With Us or Against Us Read online

  U.S. administration has “unsigned” the Rome Treaty establishing an

  International Criminal Court and has declared itself no longer bound

  by the Vienna Convention on Law of Treaties, which sets out the

  obligations of states to abide by treaties they have yet to ratify. The

  American attitude toward the United Nations and its agencies is cool,

  to say the least.

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  Washington’s stance toward the International Criminal Court, in

  particular, is especially embarrassing. It makes a mockery of the U.S.

  insistence on international pursuit and prosecution of terrorists and

  other political criminals; and it provides a cover for these countries

  and politicians who have real cause to fear the new Court. All of

  Washington’s friends and allies on the UN Security Council voted

  against the United States when this matter was discussed in 2002;

  meanwhile, Washington’s opposition to the International Criminal

  Court is shared by an unholy alliance of Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Indonesia,

  Israel, and Egypt.

  Indeed, the United States has more than once found itself in ques-

  tionable company. When the Bush Administration vetoed a protocol

  designed to put teeth into the 30-year-old Biological Weapons

  Convention and effectively destroyed a generation of efforts to halt the

  spread of these deadly arms, only a handful of the 145 signatories to the

  Convention took Washington’s side: among these were China, Russia,

  India, Pakistan, Cuba, and Iran. All too often, Washington’s position

  now pits it against the Western Europeans, Canadians, Australians, and

  a majority of Latin American states, while American “unilateralism”

  is supported (for their own reasons) by an unseemly rogues’ gallery

  of dictatorships and regional troublemakers. The impact of this on

  America’s overseas image and influence is incalculable. Even the mere

  appearance of taking the world seriously would enhance American

  influence immeasurably—from European intellectuals to Islamic funda-

  mentalists, anti-Americanism feeds voraciously off the claim that the

  United States is callously indifferent to the views and needs of others.

  America’s apparent “indifference” has distinctive roots. Just as

  modern American leaders typically believe that in domestic public life,

  citizens are best left to their own devices, with limited government

  intervention, so they project this view onto international affairs as

  well. Seen from Washington, the world is a series of discrete challenges

  or threats, calibrated according to their implications for America.

  Since the United States is a global power, almost anything that hap-

  pens in the world is of concern to it; but the American instinct is to

  address and resolve any given problem in isolation. Of course, this

  reflects, in part, a refreshingly American confidence that problems

  may indeed be resolved—at which point, the United States can return

  home. This emphasis upon an “exit strategy,” upon being in the world

  but not quite of it, always at liberty to retire from the fray, has its

  domestic analogue in modern American life. Like many of its citizens,

  especially since 9/11, the United States feels most comfortable when

  retreating to its “gated community.”

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  A New Master Narrative?

  17

  This long-standing American sense of being both engaged in the

  world and somehow apart from it has been further complicated by the

  confrontational rhetoric of the newest generation of advisers and

  rulers in Washington. The foreign strategy of the United States, in the

  words of two influential neo-conservative writers, must be “unapolo-

  getic, idealistic, assertive and well funded. America must not only be

  the world’s policeman or its sheriff, it must be its beacon and guide.”1

  By confidently equating the United States’ own interests with those

  of every right-thinking person on the planet, such a strategy is doomed

  to arouse the very antagonism and enmity that provoke American

  overseas intervention in the first place. In American governing circles

  today, it is widely held that America can do as it wishes without listening

  to others, and that in so doing, it will unerringly echo the true interests

  and unspoken desires of friends and foes alike.

  *

  *

  *

  The anti-Americanism now preoccupying commentators should thus

  come as no surprise. But, in America especially, it is much misunder-

  stood. Thus, in the prelude to the Iraq war, it was widely asserted in

  Washington that “pro-American” Europeans could be conveniently

  distinguished from their “anti-American” neighbors. But this is not

  the case. In a poll by the Pew Research Center, Europeans were asked

  whether they thought “the world would be more dangerous if another

  country matched America militarily.” The “Old European” French

  and Germans—like the British—tended to agree. The “New European”

  Czechs and Poles were less worried at the prospect. The same poll

  asked respondents whether they thought that “when differences occur

  with America, it is because of [my country’s] different values” (a key

  indicator of cultural anti-Americanism): only 33 percent of French

  respondents and 37 percent of Germans answered “yes.” But the

  figures for Britain were 41 percent, for Italy 44 percent, and for the

  Czech Republic 62 percent (almost as high as the 66 percent of

  Indonesians who feel the same way).2

  In Britain, the Daily Mirror, a mass-market tabloid daily that had

  hitherto supported Tony Blair’s New Labour Party, ran a full-page

  front cover on January 6, 2003, mocking Blair’s position; in case you

  haven’t noticed, it informed him, Bush’s drive to war with Iraq is

  about oil for America. Half the British electorate opposed war with

  Saddam Hussein under any circumstances. In the Czech Republic,

  just 13 percent of the population endorsed an American attack

  on Iraq without a UN mandate; the figure in Spain was identical.

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  In traditionally pro-American Poland, there was even less enthusiasm:

  just 4 percent of Poles would back a unilateralist war.

  In Spain, voters from José Maria Aznar’s own Popular Party over-

  whelmingly rejected his support for President Bush; his allies in

  Catalonia joined Spain’s opposition parties in condemning “an unpro-

  voked unilateral attack” by the United States on Iraq; and most

  Spaniards remained adamantly opposed to a war with Iraq even with a

  second UN resolution.3 If America is to depend on what Secretary of

  Defense Donald Rumsfeld called its “New European friends,” then, it

  had better lower its expectations. Among the pro-U.S. signatories sin-

  gled out for praise by Mr. Rumsfeld, Denmark spends just 1.6 percent

  of its GNP on defense, Italy 1.5 percent, Spain a mere 1.4 percent—

  less than half the defense commitment of Old European France.

  As for East Europeans: yes, they like America an
d will do its

  bidding if they can. The United States will always be able to bully a

  vulnerable country like Romania into backing it against the International

  Criminal Court. But in the words of one Central European foreign

  minister opposed to U.S. intervention at the time of the 1999 Kosovo

  action: “We didn’t join NATO to fight wars.” In a recent survey,

  69 percent of Poles (and 63 percent of Italians) oppose any increased

  expenditure on defense to enhance Europe’s standing as a world power.

  It is one thing to like America, quite another to make sacrifices on her

  behalf.4

  And what of Germany? American commentators were so offended

  at Germany’s willingness to “appease” Saddam, so infuriated by

  Chancellor Schröder’s lack of bellicose fervor and his “ingratitude”

  toward America that few have stopped to ask why so many Germans

  share Günter Grass’s view that “the President of the United States

  embodies the danger that faces us all.” The sources of German ambiva-

  lence toward American policy are distinctive. Germany today is different.

  It has a distinctively pacifist culture (quite unlike, say, France). If there

  is to be war, many Germans feel, let it be ohne mich (without me).

  If America stands for “war,” however justified, many Germans will be

  anti-American on that ground alone.

  However, the German stance is not representative. Pace Robert

  Kagan, the world is not divided into a pacifistic, post-Kantian Europe

  and a courageous, martial America.5 It was only very recently that

  European infantrymen were dying on peacekeeping missions in Asia,

  Africa, and Europe while American generals foreswore foreign ground

  wars lest U.S. soldiers get killed. If Americans are from Mars, as Kagan

  puts it, they rediscovered the martial virtues only recently. Indeed,

  when asked in 2002 whether they approved of the use of military

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  A New Master Narrative?

  19

  power to protect their interests, British, French, Italian, and Polish

  respondents all showed more support for military action than did

  American respondents. Only the Germans were less enthusiastic.

  Europeans may not like wars—in which respect they are indeed at

  odds with the current U.S. administration, though in tune with many

  Americans—but they are not pacifists, either.6

  *

  *

  *

  Contemporary suspicion of America—its leaders, its motives, its way

  of life—is part of an old story everywhere. America has been an object

  of foreign suspicion for even longer than it has been a beacon and

  haven for the world’s poor and downtrodden. Eighteenth-century

  commentators—on the basis of very little direct observation—

  believed America’s flora and fauna to be stunted, and of limited inter-

  est or use. The country could never be civilized, they insisted, and

  much the same was true of its unsophisticated new citizens. From

  the perspective of a cosmopolitan European conservative like Joseph

  de Maistre, writing in the early years of the nineteenth century, the

  United States was a regrettable aberration—and too crude to endure

  for long. Charles Dickens, like Alexis de Tocqueville, was struck by

  the conformism of American public life. Stendhal commented upon

  the country’s “egoism”; Baudelaire sniffily compared it to Belgium (!)

  in its bourgeois mediocrity; everyone remarked upon the jejune patri-

  otic pomp of the United States back in the nineteenth century, just as

  they do today. But in the course of the twentieth century, European

  commentary shifted perceptibly from the dismissive to the resentful.

  By the 1930s, the United States’ economic power was giving a

  threatening twist to its crude immaturity. For a new generation of

  antidemocratic critics, the destabilizing symptoms of modern life—

  mass production, mass society, and mass politics—could all be traced

  to America.

  Like anti-Semitism, to which it was often linked, anti-Americanism

  was a convenient shorthand for expressing cultural insecurity. In

  the words of the Frenchman Robert Aron, writing in 1935, Henry

  Ford, F.W. Taylor (the prophet of work rhythms and manufacturing

  efficiency), and Adolf Hitler were, like it or not, the “guides of our

  age.” America was “industrialism.” It threatened the survival of indi-

  viduality, quality, and national specificity. “America is multiplying its

  territory, where the values of the West risk finding their grave,” wrote

  Emmanuel Berl in 1929. Europeans owed it to their heritage to resist

  their own Americanization at every turn, urged Georges Duhamel in

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  1930: “We Westerners must each firmly denounce whatever is American

  in his house, his clothes, his soul.”7

  World War II did not alleviate this irritation. Left-wing anti-

  Americanism in the early–Cold War years echoed to the letter the

  sentiments of right-wing anti-Americanism 20 years earlier. When

  Simone de Beauvoir charged that America was “becoming Fascist,”

  Jean-Paul Sartre claimed that McCarthyite America “had gone mad,”

  and Le Monde declared that “Coca-Cola is the Danzig of European

  Culture,” they were denouncing the same American “enemy” that had

  so alarmed their political opponents a generation before. American

  behavior at home and abroad fed this prejudice but did not create it.

  In their anger at the United States, European intellectuals had, for

  many decades, been expressing their anxieties about changes closer

  to home.8

  The examples I have quoted are from France, but English ambiva-

  lence toward America is also an old story. The present author grew up

  in post-war Britain where the United States was envied by many,

  dismissed by some (often the same people)—and terra incognita to

  almost everyone. The German generation of the 1960s blamed

  America above all for the crass consumerism and political amnesia of

  their parents’ post-war Federal Republic; and even in Donald Rumsfeld’s

  new Europe—the Czech republic, for example, or Hungary—the

  United States, representing “Western” technology and progress, is

  increasingly held responsible on all sides of the political spectrum for

  the ethical vacuum and cultural impoverishment that global capitalism

  brings in its train.9 Nevertheless, anti-Americanism in Europe, at least,

  has always had a distinctively French tinge. As some recent publica-

  tions suggest, it is in Paris that European ambivalence about America

  takes a most acute polemical form.

  *

  *

  *

  In his recent history of French anti-Americanism, a learned and witty

  “genealogy” of the “semiotic bloc” of French anti-American writings,

  Philippe Roger demonstrates not only that the core of French anti-

  Americanism is very old indeed, but also that it was always fanciful,

  and loosely, if at all, attached to American reality. Anti-Americanism is

  a récit, a tale (or fable), with certain recurring themes, fears, and
/>   hopes. Starting out as an aesthetic distaste for the New World, French

  anti-Americanism has since moved through the cultural to the political;

  but the sedimentary evidence of earlier versions is never quite lost

  to sight.10

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  A New Master Narrative?

  21

  Roger’s book is strongest on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  His coverage of the twentieth century stops with the generation of

  Sartre—the moment, as he reminds us, when it became conventional

  for French anti-American texts to begin by denying that they were.

  That seems reasonable—there are a number of satisfactory accounts of

  the anti-Americanism of our own times and Roger is interested in

  tracing origins, not outcomes.11 And by ending short of the present,

  he can permit himself a sardonic, upbeat conclusion: “What if anti-

  Americanism today were no more than a mental slavery that the French

  impose on themselves, a masochist lethargy, a humdrum resentment,

  a passionless Pavlovian reaction? That would offer grounds for hope.

  There are few vices, even intellectual ones, that can long withstand the

  boredom they elicit.” Unfortunately, there is a fresh twist in the story.

  Anti-Americanism today is fueled by a new consideration. Most

  Europeans and other foreigners today are untroubled by American

  products, many of which are, in any case, manufactured and marketed

  overseas. Most of them don’t despise America, and they certainly

  don’t hate Americans. What upsets them, as noted above, is the U.S.

  foreign policy; and they don’t trust America’s current president. This

  is new. Even during the Cold War, many of America’s political foes

  actually quite liked and trusted its leaders. Today, even America’s

  friends don’t like President Bush: in part for the policy he pursues, in

  part for the manner in which he pursues it.

  This is the background to a recent burst of anti-American publica-

  tions; in Germany, in England, but above all in Paris. The most bizarre

  of these was a book by one Thierry Meyssan, purporting to show that

  the 9/11 attack on the Pentagon never happened. No airliner ever

  crashed into the building, he writes: the whole thing is a hoax per-