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Ralph Peters

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Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From San Francisco
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	Bruce Thornton's lastest book Decline and Fall: Europe's Slow Motion Suicide available November 13

	THORNTON

Uncouth Nation?
by Bruce Thornton [author] 11/16/07

If you haven’t noticed, Europe doesn’t like us. Recent surveys by the Pew Global Attitudes Project show that anti-Americanism in Europe has been on the rise. Only in England does a bare majority of people view America favorably (56%). In France only 39%, in Germany 37%, and in Spain 23% hold favorable opinions of the United States. Worse yet, in the EU countries, 53% saw the U.S. as a threat to world peace equal to Iran and North Korea, while in Germany, 48% believe the U.S. is a greater threat than an Iran ruled by fanatic jihadists actively seeking nuclear weapons.

The liberal intelligentsia has a ready answer for these trends: the unilateralist “cowboy” George Bush and his “illegal” war in Iraq, which squandered the global goodwill our country enjoyed after 9/11. But as Andrei Markovits shows in his study of European anti-Americanism, long before Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib, there has existed “a substantial sediment of hatred toward, disdain for, and resentment of America that has a long tradition in Europe and has flourished apart from these or any policies.”

Markovits is an immigrant from Romania who now teaches at the University of Michigan. He has published widely on European-American relations and German anti-Semitism, and proudly declares his “life-long affinity with the democratic left in Europe and the United States.” Yet because he questions the programmatic anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism dominating the left––attitudes that “both divide and determine political identity absolutely”––he has found himself more and more marginalized for deviating from leftist orthodoxy. Yet Markovits’ political orientation makes Uncouth Nation an even more convincing analysis of European anti-Americanism as a species of irrational bigotry, “a generalized and comprehensive normative dislike of America and things American that often lacks distinct reasons or concrete causes.”

In his first chapter Markovits identifies anti-Americanism as the “European lingua franca,” a unifying set of prejudices that define European identity as the “not America.” As such, anti-Americanism unites the European left and right, each of which for different reasons despises America’s politics, economy, and culture. For example, to the left, American culture “is the expression of an alienated, brutal, capitalist society” that, driven by the profit motive, “has produced a soulless, formless, and inauthentic mass culture that can never mutate into anything resembling authenticity, let alone art.” To the right, American culture is a “nonculture since Americans do not have a proper history and disdain tradition.” Thus it is “shallow at best, but really a Jewish-influenced, mongrelized mishmash featuring inferior elements like blacks and women.” All these silly stereotypes really mean is that American culture is different from European culture, a banality made painful by the enormous appetite of Europeans for the products of that same presumably inferior culture.

Markovits goes on in his next chapter to trace the long history of European hatred of, contempt for, and aversion to America. He assembles an astonishing catalogue of invective and prejudice, most of it based on superficial experience or the equivalents of urban legends.  For example, some early European commentators scorned America based on the belief that the geography and climate of America caused its inhabitants to degenerate and lose their will to procreate. Later, the German popular novelist Karl May created noble-savage Indians as sticks to beat genocidal Americans. Other European intellectuals contrasted America’s “materialism, vulgarity, and shallowness” with Europe’s “idealism, nobility, and depth.” The European elite’s love of political order imposed from above found America’s raucous, egalitarian democracy disturbing: to German poet Heinrich Heine, the U.S. was a “monstrous prison of freedom . . . where the most repulsive of all tyrants, the populace, hold vulgar sway.”

All these prejudices increased in intensity as America began to increase its global clout in the 20th century, the invective sometimes reaching surreal proportions, as in Europe’s criticism of American imperialism at a time when European nations still had colonies in Africa and Asia. And let’s not forget the racist and anti-Semitic bases for much of European disgust with the U.S. and its polyglot, multiracial society. Particularly in France, the notion that America was run by Jews intensified traditional antipathies: The 1920’s saw books published in France with titles like L’Oncle Shylock,  L’Abomination américaine, and Le Cancer américaine. As Markovits concludes, “the common themes constituting anti-Americanism existed in many European cultures,” and “have remained constant and consistent in their emphases to this day.”

Markovits next turns to anti-Americanism in contemporary Europe, where “the ‘ugly American’ is a prominent and ubiquitous figure in all of Western Europe’s public discourse.” This bigotry is communicated by the term “Americanization,” which appears in several European languages and universally connotes “something negative, bad, and above all threatening, something that absolutely has to be avoided.” Whether it’s America’s baneful influence on European languages, indifference to soccer, predatory capitalism and Darwinian workplaces, vulgar media that foster “an increased commercialization and superficiality at the cost of true substance and genuine civic culture,” obsession with health and hatred of smoking, fondness for the death penalty and lawsuits, rampant crime and violence––all the changes in European culture and society that disturb elite gatekeepers find their origins in a toxic “Americanization.” Rather than a response to empirical evidence, these prejudices reflect “the feeling of constant self-incapacitation . . . the feeling that [Europeans] are inevitably condemned to be America’s victims, to be permanent minors under America’s tutelage, to be ruled by an entity that they have consistently regarded as their cultural and moral inferior.”

The next question Markovits addresses is, do these attitudes really matter? Does European anti-Americanism affect substantially the policies and behavior of European governments? Markovits thinks so: not because of relatively trivial actions such as France’s preventing PepsiCo from buying out a French yogurt-maker, or the International Olympic Committee’s eliminating men’s baseball and women’s softball from the 2012 games. In important matters as well, the “decisions not taken because of residues of anti-Americanism, policies not implemented because of an existing though silent antipathy toward America, might be as important as the visible expressions that we can measure and observe.” Obviously, the resistance of France and Germany to the American war against Saddam Hussein, and their continuing attempts to undermine U.S. efforts there, are recent examples of how anti-Americanism affects the decisions and actions of European governments, to the detriment of U.S. interests. In the end, European governments exploit irrational anti-Americanism in order to aggrandize their own global power and influence and thus compensate for their diminished economic, cultural, and political clout.

The evil twin of anti-Americanism is anti-Semitism, the latter a European phenomenon deeply rooted in Europe’s history and culture. What joined these two bigotries in the 19th century was the socialist and Marxist-inspired hatred of capitalism and modernity: “America and the Jews were seen as paragons of modernity: money-driven, profit-hungry, urban, universalistic, individualistic, mobile, rootless, and hostile to established traditions and values.” After increased Jewish immigration to America and the growth of America’s global power, “Jews and America became inextricably intertwined, not only as representatives of modernity but also as holders of actual power.” A “Jewified America” now takes center stage as the secret manipulator of global events, a paranoia increasingly on display these days at anti-globalization rallies, where anti-Semitic imagery––the Jew as blood-sucker, for example, or the golden calf––are joined to anti-American caricature. More mainstream European institutions indulge the same stereotypes: the May 2005 cover of the German labor union IG Metall’s magazine metall “depicts a mosquito doffing an Uncle Sam-like hat with the American flag, grinning ravenously under its huge nose, revealing a gold-filled tooth.”

Particularly valuable is Markovits’ analysis of an anti-Zionism “that in fact either is anti-Semitic or functions as a vehicle and a protective cover for anti-Semitism.” Anti-Zionism thus “avails itself of anti-Semitism’s classical themes to stigmatize––and demonize––the current state of Israel or any sovereign construct for Jews.” The exaggeration of tiny Israel’s power is one way old anti-Semitic tropes––the Jew as global manipulator––finds new life in anti-Zionism. Worse yet, the disproportionate criticism of Israel and the transformation of “Zionism” into a question-begging epithet invites Europeans to wonder if the Jews in Europe are not somehow the agents of Zionist manipulations and thus worthy of dislike and suspicion. Add the blatant anti-Semitism of Europe’s Muslim immigrants, the European left’s hatred of Israel and its American ally, and the increasing historical distance of the Holocaust, and the possibility of a wider resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe becomes very real. As Markovits concludes this chapter, “The Europeans’ enmity toward Israel cannot be detached from the Europeans’ thousand-year hatred of the Jews and their shorter and much less lethal, but still palpable, antipathy toward America.”

Markovits concludes his study with an analysis of how anti-Americanism has become the unifying principle of the pan-European identity embodied in the European Union. The massive 2003 rallies against the United States’ war in Iraq, as much an expression of distaste for America as distaste for war, was interpreted by many as the “birthday of a united Europe”; as the French Finance Minister put it, “today a nation was born on the streets. This nation is the European nation.” Even the seeming rejection of a united Europe evidenced in the European Union constitution by French and Dutch voters in 2005 was predicated in part on anti-Americanism: the EU, its bureaucracy in Brussels, and its projected economic reforms were depicted as “manifestations of an Americanized Europe that had to be opposed and resisted.” Such prejudices are fueled equally by old stereotypes and massive ignorance of American life and institutions, as in an Italian philosopher’s assertions that America is “fascistic,” a “Herrenvolk [master race] democracy” in “open pursuit of political, economic, and military world domination.” A prejudice that can be manipulated by the opposing sides of a contentious issue is potent indeed. Whatever else Europeans disagree about, they can still agree that they don’t like America.

Given the numerous political uses of European anti-Americanism, it is unlikely to abate anytime soon, despite the occasional election of European leaders friendly to America. Quite simply, anti-Americanism “has helped gain Europeans respect, affection, and­­––most important––political clout in the rest of the world,” especially since Europe is unwilling and unable to finance a military power commensurate with its global ambitions. Let’s not forget too that many Europeans mistakenly believe that they can placate the jihadists by thwarting the policies of the latter’s greatest enemy. As Markovits conludes, “ I see few incentives for Europe to divest itself of its current opposition to and antipathy for America and plenty to stay the course.”

Markovits doesn’t address in detail what his interpretation of anti-Americanism can mean for American foreign policy. One thing that should be clear is that anti-Americanism is not dependent on the style or policy of whoever occupies the White House. More importantly, we Americans should rethink some of our long-cherished assumptions about our various alliances with European nations. For example, NATO serves the Europeans’ interests more than it does ours, and so perhaps we should rethink this alliance. At any rate, we should not continue to let European nations pursue their interests at the expense of ours, all the while they indulge silly stereotypes and irrational prejudices. ExileStreet

copyright 2007 Bruce S. Thornton

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