would eventually be discredited and forgotten, but the idea behind it would continue on in the nagging proposition that what eventually became the United States was somehow innately bad.

From Revolution to Civil War
By the 1830s, with the United States a political reality, the American character replaced the American climate as the focus of explanation regarding its inferiority. Increasingly, stress was placed on the idea that the American democratic experiment had failed, leading to a degraded society and culture. So began the second phase of anti-Americanism, which lasted through to 1880. The United States was a laboratory for a new type of country with no monarch, aristocracy, strong traditions, official religion, or rigid class system. It regarded itself as superior to the existing European systems, all of which might be in jeopardy if the United States worked.

Consequently, due to unfamiliarity, self-interest, and long-formed taste, many Europeans saw the United States as a travesty or even as a threat, should its example appeal to their own peoples. They agreed with those like Frederick Marryat, a British naval officer who wrote “democracy is a miserable failure” and that in America the good citizens had retired rather than submit to the “insolence and dictation of a mob.” There were also just as many criticisms of the cultural side of the United States. Frances Trollope, author of Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832), probably the single most influential person shaping European perceptions of America in the nineteenth-century, observed that the greatest difference between England and the United States was “want of refinement.” In America, she explained, “that polish which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature is unknown and undreamed of.”

In this second stage of anti-Americanism, it was believed that if the United States posed any threat to the world, it was because of its potential to serve as a bad example rather than because it had any global ambitions. The American “model” was dismissed in anti-American literature, which predicted the nation’s demise. But the United States did not collapse.

American Ascendancy
After the Civil War, when the third phase of anti-Americanism began, there was a growing fear abroad that the American model of populist democracy, mass culture, and industrialization might come to take over the world, changing everyone’s way of life. It was this fear that had prompted many in Europe to support the slave-holding states of the Confederacy, seeing those southern states as sharing more closely the values of the European aristocracy. The most celebrated European writers brought their pens down on the heads of America. French poet Charles Baudelaire lamented in 1873 that humanity was hopelessly Americanized— the word “Americanized” came into usage around this period— because of the triumph of the physical over the moral element in life, while in Britain a resolution was passed in 1900 denouncing the demoralizing effects of American plays on the British stage. The idea took hold that in Europe, as German philosopher Richard Muller-Freienfels wrote, technology was (at least in theory) the servant; but that in America it had become a despot.

The fear that America would take over the world reached its height in 1898, when America showed its strength in its military victory over Spain. By the new century, anti- Americanism penetrated Latin America, one of the few regions where it actually now seems to be on the decline. Ignoring any lessons they might learn from their northern neighbor’s success, and notwithstanding their own bad experiences with Europe, many Latin American thinkers firmly placed themselves in the European, especially French, camp of high culture and good taste, in contrast to what they saw as America’s lack of both.

Uruguayan Jose Enrique Rodo wrote an allegorical essay “Ariel” (1900), which was hailed for decades as the definitive manifesto of Latin America. The title character, representing Latin America, personifies the “noble, soaring aspect of the human spirit, he is spirituality in culture, vivacity and grace in intelligence.” The United States is depicted as Caliban, who embodies the “spirit of vulgarity.” As Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes wrote decades later, agreeing with Rodo’s assessment, “It was France that gave us culture without strings, and a sense, furthermore, of elegance, disinterestedness, aristocracy, and links to the culture of the classics solely lacking in the vagabond, unrooted homogenizing pioneer culture of the United States.”

This French belief in the superiority of their own culture has contributed to France’s anti-Americanism from the two nations’ early days. The relative lack of immigrants to early America from France, compared to the high numbers from England and Germany, left France with no expatriates in America to soften public opinion back home. Nor did France share in the Anglo Saxon heritage. By the 20th century, despite, or perhaps because of, America’s coming to France’s rescue in the world wars, the French left and right alike saw the United States as the land of harsh and brutal “absolute capitalism” that threatened to engulf the world with its malformed society. A series of influential books of the interwar years had such unambiguous titles as The American Cancer and America’s Conquest of Europe. Everything American was open to criticism, from jazz music to refrigerators to the American woman, a figure allegedly wielding too much power.

[Mediocrates]

Among French intellectuals, America made even the Soviet Union look good. While both the U.S. and the USSR are totalitarian, Alain de Benoist, leader of the French intellectual right, wrote “The Eastern variety imprisons, persecutes and mortifies the body, but at least it does not destroy help. Its western counterpart ends up creating happy robots. It is an air-conditioned hell.” But the French could not deny that America was attractive to the masses, who have always been more pro-American than the intellectuals, and this may be what disturbed them most.

The Postwar Years
In the fourth phase of anti-Americanism, from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War, fear of American domination became less abstract. America was supposedly taking over the world and had to be prevented from so doing. A striking illustration was the battle over exporting Coca-Cola, that quintessentially American drink, into Europe. The popular communist newspaper in Italy warned that it would turn children’s hair white, while French critics spread a rumor that the company wanted to put an ad on the front of Notre-Dame Cathedral. Similar criticism eventually attended the opening of McDonald’s and Disneyland in France.

Of course, by this time the United States was also being pilloried by the Soviet Union at the extreme left and European fascists at the extreme right. The extreme right argued that America had changed European society too much, while the leftists claimed that it had not gone far enough. Marxists saw America as racist, while fascists saw in it a mongrel society based on race mixing. Beyond avoiding the danger of imitating America, both doctrines sought to use its alleged threat and bad example to mobilize supporters for their own plans to revolutionize society.

Post-Cold War Anti-Americanism
With the Cold War’s end, the United States was left as the sole superpower, thus beginning the fifth and current stage of anti-Americanism.. Those who hold anti-American views see a dominant U.S. as a terrible model for civilization, the centerpiece of those supposed ills of globalization, modernization, and Westernization. This has stimulated the most angry and widespread anti-Americanism ever seen. Moreover, hatred is reinforced by claims that America’s higher level of development comes at everyone else’s expense and, by the same token, America deliberately brings about the failure of others to duplicate its success.

Editors’ Note: For a related publication, see Understanding Anti-Americanism: Its Origins and Impact at Home and Abroad, edited by Paul Hollander (Ivan R. Dee, 2004). Dr. Hollander is a member of the Editorial Board of Orbis, FPRI’s quarterly journal of world affairs. Information is posted at www.ivanrdee.com.
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