In Defense of America (3 page)

These bleak findings were echoed in a survey of American and European public opinion by the German Marshall Fund, which found that although fewer than a fifth of Europeans approved of President Bush’s policies, nearly half thought the 2008 presidential election would make no difference to their feelings, regardless of who won.
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The Background Noise of British Life

Why do these feelings run so deep in those European countries that are America’s natural allies? Let me start with Britain, because it is the closest European nation to the United States in geography, language, and traditional sympathy. It would be wrong to say that the dominant tone is hostile to America; instead, it is rather a presumption of intimacy, an assumption that anyone knows enough about the United States to offer an expert opinion. But it is startling how often the mixture of affection, admiration, and condescension resolves itself into an expression of overt dislike.

Margaret Drabble, one of Britain’s most distinguished novelists, wrote this in May 2003, two months after the Iraq invasion: “My anti-Americanism has become almost uncontrollable. It has possessed me, like a disease. It rises up in my throat like acid reflux, that fashionable American sickness. I now loathe the United States and what it has done to Iraq and the rest of the helpless world.” She continued, “I detest Disneyfication, I detest Coca-Cola, I detest burgers, I detest sentimental and violent Hollywood movies that tell lies about history. I detest American imperialism, American infantilism, and American triumphalism about victories it didn’t even win.”
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So what, you might say. But appealing to such attitudes has become useful political currency. In March 2006, Ken Livingstone, then the mayor of London, called Robert Tuttle, the American ambassador to the United Kingdom, a “chiseling little crook” for deciding that U.S. embassy staff would not pay the new “congestion charge,” then at £5 a day, for driving into central London. Myself, I think the embassy had a point in arguing that this was a local tax and that —as is the case elsewhere in the world —its diplomats should be exempt, although it presented its case (as too often) astonishingly badly. But the mayor, a maverick with a taste for headlines and more fondness for Venezuela than the United States, judged that the insult would be popular.

Those who object to such attacks, particularly on the political right, often accuse the BBC of systematic bias toward the left, against the United States and against the possibility of success in Iraq. In my experience, the charge is greatly overstated, but in June 2007, a report commissioned by the BBC Board of Governors said that while coverage was generally impartial, the United States was one area in which the broadcaster showed bias. In the report, Justin Webb, one of the BBC’s long-standing reporters in Washington, DC, said that he often had to fight the “casual anti-Americanism” of his colleagues. “In the tone of what we say about America, we have a tendency to scorn and deride,” he said. “And I’m not just talking about [President] George Bush, although he’s part of the problem. I’m talking about a much wider sense in which we don’t give America any kind of moral weight in our broadcasts.”
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Leaving aside the debate about the BBC, there is no question that there exists a pronounced vein of anti-American attitudes across both the political left and right. It is noisiest on the left, among those who cut their teeth on the anti-Vietnam and antinuclear demonstrations of the 1970s and 1980s, and among those who now see an American hand in the worst effects of globalization. Tony Blair’s wing of the Labour Party, which he had painfully dragged toward the political center, is passionately pro-American as an article of faith, although some of its members have become more subdued, inhibited even, about asserting those shared values, while Gordon Brown’s wing has been noticeably cooler. Anti-American sentiments also have had a long tradition among conservatives, nervous about the erosion of British culture and identity, although they are balanced by the high Tory grandees, former generals and Foreign Office knights of the realm, meeting in the mirrored breakfast rooms of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Knightsbridge to affirm their belief in the transatlantic alliance.

The Attitudes Were There Before Iraq

In London, after the Iraq invasion, a bitter joke among resident Americans was whether to call themselves Canadians to avoid getting into discussions about the war. In a BBC online debate on just that question in April 2006, a Canadian contributor said, “If you suspect your ‘Canadian’ is actually American, ask them to name three provinces (excluding Ontario) or what the capital of Saskatchewan is,” adding, “We don’t like them either, by the way.”
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But Iraq only reactivated attitudes that were there already. On November 2, 2001, in a shocking and much-noticed essay called “The Spirit of Terrorism” in
Le Monde,
the admired French cultural critic and philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote of his “prodigious jubilation” at the sight of the two planes slamming into the Twin Towers. The superpower had, he said, “through its unbearable power, engendered all that violence brewing around the world,” adding that “we have dreamed of this event, because everybody must dream of the destruction of any power hegemonic to that degree.”

Meanwhile, in Britain, the BBC issued a rare public apology for the edition of its
Question Time
television panel program two days after September 11, 2001, during which members of the audience attacked the United States for bringing the tragedy on itself through its “anti-Arab” policy in the Middle East. According to many reports, Phil Lader, the former U.S. ambassador to the UK who was on the panel and was shouted down by the audience, was close to tears.

These were not isolated incidents. One leading academic analysis noted “an astonishing indifference on display” after 9/11. “From Mexico to Europe to Asia, the search for rationalizations for the attacks set in, mostly led by public intellectuals and sometimes manifested in barely concealed malicious joy,” said academics Michael Werz, transatlantic fellow of the German Marshall Fund, and Barbara Fried, a visiting scholar at the University of California, in 2007. “America, the alleged source of violence and all ills, finally had received its comeuppance for its historical role as a global power.”
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Why?

Some of this rising hostility, even before Iraq, can be attributed to the demise of the Soviet Union, which left the United States as the world’s sole superpower, the “hyperpower,” in the phrase coined by Hubert Védrine, French foreign minister, in 1999. Tony Blair, in a two-hour interview with
The Times
in May 2002 which was largely devoted to the transatlantic relationship, said the inspiration for the “anti-American voices” within Europe was “jealousy about America’s position, worry about American culture dominating European culture. Also, partly, America is the world superpower. Anyone who is preeminent always takes a bit of flak.”
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As if to rub home Britain’s dependence on that eminence, the interview had taken place squashed into an eight-seater plane on the way to Madrid, as Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair’s adviser, griped that parliament would not let the prime minister have the equivalent of Air Force One.

The flak which Tony Blair predicted reliably arrived. In Europe, as memory of the Cold War retreated, countries were suddenly able to criticize the United States without depending on it to defend them from the Soviet Union. European countries also became readier to see American action as high-handed. Unfair as it might seem, in the 1999 Kosovo conflict, the United States was accused both of imperialism in leading the military action and of refusing to get enough involved when it declined to put its troops on the ground.

At the same time, the blossoming anti-globalization movement was appropriated by its most energetic campaigners to attack the spread of all things American. The end of the Cold War allowed Europe to explore again its sense that it had very different cultural and intellectual traditions from the New World —that it had, at heart, a very different spirit. Peter Beinart, just before 9/11, put it this way in the
New Republic:
“During the Cold War, Europe resented America for what it did; today, Europe resents America for what it believes, global warming, missile defense, the death penalty, economic policy —each dispute further illustrated this transatlantic cultural gulf.”
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Peter Schneider, the German writer and academic, was distressed on Americans’ behalf for the sacrifice of soul that had come with their perfection of the body. “One of the great unsolved mysteries of American culture is the devotion Americans have for their teeth. . . . Those with perfect teeth unwittingly suffer a loss. They cannot appreciate the idea that natural diversity or incompleteness is part of a person’s character.”
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Long History of European Anti-Americanism

It is worth saying a word about the deep roots of anti-American feeling across Europe, particularly in France, in arguing why the phenomenon is not about to go away. Britain, France, and Germany were all losers from the “American Century,” as Alexander Stephan, a professor of German at Ohio State University who runs a project studying anti-Americanism around the world, points out.
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They lost empires, territory, and financial power as America rose. But in Britain and Germany, any anti-American feeling was tempered by a strong sense of being closely intertwined with the United States —in Britain’s case, with a common language, whose value in constantly affirming that link is impossible to overstate. The old British left might have agonized over the erosion of British culture through American films and music, and George Orwell may have lamented “half-understood import[s] from America,”
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but in a postwar Britain still dealing with rationed food supplies, America was a land of unattainable plenty.

There were crises in the relationship at the highest level; Britain’s failed attempt to get control of the Suez Canal in 1956 did not help, nor did the McCarthyism of the 1950s. But postwar cultural exchanges such as the Fulbright Program had a profound impact on future British politicians and intellectuals, impressing them with the best of the United States. In his 2006 essay “Britain: In Between,” Hugh Wilford, an associate professor of history at California State University, quotes Margaret Thatcher describing her first visit to the United States in 1967 as “an excitement” that “never really subsided.”
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In Germany, dependence on the United States, financially and managerially, as it rebuilt itself after the Second World War mitigated against wholesale rejection of American values. Germany does, in any case, see more of itself in the United States than do many European countries, from its federalism after the war, with so much power devolved to the states, to the structure of its education; from its kindergartens to its universities; not to mention the cuisine of hamburgers, frankfurters, and endless breads and cookies.

Of course, the anti-Vietnam and antinuclear demonstrations of the 1970s and 1980s seized Germans’ imaginations, and anti-American sentiment was powerful enough for Gerhard Schröder, as chancellor, to win the 2002 election based on extravagant attacks on the United States ahead of the looming war in Iraq. But the sense of a tie easily restored was always there, as Angela Merkel, his successor, appreciated.

France is different, and conscious of that difference. An ally of America against Britain in the War of Independence, its own revolution of 1789 inspired by ideals of liberty and equality, it has nonetheless, more than any other European country, set itself up as a moral and political challenger to the United States, and as a model of a different kind of nation. France is the Western European country where anti-Americanism is most openly articulated and most closely intertwined with national identity, noted Philippe Roger, a French academic who produced a magisterial analysis of French historical antipathy to the United States shortly before the Iraq invasion.

It is, as Nicolas Sarkozy, now France’s president, said with understatement in Washington, DC, in 2006, a “complicated” relationship. France’s early alliance with America lasted only until its own revolution of 1789. Walter Mead, of the Council on Foreign Relations, discussing Roger’s arguments, notes, “The short-lived period of Franco-American unity during the American Revolution” was inspired partly by France’s desire for “revenge on Britain for the humiliations of the Seven Years’ War,” a conflict which had drawn in all the great powers of Europe.
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There have always been figures in French history who championed American values, beginning with the Marquis de Lafayette, who fought with George Washington and returned home to argue for the American way. (The White House, in a heavy-handed and high-calorie compliment, served President Sarkozy a dessert called Lafayette’s Legacy on his November 2007 visit.) There have been spasms when shared republican ideals have expressed themselves in romantic gestures, most solidly in the presentation of the Statue of Liberty by France to the United States in 1886. But Alexis de Tocqueville’s
Democracy in America,
published in 1835 and 1840, was derided in France for the rest of the century for “sugarcoating” the United States. France backed the South in the Civil War (partly for its perceived Latinate rather than “Anglo-Saxon” culture), hoping to see the war put a limit on American power. In 1898, when America declared war on Spain, France became alarmed that it might be next. That was the point, Roger argues, when French anti-Americanism became serious.

France then resented the late entry (from its point of view) of American troops into the First World War in 1917, and felt the terms of the settlement at the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 left it shackled to American moneylenders (a provocation for anti-Semitic French productions, including the notorious
L’Oncle Shylock,
or
Uncle Shylock,
a play, of sorts, on “Uncle Sam”).