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WHAT IS ANTI-AMERICANISM?
The last respectable prejudice?
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself, I am large, I contain multitudes,” wrote Walt Whitman. The words from his self-referential magnum opus Song of Myself can also be read as a hymn to his nation (in fact the work’s original title was Poem of Walt Whitman, an American). America seen from this Whitmanesque viewpoint is a vast and contradictory land. While this emphasis on variety and paradox would seem the obvious starting point from which to understand America, it is an outlook eschewed by anti-American commentary. This commentary reduces America’s vastness to a series of stereotypes and caricatures, in which America’s essence is described exclusively through negative examples drawn from history or the contemporary era. From this narrow and biased focus emerges the spectre of anti-Americanism. Selectivity and caricature have long been the tools of trade in explaining America. Oscar Wilde opined that: “English people are far more interested in American barbarism than they are in American civilization.”1 Similarly, George Bernard Shaw, whose quotes are often confused with Wilde’s, ventured that “one must distinguish between civilized America and barbarian America.”2 This polarisation suggests that there are at least two Americas but it misses the bigger point that America, just like other nations, is good, bad and all that is in between.3 The ordinariness of much of American life is lost as America is constantly fantasised, sensationalised, and caricatured. The ubiquity of cameras and smart-phones has meant that wackiness and weirdness is increasingly easy to find in the US,4 but the disproportionate attention it enjoys in the international media reinforces certain stereotypes.5 Meanwhile, the public thirst for American stupidity is insatiable as the recent success of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who is America? indicates.6 This insatiability has a long history with James Russell Lowell writing in 1869 that “for some reason or other, the European has rarely been able to see America except in caricature.”7 Trump’s 2016 drama-filled, often hyperbolic election campaign and then presidency makes the case for seeing American as a land of variety, moderation, and nuance difficult. However, more so than with George W. Bush’s election and presidency, people around the world seem aware of the consistently high levels of internal opposition that Trump’s presidency provokes.
How to explain the tendency to see this exaggerated and mythologised – or screen version – of America as the reality? A big part of the story is that American leaders and celebrities often portray America in a grandiose manner when delivering widely viewed speeches. America’s grand founding documents, its idealistic and sweeping foreign policy pronouncements and later its celluloid dream factories have made it the most talked about country, the most desired immigrant destination and the most resented nation on earth for almost 250 years.8 Since its founding, America has been both admired as a bold new experiment and criticised for its grandiosity, excessive self-regard and hypocrisy. Americans and non-Americans alike regularly refer to America’s proclaimed exceptionalism, which, as this book argues, is a source of enormous belief in America and significant disappointment when the reality falls well short of the promise. For many refugees and immigrants, ambitious actors and musicians – and anyone else intent on making it big – America’s self-proclaimed specialness, greatness and exceptionalism creates the allure that it is a dream factory for those who arrive on its shores.
For many Americans, this exceptionalist tradition is bound up in a strong patriotism and an enduring belief in the “American Dream”.9 However, many observers of America believe the opposite; rather than a dream, American exceptionalism has created a nightmarish nation whose ideas, companies and military wreak havoc wherever they go.10 This polarised view of America as the land of opportunity on one hand and the land of destruction and injustice on the other is central to the notions of pro- and anti-Americanism. In one of the first, and still one of the most insightful books on anti-Americanism, Henry Pelling summarised the above strands of thought with the following conclusion:
Hope and disillusion will long continue to colour the European view of America, as they did when [Samuel] Gompers crossed the Atlantic in 1909 to discover that people in Western Europe looked at his country as if in one of two distorting mirrors, either convex or concave…. To understand the Americans as they really are requires not only an appreciation of the peculiarities of the American environment, but also a recognition that, in its better features and its worse, human nature everywhere and at all times is, as Thucydides said, very much the same.11
America’s power and imprint is so vast that it is challenging to talk about this nation in the considered and moderate manner recommended by Pelling. A more measured approach to America needs to illuminate both the positive and negative aspects (and all that is in between) of American culture, society, politics, and foreign policy. The anti-American outlook usually exclusively focuses on the negative and fails to recognise the variety America encompasses. The core markers of such anti-Americanism are a distorted or narrowcast focus, a reflexive dislike, and a tendency to conflate the nation’s people with their government and its policies. One of the most obvious examples of this anti-Americanism is the belief aired following September 11, 2001, that “they had it coming”.12 This is the kind of comment that Todd Gitlin seems to have had in mind when he wrote: “When hatred of foreign policies ignites into hatred of an entire people and their civilization, then thinking is dead and demonology lives.”13
My analysis in this book should not be read as a blanket defence of the US. Rather, I am making the case for a differentiated understanding of the US because I strongly believe that American foreign and domestic politics is often deleterious and dangerous and therefore targeted and intelligent critique is a necessity.14 In making this point, I follow in the footsteps of James Madison who declared in the Federalist Papers # 6 that “in doubtful cases, particularly where the national councils may be warped by some strong passion or momentary interest, the presumed or known opinion of the impartial world may be the best guide to be followed.” Of course the outside world is seldom, if ever, impartial, but the principle is still sound. While I strongly believe that powerful nations need to be particularly closely analysed, criticism of any nation needs to be based on an examination of detailed evidence rather than sweeping generalisations and prejudices. Given the unprecedented power and influence of the United States, close scrutiny is a necessity but a narrowcast or a priori view of America’s motives and behaviour will inevitably lead to distortions and foreclose sensible conversations and debates. Henry Pelling made a similar point about a different time period in America and the British Left (1957): “The historical perspective provided by these studies inevitably suggests that dangerous distortion of the facts is likely to take place among those who commit themselves most fully to an a priori view of politics. Socialists of the mid-twentieth century seem to be often as blind to the merits of American society as Radicals of the mid-nineteenth century were blind to its faults.”15
As the opening remarks to this chapter would suggest, I see anti-Americanism pejoratively and quite distinct from criticism. Thus, for me, distinguishing between these two outlooks is crucial. Although the call to differentiate the two is regularly expressed, few scholars provide a sound analytical basis for doing so. Instead they shrug their shoulders and declare that it is “all about interpretation.” In posing the question of “What is anti-Americanism?” in this chapter, I seek to provide what I see to be desperately needed – a precise definition of Anti-Americanism. When writing about anti-Americanism, an acknowledgement of the variety and diversity of global opinions on Americans and their culture must be made. It is important to avoid generalisations about American culture and politics and its critics. Two further preliminary points are necessary before offering a definition of anti-Americanism. Writing about anti-Americanism forces scholars to put their stake to being a generalist on the line; after all, this is a debate about global opinions on 328 million Americans and their culture, politics and history. Further, given the vastness of the topic, one needs to be sceptical about coming to conclusions too hastily. Donald Trump’s election as President of the US makes the need for well-targeted and effective criticism of the US as relevant as ever. Trump, anti-Americanism and American exceptionalism will be discussed in the concluding chapter of this book. In this first chapter, I begin by examining what I see as the two big issues that threw discussions of anti-Americanism back into the limelight, namely September 11, 2001 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq and its aftermath. From these much analysed events I will move on to discuss how anti-Americanism has been measured by public opinion surveys and defined in popular commentary. I will contend that most analysis is inadequate and generally far too imprecise before finally presenting my own typology of anti-Americanism.
The two elephants in the room
September 11, 2001 and America’s invasion of Iraq have led, in the past two decades, to an unprecedented level of discussion about the issue of anti-Americanism. Cataclysmic events such as terrorist attacks and wars do not engender subtle debate. In place of critical and nuanced thinking, simplistic “for us or against us” clichés abound. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 and the ensuing response from much of the American media and the Bush administration started a global conversation about the virtues and vices of the United States. The attacks on the two World Trade Center buildings in New York City, the Pentagon building in Washington and the planned fourth plane attack on either the Capitol Building or the White House were immediately seen as an attack on American culture, society and politics; in other words, an attack on Americanism. Once the attacks were claimed by al Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden, the conflict shifted to become a portent of the ideological war between “Islamofascism” and Western/American Civilisation. As I will discuss later, this erroneous position was not only adopted, as one might expect, by the terrorists but also by certain politicians and polemists in the West. It is this ideological dimension of the discussions which is most fascinating to me. In my mind the ideological face of anti-Americanism is where we move beyond mere individual prejudice to collective prejudice. However, as I will explore in the coming pages, viewing anti-Americanism as an ideology is problematic when those most vehemently against America frequently offer contradictory views. Further, to view the issue as a clash of ideologies – Americanism vs “Islamofascism” – or a clash of civilisations is unsound, for only a small number of Muslims in 2001 supported al Qaeda or its attacks on America. It was a grave error by the Bush administration and allies like the Blair government in Britain and the Howard government in Australia to exaggerate the extent of this support for al Qaeda and terrorism. This was done at times for electoral purposes to make life hard for their so-called “soft” political opponents; something that, with hindsight, is unforgivable. This error of judgement – based often on these immoral political calculations – created a certain momentum to “do more and more” and led eventually to the disastrous decision to invade Iraq in 2003. There was a lot of sensible and reasonable opposition all around the world to making Iraq a central target in the war on terror. Just like during the Vietnam War,16 proponents of the war in Iraq used real and exaggerated cases of anti-Americanism to help silence dissent.17 The tragedy of the approach adopted by Bush and his allies abroad, which linked al Qaeda not only to the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan but much more broadly to include fabricated links with Iraq, have been a significant factor in increasing anti-Western sentiment and terrorism by newly radicalised Muslims. The rise of ISIS is the most extreme example of how exaggerating and targeting terrorist connections and sympathies in Iraq created a significantly more violent strand of anti-Americanism.
In the aftermath of the violent attacks of 9/11 most governments and peoples around the world spoke out in condemnation. However, it soon became apparent that man...
