Three years later, Rubinstein and Smith co-authored an article and came closer to delineating the term: “Anti-Americanism can be viewed as any hostile action or expression that becomes part and parcel of an undifferentiated attack on the foreign policy, society, culture, and values of the United States.”[2] This definition, however, seemed too broad.

 

Anti-Americanism has been a subject of discussion for a while. Both as an abstract notion and a real concern for U.S. foreign policy, it has garnered considerable attention since the Cold War.[3] And the need to understand the causes of anti-Americanism has become more pressing after the frightful attacks of September 11, 2001. Since then, everybody wonders “why they hate us” and what the U.S. government can (or cannot) do to stem anti-Americanism abroad.[4]

 

By perusing secondary literature, this essay tries to explain the meaning and sources of anti-Americanism. It discusses why anti-American sentiment comes about and gives an overview of the French and Nicaraguan cases to illustrate its position. The essay also synthesizes a new interpretation of the causes and implications of anti-Americanism and defines that concept within the parameters of U.S. foreign policy and the antagonism it creates around the world.

***

 

One year after the Cold War ended, the sociologist Paul Hollander published one of the most original works on anti-Americanism. “Anti-Americanism refers to a negative predisposition,” Hollander declared, “a type of bias which is to varying degrees unfounded [and] [a]n attitude similar to its far more thoroughly exploredcounterparts, hostile predispositions such as racism, sexism, or anti-Semitism.”[5]

 

Hollander explained anti-Americanism as a crisis of meaning inside the United States and abroad; a by-product of modernization. “To the extent that ‘Americanization’ is a form of modernization,” he said, “the process can inspire understandable apprehension and anguish among those who seek to preserve a more stable and traditional way of life in various parts of the world.” According to Hollander, as they encountered socioeconomic turmoil, some Americans have conflated American capitalism with modernity and the harm it wreaks on values and human relationships. The crux of anti-Americanism, then, is “unhappiness about living in a basically secular, excessively individualistic society which, while providing a wide range of choices and options, offers little help for its members to make their lives more meaningful.”[6]

 

The general features of what Hollander called “domestic anti-Americanism,” or “the adversary culture,” in the United States and abroad can be laid out as follows: opposition to any U.S. intervention in the world and all U.S. military expenditure; blaming the United States for all Third World suffering; and belief that the United States is uniquely hypocritical and destructive. In general, the domestic origins of anti-Americanism have to do with American intellectuals’ intense alienation with the existing social and political order in the United States. Hollander contended that, from the 1960s onward, radical critics of the United States lashed out at the success of a “new materialism, a new ethic of self-seeking, an amoral indifference to the poor, and unconcern for social justice.”[7]

 

In a volume he edited in 2004, Hollander expanded on previous themes by elaborating on the domestic sources of anti-Americanism. “Domestic anti-Americanism is an integral part of [American] culture,” he said, “a product – however distorted, perverse, and exaggerated – of an American idealism, of high expectations disappointed.”[8] Hollander added that, in America, “there is endless tension between freedom and security, security and adventure, equality and excellence, the mandates of egalitarianism and achievement orientation.” In a sense, Americans’ desire to eat their cake and have them too leads to frustration and, eventually, anti-Americanism.

 

Unfortunately, just like in his 1992 study, Hollander did not investigate the direct connection between domestic and international anti-Americanism in his new work. Nonetheless, he expounded previous ideas about foreign anti-Americanism. He repeated that it would be misleading to claim that only America’s domestic and international mistakes cause anti-Americanism. “After all,” he reminded readers, “notwithstanding the critiques and denunciations heaped upon the United States, millions of people from every corner of the globe continue to seek admission to this much vilified country.”[9] Looking at that picture, Hollander said, anti-Americanism cannot be treated like a rational phenomenon.

 

In their 1985 book, Rubinstein and Smith had taken a different approach. Rather than dismissing the phenomenon as “irrational,” they delineated four types of anti-Americanisms in the international scene: issue-oriented (policies or the actions of the U.S. government creates a backlash in a given country); ideological (anti-American sentiment forms an integral part of the belief systems of certain sections of a society, especially elites); instrumental (instigation and/or manipulation of hostility toward the United States by foreign governments to elicit mass support, neutralize domestic opposition, cover up failure, or legitimize close relations with Moscow); and revolutionary (an extension of the ideological type, used to overthrow a regime closely identified with Washington).[10]

 

This typology enabled Rubinstein and Smith to understand why the United States was so unpopular, especially in the Third World. Their answer tilted toward issue-oriented anti-Americanism. As they explained it, during the Cold War, as a capitalist country, the United States was seen as indifferent (if not openly hostile) to the socialist aspirations of newly independent countries. And Moscow had significant advantages over Washington in the international realm because practical preferences borne out of ideological predisposition dominated economic, social, and political questions. The Soviet model of development, which emphasized nationalization of key industries, heavy public sector investment, extensive central planning, and collectivist solutions, appealed to the Third World more than the U.S. focus on private investment, low tariffs, and open markets.[11] In that respect,

 

anti-Americanism was an inevitable consequence of Third World disenchantment with the United States. The idealized conception of an America exemplified by Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, and Woodrow Wilson was rudely dispelled by the actions of U.S. administrations that became intimately enmeshed in international politics, and in the process, [s]upported colonialism, apartheid, and dictatorships, sounding the alarm over communism when throughout the Third World the clarion call was for change.[12]

 

Both the Rubinstein-Smith and Hollander studies stressed the inevitability of anti-Americanism. Given the rapid transformation of the world in the twentieth century, sooner or later, any hegemonic power would have been hated by the rest. As far as modernity and modernization were concerned, however, Rubinstein and Smith differed fundamentally from Hollander. Hollander stated that, because the United States symbolized modernity, all the blame for its undesirable effects – especially the decline of tradition – was heaped on America. Rubinstein and Smith, on the other hand, maintained that a specific type of modernization – capitalist and Western-oriented – that Washington advocated caused anti-Americanism.

 

That position poses a significant problem, especially given what Rubinstein and Smith had stated in their book: “The Third World perceives U.S. foreign policy as frequently irresponsible, belligerent, and imperialist, U.S. international economic activity as frequently exploitative, and the United States as a basically good society.”[13]U.S. policy-makers chose to pursue policies that contradicted their own ideals (and international expectations partially based on those ideals). Yet they do not adequately explain how inevitable anti-Americanism was when

***

The historian Richard Kuisel’s seminal study of French attitudes toward America and American culture tests many of the ideas discussed so far. In his book, Seducing the French, Kuisel pointed out that even though France appeared like the most anti-American of Western European nations, “it has drawn equal notice for its fascination with America and American material and cultural products.” “Now,” wrote Kuisel (in 1994), “the American way has apparently seduced the French.”[14]

 

That seduction worked in mysterious ways. Following World War II, with its consumerism and prosperity, America represented the new order of things. France wanted to consume like America but remain French. The French admired American efficiency but still preferred their “mischief, exuberance, uniqueness, and spontaneity” over “the functional anthill of the New World.”[15] Resembling Hollander’s frustrated anti-American Americans, Kuisel’s French wanted to continue having their Roquefort with a glass of Bordeaux,evenas they discovered Fordism, Faulkner, and french fries.

 

An important element of Western European anti-Americanism in general, and its French strand in particular, has been the perceived cultural invasion by the United States. According to the Italian political scientist Sergio Fabbrini, as globalization caught more headlines in the 1990s, it came to be equated with Americanization, or “McDonaldization” as critics put it. Americanization, its opponents have maintained, destroyed local customs and replaced them with “standardized, predictable and, therefore, more easily controllable ways of behaving.” “In other words,” Fabbrini tells us, “globalization tends to be seen as a process of social and economic assimilation into basic patterns of behavior and thought that are closely identified with the U.S.”[16]

 

This fear of American cultural domination was not unprecedented. In his work, Kuisel aptly demonstrated the historical background to that process. In the 1950s, with the entry of Coca-Cola to the French market, the specter of “Coca-Colonization” caused massive anxiety over the future of French eating habits. Many Frenchmen feared that the artificial American soda would replace their delicious wine.[17] And add to that the decline of the French Empire after 1945, the French language losing its status as the lingua franca of culture and diplomacy to English, and the corresponding “Anglo-Saxon” takeover of the world, one can get a better sense of Gallic anti-Americanism.[18]

 

On the surface, these cases bolster Hollander’s point about the irrationality of anti-Americanism and, to a lesser extent, the ideological element of Rubinstein-Smith’s taxonomy. Nevertheless, many studies of anti-Americanism in France overlook the other half of French attitudes toward the United States. In the second half of the twentieth century, American literature, social science, and popular culture had a profound – and by and large well-received – impact on French culture.[19] Richard Kuisel informs us that more French citizens were more pro-American than almost any other country in the world by the 1980s.[20] (It is no surprise that Kuisel chose the subtitle The Dilemma of Americanization for his book.) If the most anti-American nation can also be the most pro-American for the same set of reasons, we need to look elsewhere for answers.

 

A brief discussion of a Third World case can shed more light on the sources of anti-Americanism. David Ryan, an expert on U.S. foreign policy in Latin America, cites three reasons why, in general, anti-Americanism comes about. Like Rubinstein and Smith, Ryan attributes anti-Americanism to unequal economic interaction between the United States and Third World countries and the poverty it causes. Moreover, U.S. (mis)perceptions and characterizations of “others” create resentment in Third World nations, especially in Latin America. In the final analysis, Third World anti-Americanism stems from the perception that America does not live up to the standards that it champions.[21]

 

According to Ryan, these factors played a very important role in fostering anti-Americanism in Nicaragua in the 1980s. Nicaragua had a revolution when the Sandinistas, a national revolutionary group, overthrew the U.S.-backed right-wing regime of the Somoza family in 1979. With Ronald Reagan’s presidency from 1981 onward and Sandinista support for other left-wing groups in Latin America, relations between Washington and Managua soured. For the Sandinistas, it was bad that Washington had supported the Somozas in the past and exploited Nicaragua economically. And then things took a turn for the worse when the Reagan administration began aiding the Contras. Running in the face of American values such as self-determination and democracy, U.S. support for the Contras, which employed terror tactics against the Sandinistas and the people of Nicaragua, destroyed any remaining goodwill toward the United States in the Central American nation. According to Ryan, “Sandinista anti-Americanism not only rested on their interpretation of economic dependency, but was also buttressed by a resentment of [U.S.] support for the contras.” In the end, the lesson is that

 

the perception of double standards lies at the heart of much anti-Americanism. It is a convenient and comfortable conclusion to suggest that there is a hatred of American institutions, ideas and ideologies or that such expressions of anti-Americanism pose a threat to the United States. It is more difficult to suggest that such opposition at the periphery also arises as a result of the U.S. violation of its own norms.[22]

 

Will the United States learn that lesson? It depends. America continues to identify itself as an “exceptional” nation whose values are unique and not quite espoused by most countries. According to the British journalist Godfrey Hodgson, “American exceptionalism is the claim that American society, and the United States as a political power, are inherently more virtuous than other nations, and especially more so than the corrupt societies of the Old World.” The logical corollary to that idea is that “the high duty of the United States [is] to spread its virtues to as much of the rest of the world as possible.”[23]

 

The end of the Cold War created an illusory vindication of American policy around the world. From 1991 until 2003, Washington used its status as the sole superpower to spread its values and consolidate U.S. hegemony around the globe. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the military victories against Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic, and the economic boom of the 1990s provided the backdrop to the immense hubris that consumed the Bush administration after 9/11. Next, before March 2003, the U.S. government tried to change international law by inventing and then invoking a right of “pre-emptive self defense” against Iraq. At the time, the influential observer William Kristol justified that position by telling the American people that “we need to err on the side of being strong. [A]nd if people [s]ay we’re an imperial power, fine.”[24] Read: accept U.S. domination, or else.

That mindset is a recipe for more global anti-Americanism. It is interventionist U.S. foreign policies that go against the grain of American ideals and the ultimate source of why America is so disliked around the (First and Third) world. The belief that America is the sole purveyor of freedom and modernization, ergo, opposition to America is opposition to those sublime goals, is misleading. As the historian Max Paul Friedman has correctly stated, to explain anti-Americanism as the cause of opposition to U.S. policies is not only to put the cart before the horse, it is to argue that the cart is the horse. People around the world do not resent U.S. policies because they are anti-American. Bad U.S. policies cause people to become anti-American.[25]

***

 

Looking at this picture, we can define anti-Americanism as a set of grievances – rational or irrational – that are borne out of U.S. policies toward a certain country or region. We ought to focus on such an “issue-oriented” definition of anti-Americanism. There is not much the United States can do about being disliked for “representing” and/or promoting modernity; for being a convenient scapegoat in the local politics of a domestic country; or for other people’s cultural anxieties.

 

But there are many things that Washington can do to make globalization more Third World-friendly. There are countless human development projects that the United States can support in the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America that can ease anti-U.S. sentiment and create goodwill. In the general scheme of things, what Rubinstein and Smith said about the effects of U.S. foreign policy in the Third World holds true for the rest of the planet:

 

What we have suggested is that the Third World perceives U.S. foreign policy as frequently irresponsible, belligerent, and imperialist, U.S. international economic activity as frequently exploitative, and the United States as a basically good society. The paradoxical perception of a good society that frequently does bad things in the world captures this fundamental ambivalence.[26]

 

The paradox of anti-Americanism can be resolved if the leaders of the good society can do good things in the world by remembering that an overwhelming majority of the world is populated by good people who share many of their values.

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