These days Europeans are hearing demands from around the world to resist the US. The big awakening came at a seminar in Chennai, India, when the topic of America was discussed. The EU Constitution and WTO negotiations were all well and good, but the Indian participants thought that the EU’s raison d’etre ought to be one thing above all: to put the arrogant US in its place.
The prevailing mood against the United States runs deeper than the concrete topics of policy dispute. When Angela Merkel traveled to the US/EU summit in Washington, she met the tamest, most cooperative American government in a very long time. American diplomacy is working overtime to negotiate within NATO and with the Russians about the controversial missile defense program. The Washington government has given up its grandiose plans of reform for the Islamic world (which looked to the Europeans like megalomania) and has returned to working with the EU on a more traditional Middle East peace policy. Humbled by Iraq and weakened, the Bush administration is probably a more comfortable partner than the Clinton government—still mourned in Europe—ever was.
But American humility doesn’t help America’s image. Everything American has become radioactive in (Western) Europe—whoever comes into contact with it too closely and for too long becomes contaminated to the point of unelectability. Something potentially universal, a form of worldwide bellyaching in varying strengths, is seen in the criticism of the United States. Anti-Americanism is a new global ideology, the “Leitkultur” for protest against prevail-ing conditions.
There is something pathological to this resentment-laden anti-Americanism. When today’s Arab world looks to the American-dominated West and feels backward in comparison, it is with a paradoxical mixture of disgust and fascination: “Yankee, go home, but take me with you!” The USA is being branded as barbarian by globalization’s losers, who want to feel at least morally and culturally superior, as was the pattern during the classic European anti-Americanism from the 19th and early 20th centuries.
The historic breaks from 1989 to 2001 only intensified the emotional and political polarization with regard to the USA. The Iraq War and George W. Bush are also no longer popular in Poland or the Czech Republic, but the disappointment did not break a fundamental trust. It is exactly the opposite in the other half of the once divided world, and especially so among earlier close allies such as those in Germany, Turkey or South Korea. There America is just the superpower that has fallen to the outer edges after 9/11 and has largely used up the thanks for its support in the Cold War. The world has become fundamentally different from an old European perspective, but the United States has as well. For Prague or Warsaw, on the other hand, in a changed reality the USA has remained the same force for good and the same indispensable protective power. This difference in perceptions is driving Europe and the Atlantic alliance apart, and it is not at all easy to say who is right.
Anti-Americanism is the phenomenon of a world dominated by America—or at least of a world in which America is the strongest force and the most dynamic factor. There will always be losers in globalization, but will they still direct their anger towards the United States when globalization has an Asian face instead of an American one?
This article has been shortened from its original version, which first appeared in German under the title Das Bauchgrimmen des Erdballs: Von der Subkultur zur Leitkultur – ein kollektiver Anti-Amerikanismus erobert die Welt, published in Die Zeit on April 26, 2007.
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May 23, 2007
Michael John Williams, Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, Silver Contributor (62)
European leaders know that although US foreign policy has been disastrous under President Bush, Europe needs to work with the United States, despite the difficulties at hand. The Bush Administration now realizes that it cannot ride roughshod over international institutions and international norms of law and order, and anyone elected in 2008 is going to pony-up to work with Europe and Asia, not against these regions in order to effect US policies. Now is the best time to engage the US (and please do so in a way that does not reek of ‘I told you so sentiment’). It would be very foolhardy to think that playing the anti-American card will benefit international security, the economy or the environment in any way, shape or form. Unfortunately, the White House has made it difficult for European politicians to be pro-American – no one ever said, however, that good politicking was easy.