AHR Forum Always Blame the Americans: Anti

AHR Forum
Always Blame the Americans:
Anti-Americanism in Europe in the Twentieth Century
JESSICA C. E. GIENOW-HECHT
LET THERE BE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT: if one can believe the press and the public on
both sides of the Atlantic, the United States has a serious public relations problem.
The proportion of the public expressing pro-U.S. sympathies declined in France from
62 percent in 1999/2000 to 43 percent in June 2003, in Germany from 78 to 45 percent, and in Spain from 50 to 38 percent, with no improvement in sight.1 The Internet
is flooded with published and unpublished essays pertaining in a more or less serious
fashion to anti-Americanism in Europe,2 while supposedly “best-selling” books with
sexy titles such as Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World and Why Do People
Hate America? jam the shelves of bookstore chains like Waterstone’s, Hugendubel,
FNAC, and Barnes and Noble.3 Authors juggle the names of contemporary leaders
such as German ex-chancellor Gerhard Schröder, French president Jacques Chirac,
and Javier Solana of Spain, the current High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy of the European Community, all of whom made a career
sailing on the waves of anti-Americanism. Scholarly conferences and editions on the
subject abound, while esteemed scholars such as Robert Kagan and Timothy Garton
Ash present powerful arguments about the history and future of European-American antipathies.4
Many thanks to David Ellwood, Joseph Kett, Guido Müller, Volker Depkat, and the anonymous reviewers of the AHR for reading early drafts of this essay with a critical eye. Participants in Hans-Jürgen
Puhle’s research colloquium at the University of Frankfurt am Main, Gareth Davies’s seminar at the
Rothermere Institute, Oxford University, and Abby Collins’s “Stammtisch” at the Minda de Gunzburg
Center for European Studies at Harvard University likewise offered helpful insights.
Russell Berman, Anti-Americanism in Europe: A Cultural Problem (Stanford, Calif., 2004).
Eric Krebbers, “The Conservative Roots of Anti-Americanism,” De Fabel van de Illegaal 58 (May/
June 2003), http://www.gebladerte.nl/30048v01.htm (accessed August 5, 2004); James Ceaser, “A Genealogy of Anti-Americanism,” The Public Interest, Summer 2003, http://www.travelbrochuregraphics
.com/extra/a_genealogy_of_antiamericanism.htm (accessed August 5, 2004); Jean-François Revel, “Introduction,” in Revel, Anti-Americanism, trans. Diarmid Cammell (San Francisco, 2003); Hugh Brogan,
“Foreign Views of America,” in “The Reader’s Companion to American History,” http://college
.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_032300_foreignviews.htm (accessed August 5, 2004);
Richard Bernstein, “Does Europe Need to Get a Life?” New York Times, August 8, 2004.
3 Mark Hertsgaard, The Eagle’s Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World (New
York, 2002); Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies, Why Do People Hate America? (Cambridge, 2004);
Richard Herzinger and Hannes Stein, Endzeit-Propheten oder Die Offensiver der Antiwestler (Hamburg,
1995).
4 Alexander Stephan, ed., Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The German Encounter with
American Culture after 1945 (New York, 2005); Stephan, The Americanization of Europe: Culture, Di1
2
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The bottom line is typically the same: in the twentieth century, a nation rose—
Rome-like—to the heights of a superpower that now attracts more hatred than any
other country in the world. When commentators ask “Who Is Afraid of America?”,
depict “the tragedy of American democracy” and the fate of “the parochial superpower,” or diagnose “American Hamburgers and other viruses,” their conclusions
fall into two categories. Advising that people should transcend their hatred and acknowledge their blindness, conservative critics scold Europeans for their ignorance
of America and the problems of U.S. foreign policy.5 Flabbergasted at how little the
United States knows about Europe and the world at large, including its allies and
its enemies, anti-American critics draw the image of an apocalypse, or at least a sort
of decline—again reminiscent of Rome—in which the nation will outspend, outdine,
and outkill itself before fading into oblivion. “Always blame the Americans,” concludes a character in Costa-Gavra’s political 1969 film Z . “Even when you’re wrong,
you’re right.”6
Since 9/11, there has been a notable abundance of discussions about anti-Americanism in academia and beyond. Some effort has been made to look at the contemporary manifestations of anti-Americanism within a historical context. Fifteen
years after the Cold War and five years after the attacks on the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon, it seems appropriate to reexamine some of the historiographical
and historical conclusions and ask how, in effect, they might explain the current
situation. There is a tendency among scholars of twentieth-century history to subdivide this period into three blocs: pre-1945, the Cold War, and the post–Cold War
era. However, the course of anti-Americanism did and does not necessarily follow
this timeline.
Over the decades, there have been a number of books on the phenomenon of
anti-Americanism, some of which have become or deserve to become standard reading in upper-division classes, including the works of British historian Richard Crockatt and French critic Philippe Roger.7 There are two main currents in the debate:
one focuses on discourse (at home or abroad), the other on power (notably U.S.
power). In order to conduct a succinct and up-to-date analysis, we need to look at
both in tandem, examining discourses of anti-Americanism in the twentieth century
from a European—and historical—perspective while at the same time integrating
aspects of U.S. hegemony.
Anti-Americanism is a curious phenomenon, and one that seems to be unique
plomacy, and Anti-Americanism after 1945 (New York, 2006); Timothy Garton Ash, Free World: America,
Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West (New York, 2004); Robert Kagan, Of Paradise and Power:
America and Europe in the New World Order (New York, 2003). For a European reply, see Rudolf von
Thadden and Alexandre Escudier, Amerika und Europa—Mars und Venus: Das Bild Amerikas in Europa
(Göttingen, 2004).
5 Thus, Jean-François Revel, a firm advocate of American policies in Europe, believes that European hostility toward the United States makes it impossible for the U.S. administration in power to
distinguish between enemies and friends, and has therefore pushed the U.S. into an unalterable course
of unilateralism. Revel, Anti-Americanism, 171, 176; Dan Diner, Feindbild Amerika: Über die Beständigkeit eines Ressentiments (Berlin, 2002), 206.
6 Cited in J. L. Granatstein, Yankee Go Home? Canadians and Anti-Americans (Toronto, 1996), 7.
7 Richard Crockatt, America Embattled: September 11, Anti-Americanism and the Global Order
(London, 2003); Philippe Roger, L’ennemi américain: Généalogie de l’antiamericanisme française (Paris,
2002).
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to the United States. There does not seem to be such a thing as anti-Europeanism,
at least not to the same extent. Of course, this does not mean that nations have never
been systematically hated before. Indeed, most empires have been systematically
despised. Even among them, Europeans, Asians, and Middle Easterners have often
reached a degree of mutual antagonism that comes close to verbal warfare. But there
is no other convenient catch phrase that covers such a broad variety of complaints
as “anti-Americanism,” not even “Anglophobia” or “Japan-bashing.” “Anti-Slavism” and “Sinophobia,” although they are powerful concepts, never achieved the
popularity of the term “anti-Americanism.”
For this reason, most critics worry about “Why America?”8 But the question, it
seems to me, is not why there is anti-Americanism, but why anti-Americanism has
been around for so long a time and across the political spectrum. Why are these
“pictures in our mind” so enduring? And to what extent do these images affect current assessments of an anti-Americanism spreading across Europe in the twenty-first
century?
European anti-Americanism has very little to do with America or politics, and
even less with transatlantic relations. In many ways, it is not even a useful term,
because unlike other “isms” it is not supported by a movement, it lacks the vision
of a future, and it defines itself by opposition rather than through a proper point of
view. In a sense, there is no one European anti-Americanism, but rather a variety
of heterogeneous expressions of this phenomenon, conditioned by geographical concerns and historical cycles. The shape and content of the phenomenon differ in accordance not only with dimensions of space, but also with dimensions of time: each
epoch has its own forms of anti-Americanism, and it is misleading to assume, as Dan
Diner does for Germany, that one and the same anti-Americanism has simply assumed different forms at different times.
Anti-Americanism in Europe is a habitus, a syndrome, an ideological Versatzstück
the profile of which is dependent on the local political and cultural context as well
as regional economic interests. There is, of course, a cultural, a political, and an
economic anti-Americanism, but these accentuations typically merge within the
same reference group or even one and the same person. In other words, there is no
“European” anti-Americanism proper, but only many different varieties of the phenomenon. At best, anti-Americanism manifests a century-long frustration over the
loss of a vision that once proved so powerful before it literally turned sour, in the
form of the American Century. Popular belief often has it that since the nineteenth
century, anti-Americanism has been a left-wing phenomenon: Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels projected many of their criticisms on the United States, as did
twentieth-century socialists and liberals who devised their own rather fractured image of the country. But historically, anti-Americanism has been at least as strong on
the right, where the U.S. is demonized for inflicting mass man and mass culture on
the world. The meaning of the discourse, then, derives less from the object (the
United States) than from the subject (the critics).
European anti-Americanism is a cultural phenomenon; however, it occasionally
hides behind a political mask, such as during the height of the Cold War or since
8
Crockatt, America Embattled, 46.
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9/11. Since the 1950s, the relationship between cultural images and U.S. foreign
policy has became increasingly complicated; but even then, anti-Americanism always
followed the same structural course: politics served as a trigger but never as a cause.
Indeed, for many years politics played no role in Europe’s perception of the United
States. That is to say, anti-Americanism was and remains at core a cultural mindset,
one that usurps and manipulates the political context without being dependent on
it. For this reason, governments and official receptions have not had a major part
to play in the development and persistence of anti-Americanism. Instead, over the
decades, conservatives, progressives, and the left have consistently agreed on their
common rejection of the American model.
Most important, anti-Americanism is unthinkable without its flip side, philoAmericanism, and the tension between the two constitutes the very condition necessary to support the existence of both: high expectations and bitter disillusion are
always joined at the hip. Or, to put it in terms of Hegelian dialecticism, the European
debate on the U.S. has always employed a system of reasoning that seeks to arrive
at a conclusion (“the truth”) through the exchange of logical and conflicting arguments, by mounting two opposite warring forces. Anti-Americanism and philoAmericanism not only coexist in juxtaposition; they are structurally linked with one
another, related to each other in the sense that anti-American statements frequently
respond to philo-American perspectives.
Philo-Americanism is at least as old as anti-Americanism. It originally combined
condescension with a vision of the U.S. as the laboratory of Europe’s future. European liberals fell in love with America as a utopian vision before the rise of industrial capitalism and modernity. Then they began to think that the United States
had walked out on them.9 That was the hour an anti-American discourse framed by
philo-American tendencies was born.
IN THE LAST FEW YEARS, media experts, popular entertainers, political observers, and
scholars have produced a plethora of definitions and theories to characterize antiAmericanism, revealing a stunning extent of emotional involvement.10 “You want to
know what anti-Americanism is for most people?” asked online political analyst
David Kaspar in 2003. “It’s a German schoolteacher who vacations in America, who
watches American movies, who was defended from the Soviets by America and then
later met an Eastern German cousin she never knew because Reagan won the Cold
War, who sneers at America in front of the kids she teaches every day.”11 Charles
9 Guy Sorman, “United States: Model or Bête Noire?” in Denis Lacorne and Jacques Rupnik, eds.,
The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism: A Century of French Perception, trans. Gerald Turner (Houndmills, 1990), 213–218, quotes 215–216.
10 Marie-France Toinet notes that before 1984, the term did not even appear in French or American
dictionaries; however, they did include “Americanism,” a term popularized by Theodore Roosevelt’s
Americanization campaign in the early 1900s as well as by a generation of America critics thereafter.
Toinet, “Does Anti-Americanism Exist?” in Lacorne and Rupnik, The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism,
219–235, definition 219.
11 The image of the German teacher is far from the only one cited by Kaspar. Indeed, it is coupled
with images of a Saudi oil entrepreneur and a Liberian businessman. But the vision of a German schoolteacher indoctrinating thousands of innocent schoolchildren with heavy doses of anti-American statements remains striking—and not only because it refers to stereotypes of both the past (Germany as the
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H. Price, U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom between 1983 and 1989, concluded: “For my part I approach [anti-Americanism] as one of our Supreme Court
justices approached pornography; I can’t define it but I sure can recognize it when
I see it.”12 And to John Gibson, host of the Fox News Channel’s The Big Story, antiAmericanism—or “Hating America”—has simply become “the new world sport,”
and one that serves to delight many nations in many ways: since September 11, the
French—grateful for the opportunity and mindful of their own interests in the Middle East—have started a “War on America” and almost co-opted the “Arabs’ mindless hatred for America.” The British continue to pursue an “annoying tendency to
hate themselves for not hating America quite viciously enough”; the Germans are
simply delighted that “at last someone else is Hitler”; and Belgium, South Korea,
and Canada have conspired to form “the axis of envy.” All agree that they despise
George W. Bush, and Gibson’s only (and conclusive) piece of advice to the world
is, “They’re Wrong. We’re Right. Get Used to It.”13
Supposedly scholarly assessments offer a similar brand of emotion and ahistorical
thinking. Russell Berman, Hoover fellow at Stanford University, sees contemporary
anti-Americanism both as related to the U.S. retreat from Europe (protection no
longer needed) and as a functional attitude that is helping to strengthen a new European identity: particularly for the Germans, “becoming more European is a way
to become less German.”14 In the words of French philosopher Jean-François Revel,
anti-Americanism represents an almost totalitarian vision, according to which
“Americans can do nothing but speak idiocies, make blunders and commit crimes;
and they are answerable for all the setbacks, all the injustices and all the sufferings
of the rest of humanity.”15
One of the most prolific writers on anti-Americanism, conservative scholar Paul
Hollander, points out that anti-Americanism has sprung up both at home and
abroad, and in either case originates in an almost unlimited set of complaints, encompassing nationalism, anti-Western sentiments, a disdain for capitalism, “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.”16 And to British political scientist Stephen Haseler, antiAmericanism is a “straightforward opposition, ranging from distaste to animus, to
the cultural and political values of the United States,” one that is often emotional
land of knowledge and education) and the present (today’s teachers’ lack of political sensibility and abuse
of influence). David Kaspar, “A Wonderful Definition of Anti-Americanism / Eine wundervolle Definition von Anti-Amerikanismus,” Davids Medienkritik: Politisch unkorrekte Betrachtungen zur Berichterstattung in deutschen Medien, http://medienkritik.typepad.com/blog/2003/11/a_wonderful_def.html
(accessed July 23, 2006).
12 Cited in David Ellwood, Anti-Americanism in Western Europe: A Comparative Perspective, Occasional Paper Series, European Studies Seminar Series, no. 3 (Bologna, 1999), 47. The remark was made
in 1987.
13 John Gibson, Hating America: The New World Sport (New York, 2004).
14 Berman, Anti-Americanism in Europe, xii, xv, 4, 10, 39–52.
15 Revel, Anti-Americanism, 143.
16 Paul Hollander, Anti-Americanism: Irrational and Rational (New Brunswick, N.J., 1995), 384,
lxviii.
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in its origins and centers on the envy of U.S. political power, economic success, and
idealism.17
In Europe, a number of scholars have explored further the idea that anti-Americanism often lacks a clear focus. To Herbert J. Spiro, professor of politics at the John
F. Kennedy-Institut at the Freie Universität Berlin, anti-Americanism “consists not
of opposition to particular policies but of ‘persistent patterns of gross criticism of
the main values of the U.S. Constitution.’ ”18 In the Netherlands, Rob Kroes believes
that “ ‘America’ [is] a construct of the mind, a composite image based on the perception of dismal trends which are then linked to America.”19 To cultural historian
Pascal Ory, anti-Americanism entails “an aristocratic lost paradise of the ‘lord of the
manor,’ ” on the one hand, and “the plebian ‘singing tomorrows’ of the liberal or
democratic variety,”20 on the other.
Much of this polemical and sometimes even melodramatic blame on the part of
anti-Americanists abroad originates—consciously or not—in the false assumption
that things were not always that way. It is true that Europeans developed a tremendous amount of admiration for the American way of life during the decades
following the American Revolution. Because the French Revolution had failed, by
the early nineteenth century the United States constituted the sole example of a
country guided by Enlightenment principles. Hence it became the only target for
those attracted to and repulsed by the ideals of a modern democratic society. The
failed revolutions of 1848 further sealed the fate of liberal thought, which began to
turn increasingly into a European enigma with no real focus other than the New
World.21 Liberals, in turn, quickly came to the defense of the world’s first modern
democratic—and supposedly fruitful—experiment.22
Portrayals of U.S. society remained favorable throughout the nineteenth century
and up until World War I, whether out of idealism or personal interest. Besides
political charges, a literary canon bolstered by writers such as Friedrich Gerstäcker,
Karl May, and numerous others drew the image of a romantic West where human
values were still intact, though constantly under attack by European corruption and
greed. While European elites remained distrustful of the American experiment and
17 Stephen Haseler, The Varieties of Anti-Americanism: Reflex and Response (Washington, D.C.,
1985), 6. See also Uwe Srp, Antiamerikanismus in Deutschland: Theoretische und empirische Analyse
basierend auf dem Irakkrieg 2003 (Hamburg, 2005).
18 Herbert J. Spiro, “Anti-Americanism in Western Europe,” in Thomas Perry Thornton, ed., AntiAmericanism: Origins and Context, special issue, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social
Science 497 (May 1988): 120–132, quote 120. See also André Kaspi, “By Way of Conclusion,” in Lacorne
and Rupnik, The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism, 236–243.
19 Rob Kroes, “The Great Satan versus the Evil Empire: Anti-Americanism in the Netherlands,”
in Kroes and Maarten van Rossem, eds., Anti-Americanism in Europe (Amsterdam, 1986), 1, 12, 37. See
also August J. Fry, “Undergoing Anti-Americanism: A Personal Statement,” ibid., 137–147.
20 Pascal Ory, “From Baudelaire to Duhamel: An Unlikely Antipathy,” in Lacorne and Rupnik, The
Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism, 42–54, quotes 42, 52. See also Alvin Z. Rubinstein and Donald B.
Smith, “Anti-Americanism: Anatomy of a Phenomenon,” in Rubinstein and Smith, eds., Anti-Americanism in the Third World: Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy (New York, 1985), 1–30; Sigrid Faath,
ed., Antiamerikanismus in Nordafrika, Nah- und Mittelost: Formen, Dimensionen und Folgen für Deutschland (Hamburg, 2003).
21 James Ceaser, “The Philosophical Origins of Anti-Americanism in Europe,” in Paul Hollander,
ed., Understanding Anti-Americanism (Chicago, 2004), 45–64; Michael Freund, “A Historical Sketch of
German Attitudes,” ibid., 105–123.
22 J. W. Schulte Nordholt, “Anti-Americanism in European Culture: Its Early Manifestations,” in
Kroes and Rossem, Anti-Americanism in Europe, 7–19.
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while art critic John Ruskin refused an invitation to visit the U.S. because he could
not, as he stated, reside in a country with no castles, not even for a couple of months,
others saw precisely those medieval relics as a burden on the European mind. “America, thy happy lot,” rhymed Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1827, “Abode old Europe’s I exalt: / Thou hast no castle ruin hoar / No giant columns of basalt. / Thy soul
is not troubled. / In living light of day / By useless traditions, / Vain strife and array.”23
Yet in tandem with philo-Americanism, anti-Americanism began shortly after the
American Revolution, expanded in the nineteenth century as a criticism of culture
and modernity, and remained that way throughout the early twentieth century, until
shortly after World War I. Dutch traders watched the outcome of the revolution
anxiously because they feared that the interests of the new nation might thwart their
own mercenary designs. As a result, one of the earliest stereotypes was that money
determines everything in the United States. In the Romantic era, skeptical observers
extended such charges to embrace complaints about the United States’ “abstract
liberty” and “abstract principles.”
This contrast between Europe’s decay and wisdom and America’s lack of history
and vigor would be, and has continued to be, endlessly repeated in the media on both
sides of the ocean. As Volker Depkat has shown, the myth of the dishwasher who
grew up to be a millionaire in America, the obsession to exclude everything “American” from contemporary values and terminology, and the inability to see the United
States on its own terms rather than as a shrill deviation from the European norm
can all be traced back to the eighteenth century. Two hundred years ago, these accusations developed in the context of Europe’s social and political change from a
feudal to a bourgeois society.24
One of the most noteworthy examples of this mutual—and increasingly idiosyncratic—dependence between philo- and anti-Americanism was British author W. T.
Stead’s The Americanization of the World; or, The Trend of the Twentieth Century.
Initially published in 1901, the book went into numerous editions and has been reviewed countless times since its first appearance. To Stead, America’s rising impact
on the rest of the world in the realm of politics, finance, industrial production, consumer culture, and even the arts was a given. The question was merely how individual
people and nations would deal with this fact. Stead meant his account to be benevolent. It was intended to set the record straight: from the Ottoman Empire to
Asia, most people who abhorred the U.S. did so even though they personally had
“things American” in their lives. The Royal Munich Academy had given awards to
prestigious American artists, American singers were staffing opera ensembles all
over Europe, and U.S. scientific progress was soon to outdo European achieve23 “Amerika, du hast es besser / Als unser Kontinent, der alte, / Hast keine verfallenen Schlösser
/ Und keine Basalte. / Dich stört nicht im Innern / Zu lebendiger Zeit / Unnützes Erinnern / Und
vergeblicher Streit.” Cited in ibid., 12, 18.
24 Volker Depkat, Amerikabilder in politischen Diskursen: Deutsche Zeitschriften von 1789 bis 1830
(Stuttgart, 1998); Schulte Nordholt, “Anti-Americanism in European Culture,” 16. Mid-century novels
such as F. R. Eylert’s Rückblicke auf Amerika (Reflections on America, 1841), Elisabeth Wetherell’s The
Wide, Wide World (1851), Talvj’s Die Auswanderer (The Exiles, 1852), or Ferdinand Kürnberger’s Der
Amerikamüde (Disenchanted with America, 1855), along with a host of lesser-known oeuvres condemning migration, country society, and life in the big city, typically portrayed violence, swindling, theft, and
fraud, and some were explicitly composed to stop emigration. G. T. Hollyday, Anti-Americanism in the
German Novel, 1841–1862 (Berne, 1977).
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ment.25 Yet curiously, The Americanization of the World became a standard dictionary for anti-American complaints because it could not make a case for the United
States without elaborating on—and thereby giving voice to—all the fears that have
since become so commonplace around the world: fears that America’s culture, standards, and way of life would overrun everyone else’s; that U.S. consumer products
would extinguish other countries’ economies; and that a monster USA would simply
devour European identities.26
Before World War I, anti-Americanism was typically a concern of conservative
elites who focused their criticism on the threat of modernity incarnated by things
American. Yet in the twentieth century, entire generations of intellectuals and cultivated minds, from Ernst Jünger and Martin Heidegger to Herbert Marcuse and
Emmanuel Todd, portrayed the United States as the site of a gigantic human catastrophe.27 In other words, anti-Americanism originated in the nineteenth century,
but it became a common habit of the mind only after World War I.
Take, for example, the case of Russia. Russian nativist critique of the United
States had been widespread before World War I.28 The Slavophile idea of a “Holy
Russia” contrasted markedly with the vision of a dying West subdued by secularism
and class struggle. It opposed industrial modernity and acquisitive individualism.
Instead, Slavophiles underlined religious, communal, and irrational values. In their
view of a romantic and organic nation, the United States was really no nation at all.
Indeed, to the writer Fedor Dostoevsky, America constituted a geographical outlaw,
a place where his fictional protagonists fled never to return. Russian Slavophiles thus
confirmed what historians have called the historical friendship between Russia and
the United States, based on political calculations (notably a common opposition to
England) while each nation loathed the political principles of the other. In doing so,
25 W. T. Stead, The Americanization of the World; or, The Trend of the Twentieth Century (New York,
1901). To Stead, American influence should be embraced because Europe could benefit from it and
because it is unavoidable. At the same time, Stead cautions Europeans, and notably the British, to
convert to the “rush and bustle of modern life” (442). Stead lists all the “Americanizing forces” that
Europeans criticized when viewing the United States: the ramifications of the Monroe Doctrine, a flood
of supposedly superficial literature, the state of the arts, the emancipation of American women, mass
production, overly competitive sports, the invasion of American consumer products, and the unrestrained capitalism of railways, shipping, and trusts. On American artists in Germany, see also Jessica
C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Trumpeting Down the Walls of Jericho: The Politics of Art, Music and Emotion
in German-American Relations, 1870–1920,” Journal of Social History 36, no. 3 (Spring 2003): 585–613.
26 Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, “Shame on US? Cultural Transfer, Academics, and the Cold War—A
Critical Review,” Diplomatic History 24 (Summer 2000): 466– 479; D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic
American Literature (1923; repr., New York, 1950), 9–21; Adolf Halfeld, Amerika und der Amerikanismus:
Kritische Betrachtungen eines Deutschen und Europäers (Jena, 1927); Mary Nolan, Visions of Modernity:
American Business and the Modernization of Germany (New York, 1994), 26, 113–114; Frank Costigliola,
Awkward Dominion: American Political, Economic, and Cultural Relations with Europe, 1919–1933
(Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), 19ff., 167–183, 264ff.; Alexander Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne: Der AmerikaDiskurs des deutschen Bürgertums vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg im europäischen Vergleich (Berlin, 1997),
163–169.
27 In 1927, Richard Müller Freienfels, one of the leading psychologists of his time, published Geheimnisse der Seele (Mysteries of the Soul; Munich, 1927), in which he developed an overview of human
psychological development. Freienfels believed that Americanism constituted an abstract concept that
determined the face and soul of the twentieth century all across the globe. Resulting from the modernization, mechanization, and mathematization of life, the rule of mass and quantity over quality and
uniqueness, it encompassed an increasing shallowness of the soul, a “psychological wilderness.”
28 Abbott Gleason, “Republic of Humbug: The Russian Nativist Critique of the United States, 1830–
1930,” American Quarterly 44, no. 1 (March 1992): 1–23.
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the Slavophiles developed an argument that Soviet communists would later recite
ad nauseam to discredit the United States, and which resurfaces later in the writings
of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and others.29
After World War I, the debate about America—and with it manifestations of
philo- and anti-Americanism—spread like wildfire though books, cartoons, fashion,
music, advertising, and movies.30 Henry Ford and his vision for transforming the U.S.
from an agricultural to an industrial, mass-production, mass-consumption economy
had a huge impact on the immediate post–World War I era in Europe. It inspired
Aldous Huxley’s insidious satirical novel Brave New World and José Ortega y Gasset’s
influential work on social theory La rebellion de las masas, as well as Robert Arnaud
and André Dandieu’s Le cancer américain less than a decade later.31
Another important trigger for anti-Americanism in the 1930s was the Wall Street
crash of 1929 and the ensuing Depression. Until the late 1920s, anti-Americanism
fed off fears of the U.S. as a monster that threatened Europe’s future. Instead of
diminishing this fear, the crash aggravated the dread of cultural critics such as Huxley, Ortega y Gasset, Arnaud, and Dandieu. To many other European observers, the
crash exposed the corruption and failure of American capitalism. The ensuing New
Deal seemed to constitute a new approach to the European way, including a statecentered domestic policy and social welfare. The United States became so important
in the popular European perception because images of America served to cement
national positions in the discourse on modernity.32 America thus mutated into a
“cipher” for modernity, as Detlev Peukert has argued, while the discourse on America became a debate on the challenges of modernity to European culture.33
Germany was arguably the most American of the European countries long before
the Cold War. Germany saw several waves of philo-Americanism, including during
the Weimar Republic, when the country moved closer to the United States in terms
of its culture and industrialization.34 Many political and intellectual observers supported an affinity with the U.S. And like many other Europeans, Germans developed
Ibid., 3–9, 12.
Looking at German images from the nineteenth century to the present, Mary Nolan has shown
how German analyses of North America shifted focus during the 1920s, from illusory images of the West
to the United States as the incarnation of modernity. Nolan, “American in the German Imagination,”
in Heidi Fehrenbach and Uta Poiger, eds., Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations: American Culture in Western Europe and Japan (Providence, R.I., 2000), 3–25.
31 Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (London, 1932); José Ortega y Gasset, La rebellion de las masas
(The Revolt of the Masses; Madrid, 1930); Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu , Le cancer américain (The
American Cancer; Paris, 1931).
32 Philipp Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich: Ideologie, Propaganda und Volksmeinung, 1933–1945
(Stuttgart, 1997), 12–13.
33 Detlev Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der klassischen Moderne (Frankfurt am Main,
1987), 178–179; Alf Luedtke, Inge Marssolek, and Adelheid von Saldern, Amerikanisierung: Traum und
Alptraum im Deutschland des 20. Jahrhunderts (Stuttgart, 1996). Twentieth-century European literature
reveals many of these ciphers: you’re on your own; the land of unlimited opportunities; money makes
the world go around; acquisitive greed; faceless society; robber barons and self-made men; violence and
crime; short-term orientation and quick profit; poverty in the United States; corruption, lobbyism, industry, and war; the military-industrial complex; and so on. European novels typically presented such
assessments in a highly critical manner, designed to evoke images of a societal monster that brought the
country to the brink of ruin. Iris Sommer and Karsten Hellmann, The American Economic System as
Depicted in the Critical Literature of the 20th Century (Frankfurt am Main, 1994).
34 Adelheid von Saldern, The Challenge of Modernity: German Social and Cultural Studies, 1890–1960
(Ann Arbor, Mich., 2002), 93–298.
29
30
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a profound admiration for American sports, as was visible at the Olympics of 1936
in Berlin, when the African American athlete Jesse Owens became “the hero of the
Games and the darling of the Berlin crowds.”35
At the same time, the Weimar years bred a heavy dose of anti-Americanism,
triggered, but not caused, by reparations, Woodrow Wilson’s “14 Points,” and the
fact that American passivity had confirmed the Versailles Treaty and the Dawes Plan.
Intellectuals, critics, popular writers, and playwrights from Egon Erwin Kisch to
Bertolt Brecht used America to portray either the evils of capitalism or the vision
of a superficial, childish, and soulless society, even if, as in Alfred Kerr’s 1925 novel
Yankeeland, anti-Americanism was not an issue.36 With Adolf Halfeld, Germany
produced its foremost (but far from its only) prolific critic of the United States.
Having spent several years in the U.S., where he had devoured the new critical literature of the 1920s such as H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis, Halfeld disdained
the way that America’s “planned culture” and “dying landscape” were determined
by American business, the almighty obsession with success that drove both urban and
rural inhabitants, and the “fetters of the spirit,” notably what he called the “cultural
feminism” that reigned among both American thinkers and the general public.37
Popular culture echoed the tension between admiration and rejection. The antagonism to Hollywood movies may have featured most strongly as a component in
anti-Americanism after the 1920s, and German movies often picked up on the American debate. Films with regional backgrounds such as The Prodigal Son (1934), starring Luis Trenker, portrayed America as ridden by economic depression, a land of
seduction, and, as Eric Rentschler puts it, “a dangerous object of desire” shaking
from the contractions of economic cycles. Retracing the fate of a young German in
New York, Tonio Feuersinger, who ends up in the gutter before returning to his
home village in the Dolomites, The Prodigal Son contrasts American modernity with
alpine homegrown happiness.38 At the same time, for every Luis Trenker movie,
there was another film that admired American modernity and liberty. Fritz Lang’s
classic Metropolis showed philo-American tendencies in German society. Lang’s
movie demonstrated the longing for a resolution of the discrepancy between labor
and capital, modernity and tradition, men and women, set in an American environment.39
Such paradoxes continued during the Third Reich. Adolf Hitler himself both
loathed and liked the United States. In typical Weimarian fashion, he and his entourage despised the country as weak and unmilitary, a nation driven by Jews, African Americans, and the almighty dollar.40 At the same time, the Nazis were keenly
35 Barbara Keys, “Spreading Peace, Democracy, and Coca-Cola: Sport and American Cultural Expansion in the 1930s,” Diplomatic History 28, no. 2 (April 2004): 165–196, quote 192.
36 Alfred Kerr, Yankeeland: Eine Reise von Alfred Kerr (Berlin, 1925); Dan Diner, Verkehrte Welten:
Antiamerikanismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main, 1993), 37, 86.
37 Halfeld, Amerika und der Amerikanismus, 191.
38 Eric Rentschler, “There’s No Place Like Home: Luis Trenker’s The Prodigal Son (1934),” New
German Critique 60 (Fall 1993): 33–56, special issue on German film history.
39 German audiences welcomed Hollywood films, hundreds of which were shown in cinemas
throughout the Reich between 1933 and 1940. Disney cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse were
tremendously popular in the Third Reich, particularly when several cartoons were combined into feature-film length shows. Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, and Marlene Dietrich were among the most popular Hollywood stars. Gassert, Amerika im Dritten Reich, 164 –165.
40 In Die Stunden der Entscheidung: Kampf um Europa (Munich, 1943), dedicated to Reichsminister
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interested in the United States’ technological development, Taylorism, modernization, rationalization, and mass production, notably in the area of consumer products
such as cars.41 American films, jazz, and swing, although officially forbidden by the
Reichsleitung, remained in vogue until the end of the war, and not only in dance halls
but even, in fact especially, in the frontline trenches of the Wehrmacht. The Nazis
never resolved their inconsequential position: on the one hand, they admired Fordism and economic Americanization; on the other, they rejected the mass society
produced by American culture, a position that Jeffrey Herf has labeled “reactionary
modernism.”42
European fascists saw no contradiction in the juxtaposition of philo- and antiAmericanism, but their motivations differed in accordance with national and regional concerns. The Italian press, for example, displayed a profound antipathy
against the United States in the 1920s, although the U.S. government contributed
substantially to the rise of Benito Mussolini until 1935.43 Mussolini himself remained
completely ambivalent toward the United States. As an anti-Bolshevik and an advocate of modernization, Mussolini maintained friendly relations with Roosevelt and
congratulated Herbert Hoover on his political achievements. He admired Charles
Lindbergh and even produced a film designed to explain fascism to American audiences. He was an advocate of American tourism, American investment, and American joint ventures in the film industry, allowing Hollywood movies in Italy until
1938.44 Yet Italian fascists rejected liberalism and “the dictatorship of businessmen,”
particularly when the Depression hit harder in the United States than in Italy.45
To Italian fascists, moralism and the reconfiguration of the family constituted a
pillar of the making of the “new Italian,” while American snobbery, the crisis of the
family, feminism, capitalist greed, and individualism posed as its counterpoint.46
Anti-Americanism in Italy remained linked to a complete abhorrence of modernity,
but such aversion constituted only one side of Italian fascists’ perception of the
United States. Like the Nazis, Italian fascists did not regard the arrival of technology
or mass industry as a threat. In contrast, many believed that the New Deal was America’s acknowledgment of the superiority of fascist solutions, notably the domination
of the individual’s will over the rhythm of history and a balance between man and
machines. “Containing and domesticating the American challenge, in all its everchanging variety of forms,” writes David Ellwood, “was probably an experience
und Reichsleiter Alfred Rosenberg on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday, A. Sanders contrasted a
struggle between continental Europe and Anglo-Americans for world domination. To Sanders, the Puritans, the Freemasons, and the Jews dominated the Anglo-American world and threatened to overpower the European continent, the European economy, and the European way of life. The challenge
for Europe, then, was to defend its borders, defeat the Anglo-Americans, reorganize Europe politically,
and thereby inaugurate a “welthistorische Wende.”
41 Diner, Verkehrte Welten, 92–94.
42 Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar and the Third
Reich (Cambridge, 1984).
43 Stefano Luconi, “Anti-Americanism in the Italian-Language Press in the United States in the
Interwar Years,” in Groupe de Recherche et d’Etudes Nord-Américaines, L’Antiaméricanism: AntiAmericanism at Home and Abroad (Aix-en-Provence, 2000), 33.
44 I am indebted to David Ellwood for this point.
45 Luconi, “Anti-Americanism in the Italian-Language Press,” 35, 36, 45, 47.
46 Emilio Gentile, “Impending Modernity: Fascism and the Ambivalent Image of the United States,”
Journal of Contemporary History 28 (1993): 7–29, magazine count 7.
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which helped to unite Italians more than it divided them.” Catholicism, fascism,
communism, and the U.S. occupation all were and are bound up with the question
of what it meant to be an Italian as opposed to an American.47
If European fascists were divided over their reasons for rejecting America, so
were European democracies. For example, French feelings toward the new republic
had been ambivalent throughout the nineteenth century, swinging from Tocquevillian admiration to utter hostility at the end of the July Monarchy in 1848. Robert
Young has shown that despite the antipathy on the part of French elites, the French
government made a forceful effort to win U.S. sympathies between 1900 and 1940.
While privately opposing American “best-in-the-world” claims, French leaders understood that France had more control of its identity than of the productive resources necessary to become a major modern power. Therefore, they often complemented popular anti-Americanism with a heavy dose of Franco-American
friendship and admiration.48 In 1931, French author Edmond Demolins argued in
A quoi tient la Supériorité des Anglo-Saxons that the Anglo-Saxons had managed to
liberate themselves from the pastoral, proletarian, and more sedentary Celtic race,
which typically “fill the ranks of the lower proletariat, or higher in the social scale—
the liberal and political professions.” Anglo-Saxons had likewise liberated themselves from the fetters of Norman influences, whose “spirit of snobbery” tended to
weaken the upper classes.49
As a result, feelings in France moved continuously up and down during World
War I and the interwar period. The nation moved from gratitude for American military intervention to outspoken reproach when the U.S. government refused to allow
the French to ally their repayments to German reparations. The French consequently regarded their country as the new pauper of Europe, if not of the community
of capitalist nations, while the United States seemed to enjoy the comforts of unlimited wealth.
Yet for all its political patina, in the interwar period French anti-Americanism
remained a fundamentally cultural phenomenon, which originated among that group
of French critics most familiar with U.S. society, including intellectuals such as André
Tardieu, Georges Duhamel, and Paul Morand. Some focused their criticism on
American diplomatic power, while others worried about the ramifications of a mass
society. But all continuously looked back to the prewar world, mourning the decline
47 David Ellwood, “Italy: Containing Modernity, Domesticating America,” in Alexander Stephan,
ed., Dynamics of Cultural Blending: Americanization and Anti-Americanism in Europe (New York, forthcoming).
48 Robert Young, Marketing Marianne: French Propaganda in America, 1900–1940 (New Brunswick,
N.J., 2004), quote 18. See also André Béziat, “Le Général de Gaulle était-it antiaméricain pendant la
deuxième guerre mondiale?” in Groupe de Recherche Nord-Américaines, Antiaméricanisme, 65–82.
49 Demolins drew a concise picture that consistently underlined the cause of Anglo-Saxon superiority. The mode of education in France, he claimed, had reduced the country’s birth rate and compromised its financial situation, while Anglo-Saxon education prepared children for the struggle for
existence, physical fitness, gender equality, independence, and the future. Political actors in France and
Germany were more receptive to socialism than were Anglo-Saxons, which led both countries into moral
decay and social degeneration. Anglo-Saxons nurtured a different idea of the fatherland than did their
French and German neighbors, one that emphasized business, expansion, and the future. Edmond
Demolins, Anglo-Saxon Superiority: To What It Is Due, trans. Louis Bert. Lavigne (New York, 1931), vi.
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of France and the modernization of French society.50 In the 1930s, French intellectuals refocused their critique on the American empire, notably its demand for raw
materials, its expansion and domination of Europe, the threat of American capital
to Europe, and distaste for American culture.51
Neither prewar Catholics nor the Uriage group—designed to train young leaders
for Vichy youth movements—nor leaders such as François Mitterand could avoid
this position: they all were convinced that in order to make France more French, to
avoid Americanization, and to distill “la France profonde” from the sway of minority
groups, they needed to support Pétain and the Vichy regime even if that included
discriminating against Jews and compromising the Resistance.52 As Robert Paxton
has shown, the Vichy regime was the first to actively bar U.S. culture in France.
Subsequent leaders preferred an America that was generous but distant, and they
sought to avoid armed liberation in favor of a revival from within.53
As a result, the Vichy regime gave way to Gaullist nationalism, a pro-Soviet attitude, and two powerful myths: first, that France had liberated itself; second, that
the Soviets and the Americans had divided Europe between themselves at Yalta—at
the expense of France. Such political anti-Americanism went hand in hand with a
resurgence of cultural criticisms focusing on everything from individual rights to the
menace of Coca-Cola and the Americanization of the French language (even though
less than 2 percent of the words added to the French vocabulary are of Anglo-Saxon
origin).54 Just as in the case of Italy and Germany, the French discourse on the
United States concerned less American society than French interests, methods, and
social life. In the words of Marie-France Toinet, “The French hold up the United
States as a mirror to look, in fact, at themselves.”55
Thus, interwar perceptions of the U.S. in Europe were mixed, regardless of a
country’s political system and ideology. Beyond a general admiration for Fordism
and the New Deal, there was a general fascination—almost scientific—with understanding the American system as an original phenomenon. Simultaneously, cultural
anti-Americanism remained a feature of conservative and fascist circles, all of which
50 David Strauss, Menace in the West: The Rise of French Anti-Americanism in Modern Times (Westport, Conn., 1978), 65–77.
51 Ibid., 97, 103. See also Donald Roy Allen, French Views of America in the 1930s (New York, 1979),
64; Seth D. Armus, “The Eternal Enemy: Emmanuel Mounier’s Esprit and French Anti-Americanism,”
French Historical Studies 24, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 271–304.
52 John Hellman, “Wounding Memories: Mitterand, Moulin, Touvier, and the Divine Half-Lie of
Resistance,” French Historical Studies 19, no. 2 (Autumn 1995): 461– 486.
53 Vichy leaders’ campaign focused on antimodernism, patriotism, and religious values along with
education. They sought to moralize French youth and the educational hierarchy, barring jazz and American films. Since the Resistance focused on the defense of the French way of life, leaders rejected much
of the U.S. example in the realm of politics and culture, since Americans were seen as a bunch of big
children, naı̈ve, rootless, and materialist. Robert O. Paxton, “Anti-Americanism in the Years of Collaboration and Resistance,” in Lacorne and Rupnik, The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism, 55–66;
Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940–1944 (New York, 1972), 165.
54 Denis Lacorne and Jacques Rupnik, “France Bewitched by America,” in Lacorne and Rupnik,
The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism, 1–34.
55 Marie-France Toinet, “French Pique and Picques Françaises,” in Thornton, Anti-Americanism,
137; Ellwood, Anti-Americanism in Western Europe. The best survey on postwar France so far remains
Richard Kuisel, Seducing the French: The Dilemma of Americanization (Berkeley, Calif., 1993).
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viewed the United States as an attack against tradition, national essence, and Europe’s internal reinvention in the 1930s.56
During the Cold War, the anti-American debate took a decisively political turn.
While Europeans had always voiced political criticism, notably after the ratification
of the Versailles Treaty, it was only during the era of McCarthyism that observers
abroad formulated a criticism of the United States that extended the cultural critique
to include political ideology.57 In line with the dialectical approach of the prewar
decades, culture and philo-Americanism continued to shape any criticism of the
United States, and for every manifestation of rejection there was another one of
appropriation. Both philo- and anti-Americanism became part of everyday life.58
Europeans selectively appropriated certain commodities, ideas, and images by carefully tailoring those to their own needs. Moreover, instead of a one-way street of
ideas flowing west to east across the Atlantic, there was a constant flux of communication from both sides throughout the Cold War.59
Take, for example, French intellectuals and their admiration of jazz music. After
jazz hit France in the interwar years, French avant-garde musicians “intellectualized”
this music genre, collectively forming a genuine French jazz “milieu” after World
War II. They successfully dissociated jazz from its origins, using it instead to underline the superiority of European culture. Ludovic Tournès calls this process
“counter-Americanization,” as an American cultural product mutated into a powerful instrument of criticism against U.S. culture.60
This process continued throughout the Cold War. Despite all the political cooperation, European anti-Americanism ballooned nearly everywhere during this
time, seamlessly merging cultural and political concerns. French anti-Americanism,
for example, was very much conditioned by the rift between communism and so56 On inter-European NGO efforts to redesign an occidental European unity between the wars
(occidental culture), see Guido Müller, “France and Germany after the Great War: Businessmen, Intellectuals and Artists in Non-Governmental European Networks,” in Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht and
Frank Schumacher, eds., Culture and International History (Oxford, 2003), 97–114; Guido Müller, Europäische Gesellschaftsbeziehungen nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: Das Deutsch-Französische Studienkomitee
und der Europäische Kulturbund (Munich, 2005).
57 In a sweeping essay on anti-Americanism in Western Europe, David Ellwood contends that only
after World War II did European perceptions shift to a rejection of American diplomacy, military power,
and ideology—and the country at large—thus inaugurating a distinctive anti-Americanism. Reactions
to America—however diverse—assumed a different meaning and a different level of force once the
United States began to project its power abroad, during and even more so after World War II. It was
at this point, Ellwood argues, that nineteenth-century distaste and early-twentieth-century fears of modernity combined to form a new antagonism to U.S. power. And it was at this point, too, that the U.S.
government first began to worry about the image of America in the world. David Ellwood, “Comparative
Anti-Americanism in Western Europe,” in Fehrenbach and Poiger, Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations, 26– 44; Gienow-Hecht, “Shame on US?” 466– 469.
58 Nolan’s conclusion that America would lose its central position in the German imagination after
the Cold War has proven futile. Mary Nolan, “America in the German Imagination,” in Fehrenbach and
Poiger, Transactions, Transgressions, Transformations, 3–25.
59 Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht, Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy
in Postwar Germany, 1945–1955 (Baton Rouge, La., 1999); Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans
Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York, 1997); Heide
Fehrenbach, Cinema in Democratizing Germany: Reconstructing National Identity after Hitler (Chapel Hill,
N.C., 1995); Mary Nolan, “Consuming America, Producing Gender,” in Maurizio Vaudagna, ed., The
American Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 2003), 243–261; Kuisel, Seducing the French.
60 Ludovic Tournès, “La reinterpretation du jazz: Un phénomène de contre-américanisation dans
la France d’après-guerre (1945–1960),” in Groupe de Recherche Nord-Américaines, Antiaméricanisme,
167–183.
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cialism articulated at the Communist Congress in Strasbourg in 1947. Public debates
denounced American expansionism, NATO, and the corruptive influence of American art, horrifying French elites but not the mass of voters. Instead, the American
way of life fascinated a generation of young French enamored with consumerism,
better living standards, and economic growth.61 For many French, America represented more of a “counter-myth” designed to refute the anticulturalists than a concern based on the reality of international relations.62
Nowhere were these internal cultural concerns more visible than in the field of
modern art. In the 1950s, French art administrators had serious concerns about their
nation’s standing in the international art market. In their eyes, German moderns
were claiming that modern art had originated in Germany and not in France, thereby
denigrating the latter’s contribution to the twentieth-century art scene.63 At the same
time, Paris turned into a cultural Cold War battlefield for Soviet and American art
administrators who were fighting for the heart of France. The New York Museum
of Modern Art attempted to promote America’s cultural reputation in Europe during the Cold War vis-à-vis the Soviets and to redefine the United States as a leader
in modern Western civilization. When they realized what was happening, French
artists, administrators, critics, and the public were quick to deride the onslaught of
Americanism without realizing that Paris itself had already become the center of a
new modern movement: the surrealists.64
If language and the arts preoccupied French critics of American culture, antiAmericanists across the channel worried about a completely different set of issues.
In the early days of the Cold War, proponents of anti-Americanism in Britain focused
on the belief that their country had yielded its status as an empire to the United
States, while at the same time, many British felt that the New World could and should
continue to learn from the mother country. In 1957, Art Buchwald published an
advertisement in the London Times, calling for “people who dislike Americans and
their reasons why.” He reportedly received more than one hundred replies that testified to the persistent existence of anti-American stereotypes—however diverse—in
British society. On the basis of these responses, Buchwald summarized his findings
by saying, “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 (a reference to the Anglo-French descent upon the Suez Canal
in 1956), stop taking oil out of the Middle East, stop chewing gum, . . . move their
air bases out of England, settle the desegregation problem in the South, . . . put the
American woman in her proper place, and not export Rock n’ Roll, and speak correct
61 Brian McKenzie, Deep Impact: United States Public Diplomacy in France, 1945–1952 (New York,
forthcoming).
62 Michel Winock, “The Cold War,” in Lacorne and Rupnik, The Rise and Fall of Anti-Americanism,
67–76.
63 Their concerns were well founded, as Marie-Amélie Zu Salm-Salm has shown. Zu Salm-Salm,
Échanges artistiques franco-allemands et renaissance de la peinture abstraite dans les pays germaniques après
1945 (Paris, 2004).
64 Gay R. McDonald, “The Launching of American Art in Postwar France: Jean Cassou and the
Musée National d’Art Moderne,” American Art 13, no. 1 (Spring 1999): 40–61; Serge Guilbaut, “1955:
The Year the Gaulois Fought the Cowboy,” Yale French Studies 98 (2000): 167–181. André Breton’s
“Manifesto of Surrealism” came out in 1924.
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English, the tension between the two countries might ease and the British and Americans would like each other again.”65
What Buchwald observed in the 1950s bore no trace of a popular movement. But
in the 1960s, ideological criticism, frustration, and disillusionment intensified, largely
fueled, ironically, by American anti-Americans, who had picked up many of their
ideas from the exiled Frankfurt School, now operating out of Chicago, New York,
and Washington, D.C.66 U.S. professions of democracy seemed hypocritical in the
age of segregation and the war in Vietnam. Not surprisingly, it was here that domestic
and European anti-Americanism most clearly overlapped. Samuel Huntington once
argued that anti-Americanism focuses on the double standard applied by both Americans and non-Americans in judging U.S. institutions and culture: liberal principles
cherished in the United States often are not accorded the same status in U.S. foreign
policy toward other countries and people. Anti-Americanism protests not the prevalence of American values abroad, but the absence or failure of those values.67 That
is precisely what happened in Europe. “My entire liberal education began in the
Amerika-Haus [sic] where I studied the American Declaration of Independence,”
stated a young German in a public opinion poll in the late 1960s. “What happens
now is a public rape of such ideals.”68
West German anti-Americanism clearly concentrated on an idealist review of
Western values and institutions. Widespread among intellectuals, environmentalists,
and peace groups, anti-Americanism in West Germany sprang from the presence
there of American troops. Aversion to the U.S. military forces went hand in hand
with anti-consumerism and an attack on the “McDonaldization” of Germany, a concern that originated in conservative fears in the nineteenth century.69 Gesine Schwan
has shown that in Germany after 1945, anti-Americanism—despite its appeal among
the New Left—was in its essence conservative, and that means also politically conservative. Both left and right criticism originated among the same milieu, one generated by elitist assumptions critical of mass society, modernity, and new power, and
favorably disposed toward Abendland (occidental) ideology, as well as the idea of
Eurocentric cultural and political superiority.70 A typical follower of the Green
Party, for example, was young (born after 1946) and well educated with perhaps a
university degree, had an affinity with both environmental causes and leftist tendencies, and felt a general disdain for the established conservative parties. He or she
65 Marcus Cunliffe, “The Anatomy of Anti-Americanism,” in Kroes and Rossem, Anti-Americanism
in Europe, 20–36, Buchwald quotes 23, 24.
66 Gienow-Hecht, “Shame on US?” 465– 494.
67 Samuel Huntington, “American Ideals versus American Institutions,” Political Science Quarterly
97, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 1–37, quotes 22, 23; Hollander, Anti-Americanism, 371. See also Jochen Hils,
“Zwischen Hyperdemokratie und ‘Minderheitstyrannei’: Die USA zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts,”
ZENAF Arbeits- und Forschungsberichte 1/2004 (Frankfurt am Main, 2004), http://web.uni-frank
furt.de/zenaf/zenaf/01_04_ZAF.pdf.
68 Cited in William J. Weissmann, Kultur- und Informationsaktivitäten der USA in der Bundesrepublik
während der Amtszeiten Carter und Reagan (Pfaffenweiler, 1990), 66.
69 Stephan, Americanization and Anti-Americanism; Diner, Verkehrte Welten, 36. See also Dan Diner,
Feindbild Amerika: Über die Beständigkeit eines Ressentiments, 2nd ed. (Munich, 2003); Hollander, AntiAmericanism, 384. On the perspective of peace activists in the Netherlands, see Koen Koch, “AntiAmericanism and the Dutch Peace Movement,” in Kroes and Rossem, Anti-Americanism in Europe,
97–111.
70 Gesine Schwan, Antikommunismus und Antiamerikanismus in Deutschland: Kontinuität und Wandel nach 1945 (Baden-Baden, 1999).
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typically favored “post-materialist” values and unconventional forms of political participation, including candle chains and mass demonstrations.71
Even at the height of protest against U.S. involvement in the Third World and
Star Wars, anti-American political criticism remained an elitist conservative affair
often borrowed by representatives from the left.72 Joachim Fernau, Germany’s most
polemic conservative critic in the 1970s, drew an apocalyptic scenario of a world
driven by sex murderers, global warriors, consumer terrorists, drug czars, and moneydriven industrialists, on the one hand, and vast numbers of victims, TV-obsessed
children, and artists without ideas, on the other. “For the love of things that we
hunger for and what has been destroyed, I say: Hate!” Fernau finally advised readers
in a survey of U.S. history titled Halleluja. “There, on the other side of the ocean,
stands the guilty one. If Americanism wins it will annihilate the human race within
the next 150 years.”73 New Leftists (whom Fernau abhorred) would have wholeheartedly embraced his conclusion.
Although manifestations of West German anti-Americanism mirrored similar
events in France, their origins differed significantly. In contrast to German antiAmericanism, French nationalism continues to shape French attitudes and cultural
anxieties.74 The Communist Party had a profound influence on negative perceptions
vis-à-vis the United States and sympathetic attitudes toward the Soviet Union. But
the party’s influence waned considerably during and after the 1960s, with the rise of
an anti-Soviet cadre among the French political leadership.75 Since that time, French
anti-Americanism has been guided by a protective sense of the French language,
notably since English became the lingua franca in the Western Hemisphere.76 Philippe Roger even believes that anti-Americanism is an expression of humanism, almost a duty to defend spirit, culture, and the nation.77 Coupled with fears among the
French for their culture and continuous depression over a loss of power, the Vichy
syndrome—the lack of resistance to the Nazis compensated for by emblematic resistance to the United States—continues to exist with a new face.78
Generational affiliation seems to have played a crucial role in the formation of
71 Harald Mueller and Thomas Risse-Knappen, “Origins of Estrangement: The Peace Movement
and the Changed Image of America in West Germany,” International Security 12, no. 1 (Summer 1987):
62, 63, 87. On the central role of peace movements and the Greens in the anti-American scene in
Germany, see also Andrei Markovits, “On Anti-Americanism in West Germany,” New German Critique
34 (Winter 1985): 3–27.
72 In an effort to demonstrate the party’s opposition to the U.S. military presence in Germany, in
August 1983, a member of the Green Party in the Hesse Landtag poured his own blood over U.S. general
Paul S. Williams while the latter was giving a speech before some eighty U.S. military representatives,
their wives, the party leaders, and committee chairmen of the Hessian Landtag. Die Grünen im Hessischen Landtag, Die Würde einer Uniform ist antastbar: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main, 1983).
73 Joachim Fernau, Halleluja: Die Geschichte der USA (Munich, 1977), 298, 318, 319.
74 See, e.g., France/USA: The Cultural Wars, special issue, Yale French Studies 100 (2001), notably
Ralph Sarkonak’s preface, “Just How Wide Is the Atlantic Anyway?” 1–10.
75 Hollander, Anti-Americanism, 384. On the perspective of peace activists in the Netherlands, see
Koch, “Anti-Americanism and the Dutch Peace Movement,” 97–111.
76 Anthony Daniels, “Sense of Superiority and Inferiority in French Anti-Americanism,” in Hollander, Understanding Anti-Americanism, 65–83. See also Robert M. McKenzie, “Images of the U.S. as
Perceived by U.S. Students in France,” in Yahya R. Kamalipour, ed., Images of the U.S. around the World:
A Multicultural Perspective (Albany, N.Y., 1999), 117–133.
77 Roger, L’ennemi américain.
78 Philippe Grasset, Le monde malade de l’Amérique: La doctrine américaine des origins à nos jours
(Brussels, 1999).
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anti-Americanism since the 1960s. In the Netherlands, a public opinion poll in 1983
concluded that “almost half the population shows a more or less negative attitude
toward the United States,” while “young people as a group (from 18 to 29 years of
age) tend to hold more negative views of the United States than those over 30.” One
Dutch scholar has linked these findings to an ever greater alienation from and disaffection with modern society, one that marked an entire generation and was not
caused by a single event such as the Vietnam War.79
Even in the most turbulent years of protest, anti-American critique went hand
in hand with philo-American statements. This is a delicate point that Americans find
hard to understand. How can people consume goods that symbolize American popular culture—jeans, pop music, hamburgers, Coke—while protesting both U.S. culture and foreign policy? The fact remains that, as in the United States, such ambivalent positions can be found in the same country, the same group, even the same
person, and in most cases this duality symbolizes schisms within that very country,
group, or person. For all their criticism of mass society, intellectuals such as Herbert
Marcuse and Theodor Adorno emphasized their positive personal experiences in the
United States, notably in the sector of research and higher education. Likewise, from
the 1960s well into the 1980s, half of those polled in Germany consistently named
the United States as their country’s best friend (before France), while only 20 percent
advocated a withdrawal of the U.S. military from Western Europe, and up to 80
percent supported Western Germany’s membership in NATO. Not a single anticonstitutional party has won in the Bundestag elections since 1953. Even at the height
of Star Wars, when polls indicated an overall decline in approval rates for U.S. foreign policy and hundreds of thousands of Germans took to the streets to demand
a total ban on nuclear weapons on the European continent, 64 percent of Germans
believed that the Soviet Union constituted the foremost threat to world peace.80
European polls conducted between 1975 and 1983 likewise suggested a strikingly
stable attitude, with some 10 percent confirmed anti-Americanists and 30 percent
pro-Americanists, while the rest preferred to remain neutral but when pressed to
take sides, rallied behind the United States.81 “There is an Americano-phile lurking
inside every anti-American,” marvels Rob Kroes. “Much as his tolerance of ambiguity may have been waning recently, he does not seem quite ready yet for that final
auto-da-fé, that final act of faith: the burning of his blue jeans.”82
Anti-Americanism has fulfilled starkly different functions in different societies
at different times, and in this respect the American challenge represents a dividing
rather than a unifying force in Europe. In Germany, anti-Americanism has taken the
form of a “New Regionalism,” as depicted in the 1984 TV series Heimat. Here we
meet Paul, “the American,” who has escaped the oppressive atmosphere of his wartime home village, Schabbach, to become, in the words of Michael Geisler, “a real
79
On Dutch anti-Americanism, see Kroes, “The Great Satan versus the Evil Empire,” 37–50, quotes
46.
Mueller and Risse-Knappen, “Origins of Estrangement,” 52–88.
Mass participation in anti-American demonstrations—whether related to issues of nuclear power,
politics, or military intervention—is difficult to explain. Indeed, as Koen Koch suggests, opposition to
nuclear weapons may not signify anti-Americanism. Koch, “Anti-Americanism and the Dutch Peace
Movement,” 98, 106–107.
82 Kroes, “The Great Satan versus the Evil Empire,” 48, 49.
80
81
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American, in the way he behaves, in his attitudes, even in his inability to express
himself.” Predictably, Paul ends up leading a deplorable existence, “a man without
a home (‘ein Heimatloser’), without roots, a sentimental globetrotter.”83 The German Peace Movement of the 1980s further spurred anti-Americanist sentiments
when literary giants such as Günter Grass sharply criticized the United States for its
involvement in Southeast Asia and Latin America.84 But those claims focused on
specific aspects of U.S. foreign policy, and not—as in France—on a widespread rejection of U.S. society and culture.
Regional differences and a common cultural conservatism remain the most common denominators of anti-Americanism throughout Europe. In Malta, for example,
people’s perception of the United States is largely focused on the notion of freedom,
innovation, and technological progress. Resistance to U.S. mass media messages
remains strong, notably since Maltese society emphasizes community and togetherness over personal liberty and individualism.85 Likewise, an analysis of anti-Americanism in Turkey reveals that even though the country’s left has continuously echoed
European concerns over U.S. military involvement abroad, regional concerns have
dominated the agenda of anti-Americanism. Notably, the influx of Hollywood movies
and the Cyprus problem in the mid-1970s have repeatedly served to legitimize the
image of the “ugly American.” In conjunction with U.S. involvement in the Gulf War,
the war in Bosnia, and U.S. policies to bar imports from developing countries, in the
1990s these impressions sealed the image of “Uncle Sam” as “a giant holding the
world in his arms or as a ‘cowboy’ sitting on top of the world.”86 The issue of Turkish
involvement in the U.S. attack on Iraq has further aggravated the situation: depicting
an apocalyptic scenario in which American troops invade Turkey while a Turkish
agent explodes an atomic bomb in Washington, D.C., the movie Metal-Firtina (Metal
Storm) dominated the list of blockbuster films in Ankara for weeks in early 2005.87
Likewise in Greece, both political and cultural anti-Americanism feature strongly in
people’s national self-perception. For one thing, the United States supported the
colonels who took over the country during Richard Nixon’s presidency, and many
Greeks never got over that. Furthermore, the influx of American cultural productions such as films and TV programs has had a profound impact on Greek society.
A study on Greek teenagers’ perceptions of the United States found that they tended
to be neutral and negative. The students see Americans as leading a comfortable,
affluent, but boring life.88
83 Michael E. Geisler, “ ‘Heimat’ and the German Left: The Anamnesis of a Trauma,” New German
Critique 36 (Autumn 1985): 25–66, quote 63.
84 Günter Grass, Heinz D. Oesterle, and Barbara F. Lamphier, “Interview with Günter Grass Concerning American-German Relations,” New German Critique 31 (Winter 1984): 125–142; Alice Cooper,
Paradoxes of Peace: West German Peace Movements since 1945 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1996).
85 Peggy Bieber-Roberts and Pauline Abela, “From an Island Nation: Maltese Perception of the
U.S.,” in Kamalipour, Images of the U.S. around the World, 197–207.
86 Ayseli Usluata, “U.S. Image Reflected through Cartoons in Turkish Newspapers,” in Kamalipour,
Images of the U.S. around the World, 87–101, quote 99.
87 “Wachsender Antiamerikanismus in Ankara: Bemühungen um Schadenbegrenzung auf beiden
Seiten,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung 50 (March 1, 2005): 5. Within two weeks, Metal-Firtina sold more than
100,000 copies, because, as numerous political observers concluded, it successfully reflects Turkish people’s fears of an impending collision with the United States.
88 A key variable is Greek ethnocentrism: the more that viewers feel “safest” in Greece, and the more
highly they value Greek traditions, the more they tend to see the United States as principally ridden
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As in Greece, Malta, and Turkey, everywhere in Europe politics may serve as a
trigger but never as a cause for the emergence and continuity of anti-Americanism.
Nowhere is this more obvious than in the former states of the Warsaw Pact. Even
as governments crumbled, politics changed, and state structures vanished, philoAmericanism and anti-Americanism based on its two key variables—cultural conservatism and regional concerns—remained squarely in place.89 Much communist
propaganda centered on precisely this phenomenon: the pitfalls of unrestrained modernity, the encroachment of capitalism, and the evils of democratic nationalism. Yet
even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, these charges continue to affect popular attitudes toward the United States.
For example, in the Soviet Union, the Kremlin’s goal was to denounce the United
States—notably top U.S. officials—and its widespread appeal through the use of
propaganda.90 Russophile ideology and anti-Western propaganda consistently influenced both state and popular perceptions of the U.S. While before 1970, statedirected anti-Americanism concentrated on liberalism and American capitalism, in
the 1970s and 1980s criticism shifted to the American way of life. Cultural superiority
supplanted any anxieties over the increasing economic and technological gap between the Soviet Union and the United States. The average American was seen as
an individual driven by material interests and an indifference to culture and community values.
Yet for all the criticism of U.S. materialism, Soviets under Joseph Stalin began
to display an increasing interest in consumer products, comfort, and prestige, such
as cars, foreign apparel, and electronics. Soviet artists imitated American pop artists
in using video recorders and televisions in their work at the very moment when the
Soviet government was denouncing those same trends in the United States.91 Ironically, then, according to the Russophiles, America was materialist and had no culture or history, while Russia represented an old spiritual nation with a long tradition.
But according to most of the educated public, America was a cool place, a great
culture, and, in the words of Ilya Ehrenburg, the home of many progressive and fine
musicians and authors.92 Both attitudes have survived the demise of the Soviet
Union.
In the GDR, SED party propaganda officials focused many of their state education programs on youth and youth movements. But in the 1970s and 1980s, an
by violence, accidents, and crime, and less as a place of affluence, comfort, variety, and freedom. Thimios
Zaharopoulos, “Television Viewing and the Perception of the United States by Greek Teenagers,” in
Kamalipour, Images of the U.S. around the World, 279–293.
89 See, e.g., Susan Reid and David Crowley, eds., Style and Socialism: Modernity and Material Culture
in Post-War Eastern Europe (Oxford, 2000); Mark Pittaway, Eastern Europe, 1939–2000 (London, 2004);
Padraic Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe, 1989 (Princeton, N.J., 2002). Still, since 1945,
scholars of anti-Americanism have paid considerably less attention to the former Warsaw Pact states
than to Western societies, mostly because they ascribed all antagonism to state indoctrination or because
they believed with Paul Hollander that there was no anti-Americanism worth speaking of in Eastern
Europe. Hollander, Anti-Americanism, 367; Thomas Bruce Morgan, Among the Anti-Americans (New
York, 1967), 3.
90 Donald Dunham, Kremlin Target: U.S.A.—Conquest by Propaganda (New York, 1961).
91 Eric Shiraev and Vladimir Zubok, Anti-Americanism in Russia: From Stalin to Putin (New York,
2000), 7–24.
92 Vladimir Shlapentokh, “The Changeable Soviet Image of America,” in Thornton, Anti-Americanism, 157–171; Shiraev and Zubok, Anti-Americanism in Russia, 15, 18, 20, 45–61.
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increasing number of splinter groups de facto destroyed the monopoly of the Freie
Deutsche Jugend, the major educational arm of the social government. Punks, rock
fans, peace movements, and ecological interest groups opposed state and party propaganda, and indeed any form of ideological socialization. Parents and teachers began to openly confront the dogma of effective ideological education because it did
not comport with reality. The image of the United States as enemy contrasted with
the popular interest in American musicians such as Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, and
Bruce Springsteen, as well as with the hundreds of U.S. films shown in GDR movie
theaters. A number of research institutes, including the Institut für Internationale
Politik und Wirtschaft in East Berlin, investigated American themes, as did a number
of departments at East German universities, all of which were expected to deride
the idea of U.S. imperialism. As in the Soviet Union, the result was an official image
of America that stereotypically repeated a limited number of ideological charges
while popular opinion simultaneously favored U.S. cultural products: in 1981 alone,
73 percent of all moviegoers said they preferred Western (nonsocialist) films.93 And
these controversial attitudes remained in place beyond 1989. Today, the cultural fear
of a Moloch USA that might swallow German Kultur remains a powerful topic
among educators, teachers, and other multipliers who are horrified at their students’
interest in American consumer culture.
The German Democratic Republic provides an excellent example of the fact that
for a brief moment after the end of the Cold War, political anti-Americanism seemed
to subside, perhaps because U.S. politics appeared to shift to domestic concerns.
Cultural criticism, however, remained intact. In Eastern Europe, politically motivated communist anti-Americanism often transformed into cultural antagonism.
Here we can discern the analytical viability of the former Warsaw Pact states.
Take, for example, the case of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakian anti-Americanism between 1945 and 1989 included a heavy dose of state-ordered propaganda fueled by official political warfare that extended to both the political and cultural sectors. It focused on an aversion to popular culture as well as a traditional sentiment
of Slav superiority vis-à-vis Western materialism. Because it was risky to oppose
state-ordered doctrine, most writers operated under self-censorship. Still, this did
not breed a pro-American attitude among people, but rather an “anti-American way
of life,” a refusal of middle-class values that could have been found among capitalists
and communists alike. As a result of forty years of official state doctrine and in the
absence of any opposition, after the end of the Cold War, political anti-Americanism
transformed into popular anti-Americanism.94 This is not to say that people simply
imbibed communist rhetoric on this subject. Anti-materialism and anti-Americanism
had long been common denominators of the intelligentsia in many Warsaw Pact
states. Moreover, one should not subsume the various East European nations under
one umbrella analysis. In Central East Europe, for example, people vehemently deny
any allusions of Slavophilism. Instead, the public discourse has typically exhibited
a more Western point of view that celebrates the United States as a beacon of the
93 Much of SED propaganda focused on children by disseminating schoolbooks, cartoons, music,
and brochures such as Frösi (Fröhlich Sein und Singen—Be Happy and Sing), a “Pioneer Journal for
Girls and Boys.” Jürgen Grosse, Amerikapolitik und Amerikabild der DDR 1974 –1989 (Bonn, 1999).
94 Justine Faure, “L’antiaméricanism en Tchécoslovaquie, 1945–1989,” in Groupe de Recherche
Nord-Américaines, Antiaméricanisme, 83–98, quote 95.
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future.95 But as a popular attitude, anti-Americanism surfaced after the end of the
Cold War and, ironically, invoked a retrospective tendency for which East Germans
coined the phrase Ostalgia, an amalgamation of the words Ost—East—and nostalgia.96
In postcommunist Bulgaria, in the 1990s, local newspapers typically portrayed the
United States as “a global police force, often incompetent and guilty of partiality,”
marked by an “international bias and political hypocrisy.” Like many East European
countries, Bulgaria has witnessed an American intrusion into its culture and its media. While American cultural mass products such as films and clothes are no longer
censored (and therefore are no longer attractive as forbidden goods), their popularity has not waned. Bulgarian media often portray George Soros and his Open
Society Foundation as a systematic destroyer of their country’s national identity in
the service of the American government. As a result, writes Dina Iordanova, “Bulgaria seems to be taking a new path in its foreign orientation, one that will bring it
closer to Russia again and emphasize its difference from the West.”97
IF THE 1990S temporarily deleted politics and diplomacy from the anti-American
discourse, the events of September 11, 2001, and the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan
and Iraq, along with a host of political issues such as environmentalism, the death
penalty, and the international court in the Hague, all put political issues right back
into the debate. Political anti-Americanism has flared up anew and, according to
some observers, even seems to supersede cultural criticism. This takes us back to the
beginning of this essay and current assessments that anti-Americanism has its origins
in political culture, notably the culture of foreign relations. Russell Berman talks
about a “postdemocratic anti-Americanism” that criticizes the U.S. refusal to transfer sovereignty to international bodies.98 Political scientist and sociologist Andrei
I am indebted to Ivan Gregurić for this hint.
Even if not confronted by outright rejection, in Eastern Europe the perception of America remains conditioned by the “old ways.” Elizabeth Dunn’s study of a rural Polish baby-food plant that was
privatized by the U.S. company Gerber shows that workers as well as middle and senior management
representatives remain ambivalent toward their new employer as well as toward the general influx of
American values. Working on the shop floor for sixteen months, Dunn wanted to know how employees
who were used to a state social system experienced the new economic model, one that stressed different
performance criteria, incentives, organizational models, and market-oriented production. While both
workers and managers quickly understood the inner workings of the new way, employees generated
meanings and results from this experience that remained in line with their former ideological framework,
complete with shortages, self-help mechanisms, lack of supplies, and constant troubleshooting. Elizabeth
C. Dunn, Privatizing Poland: Baby Food, Big Business, and the Remaking of Labor (Ithaca, N.Y., 2004).
97 Dina Iordanova, “Political Resentment versus Cultural Submission: The Duality of U.S. Representations in Bulgarian Media,” in Kamalipour, Images of the U.S. around the World, 71–86, quote 84,
85.
98 Berman, Anti-Americanism, 43– 44. Great Britain has become perhaps the most complex and complicated case in Europe today, a situation aggravated by the fact that the country’s “special relationship”
with America—which competed during the Cold War with Germany’s special relationship with the
United States—has also involved a peculiar diplomatic dimension. Today, America seems to be more
present, prevalent, and prominent in British foreign policy than ever before. But outside the intellectual
circuit, British people tend to give less thought to the United States than to any other nation in Europe.
As a result, recent British anti-American criticism has focused largely on American power and the
nation’s imperialistic ambitions. Opposition to the war in Iraq, according to Michael Mosbacher and
Digby Anderson, may have less to do with the Middle East than with British opposition to American
95
96
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Markovits even argues that the current wave of anti-Americanism originates first in
anti-Zionist and antisemitic tendencies, and second in a list of complaints more than
a century old that now target George W. Bush for abuse. The United States, concludes Markovits, represents to Europe an expression of “the Other,” everything that
Europe does not want to be.99
Berman, Markovits, and many others get away a bit too easily with their contemporary analyses of anti-Americanism, because they overlook the cultural origins
of European political criticism, the mutual dependence between philo- and antiAmericanism, and the fundamentally historical dimension of the phenomenon. Since
the late nineteenth century, a true rapprochement of both continents’ social and
economic conditions has overshadowed the European debate on America. With the
advent of modernity, Americanization changed from a utopian vision into a very real
possibility for most Europeans. The cultural rapprochement resulted in Europeans’
having learned to understand the United States as their own immediate future. This
lent a dynamic to the debate that had not existed before the Civil War. After 1920,
and especially after 1945, the cultural, economic, and political hegemony of the
United States heavily influenced all critics’ assessments of the “American menace.”
Disillusionment—the loss of illusions that Europeans had projected onto the New
World and that the United States could never have fulfilled—and the specter of an
unavoidable course into the future merged to cause a polarized debate that revealed,
above all, indigenous hopes, ideals, and value systems. Historical reality played much
less of a role than American ideals, which, however, Americans chose to realize in
terms very different from the hopes of European observers.
European anti-Americanism, then, originated in the decades after the American
Revolution and turned into a cultural vision (or critique) of modernity in the nineteenth century. That critique, however, became popular only after World War I and
political after World War II. Between the late 1940s and the end of the Cold War,
political criticism remained consistently embedded in the critique of cultural imperialism, and it also became increasingly academic. While the 1990s witnessed a
temporary retreat of political anti-Americanism, the events following 9/11 re-created
a scenario reminiscent of the 1950s—but without the European sympathy generated
by years of foreign investment, cultural exchange, and political goodwill on the part
of the United States. While occasionally profiting from the political climate and often
used by parties on the left and the right, anti-Americanism in Europe has remained
a cultural grassroots habitus to which official reactions, state representatives, and
governmental policy have contributed very little.
Why, then, has the phenomenon of anti-Americanism proven so enduring? Traditions and historical continuity play an important role in this scenario, but it is the
adaptive quality of the discourse, its chameleon-like ability to change colors rapidly
according to its environment, that has made it so enduring. The longevity of antiAmericanism lies in its conservative outlook, which attracts followers on the left; its
cultural criticism, which integrates elements of political and economic concerns; and
power and George Bush. Mosbacher and Anderson, “Recent Trends in British Anti-Americanism,” in
Hollander, Understanding Anti-Americanism, 84 –104.
99 Andrei S. Markovits, Amerika, Dich hasst’s sich besser: Antiamerikanismus und Antisemitismus in
Europa (Hamburg, 2004).
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its consistent dialectical juxtaposition with philo-Americanism, which is designed to
respond to local concerns over identity, mores, and modernity. Over the course of
the decades, the cultural discourse has always fueled ideological and diplomatic disputes (including those spurred by the New Left), but it has done so by changing its
face innumerable times. After 1776 and throughout the nineteenth century, America
remained an “enduring vision” to most Europeans, one that promised many of the
ideals held by European liberal thinkers but also warned of their pitfalls.100 In the
twentieth century, that vision and promise began to crumble when the downside of
mass society, industrialization, and individualism, along with the ascent of the United
States as a hegemonic state, began to reveal itself. For many Europeans, the American Century was one in which the United States became a reality and one that they
hoped did not reflect European progress any longer.101
Culture, conservatism, and elitism have remained the common denominators of
European anti-Americanism, while the fascination with Taylorism, Fordism, technology, and sports has consistently marked its opposite, philo-Americanism. Future
research may well ponder the question whether there was a Catholic variety of antiAmericanism or to what extent the debates revealed the characteristics of a gender
discourse.102 Beyond those par values, however, the sample analyses from various
regions and countries east and west of the Iron Curtain reveal that the function and
direction of this phenomenon remain completely dependent on local conditions.
French cultural nationalism, Russian Slavophilism, and West German democratic
idealism never had much in common. Visions of “America” have little in common
with reality; what matters is their function in countries and societies outside the
United States. In a way, then, the analysis of European philo- and anti-Americanism
tells us little about the United States or the nation’s international relations, but a
lot about national peculiarities in Europe. These discourses have done more to divide than to unite Europeans, and they fall far short of creating a European identity.
One question remains: If philo- and anti-Americanism illuminate the heterogeneity of Europe, what does the discourse mean for the United States, not only the
nation’s past but its present and its future? Most empires have experienced the basic
historical lesson that power generates suspicion, and the more power a hegemonic
nation exerts, the more antagonistic other nations turn. It seems that U.S. leaders
in former decades were less oblivious to this fact than their successors are today. In
the interwar period and even during the early Cold War years, a number of American
academics grasped this point, and they tried to warn policymakers that as the U.S.
had become a new kind of empire, it was inevitable that people abroad, in the words
of Reinhold Niebuhr, “should hate those who hold power over them.”103 Given the
100 Not surprisingly, one of the most popular textbooks on American history in Europe is titled The
Enduring Vision. Paul S. Boyer, Clifford E. Clark, Jr., Joseph F. Kett, Thomas L. Purvis, Harald Sitkoff,
and Nancy Woloch, The Enduring Vision: A History of the American People (Lexington, Mass., 1992).
101 Tony Judt has recently argued that traditional pacifism aside, Europe in the last sixty years has
come to see itself as a continent dedicated to working out international conflicts solely through communication and compromise. The military campaign in Iran, Iraq, and elsewhere threatens to endanger
the approachment between Europe and Turkey, and thereby Europe’s culture of conflict management.
Judt, “Europe vs. America,” New York Review of Books 52, no. 2 (February 10, 2005), http://www.ny
books.com/articles/17726 (accessed July 23, 2006).
102 For a beginning, see Nolan, “Consuming America, Producing Gender.”
103 Cited in David Michael Smith, “U.S. Global Tyranny,” http://www.abusaleh.com/index
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polemic assessments of anti-Americanism by observers such as Gibson, Berman,
Hollander, and countless others, I sometimes wonder where these perceptive observers are today. For the challenge for the United States today is how to live and
act conscientiously in a world where people will always blame the Americans.
.php?id⫽502 (accessed March 8, 2005). See also Reinhold Niebuhr, Christianity and Power Politics (New
York, 1940).
Jessica C. E. Gienow-Hecht is a Heisenberg fellow at the Johann Wolfgang
Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, where she has taught since 2004. Her
study Transmission Impossible: American Journalism as Cultural Diplomacy in
Postwar Germany, 1945–1955 (Louisiana State University Press, 1999) was cowinner of the Stuart Bernath Book Prize and the Myrna Bernard Prize, both
awarded by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations. GienowHecht is the editor of the series “Explorations in Culture and International History,” published by Berghahn Books. She is currently finishing a study for the
University of Chicago Press titled Sound Diplomacy: Music and Emotions in German-American Relations since 1850.
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OCTOBER 2006

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