Pride and Prejudice
Mini Teaser: Anti-Americanism takes many forms -- most of them unfair. But as long as it strives to be a City upon a Hill, America Must learn to live with it.
Jean Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism (London: Verso, 2002), 105 pp., $13.
Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 165 pp., $21.95.
Alan McPherson, Yankee No! Anti-Americanism in U.S.-Latin American Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 257 pp. , $39.95.
Clyde Prestowitz, Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (New York: BasicBooks, 2003), 328 pp., $26.
Jean-Franรงois Revel, Anti-Americanism (San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2003), 176 pp., $25.95.
Anti-Americanism poses a paradoxical problem. It is visibly more widespread today than when the Soviet Union was producing a steady output of anti-American propaganda. Admittedly, there were always spontaneous anti-American sentiments throughout the world quite independent of Soviet inspiration. Still, the Soviet collapse might have been expected at least to weaken anti-Americanism. That has not been the case. Indeed the Soviet collapse could not even put an end to the anti-capitalism that has always been key to anti-Americanism. Instead they re-emerged, apparently stronger than ever, and joined together in anti-globalism.
How can this be explained? Anti-Americanism can best be understood by holding two seemingly incompatible propositions in balance. The first is that hostility towards the United States is a rational and justified response to its actual flaws and misdeeds--to the unsettling processes of modernization it sets in motion, to the discernible defects of American social institutions, and to the social injustices prevalent in American society. The bill of particulars in foreign policy includes alleged or real American intervention in the internal affairs of countries around the world, a bloated, imperialistic military establishment (the major instrument of such interventions), economic exploitation of poor, third world countries, the ravaging of the natural resources of the world causing serious environmental damage, and the corruption of the masses by mindless entertainment. In domestic policy, the indictments emphasize racism, sexism, immense economic inequalities and rampant commercialism.
The second proposition holds that anti-Americanism is a largely irrational predisposition somewhat similar to racism, sexism, antisemitism and other scapegoating impulses. Thus, virtually any widely shared group grievance can become a source of anti-Americanism since all such grievances are easier to bear if some familiar, powerful and prominent entity can be held responsible for them.
There are also domestic variants of anti-Americanism. They tend to be deeper, more visceral and more difficult to grasp than foreign forms of anti-Americanism since the latter are often connected with more tangible and identifiable collective grievances. More often than not, anti-Americanism is also associated with the adversary culture. The angry anti-Americanism of individuals like Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore, the late Edward Said, Susan Sontag or Gore Vidal has a certain unfathomable purity. Its defining characteristic is the unshakeable belief that the United States (or American society) represents something uniquely, self-evidently and matchlessly depraved and evil that has no parallel in history.
Both domestic and foreign anti-Americanism have a complex and close relationship with each other, providing mutual support and inspiration. The phenomenal success of Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 in Europe is a good example.
It is not easy to separate the reasonable critiques of particular American institutions or policies from a virulent, scapegoating anti-Americanism. Sometimes justified critiques merge with the diffuse, undifferentiated hostility. But it can be done--and the volumes reviewed here represent varying degrees of success in that endeavor. They also represent but a small sample of the growing literature on anti-Americanism ranging from the purest example of the visceral kind (Baudrillard) to the energetic refutation of such attitudes (Revel). In between are more specialized and scholarly explorations, such as the examination of how the phenomenon has been stimulated (allegedly) by the Bush Administration (Prestowitz) and a historical study of three episodes of Latin American anti-Americanism (McPherson). There is finally a study of the connections between the longstanding Western critiques of the West (closely tied to anti-Americanism) and more recent non-Western rejections of the West (Buruma and Margalit).
J.F. Revel is perhaps a good starting point since he sets out to anatomize the anti-American phenomenon. His credentials are that he is a well-known and longtime critic of those Western intellectuals hostile to Western values and institutions and that he has written perceptively about American society in the past. In this passionate polemic directed principally at a French audience, he focuses on the important and influential French variety of anti-Americanism. Much of the book is a critique of contemporary France, its politics and elites seen through the prism of their attitudes towards America. And a paradox that emerges from his argument is that many of the actual problems and flaws prevalent in French society mirror those supposedly peculiar to the United States.
Yet the book is more a rebuttal of the assertions of anti-Americans than an inquiry into the sources of anti-Americanism. One theme running through the book is that the hostile critiques of America are often contradictory. Thus the United States is criticized both for "unilateralism" (throwing around its weight without consulting or cooperating with other nations) and for "isolationism" (not doing enough to solve or alleviate various problems around the world). Revel also demonstrates how anti-globalism and anti-Americanism have converged into a single ideological phenomenon. There is a persuasive refutation of the "root cause" argument that seeks to mitigate or excuse terrorism. Revel convincingly demolishes the idea that poverty causes terrorism.
Of particular interest to American readers is his reminder that anti-Americanism is also prominent on the European Right. Right and Left are united in a shared contempt for liberalism, which the United States represents--at any rate in its old-fashioned incarnation. The anti-Americanism of the Right (in France and elsewhere) is closely linked to its nationalistic tendencies. As elsewhere in Europe, it vilifies the United States because of its multiculturalism and openness to new immigrants at a time when western European countries face large numbers of unwanted immigrants as well as serious problems in assimilating those already within their borders. (Arguably, Islamic anti-Americanism is much closer to the right- than left-wing variety.)
While most of the substantive arguments in the book are on target, some of its bolder assertions could have been documented more carefully for the benefit of skeptics. It is noted, for instance, that in 1994, at the height of a famine, North Korea purchased forty submarines from Russia. I do not doubt for a moment that buying weapons took precedence over feeding the population, but I find the figure of forty (even if diesel) submarines rather large and would have welcomed information on where it came from. Also, even Revel's strong points might have been conveyed in a less-overheated polemical style. His often heavy-handed sarcasm will find favorable reception mainly among those who already share his premises. His tone suggests that much of anti-Americanism is so patently absurd that it can be easily discredited. This overlooks real failings in American society.
In particular, Revel ignores the substantial flaws of American mass culture--a potent source of anti-Americanism among both European intellectuals and Muslim clerics. He dismisses the notion that Hollywood is "the capital of bad taste, vulgarity and banality"--a characterization that may be exaggerated, but it resonates in many a civilized breast. It is of course true that American mass culture is popular and widely imitated all over the world, but that says little about its quality or about its impact. It is the very ubiquity of, say, MTV that alarms tradition-minded parents outside America. Unlike similar parents inside America, moreover, they have no wider knowledge of the United States that would allow them to put MTV into the context of a society that also has first-rate symphony orchestras, fine museums, first-class bookstores and various other barriers and alternatives to the mindlessness of much of American popular culture.
Despite these reservations, Revel acquaints the American reader with the specifics of a particular French anti-Americanism represented all too well by Jean Baudrillard at the other end of the ideological spectrum. Indeed, this fellow countryman of Revel may be said to incarnate the excesses of a convoluted anti-Americanism embedded in an opaque postmodernist jargon. For instance he writes about 9/11:
"When global power monopolizes the situation . . . when there is such a formidable condensation of all functions in the technocratic machinery and when there is no alternative form of thinking allowed, what other way is there but a terroristic situational transfer? . . . Terrorism is the act that restores an irreducible singularity to the heart of a system of generalized exchange."
Nor is clarity restored by the assertion that "it was, in fact, [the towers'] symbolic collapse that brought about their physical collapse . . . ."
While much of this small volume is impressively impenetrable, argument occasionally breaks out. But this is only a modest improvement. Baudrillard leaves no doubt that in his view the United States bears the responsibility for 9/11:
"[I]t is that superpower which, by its unbearable power, has fomented all this violence which is endemic throughout the world . . . . [W]e have dreamt of this event [9/11] . . . because no one can avoid dreaming of the destruction of any power that has become hegemonic to this degree . . . ."
Baudrillard's anti-Americanism stems in part from his horror of a globalization that is promoted by a "hegemonic" United States. Unfortunately, his arguments unoriginally repeat neo-Marxist critiques of capitalist mass society: "the mission of the West . . . is to subject the many different cultures by any means available . . . ." When conducted by military means, the objective of globalization "is to quell any refractory zone, to colonize and tame all the wild spaces whether in the geographical space or in the realm of the mind." And so on and so on.
Well before 9/11, however, Baudrillard had assembled the full range of anti-American cliches in his 1988 travelogue of the United States. He then observed, for example,
"America is a world completely rotten with wealth, power, senility, indifference, puritanism and mental hygiene, poverty and waste, technological futility and aimless violence . . . the only country where quantity can be extolled without compunction . . . ."
Baudrillard equated air-conditioning, freeways and supermarkets with inauthenticity. This inauthenticity extended even to what he perceived as purified garbage: "The country is without hope. Even its garbage is clean, its trade is lubricated, its traffic pacified . . . ." There was an "insane ease of life, to counteract the hyperreality of everything . . . ."
No wonder the Twin Towers emerged in his mind as the most potent symbols of globalization, inauthenticity and all. Whatever it reveals about America, The Spirit of Terrorism certainly testifies to the capacity of some intellectuals to misinterpret reality in obscure and empty verbiage.
A more judicious critic is Clyde Prestowitz, who accounts for the recent upsurge of global anti-Americanism in a fairly conventional way. Prestowitz, a former U.S. trade representative in the Reagan Administration, is not himself animated by anti-American sentiments. And he may not sense the powerful psychological factors at its roots. So he is tempted to explain--or explain away--anti-Americanism both as a response to the policies and attitudes of the current Bush Administration and as a response to the United States' rise to become the sole superpower. Accordingly he wishes to explain "to baffled and hurt Americans why the world seems to be turning against them and also to show foreigners how they frequently misinterpret Americans' good intentions."
Yet as it proceeds, Prestowitz's book amounts to a survey of what the United States has done wrong and how its actions and attitudes stimulate rejection and hostility abroad. The author faults the United States under Bush as being too assertive, arrogant, unilateralist, militarist and propelled by a missionary zeal and a belief in "being exceptional and apart from the rest of humankind, a special chosen people. . . ." More specifically, he "often felt that America's differences with the world could be largely explained in four words: Israel, Taiwan, religion and lobby."
"Religion" here does not mean Islamic religious fanaticism, however, but American religious fundamentalism. This is blamed for stimulating a Manichean view of the world and a wrongheaded moralism in U.S. foreign policy. Similarly, in the Arab-Israeli conflict, Prestowitz blames the Israel lobby and finds the Palestinian case far more compelling than that of Israel. He gives every benefit of doubt to Arafat, who is among the many people he interviewed for the book. He also offers a spirited defense of Saudi Arabia against its detractors.
Much of his methodology relies on recounting conversations with a wide variety of prominent figures around the world, from the prime minister of Malaysia to George Soros. All of them turn out to be critical of U.S. policies. The interviews convey the unmistakable implication that if such a wide range of important and influential people object to American policies, well then, the objections must be well founded and the policies accordingly mistaken. Occasionally, Prestowitz approaches the subject in a judicious "on the one hand and on the other" spirit, but the critiques of U.S. policy invariably overwhelm the defenses.
Lively and well written, Prestowitz's volume highlights the irritants which impede relations between the United States and other nations. But it fails to come to grips with the deeper, less rational aspects of anti-Americanism.
Doubtless many of the U.S. policies here surveyed contribute to anti-Americanism. But these policies by themselves cannot sufficiently explain these widespread anti-American attitudes (many of which predate the Bush Administration). One may doubt that if, say, the United States had ratified the Kyoto Treaty, signed the landmine treaty, endorsed the International Criminal Court, become generally more supportive of the UN, put more pressure on Israel, given up any pretense of defending Taiwan against a Chinese attack, and pursued a more sensible energy policy--these steps would have made a huge difference to those who are persuaded, on ideological, religious or political grounds, that this country is the embodiment of all evil.
Of all the varieties of anti-Americanism, the Latin American types have been most obviously determined by historical factors. Yankee No! is a historical case study of particular types of anti-Americanism (revolutionary, conservative, episodic) which erupted in Cuba in 1959, Panama in 1964 and the Dominican Republic in 1965. Each of these, according to the author, was "a milestone in the history of anti-Americanism." They have had the closest connection with the policies of the United States and have exhibited the "diversity of grievances against U.S. power."
In line with the author's "case by case" approach, he shows a reluctance to offer generalizations aside from suggesting that anti-Americanism has three features: variability, ambivalence and the resilience of the U.S. responses it generates. Two of these features are clear enough. But is not clear how or why U.S. "resilience" to manifestations of anti-Americanism could be a defining feature of the phenomenon itself. But he may have perceived a real link when he writes that anti-Americanism "has been an idealistic but confused resistance to idealistic but confused U.S. foreign policies."
More debatable is the author's assertion that "the political and intellectual Right has done most to sabotage serious thinking about anti-U.S. sentiment by overusing the term and exploiting its inherent negativity." He supports this by reference to the writings of this reviewer, objecting to my "paint[ing] anti-Americanism as a pathology." While I certainly emphasized that it is a "hostile predisposition" involving non-rational elements, I also took pains to stress (as in this review) that a wide range of well-founded criticisms can be made of U.S. foreign policy or domestic American institutions. McPherson concedes this point when he writes,
"even for supposedly more 'rational' critics [of the United States] . . . it has proved extremely difficult to escape generalities about the United States--that all of its foreign policies were unilateral, that all its companies are exploitative, that all its culture vulgar, and so on."
All of which surely suggests a hostile predisposition.
Yankee No! concludes by arguing that in the wake of 9/11, it is of particular importance "to understand that anti-Americanism has not been a pathological prejudice but a complex cultural and political concept that merits serious treatment by historians." Actually 9/11 suggests that it can be both of these things.
Among the books here reviewed, Occidentalism is the most original and insightful. In a short space it presents the core beliefs associated with the anti-Western outlook--namely, the "Occidentalism" of the title (of which anti-Americanism is a major part). Occidentalism is the counterpart of the better known concept of "Orientalism", which in the late Edward Said's formulation was a wrongheaded and demeaning collection of Western ideas about the East. Time has certainly come to show that a more powerful, influential and destructive counterpart of Orientalism can be found in Occidentalism: "the dehumanizing picture of the West painted by its enemies . . . ." Central to this vision is the image of the West as an unheroic, "machine-like society without a human soul." Components of Occidentalism include hostility to the city, to science and reason, trade, materialism, "commodified human relations" and the self-interest they promote. Occidentalism in particular "reflects the fears and prejudices of urban intellectuals who feel displaced in a world of mass commerce."
What this study also shows is that Occidentalism, while most influential today in the non-Western, Islamic world, has been greatly influenced by--if not altogether derived from--Western ideas about the West. The authors acknowledge that "Islamism [is] the main religious source of Occidentalism in our time." But they go on to argue that "today's suicide bombers and holy warriors don't suffer from some unique pathology but are fired by ideas that have a history." Western influences on non-Western Occidentalism include German romanticism, Russian Slavophilism and certain strands of Marxism:
"Ninenteenth-century Russian nativist thinkers, loosely termed Slavophiles, have provided a model for national or ethnic spiritual attacks on Western rationalism that was followed by generations of intellectuals in other countries, such as India, China and Islamic nations . . . . [In turn,] Russian Slavophilia was rooted in German Romanticism . . . . [I]t was a common Romantic belief that excessive rationalism caused the terminal decay of what was once the vital organism of the West. . . . Wars against the West have been declared in the name of the Russian soil, the German race, State Shinto, communism and Islam."
What the authors also show, however, is that anti-Western hostility is stimulated not only by Western ideas, but also by their failure. In particular, "the most violent forms of Occidentalism" (such as we encounter at the present time) were born from the failures of the non-capitalist alternatives to modernity attempted in countries such as Egypt, Iraq, North Korea, Ethiopia, Cuba, China, Vietnam and others.
All this is powerful and provocative. But the suggested continuity between the suicide bombers and 19th-century Romantic thinkers (among others) is not without problems. Islamic religious convictions--converted into murderous and suicidal violence--add a unique dimension, indeed a pathology, to the loathing of the West resembling earlier sources (Romantics, Slavophiles, and sundry guardians of tradition and critics of mass society, depersonalization, alienation, the cash nexus, and other afflictions of modernity). While Western self-loathing and guilt have helped to legitimate non-Western rejections of the West, the trajectory of ideas from Western Romanticism (highly individualistic, extolling passionate personal relationships, sensual gratification and so on) to traditional Islamic beliefs (anti-individualistic, puritanical, stressing other-worldly gratifications and the like) is a long and roundabout one. Occidentalism, in all its varieties including anti-Americanism, "is a tale of cross-contamination, the spread of bad ideas." These bad ideas come from several different cultures.
All the books here discussed support the suggestion that anti-Americanism can best be grasped by recognizing the wide range of circumstances and conditions associated with it. One likely source of its recently renewed strength, however, is the passing of the superpower status from two countries to one. The United States has thereby become a more plausible and inviting target for a wide range of grievances and discontents: global, national, religious and ethnic. As Revel writes:
"The United States is charged with all the evils, real or imagined, that afflict humanity, from the falling price of beef in France to aids in Africa and global warming everywhere. The result is a widespread refusal to accept responsibility for one's own actions."
It is almost certainly the other way round: The refusal to accept responsibility predisposes people to search for a scapegoat.
A particularly striking example of these trends has been the recent intensification of violent Islamic anti-Americanism culminating in 9/11. Arab grievances against the West, and especially its two key representatives (from the Arab point of view) Israel and the United States, have been long-standing. These grievances apparently intensified in the wake of the failed Oslo "peace process" that raised Arab expectations without gratifying them. Of late, anti-Israeli sentiments have been transferred to the United States, owing in part to its firm support of Israel and because it is the leading force of modernity in the Middle East.
This brand of anti-Americanism further increased after 9/11 in response to American actions against terrorism. American military assertiveness has always been repugnant to those convinced that the United States is the real "evil empire" and deserves all the blows struck against it. Thus the hostile critics of America at home and abroad embarked with earnest relish on explaining why 9/11 and other anti-American acts of terror could only be blamed on the United States since it embodies the "roots causes" of virtually everything wrong with the world.
Two additional phenomena helped to raise level the of anti-Americanism in recent times: the increased political and economic competitiveness of the European Union (combined with its declining military power and political will) and the personality of President Bush. Both at home and abroad, George W. Bush has stimulated an extraordinary amount of hostility and is widely seen as personifying everything wrong with American society, culture and foreign policy. He was even designated in European opinion polls as a greater threat to world peace than Saddam Hussein. This personal animosity has crystallized European objections to American power--and helped to justify the idea of the European Union as a "counterweight" to it.
But the most important underlying explanation of anti-Americanism is that the United States remains the leading embodiment of modernity--a condition at once widely desired and yet deplored the more it is realized. Hence the United States is inevitably seen as a global force for destabilization--undermining traditional values, communities, institutions and understandings of the world. This particular charge is well grounded. But it arises from the less well understood fact that the discontents of modernity are unintended consequences of the processes eagerly embraced. Not all good things go together: The advances of medical science lower mortality rates, which leads to overpopulation; the greater availability of consumer goods leads to a "consumerism" felt to be aesthetically and psychologically undesirable; access to nature contributes to its degradation; the freedoms associated with modernity leave people with bewildering choices; individual freedom and social isolation are often closely related; the freedom to choose among competing religious beliefs and denominations dilutes religious commitments and deprives people of taken-for-granted beliefs; social and physical mobility undermine the community; the liberation of women contributes to rising divorce rates; and so on and so forth.
And these discontents are aggravated by the historical fact that this country has been a repository of high ideals from its earliest beginnings. Its very existence is in large measure a result of collective efforts to create a society morally and materially superior to all others in history. Such ideals can never be fully realized--and they make the most successful achievements look inadequate and even hypocritical. America could avoid the hatred of anti-Americanism either by failing economically and socially or by becoming a "normal" country with no sense of mission. As long as the United States continues both to preach and prosper, however, it must reconcile itself to being heartily disliked.
Essay Types: Book Review