With Us or Against Us Page 4
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
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-