Wednesday, February 28, 2007

"Where are the cries of outrage over Darfur?" (Lebanon Daily Star)

Yesterday I reproduced a piece by two Arab human-rights activists, Moataz El Fegiery & Ridwan Ziyada, that criticized the failure of Arab public opinion to respond in a morally and politically responsible way to the ongoing atrocity in Darfur (see Arab public opinion & mass murder in Darfur). Their piece is not the only recent attempt to appeal to the conscience of the Arab world on this issue. The Beirut Daily Star, which argued in a June 2004 editorial that mass murder in Darfur posed a defining moral and political test for "the Arab Body Politic," has once again called for a serious and constructive Arab response: "It's time to put a halt to the Arab world's homegrown disaster".

The conflict in Darfur, where at least 200,000 civilians have been killed and more than 2 million made refugees [JW: The real figures are almost certainly twice as great], is one that exposes multiple layers of hypocrisy. Much has been said about the lack of international will to address the crisis, even though many of the same superpowers have supported military and heavy-handed diplomatic intervention in other countries under less clear-cut circumstances. But Arab leaders themselves are among the ranks of the world's hypocrites on this issue. A savage form of terror has been unfolding in our own backyard for four years, yet until now, neither the Arab League nor any individual Arab government has sought to do much about it. [JW: This actually puts it a bit euphemistically, since Arab governments have been giving the genocidal Khartoum regime active diplomatic, political, and diplomatic support.] [....]

The Arab League, several of whose members are drowning in petrodollars, has only paid $15 million of its $150 million pledge to the near-bankrupt African Union peacekeeping force. Each day that our leaders ignore Darfur marks a political and moral failure and a contribution to a calamity of our own making.
--Jeff Weintraub

P.S. There are certain pieties that the Daily Star still finds it hard to shake loose from (or offend). Mick Hartley noticed one strange formulation in this passage:
Many of our political and religious leaders have strongly denounced what are arguably lesser crimes - such as the awkward and insensitive remarks made by the pope during an academic lecture - but have turned a blind eye as their fellow Muslims are slaughtered in Sudan. Where are the cries of outrage over Darfur?
To which Hartley properly responded:
The pope's remarks are arguably a lesser crime? Good to see some acknowledgement of Arab lack of concern over Darfur, but it looks there's a way to go yet.
(On some of the relevant issues, see also Maurice Glasman on the Darfur atrocity, warped priorities, and the "respect" scam.) Yes, even in this outspoken editorial, it's clear that Daily Star still felt compelled to pull its punches in various respects. But this remains a brave and commendable editorial--which, unfortunately, is unlikely to have much effect.

====================
The Daily Star (Beirut, Lebanon)
Saturday, February 24, 2007
It's time to put a halt to the Arab world's homegrown disaster
Editorial

Any long-time observer of events in the Arab world is familiar with the tendency of our politicians, religious leaders and intellectuals to blame all of the region's woes on "the West" or other external factors. There is a worthwhile point to be made in saying that centuries of colonialism, military intervention and Western-backed occupation have created distortions that have contributed to instability and turmoil in the region. But while foreign powers have had a clear hand in creating the crises in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq, not all of the Arab world's disasters can be attributed to outside aggression. Indeed, one of the most grave calamities in the region - Darfur, a tragedy that has been called the first genocide of the 21st century, but which has been permitted to drag on for almost four years now - is a disaster largely of our region's own making.

The conflict in Darfur, where at least 200,000 civilians have been killed and more than 2 million made refugees [JW: The real figures are almost certainly twice as great], is one that exposes multiple layers of hypocrisy. Much has been said about the lack of international will to address the crisis, even though many of the same superpowers have supported military and heavy-handed diplomatic intervention in other countries under less clear-cut circumstances. But Arab leaders themselves are among the ranks of the world's hypocrites on this issue. A savage form of terror has been unfolding in our own backyard for four years, yet until now, neither the Arab League nor any individual Arab government has sought to do much about it. Many of our political and religious leaders have strongly denounced what are arguably lesser crimes - such as the awkward and insensitive remarks made by the pope during an academic lecture - but have turned a blind eye as their fellow Muslims are slaughtered in Sudan. Where are the cries of outrage over Darfur?

As we approach the four-year anniversary of the start of the conflict, the catastrophe is continuing to escalate. The head of the International Committee of the Red Cross has said that violence is now at its worst levels since the fighting began four years ago - and it is also spilling over into neighboring countries. Each day that the conflict drags on makes it harder to reach a resolution. Rebel groups have splintered into dozens of warring gangs, making it increasingly difficult to identify parties with whom mediators can even begin to negotiate a viable peace treaty.

Regional leaders are currently making a belated and half-hearted attempt to address this four-year-old crisis, with the Arab League meeting on the issue next week. But there is every reason for observers to doubt whether the talk of doing something will materialize as decisive action. The Arab League, several of whose members are drowning in petrodollars, has only paid $15 million of its $150 million pledge to the near-bankrupt African Union peacekeeping force. Each day that our leaders ignore Darfur marks a political and moral failure and a contribution to a calamity of our own making.

Friday, February 23, 2007

Arab public opinion & mass murder in Darfur (Moataz El Fegiery & Ridwan Ziyada)

The lack of any serious and effective response to the Darfur atrocity has been a comprehensive failure for the entire "world community," but different parts of it have been guilty in different ways and to different degrees. In some respects, the Arab world bears a special responsibility. The ongoing mass murder, mass rape, and ethnic cleansing of African Muslims in Darfur has been carried out by an Arab-dominated Sudanese government, a member of the Arab League, in the name of a racist Arab-supremacist ideology. What has been the response of the Arab world? Arab governments have given the genocidal Khartoum government unwavering support, and Arab public opinion--with just a few honorable exceptions--has done the same or, at best, has simply ignored the atrocity.

As Joseph Britt pointed out in mid-2005, this response poses an uncomfortable question: "What responsibility do Arabs have to stop genocide being committed by Arabs?" He was not the first to raise this question. As far back as June 2004, an outspoken editorial in the Beirut Daily Star, argued that mass murder in Darfur posed a defining moral and political test for "the Arab Body Politic" and called for a serious and constructive Arab response:
International neglect led to near-genocide a decade ago in Rwanda, while NATO went to war in Kosovo in 1999 for the sake of a few hundred thousand refugees. While the United States is considering formally labeling the Darfur crisis as a genocide in progress, the world - the world beyond the Arab world that is - is justified in asking the following question: "What are the Arabs doing about this atrocity in their own back yard?"

The answer, of course - as usual - is nothing.
The answer is still nothing. In fact, it is worse. Passivity would be bad enough, but Arab governments and large sectors have actually supported the mass murderers and actively opposed any international efforts to restrain them.

=> A forceful appeal by two Arab human-rights activists, Moataz El Fegiery and Ridwan Ziyada, raises these questions again in a piece in the pan-Arab newspaper Al Hayat: "Why is it that - in contrast to the attention given to the Middle East conflicts - Arab media and politicians are largely ignoring events in Darfur?"
The Arab world's response to the Darfur crisis has been a miserable failure. It's the moral failure, however, more than the political failure, that is the real tragedy. And it is a failure of the intellectuals just as much as it is of the Arab governments.
However, they argue, it is not too late for this situation to change ("better late than never"), and such a change could have real consequences.
For many people in the Arab world the "humanitarian catastrophe" unfolding in Darfur just doesn't exist - and the simple reason for that is that the Arab media has ignored it. [....]

Let's assume for the moment that Arab governments' displaying a less than clear cut commitment to the human rights issue in Darfur is only to be expected - in fact it is just about the last thing an Arab government is going to place on its list of foreign policy priorities - but what about Arab journalists, intellectuals, political activists and artists? How is their behaviour, particularly those whose job it is raise public awareness of such things on behalf of the United Nations, to be explained? [....] How can they justify their silence on events in Darfur? No explanation, no honestly expressed shock at what is happening in Darfur has been forthcoming. [....]

Some sections of the Arab media even insist on referring to the Darfur crisis as "a Zionist-American conspiracy" whose aim is to carve up and depredate Sudan. [....]

What some, in particular the Khartoum government, have overlooked is the fact that a 10,000-strong UN troop, made up mostly of soldiers from 60 different African and Asian countries, is currently stationed in Sudan.

It was the peace agreement of 2005 that brought an end to twenty-one years of civil war between the government and the Sudanese liberation movement and led to the troops being deployed in central and southern areas of the country.

Collaboration with the international community for the purposes of securing peace in Darfur does not contravene international law nor undermine the sovereignty of the Sudanese leadership; it is in fact the duty of the international community.

The Arab world's response to the Darfur crisis has been a miserable failure. It's the moral failure, however, more than the political failure, that is the real tragedy. And it is a failure of the intellectuals just as much as it is of the Arab governments.

Because it is better late than never, Arab politicians, intellectuals, lawyers and journalists must act now. They must come together to protect the people of Darfur. It may, perhaps, still be just enough to help ease a little the pangs of remorse and grief which are the lot of all who indulge in misplaced silence and ignorance.
--Jeff Weintraub

=========================
International Freedom of Expression Exchange (IFEX)
February 23, 2007
Sudan: The tragedy of Darfur - double standards being applied

Why is it that - in contrast to the attention given to the Middle East conflicts - Arab media and politicians are largely ignoring events in Darfur? Moataz El Fegiery and Ridwan Ziyada look for answers

This article was first published by al-Hayat. Moataz El Fegiery is Programs Director of the "Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies". Ridwan Ziyada is director of the "Damascus Centre for Human Rights Studies". Translated from the German by Ron Walker

For many people in the Arab world the "humanitarian catastrophe" unfolding in Darfur just doesn't exist - and the simple reason for that is that the Arab media has ignored it. So it's little wonder that there has been no unease or disapproval voiced at the ignorance exhibited by the Arabs on the subject of crimes against humanity in this region of Sudan.

What makes things worse is a suspicion that what we are faced with here is the kind of unscrupulousness that borders on a denial of history; one need only recall the role of some Arabs in the African slave trade.

Let's assume for the moment that Arab governments' displaying a less than clear cut commitment to the human rights issue in Darfur is only to be expected - in fact it is just about the last thing an Arab government is going to place on its list of foreign policy priorities - but what about Arab journalists, intellectuals, political activists and artists? How is their behaviour, particularly those whose job it is raise public awareness of such things on behalf of the United Nations, to be explained?

Turning a blind eye on the Darfur crisis

How can they justify their silence on events in Darfur? No explanation, no honestly expressed shock at what is happening in Darfur has been forthcoming. The only rent in this curtain of silence being the statement of 17 October 2006, when at least some few Arab intellectuals were prepared to express their disapproval of "the silence of the Arab world in the face of the humanitarian catastrophe in Darfur."

Since 2003, a combination of the armed hostilities, generally poor living conditions and widespread disease and malnutrition has brought the death toll in Darfur to somewhere in the region of 300,000 - 400,000. Over two million refugees are on the move or have fled the country completely. The violence has left three and a half million people dependent upon humanitarian aid money.

The peace treaty signed at Abudja on 5 May 2006, between the Khartoum government and one of the most influential of the province's guerrilla groups has failed to bring either security or peace to Darfur. The indications are, in fact, that far from improving, things are getting worse.

In Darfur, in contrast to what is happening in other Arab regions, what we have is an internal Sudanese conflict that is being fought out between the central government and armed opposition groups, against a backdrop of decades of backwardness in development and government greed for power - and this in a region where ethnic, cultural and religious disharmony has brought a catalogue of wars, one after the other.

The fact that the Arabs have ignored the subject, despite the vicious bloodletting, may be down to the central importance attached to the Middle East, particularly to the conflict with Israel. Certain sections of the political and intellectual elite of the Arab world are choosing not only to ignore, but also even to deny the situation in Sudan. This has been suggested by reports from both the Arab Doctors and Muslim Lawyers unions, amongst others.

The role of the Arab media

Darfur, then, unlike the Middle East conflicts, is a non-event as far as Arab media interest is concerned - "as if Darfur were really none of our business, or we didn't want it to be any of our business," was how one female Arab journalist put it.

Some sections of the Arab media even insist on referring to the Darfur crisis as "a Zionist-American conspiracy" whose aim is to carve up and depredate Sudan. It's a belief that conveniently allows them to ignore the crimes committed in the region itself. Some national media, the Egyptian in particular, are choosing to lay increasing importance on the question of national security to the detriment of all other humanitarian concerns.

The Egyptian media, in fact, has not only continually denied the existence of the humanitarian crisis in Sudan; it continues to adopt an arrogant attitude to the subject. Egyptian press reports on the crisis of the Sudanese refugees, dozens of whom were killed after they gathered in a square in Cairo to protest against policy on refugees, clearly illustrated this.

The official Egyptian press vindicated the action of the security forces and were arrogant and racist in their reporting of the fate of the defenceless Sudanese, who had fled the misery of Sudan only to make the acquaintance of clubs wielded by the Egyptian security forces.

Much of the current debate is taken up with protest over the presence of the UN peacekeeping forces in Sudan. On the one hand, the Arab regimes accuse the international community of incompetence and of applying double standards with regard to the Arab-Israeli conflict. At the same time, however, there are constant demands made for international protection for civilians in Palestine.

Double standards

The same double standards are also recognisable in Arab thinking. The blinkered political rationale has cost millions of civilian lives in Darfur, with innocent people suddenly becoming expendable pawns in the conflict being waged by the political and intellectual Arab elite against the West.

What some, in particular the Khartoum government, have overlooked is the fact that a 10,000-strong UN troop, made up mostly of soldiers from 60 different African and Asian countries, is currently stationed in Sudan.

It was the peace agreement of 2005 that brought an end to twenty-one years of civil war between the government and the Sudanese liberation movement and led to the troops being deployed in central and southern areas of the country.

Collaboration with the international community for the purposes of securing peace in Darfur does not contravene international law nor undermine the sovereignty of the Sudanese leadership; it is in fact the duty of the international community.

The Arab world's response to the Darfur crisis has been a miserable failure. It's the moral failure, however, more than the political failure, that is the real tragedy. And it is a failure of the intellectuals just as much as it is of the Arab governments.

Because it is better late than never, Arab politicians, intellectuals, lawyers and journalists must act now. They must come together to protect the people of Darfur. It may, perhaps, still be just enough to help ease a little the pangs of remorse and grief which are the lot of all who indulge in misplaced silence and ignorance.

(c) EL-Fegiery/Ziyada/Qantara.de 2007

US Senate interest in Darfur? - A (possible) good sign (Mark Kleiman)

As a number of people have been arguing recently, there are very good reasons to believe that Targeted economic pressure on Khartoum CAN help Darfur--and that there are morally compelling reasons to give them a try.

According to an eye-catching item by Mark Kleiman (below), it is possible that some important and powerful people in the US Senate agree. Is this a genuinely significant straw in the wind? Let's hope so.

Anyone who agrees might want to write or e-mail Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Senate Majority Whip, to encourage him.

--Jeff Weintraub
====================
Mark Kleiman (The Reality-Based Community)
February 21, 2007
The (pleasant) surprise of a lifetime
Posted by Mark Kleiman

I'm still mulling over yesterday's blogger breakfast with Sen. Dick Durbin. I can't get used to the idea that meeting with eight mid-level bloggers is considered a good use of an hour of the Senate Majority Whip's time, and too much was said too quickly for me to fully wrap my head around it by now.

But here's my sharpest impression, one I expect to remember forever. There we are, sitting around a table, mostly talking Senate inside baseball, which Durbin talks very cogently and entertainingly indeed. A lull falls in the flow of questions, so Durbin is able to bring up a topic on his own initiative.

What he wants to talk about is — no, I wouldn't have gotten it in three guesses, or thirty for that matter — Darfur.

Perhaps you've noticed the silence on Darfur in this space. What is there to say, except for howls of impotent rage? Yes, we ought to do something about it. So should the UN. So should the EU. So should the African Union. So should the Good Witch of the North, for that matter; she's as likely to do something useful as any of the rest of the players, or all of them together. And I've been unable to imagine how it could get to be a sufficiently potent issue in U.S. politics to get the Bush Administration to take action.

Well, it turns out that Durbin still has Rwanda on his conscience. He was told that if we didn't send 5000 troops, there would be genocide. He couldn't persuade Bill Clinton (fresh off his humiliation in Mogadishu and its shameless exploitation by the Republicans, including John McCain) to send the 5000 troops. As a result, 800,000 people died.

Now Durbin has the idea — I'm utterly incompetent to judge its validity — that financial sanctions can be made to work. Apparently all the Darfurian oil contracts, which provide the bulk of the Sudanese government's budget, and all of the other contracts in the world oil market, are dollar-denominated, which means the money eventually comes under the regulatory authority of the Treasury. (Why it would take more than a day to rewrite the Darfurian contracts in Euros or sterling or yen I'm not sure, but apparently all the downstream contracts are in dollars, too, so changing currencies wouldn't be a trivial exercise.) Durbin proposes to tighten the screws, on the North Korean model.

I hope it works. But even if it doesn't work, the thought that the #2 guy in the Senate, unprompted, sitting around with a bunch of political junkies, wants to talk about how to save the lives of people who aren't going to vote for him or contribute to his campaign is enough to make me teary-eyed with gratitude for the results last November. It sure wouldn't have occurred to Trent Lott.

Update Another participant in the breakfast, who was cheating by taking notes (What does he think he is? a journalist?) recalls that Durbin gave his mentor Sen. Paul Simon credit for the demarche to Clinton on Rwanda. I stand corrected.

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

"Bashing Goliath" - Another good review of Markovits on European anti-Americanism (American Prospect)

The left-liberal American Prospect magazine carried an excellent review of Andy Markovits's new book analyzing European anti-Americanism, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America. (For more about this book, see HERE.)

This reviewer, Sasha Abramsky, begins by complaining about Markovits's writing style (excessively, I think) and adds that he doesn't agree with all the arguments in the book, though he does "find most of them compelling." But he's delighted to see a serious and intelligent consideration of some important issues that are usually treated with evasion or partisan sloganeering.
No, the satisfaction comes from seeing someone on the progressive side of the political spectrum actually marshalling the evidence to point out that, while Bush is indeed bad, much of Europe has gone more than just a little loco when it comes to discussing America. [....]

Loathing America -- and, by extension, its sidekick Israel -- is, writes Markovits, a form of "pedigreed prejudice," its practitioners utilizing a rather loathsome, stereotype-laden language that would be entirely beyond the pale if it was being employed against any other nation or people on earth. Indeed, he argues, many of the most anti-American gibes are laced with heavy dosages of anti-Semitism, with the United States seen as a country controlled by, and beholden to, a nefarious global Jewish cabal. As anti-Americanism has risen, so, too, have anti-Semitic commentaries become more commonplace in Europe, with the political left -- with its allegiance to purportedly oppressed third world movements -- leading the charge.

Markovits mentions the example of an anti-globalization demonstrator at Davos wearing a Donald Rumsfeld mask with a star of David on his chest, while others danced around a "golden calf," and he asks his readers why a country as small as Israel should be a prime target of protestors bemoaning the economic inequalities of globalization. [Etc.]
Abramsky does wonder whether some of Marrkovits's arguments are a bit overstated or incomplete--which I'm not sure they are, frankly. But he adds that you don't have to agree with every detail to find the book valuable and illuminating. At the very least, it's a good antidote to the prevailing alternatives of Pollyannish evasion, pseudo-sophisticated attemts to deny the undeniable, or superficial Euro-bashing.
But, at the end of the day, the fact remains that rarely has the Atlantic Ocean, the expanse between the continents, seemed as huge. In exploring the less honorable underpinnings of this, and the more unsavory discourses that curry favor in political circles in Europe today, Markovits performs a valuable service. If you wonder where the U.S.-European relationship is heading, Uncouth Nation is a book well-worth reading.
Correct. Read the rest (below) ... and the book.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

[P.S. For some other intelligent reviews of Uncouth Nation, see here and here.]

=========================
American Prospect (On-Line)
February 2, 2007
Bashing Goliath
By Sasha Abramsky

A new book analyzes the very old phenomenon of European anti-Americanism.

I feel, having just read Andrei Markovits's Uncouth Nation, a profound satisfaction. It's not that Markovits is a great stylist; he's assuredly not. His sentences are sometimes maddeningly convoluted, and the book itself is poorly organized, with many key examples illustrating his arguments buried deep within the text. Nor is it that I agree with all of his arguments, though I do find most of them compelling.

No, the satisfaction comes from seeing someone on the progressive side of the political spectrum actually marshalling the evidence to point out that, while Bush is indeed bad, much of Europe has gone more than just a little loco when it comes to discussing America.

Visit Paris, London, Berlin, Amsterdam or Athens today, talk with leading intellectuals and commentators from all the many different sides of the continent's fractious political discourse, listen in to conversations in cafes and bars, and the chances are pretty good you'll hear some, frankly, rank nonsense about America-the-evil-Empire, or America-font-of-all-things-bad. It'll be dressed up in the superior tones Europeans often adopt when discussing the United States -- bemoaning the country's crudity, its intolerance, its barbaric mores, its fanatical and bloodthirsty social system. And the flaws in America's cultural and political visions will be rather self-satisfyingly contrasted with an ever-peaceful Europe's superior methods of social organization.

Loathing America -- and, by extension, its sidekick Israel -- is, writes Markovits, a form of "pedigreed prejudice," its practitioners utilizing a rather loathsome, stereotype-laden language that would be entirely beyond the pale if it was being employed against any other nation or people on earth. Indeed, he argues, many of the most anti-American gibes are laced with heavy dosages of anti-Semitism, with the United States seen as a country controlled by, and beholden to, a nefarious global Jewish cabal. As anti-Americanism has risen, so, too, have anti-Semitic commentaries become more commonplace in Europe, with the political left -- with its allegiance to purportedly oppressed third world movements -- leading the charge.

Markovits mentions the example of an anti-globalization demonstrator at Davos wearing a Donald Rumsfeld mask with a star of David on his chest, while others danced around a "golden calf," and he asks his readers why a country as small as Israel should be a prime target of protestors bemoaning the economic inequalities of globalization. He details prestigious academic journals kicking Israelis off their editorial boards and leading commentators proudly proclaiming an enmity to all things Israel. In January 2003, he writes, the Independent newspaper in Britain even published a cartoon of Ariel Sharon eating a baby -- a piece of propaganda that brings to mind the age-old notion of Jews as drinkers of Christian children’s blood.

In other words, while the Israeli government's actions are assuredly deserving of powerful criticism, Markovits argues that the response in Europe to years of Middle-Eastern strife has been to reawaken ethnic and religious prejudices supposedly made entirely unacceptable in the post-Holocaust years.

What emerges are a series of feedback loops: dislike for America feeds on dislike of Israel, and, conversely, dislike of an Israel currently ruled by thuggish conservatives and perceived to be pursuing old-fashioned colonial rule over the Palestinians leads to greater hostility toward its patron, America. Dislike of Israel morphs (among some) into a more pronounced dislike of all things Jewish. And dislike of Jews is furthering an anti-American worldview held by people who tend to believe American Jewry holds disproportionate political and economic sway over America's polyglot, and immigrant-heavy, populace. In many ways, the know-nothing, conspiracy-contorted populism animating these beliefs might be seen as a cousin to the narrow-minded American populism the historian Richard Hofstadter chronicled in the mid-twentieth century.

Rarely will this worldview be leavened with the kind of humility one might expect from denizens of countries that either ran their own far more bloody imperial projects in the not-so-distant past or were dominated by unfathomably nasty fascist or communist one-party systems for a good part of the 20th century. Thus the spectacle of a leading theorist for the German Social Democratic Party noting, without any sense of irony, that America is the paragon of a "defective democracy." Thus, too, Austrian journalist Eric Frey writing a "Black Book USA" detailing all of America's crimes, in emulation of the Russian journalist Vassily Grossman's World War Two-era Black Book that chronicled, for the historical record, the crimes of the Holocaust.

Not nearly frequently enough will you hear an honest acknowledgement that while the United States might be leading the stampede toward globalization, the citizens of Europe themselves, especially in the leading countries of the European Union, haven't exactly done badly from the new, and utterly unfair, global economic arrangements. Nor will one hear reference to the uncomfortable fact that if America withdrew from the global scene and shrank its foreign and military commitments back to the non-existent pre-1776 levels, inevitably Europeans would end up having to spend a lot more of their own money, and probably shed a lot more of their own soldiers' blood, setting in place their own security arrangements. Nor will one hear acknowledgments that many of the things Europeans hate most about the United States -- whether it be the death penalty, or its religiosity -- were staples of European nation-states well into modern times, and also exist in many other countries today without generating nearly the same animosity.

Markovits, a Romanian-Jewish immigrant to the United States, and a professor of comparative politics and German studies at the University of Michigan, argues that Europe's anti-Americanism -- a phenomenon he traces back to the birth of the New World and one that has existed even in periods when Western Europe and the United States were supposedly joined at the hip -- is now something akin to a European "lingua franca." Like Hannah Arendt before him, he argues that it is an "ism" unto itself, a political rallying cry at the core of the new "European" identity. Politicians debating everything from expanding the EU to protecting the integrity of national languages, Markovits argues, use "America and Americanization as a convenient bogeyman to garner points in an internal conflict that has nothing to do with America." Don't like reforms to the way cricket is played in England? Blame the United States. Don't like obesity or, conversely, an obsession with exercising? Blame the United States. Don't like reality TV (a phenomenon that emerged first in Europe)? Blame Hollywood.

Like Arendt, Markovits argues that this rather simplistic discourse serves a mainly negative role, allowing Europeans to blame all the problems, and contradictions, of modernity on one particularly savage entity, thus avoiding any culpability for their own role in the way the world is.

He sets out to pop some bubbles, and he achieves this splendidly. Whether he's quoting Italian anarchist icon Dario Fo sympathizing with the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, or German and French citizens bemoaning, in language eerily reminiscent of 19th century critiques, an "Americanization" process they detest but seem utterly unable (in a sign of startling passivity) to stop, the effect is deeply disturbing.

If, he writes, Islamic extremists had successfully flown a plane into the Eiffel Tower, as they plotted to do in 1994, it is inconceivable that large swatches of the American intelligentsia would have put pen to paper blaming the French for the atrocity against their country. Yet, he shows, immediately after 9/11 many of Europe's leading voices began crying schadenfreude, arguing something akin to "America had it coming." He quotes French philosopher Jean Baudrillard saying "We" all "without exception" dreamed of an attack on the World Trade Center for years. He writes about best-selling books in Germany that blame the entire attack on a U.S. government conspiracy. He quotes composer Karlheinz Stockhausen talking of the beauty of the imagery of the burning towers.

America is, of course, the big cheese, and it's always morally easier to side with David than with Goliath. Yet sometimes David happens to be wrong. George W. Bush is a terrible leader and his administration has done untold harm to America's relations with much of the rest of the world, but that doesn't mean that radical Islamists' goal of utterly humbling the U.S. superpower would bring anything other than chaos to the globe. Europe does many things much, much better than the United States, but that doesn't mean there aren't some things America does very well (generating material well-being for a tremendous number of its residents, assimilating many millions of immigrants a year, allowing for a national flexibility that no longer uses race as a core notion of citizenship). Nor does it negate the debt of obligation the "Old World" has to an America that, warts and all, helped make Europe the tolerant, liberal, pluralistic, environment it is today.

One could argue that Markovits exaggerates to get his point across; that he's selective in his use of sources -- ignoring, for example, the many passionate writings in defense of the United States written by Europeans immediately after 9/11, and the soul-searching that Europe has undergone as anti-Semitism on the continent has grown. He also may underplay the degree to which current anti-Americanism in much of Europe is more about a dislike of George Bush than a genuine, durable, dislike for all-things American.

But, at the end of the day, the fact remains that rarely has the Atlantic Ocean, the expanse between the continents, seemed as huge. In exploring the less honorable underpinnings of this, and the more unsavory discourses that curry favor in political circles in Europe today, Markovits performs a valuable service. If you wonder where the U.S.-European relationship is heading, Uncouth Nation is a book well-worth reading.
---------------
Sasha Abramsky is a senior fellow at the New York-based think tank Demos. The author of Conned: How Millions Went to Prison, Lost the Vote, and Helped Send George W. Bush to the White House (The New Press, 2006), he lives in Sacramento and teaches writing at the University of California at Davis.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

"Blame America . . . and oh yeah, the Jews" - Review of Markovits on European anti-Americanism (Jeffrey Kopstein)

Jeffrey Kopstein of the University of Toronto has written an excellent review of Andy Markovits's important and illuminating new book on European anti-Americanism, Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, for the Toronto Globe & Mail. This review is worth reading in full (below)--and then the book, too. Some highlights:
After decades of writing scholarly books sympathetic to the European left, U.S. political scientist Andrei Markovits is fed up with the anti-Americanism of Europe's intellectual and political elites. Anti-Americanism, Markovits writes, "is unifying West Europeans more than any other political emotion -- with the exception of hostility to Israel. In today's Western Europe, these two closely related antipathies and resentments are now considered proper etiquette. They are present in polite company and acceptable in the discourse of the political classes." I think it is safe to say that Markovits is going to lose some of his European friends with this book.

Markovits sensibly distinguishes between disapproval of the United States for what it does and dislike of the United States for what it is. The former is not anti-Americanism; the latter is. In practice, however, the line isn't so easy to draw. [....] In a fascinating twist, Markovits highlights the gradual transformation of European anti-Americanism after the Second World War from an ideology of the discredited right to one of the anti-imperialist left. [....]

And then there is the anti-Semitism. In what is surely his most controversial chapter, Markovits draws the connection between European anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. He maintains that the old and discredited anti-Semitism of the European right has migrated to a new anti-Semitism of the left. [....] The issue is not capitalism but ethnic identity. The left accepts Jews, but only on the condition that they shed their Jewishness. In a moment at once self-revelatory and accusatory, Markovits writes, "Indeed, the Left always reserved its universalism for the Jews while applying the legitimacy of its identity politics to all other nationalities."

Anti-Zionism and the demonization of Israel have become vehicles for the reintroduction of anti-Semitism into respectable European conversation, especially since the Six Day War in 1967. The syllogisms are simple enough: Israel commits atrocities. Why? Because the United States lets it. Why? Because guess who controls the United States? You got it: the Jews.

What is disturbing for Markovits is that this is not simply the nutty left but his old buddies, the Social Democrats and the Greens. [....] "Israel thus becomes a sort of new Jew, a collective Jew among the world's nations." The book offers a great deal of convincing evidence for these assertions, some of it based on survey research, but most of it based on Markovits's deep familiarity with Europe's left-wing scene. [....]

Uncouth Nation also raises the crucial question of whether it is possible to build a European identity without demonizing the United States. For the most part, European anti-Americanism has been an elite phenomenon. George Bush, however, has made it possible to close the gap between a "separatist" European elite that wants to break away from the tutelage of the United States and the broad masses who still see themselves as part of the "West." [....] Although these same intellectuals hailed the now-50-year-old project of European integration as a "post-national" exercise, the temptation to use the traditional tools of nation-building in the service of a new pan-European nationalism -- including demonizing the "other" -- has been irresistible. [....]
The Chronicle of Higher Education also carried an overview of the argument in Markovits's own words, using excerpts from the book itself ("Western Europe's America Problem").

=> Some other comments, reactions, and reviews::

Joschka Fischer, former Foreign Minister of Germany; and Professor, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton University : In Uncouth Nation, Andrei Markovits provides deep insights into anti-Americanism in Europe today and delves into many of the facets that make the American-European relationship so unique. This book should be read and discussed!

Josef Joffe, Publisher and Editor of Die Zeit, and Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University : Anti-Americanism is as old as the Republic--a historical constant, which is only remotely related to specific American behavior. So what is new? Andrei Markovits has delivered the best answer yet, ranging across an astounding wealth of material from politics and culture. Uncouth Nation is a rare academic treat. Rigorous and analytical, the book is also a pleasure to read as it penetrates a critical issue of our time.

Ira Katznelson, author of When Affirmative Action Was White: Disturbing and provocative, this wide-ranging and passionate intervention convenes history, social analysis, and a sense of anxiety to rouse attention to the underside of the European critique of America. Just as it intends, the book will stir comment and debate on both sides of the Atlantic, especially on the Left. For one, I can't wait.

Michael Walzer, Institute for Advanced Study : Andrei Markovits does three things in this excellent book: he provides an account of the historical and contemporary forms of European anti-Americanism (and of its close relative, anti-Semitism); he analyzes the roots and causes of this phenomenon; and, best of all, he gives us a running critique of the frequent silliness and malice of the anti-Americans and of their role in fashioning a certain kind, which is not the best possible kind, of pan-European politics.

Richard Wolin, Graduate Center, City University of New York author of The Seduction of Unreason: For many years now, Andrei Markovits has been North America's most insightful analyst of European political culture. In Uncouth Nation he has written a near-masterpiece. On page after page, Markovits convincingly demonstrates the all-consuming nature of European anti-Americanism. He shows that, in an era where European collective identity remains in tenuous flux, anti-Americanism has become a mainstay of ersatz ideological cohesion. In a classical instance of ressentiment, Europeans deride America not so much for what it does but because of what it is-an orientation that often says more about contemporary Europe than about its despised trans-Atlantic rival. Uncouth Nation is lucidly argued and mellifluously written. Markovits has provided us with a landmark study in political pathology.

Ezra Suleiman, Princeton University, author of Dismantling Democratic States: Recent events, from September 11 to the Iraq war to repeated acts of terrorism, have given new vigor to the debate on anti-Americanism. Uncouth Nation contributes significantly to the debate. Its author, who is deeply familiar with both the European and American literature on the subject, has clearly thought a great deal about anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism in his quest to make sense of each as well as to determine how they interact.

Jeffrey Herf, University of Maryland, author of The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda During World War II and the Holocaust: Andrei Markovits, with a mix of analytical clarity, historical perspective, and years of personal experience as one of our most informed observers of European politics, offers a challenging, disquieting yet certainly important analysis of views that have entered the continent's political mainstream. While many think or hope that the hostility of recent years is primarily a short-term reaction to the policies of George W. Bush, Markovits makes a compelling case that longer-term currents are at work. Uncouth Nation should be read by policymakers, scholars, and citizens who seek a deeper understanding of recent tensions and prospects for trans-Atlantic relations and for Europe's future.

Caroline Walsh Irish Times : Promises to explain how Europe's aversion to the US has been catapulted into overdrive by George W. Bush's policies.

--Jeff Weintraub

=========================
Toronto Globe and Mail
January 21, 2007
Blame America . . . and oh yeah, the Jews
By Jeffrey Kopstein

Review of:
Andrei S. Markovits
Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America
Princeton University Press

Jeffrey Kopstein is director of the Centre for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies and professor of political science at the University of Toronto. His book Growing Apart? America and Europe in the 21st Century will appear this year.

After decades of writing scholarly books sympathetic to the European left, U.S. political scientist Andrei Markovits is fed up with the anti-Americanism of Europe's intellectual and political elites. Anti-Americanism, Markovits writes, "is unifying West Europeans more than any other political emotion -- with the exception of hostility to Israel. In today's Western Europe, these two closely related antipathies and resentments are now considered proper etiquette. They are present in polite company and acceptable in the discourse of the political classes." I think it is safe to say that Markovits is going to lose some of his European friends with this book.

Markovits sensibly distinguishes between disapproval of the United States for what it does and dislike of the United States for what it is. The former is not anti-Americanism; the latter is. In practice, however, the line isn't so easy to draw. Some people find fault with the United States no matter what it does. It is bad for intervening militarily to stop a genocide in Kosovo but equally bad for failing to intervene to stop a genocide in Rwanda. It is wrong for promoting free trade and globalization but equally wrong for raising tariffs to protect its industries. It is this damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't approach of Europe's elite critics of the United States that bothers Markovits.

George Bush and the war in Iraq have fuelled anti-Americanism among Europe's masses, but Markovits impressively documents the long history of anti-Americanism among Europe's elites going back to the settlement of the New World. It's an ironic antipathy, because the United States was a European creation. Even so, a long line of European cranks -- from the French naturalist Georges-Louis Leclerc (better known as the Comte de Buffon), who took the sparse body hair of the U.S. native population as proof of its sexual degeneracy, to the German pulp fiction novelist Karl May, who wrote book after book about the relationship of the "redmen" to the "whitemen" without having ever visited North America -- attempted to fashion an image of America and Americans as unhealthy and corrupt.

More respectable European intellectuals played their part, too. Germany's great philosopher, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, viewed the U.S. political order as immature and chaotic. Heinrich Heine lamented that "there are no princes or nobles there; all men are equal -- equal dolts." Sigmund Freud considered the United States to be hopelessly materialist, a place with "no time for libido" and "a gigantic mistake." According to Markovits, "a strong negative assessment of things American has far outweighed any positive views of the United States on the part of German intellectuals and elites."

And it's not just the German-speakers. Britain's Frances Trollope reproached the United States, in her 1832 bestseller Domestic Manners of the Americans, for its vulgar materialism, its food culture (Americans eat, they don't dine) and its obsession with efficiency. Charles Dickens, in his 1842 American Notes, bemoans the heterogeneity of the country: too many immigrants, too dirty, too corrupt, too individualistic and too brutal. Renowned 19th-century journalist Frédéric Gaillardet educated the French Republic on American women who "dominated their husbands" and ran the country.

The list goes on. A broad array of Spaniards, Italians, Russians and even Norwegians (including Nobel Prize-winning novelist and Nazi sympathizer Knut Hamsun) have found the United States distasteful not for anything it did but for what it is and what it stands for.

In a fascinating twist, Markovits highlights the gradual transformation of European anti-Americanism after the Second World War from an ideology of the discredited right to one of the anti-imperialist left. As magnanimous as the Americans were in Europe after the war, cultural dependence on the United States elicited a deep and abiding resentment. It became the source of all of modernity's evils. Longer working hours, "publish or perish" at French universities, the dramatic increase in lawsuits and the prestige of "L.A. Law" lawyers in Great Britain, reality TV (which, in fact, originated in Europe), even the dominance of black over brown squirrels in German parks, are seen as evidence of a pernicious "Americanization."

And then there is the anti-Semitism. In what is surely his most controversial chapter, Markovits draws the connection between European anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. He maintains that the old and discredited anti-Semitism of the European right has migrated to a new anti-Semitism of the left. In some ways, of course, this should not surprise anyone. Many early socialists -- most famously Karl Marx -- shared the romantic right's prejudice of Jews as embodying everything that was bad about capitalist modernity. Markovits, however, is saying something different and far more volatile: The issue is not capitalism but ethnic identity. The left accepts Jews, but only on the condition that they shed their Jewishness. In a moment at once self-revelatory and accusatory, Markovits writes, "Indeed, the Left always reserved its universalism for the Jews while applying the legitimacy of its identity politics to all other nationalities."

Anti-Zionism and the demonization of Israel have become vehicles for the reintroduction of anti-Semitism into respectable European conversation, especially since the Six Day War in 1967. The syllogisms are simple enough: Israel commits atrocities. Why? Because the United States lets it. Why? Because guess who controls the United States? You got it: the Jews.

What is disturbing for Markovits is that this is not simply the nutty left but his old buddies, the Social Democrats and the Greens. He notes that "all the historical ingredients used to demonize Jews are simply transferred to the state of Israel, which -- in the standard diction of anti-Semitism -- behaves Jew-like by grasping for global power, exhibiting Old Testament-like (pre-Christian) vengefulness. It bamboozles the world, as cunning Jews are wont to do, extorts money from hapless victims who have been fooled into seeing the Jews as victims, exhibits capitalist greed and, of course, indulges in constant brutality toward the weak.

Israel thus becomes a sort of new Jew, a collective Jew among the world's nations." The book offers a great deal of convincing evidence for these assertions, some of it based on survey research, but most of it based on Markovits's deep familiarity with Europe's left-wing scene. Whether it is Jews being beaten up at anti-war demonstrations in Paris in 2003 or respectable left-wing publications in Europe deploying Nazi-like imagery of Israeli leaders with spindly legs and hooked noses, or the repeated superimposition of a swastika on the Star of David (itself now a European symbol for "Israeli aggression"), example after example, from the profound to the trivial, makes for painful reading. "By constantly bringing up the truly warped and ill-willed analogy of the Israelis with the Nazis," Markovits tells us, "Europeans absolve themselves from any remorse and thus experience a sense of liberation."

Uncouth Nation also raises the crucial question of whether it is possible to build a European identity without demonizing the United States. For the most part, European anti-Americanism has been an elite phenomenon. George Bush, however, has made it possible to close the gap between a "separatist" European elite that wants to break away from the tutelage of the United States and the broad masses who still see themselves as part of the "West." It is no accident that Jürgen Habermas, Jacques Derrida and other European intellectuals celebrated the anti-war demonstrations that took place on Feb. 15, 2003, in London, Rome, Paris, Madrid, Helsinki and Athens as the birthday of a united Europe. Although these same intellectuals hailed the now-50-year-old project of European integration as a "post-national" exercise, the temptation to use the traditional tools of nation-building in the service of a new pan-European nationalism -- including demonizing the "other" -- has been irresistible.

At stake here, however, is much more than mere vanity. The Americans don't really have much else besides that for which they stand. Part of being rich and powerful is to put up with a certain amount of criticism from others. But if we wish to sustain the West into the future, it is probably best if we all construct our political identities based on our highest ideals rather than on our deepest loathing.

Andy Markovits - "Western Europe's America Problem"

My good friend Andy Markovits has written an important, engaging, and eye-opening book on the complex and tricky subject of European anti-Americanism. The main focus is on its current forms and transformations, but he also puts these in a larger historical perspective.

This book first appeared in Germany, where Markovits has a significant presence as a public intellectual, with the title Amerika, dich haßt sich's besser. A revised English-language version has now been published as Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America. The book is valuable and illuminating as well as absorbing (and highly readable), and I recommend it to everyone.

Markovits's arguments are also likely to be controversial--but many of the reasons only help to explain why this is a book that needed to be written. In a first-rate review for Toronto Globe & Mail (which I also recommend reading), Jeffrey Kopstein of the University of Toronto very effectively conveys its central thrust:
After decades of writing scholarly books sympathetic to the European left, U.S. political scientist Andrei Markovits is fed up with the anti-Americanism of Europe's intellectual and political elites. Anti-Americanism, Markovits writes, "is unifying West Europeans more than any other political emotion--with the exception of hostility to Israel. In today's Western Europe, these two closely related antipathies and resentments are now considered proper etiquette. They are present in polite company and acceptable in the discourse of the political classes." [....]

Markovits sensibly distinguishes between disapproval of the United States for what it does and dislike of the United States for what it is. The former is not anti-Americanism; the latter is. In practice, however, the line isn't so easy to draw. [....]

Uncouth Nation also raises the crucial question of whether it is possible to build a European identity without demonizing the United States. For the most part, European anti-Americanism has been an elite phenomenon. George Bush, however, has made it possible to close the gap between a "separatist" European elite that wants to break away from the tutelage of the United States and the broad masses who still see themselves as part of the "West." [....] Although these same intellectuals hailed the now-50-year-old project of European integration as a "post-national" exercise, the temptation to use the traditional tools of nation-building in the service of a new pan-European nationalism--including demonizing the "other"--has been irresistible. [....]

And then there is the anti-Semitism. In what is surely his most controversial chapter, Markovits draws the connection between European anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism. He maintains that the old and discredited anti-Semitism of the European right has migrated to a new anti-Semitism of the left. [....] Anti-Zionism and the demonization of Israel have become vehicles for the reintroduction of anti-Semitism into respectable European conversation, especially since the Six Day War in 1967. [....] What is disturbing for Markovits is that this is not simply the nutty left but his old buddies, the Social Democrats and the Greens. [....]
To which one can add the jacket blurb for the book contributed by the eminent left-wing American political scientist (and recent President of the American Political Science Association) Ira Katznelson:
Disturbing and provocative, this wide-ranging and passionate intervention convenes history, social analysis, and a sense of anxiety to rouse attention to the underside of the European critique of America. Just as it intends, the book will stir comment and debate on both sides of the Atlantic, especially on the Left. For one, I can't wait.
I'll second that. Even the reviewer for the New Statesman--a publication that often displays precisely the kinds of pathologies analyzed by Markovits--was forced to concede that "Markovits's research is wide-ranging and deep, and he writes with clarity, precision and insight."

=> Markovits is a distinguished scholar of European politics, culture, and political economy. The relationship between Europe and the US also is a matter of personal as well as scholarly significance for him, since his life has made him at home in both worlds--and, unlike some people, he likes them both He was born in Romania and lived there and in Vienna for his first two decades, then has spent his academic career in the US while being immersed in European studies and things European.

One manifestation of his cosmopolitan engagements is that Andy (unlike me) is a passionate sports fan, and this enthusiasm extends both to the hegemonic American sports and to the supreme spectator sport of the world outside the US, soccer. His preoccupation with the question of why the US, almost uniquely, has failed to get swept up in this world soccer culture motivated him to write the definitive book on the comparative historical sociology of mass-frenzy competitive team sports, Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism. (Princeton University Press, 2001. By the way, this is a fascinating and important book even if you don't happen to be crazy about soccer, cricket, baseball, basketball, and/or American football yourself ... believe it or not.)

Unlike that book, Uncouth Nation can't exactly be called a labor of love, but it also combines passionate engagement with solid scholarship and insightful analysis. This combination is necessary because anti-Americanism, like most significant ideological phenomena, is a complicated, shifting, and multi-faceted subject about which superficial opinionating is easy and plentiful (including implausible denials that the phenomenon exists at all, often coming from people who are transparently anti-American themselves), but intellectually serious and sophisticated discussion is rarer and more difficult. Uncouth Nation makes an indispensable contribution to such a discussion, and you don't even have to agree with all of it to find it worth reading and usefully thought-provoking.

=> When the subject of anti-Americanism comes up, some people's first response is to point out that criticisms of American actions, policies, and political leaders, even of American institutions, don't necessarily constitute anti-Americanism. This is absolutely true--in fact, a truism. But of course Markovits recognizes that quite well, so in this case that truism is also beside the point.

Actually, the same distinction can be made with respect to any form of hostility or bias based on ethnicity, race, gender, or anything else. Not every criticism or disagreement is a sign of prejudice or hostility, and in fact even sharp criticisms can, in principle, be objective, constructive, and even friendly. But does it follow that there is never such thing as racism, sexism, religious bigotry, or ethnic antagonism? Few people would seriously claim that. In the real world, there is a point at which specific criticisms shade off into generalized and emotionally charged forms of bias, suspicion, antagonism, fear,denigration, contempt, and/or resentment. The usual signs may include crude stereotyping, habitual use of double standards, criticisms based on contradictory standards, obsessive blaming of the target (plausibly or implausibly) for every real or imagined problem, consistently invidious assessments of all the target's (real or imagined) traits, systematically exaggerated and one-sided condemnations, and so on. In such cases, it eventually becomes clear that something more is going on than just a set of specific criticisms or disagreements, and that it's misleading and ridiculous to focus exclusively on those and ignore the underlying orientations that actually shape and motivate them. Of course, drawing that line is often difficult and subtle in practice, but facing reality requires that we make the effort.

So it is with anti-Americanism, as Markovits shows quite carefully and convincingly, for those who still need to be convinced. Something more is going on. An intelligent and sympathetic review of Uncouth Nation in the American Prospect captured the central point nicely:
I feel, having just read Andrei Markovits's Uncouth Nation, a profound satisfaction. [....] [T]he satisfaction comes from seeing someone on the progressive side of the political spectrum actually marshalling the evidence to point out that, while Bush is indeed bad, much of Europe has gone more than just a little loco when it comes to discussing America.
As I already noted, a number of people, including some whom I know to be generally intelligent and well informed, try to claim that there is no significant anti-Americanism in Europe--there are only (justified) disagreements with specific American policies. Well, if people are determined to deny the undeniable, they are unlikely to be dissuaded by mere evidence. But I think that any reader who approaches Markovits's book with an even moderately open mind will have to conclude that he is dealing with a real phenomenon.

Nor can Markovits be dismissed as a Europhobe or as an uncritical apologist for American society, American foreign policies, and/or the Bush administration, since he is clearly none of these things. In US politics Markovits is and has always been a firmly committed left-of-center Democrat, with a passionate and unequivocal hostility to the Bush administration and all its works. (Unlike me, he did not support the 2003 Iraq war.) He favors an independent and viable Palestinian state as part of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is sympathetic to the peace camp in Israeli politics. And in Europe his closest political sympathies and attachments have always been with parties and movements of the democratic left. It is precisely because of these commitments that he feels especially exasperated with the left-of-center tendencies in current European anti-Americanism.

=> It may be worth underlining some themes and issues raised by Markovits that were already mentioned in the reviews from which I quoted. He recognizes, of course, that the policies of the Bush administration, in both tone and substance, have contributed to a major increase in the breadth and intensity of anti-Americanism in Europe (and elsewhere). But it would be superficial and misleading to focus exclusively on the impact of the Bush administration, since this phenomenon didn't emerge out of nowhere after November 2000, or even after September 2001. It has deeper historical roots than that, both recent and long-term, and it's unlikely to simply fade away after Bush & Cheney leave the White House.

Markovits does argue, though, that there seems to have been at least one notable shift in the social profile of European anti-Americanism during the past 6 years. Over the past two centuries, the shifting varieties of anti-Americanism have mostly been carried by social and political elites and intellectuals. Generally speaking, the bulk of ordinary Europeans have been more likely to hold favorable views about America. What is now happening, however, is that an intensified anti-Americanism on the part of elites and intellectuals has converged with an upsurge in popular anti-Americanism that is unprecedented in its breadth and intensity. This is a new development, and one with potentially important long-term consequences. The reaction against the Bush administration promoted it and helped it to crystallize, but it remains to be seen whether it turns out to be a transitory phenomenon or one that also has deeper and more durable roots.

In this connection, by the way, Markovits notes that efforts to develop a sense of common European identity often seem to be involve defining distinctive "European" values and institutions in opposition to a (real or imagined) American "other." There's no doubt that Markovits is on to something here, and he's not the only one to have noticed this. Of course, these kinds of mechanisms are a normal part of processes for defining and differentiating collective identities (think of the reciprocal roles of French Anglophobia and British Frog-bashing over the centuries), and they can often be relatively harmless, though Markovits is also right to point to some disturbing aspects of the way currently play out in European anti-Americanism. But I can't help noticing that some political currents marked by nationalist and xenophobic opposition to European integration (and immigration) aren't entirely free of anti-American overtones, either--especially given that the US often tends to be symbolically identified with the dangers of "globalization" on both the left and the right. The US can function as a scapegoat for both sides in the debates over European integration.

And then, as Kopsten says, there is the question of anti-semitism. This is a complex matter that needs to be approached carefully but without evasions. Historically, as Markovits shows, there has often been an association between anti-Americanism and anti-semitism in European ideologies. And during the past half-century this picture has been further complicated by the tangled interplay between anti-semitism and the analytically distinct but often overlapping phenomenon of anti-Zionism--that is, systematic bias and hostility against Israel, shading off into obsessive hatred and demonization.

(To head off some standard clichés in advance ... no, criticism of Israel and of Israeli policies doesn't necessarily constitute anti-Zionism, let alone anti-semitism. Criticism of Israel is not the same thing as demonization of Israel, or even bias against Israel. But, once again, this distinction cuts both ways. It would be inaccurate and unfair to equate all criticisms of Israel with demonization of Israel. But on the other hand, people who actually engage in demonizing Israel and exhibit blanket bias and hostility against Israel should not be allowed to pretend that they are simply criticizing objectionable Israeli policies.)

I don't think any serious observer argues that western European societies as a whole are in the grip of outright anti-semitism along the lines of the 1930s or even 1890s (with the significant exception of certain "immigrant" subcultures, whose size is substantial in some countries, where anti-semitism of this sort is disturbingly prevalent). But anti-Zionism, in forms ranging from genteel to hysterical, is pervasive and increasingly mainstream. Furthermore, it is increasingly linked to anti-Americanism, often with the rationale that Israel is a tool or symbol of US imperialism, or else that Israel and its supporters (guess who?) allegedly control US foreign policy, or both. In fact, it is pretty clear that a fair amount of European anti-Zionism and anti-semitism either consists of or is fueled by displaced anti-Americanism. For example, as Markovits points out, it is striking that anti-"globalization" protests not only tend to focus hostility against the US, which is perhaps understandable though a bit simplistic, but also routinely include banners and slogans attacking Israel--a tiny country that, on the face of it, is hard to see as a major force for economic globalization.

Even when anti-Zionist bigotry doesn't take the form of anti-semitism or serve as a euphemistic cover for it, this potent blend of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism helps to make anti-semitism more respectable in a number of ways. At the very least, it encourages tendencies to trivialize, make excuses for, or even justify manifestations of outright anti-semitism in European societies and around the world. It often leads to exasperation and resentment directed against European and American Jews who fail to distance themselves ostentatiously from Israel and "Zionism"--or who, even worse, have the temerity to criticize anti-Zionism and anti-semitism at all forcefully. (For a good illustration of how this whole dynamic works itself out, see a brief but penetrating recent analysis of the British situation by Shalom Lappin.) And it has produced a creeping toleration for arguments and imagery that have potentially anti-semitic overtones or that even that go over the edge into the unambiguous recycling of standard anti-semitic themes. (For some striking examples, many of which are also mentioned by Markovits, see here and here.)

Readers may or may not agree with every detail of Markovits's analysis of these problems. But there's no question that the problems he has identified are real and important, and they deserve a serious and honest conversation.

=> One last possible objection. In the past, some people whose judgment I respect, and who have not tried to deny the undeniable fact that European anti-Americanism exists, have nevertheless suggested that it's not a sufficiently important problem to warrant much concern. The US, after all, is a wealthy and powerful superpower that can take care of itself. European hostility may wound the pride of some Americans, but it isn't going to do the US much harm, and the idea of serious conflicts between Europe and the US seems fairly implausible.

I think there is a grain of truth to such points, but I'm not entirely convinced. In the first place, it's always a good idea to face reality rather than evading it, and if an analysis like the one offered by Markovits can help or encourage some people to do that, then this is enough to make the effort worthwhile. But there's also more to it than that. In so far as anti-Americanism is one factor that contributes to poisoning relations and mutual understanding between Europeans and Americans (not the only such factor, but definitely one of them), that can potentially create or exacerbate a whole range of problems, especially in areas where constructive Euro-American cooperation is necessary and important. And anti-Americanism clearly helps to distort political judgments about a range of substantively important issues.

And that's not all. A friend and colleague once suggested to me that instead of worrying about the relatively trivial problem of anti-Americanism in Europe, I should spend more time worrying about anti-Zionism and anti-semitism in Europe. Well, as Markovits shows, the unfortunate reality is that the three of them are closely interconnected, and the combination is toxic and dangerous. We need to pay careful attention to it, and Uncouth Nation should give some people a necessary wake-up call.

=> For an introduction to the book in the author's own words, the Chronicle of Higher Education constructed a useful overview using selected passages from the text. You can read it below.

Yours for reality-based discourse,
Jeff Weintraub

[Update: March 4, 2007] Jonathan Yardley's intelligent and careful review of Uncouth Nation in the Washington Post, "Exploring the roots of anti-Americanism among European elites," agrees that the elite component of western European anti-Americanism is deep-seated and persistent, but argues that broader manifestations of popular anti-Americanism are more superficial and transitory. I guess time will tell.

P.S. I can't resist adding a personal note, even though it isn't necessarily of direct relevance to Markovits's arguments in this book. As he correctly mentions at one point, you don't necessarily have to be a foreigner to be anti-American. In some ways I don't find it so hard to appreciate the intellectual and emotional temptations of Europhile anti-Americanism, since I went through a pretty intense and formative phase of it myself in my 20s. This no doubt had something to do with specific features of that particular historical period--that is, the late 1960s and early 1970s. But I suspect that for two centuries a phase of this sort, in one form or another, has often been standard part of the maturation process for would-be intellectuals in American society. (And I don't just mean left-wing or bohemian intellectuals--consider T.S. Eliot or Henry James, for example.) It might be thought of as a kind of Oedipal break from what feels like the all-encompassing stranglehold of American culture, including American anti-intellectualism, or perhaps a process of inner withdrawal and return. And an engagement with European thought, culture, and politics has often been the focus for this withdrawal and return, whether that meant actually going to Europe physically or just doing it in imagination.

I recall a conversation I had about three decades ago with one of my intellectual mentors, who at that point had a considerably more balanced attitude toward America than I did, in which he mentioned that in the long run it made a big difference whether or not someone had ever experienced a moment of radical doubt about American society. I immediately recognized the force of that remark. But it also makes a big difference whether one experiences this moment of estrangement as a point of developmental transition, and gradually finds a way to move beyond it, or instead gets stuck in it indefinitely. Both history and my own observations have made it clear to me that some people withdraw but never return.

=========================
Chronicle of Higher Education
(Volume 53, Issue 20 - Chronicle Review, p. B6)
January 19, 2007
Western Europe's America Problem
By Andrei S. Markovits

Andrei S. Markovits is a professor of comparative politics and German studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. This essay is adapted from his book Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America, to be published this month by Princeton University Press.

When my father and I arrived in the United States as immigrants from Romania — by way of Vienna — in the summer of 1960, we spent a number of weeks living with American families in the greater New York area. Some were Jews, like us; most were not. But all spoke some German because our English was virtually nonexistent at the time. What impressed me no end, and will always remain with me, was how all those people adored my Viennese-accented German, how they reveled in it, found it elegant, charming, and above all oh-so-cultured. For business and family reasons, my father had to return to Vienna, where I attended the Theresianische Akademie, one of Austria's leading gymnasia. The welcome accorded to me in that environment was much colder and more distant than it had been in the United States, not by dint of my being a Tschusch and a Zuagraster, an interloper from the disdained eastern areas of Europe, but by virtue of having become a quasi American.

From the get-go until my graduation, many years later, I was always admonished by my English teachers, in their heavily accented, Viennese-inflected English, not to speak this abomination of an "American dialect" or "American slang," and never to use "American spelling," with its simplifications that testified prima facie to the uncultured and simpleton nature of Americans. Of course any of my transgressions, be it chatting in class or playing soccer in the hallways, was met with an admonition of, "Markovits, we are not in the Wild West, we are not in Texas. Behave yourself." Viennese-accented German, wonderful; American-accented English, awful. The pattern still pertains nearly 50 years later.

Any trip to Europe confirms what surveys have been finding: The aversion to America is becoming greater, louder, more determined. It is unifying Western Europeans more than any other political emotion — with the exception of a common hostility toward Israel. Indeed, the virulence in Western Europe's antipathy to Israel cannot be understood without the presence of anti-Americanism and hostility to the United States. Those two closely related resentments are now considered proper etiquette. They are present in polite company and acceptable in the discourse of the political classes. They constitute common fare not only among Western Europe's cultural and media elites, but also throughout society itself, from London to Athens and from Stockholm to Rome, even if European politicians visiting Washington or European professors at international conferences about anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are adamant about denying or sugarcoating that reality.

There can be no doubt that many disastrous and irresponsible policies by members of the Bush administration, as well as their haughty demeanor and arrogant tone, have contributed massively to this unprecedented vocal animosity on the part of Europeans toward Americans and America. Indeed, they bear responsibility for having created a situation in which anti-Americanism has mutated into a sort of global antinomy, a mutually shared language of opposition to and resistance against the real and perceived ills of modernity that are now inextricably identified with America. I have been traveling back and forth with considerable frequency between the United States and Europe since 1960, and I cannot recall a time like the present, when such a vehement aversion to everything American has been articulated in Europe. No Western European country is exempt from this phenomenon — not a single social class, no age group or profession, nor either gender. But the aversion reaches much deeper and wider than the frequently evoked "anti-Bushism." I perceive this virulent, Europewide, and global "anti-Bushism" as the glaring tip of a massive anti-American iceberg.

Anti-Americanism has been promoted to the status of Western Europe's lingua franca. Even at the height of the Vietnam War, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and during the dispute over NATO's Dual Track decision (to station Pershing and cruise missiles primarily in Germany, but in other Western European countries as well, while negotiating with the Soviet Union over arms reduction), things were different. Each event met with a European public that was divided concerning its position toward America: In addition to those who reacted with opposition and protest, there were strong forces that expressed appreciation and understanding. In France, arguably Europe's leader over the past 15 years in most matters related to antipathy toward America, the prospect of stationing U.S. medium-range missiles, especially if they were on German soil, even met with the massive approval of the left in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

But as of October 2001, weeks after 9/11 and just before the U.S. war against the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, a massive Europewide resentment of America commenced that reached well beyond American policies, American politics, and the American government, proliferating in virtually all segments of Western European publics. From grandmothers who vote for the archconservative Bavarian Christian Social Union to 30-year-old socialist Pasok activists in Greece, from Finnish Social Democrats to French Gaullists, from globalization opponents to business managers — all are joining in the ever louder chorus of anti-Americanism.

The Bush administration's policies have catapulted global and Western European anti-Americanism into overdrive. But to understand that overdrive, we need to analyze the conditions under which this kind of shift into high gear could occur. Western Europeans' unconditional rejection of and legitimate outrage over abusive and irresponsible American policies — not to mention massive human-rights violations à la Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, secret CIA cells — rest on a substantial sediment of hatred toward, disdain for, and resentment of America that has a long tradition in Europe and has flourished apart from those or any other policies.

Ambivalence, antipathy, and resentment toward and about the United States have made up an important component of European culture since the American Revolution, thus way before America became the world's "Mr. Big" — the proverbial 800-pound gorilla — and a credible rival to Europe's main powers, particularly Britain and France. In recent years, following the end of the cold war, and particularly after 9/11, ambivalence in some quarters has given way to unambiguous hostility. Animosity toward the United States has migrated from the periphery and become a respectable part of the European mainstream.

Negative sentiments and views have been driven not only — or even primarily — by what the United States does, but rather by an animus against what Europeans have believed that America is. While the politics, style, and discourse of the Bush terms — and of President Bush as a person — have undoubtedly exacerbated anti-American sentiment among Europeans and fostered a heretofore unmatched degree of unity between elite and mass opinion in Europe, they are not anti-Americanism's cause. Indeed, a change to a center-left administration in Washington, led by a Democratic president, would not bring about its abatement, let alone its disappearance.

Anti-Americanism constitutes a particular prejudice that renders it not only acceptable but indeed commendable in the context of an otherwise welcome discourse that favors the weak. Just as in the case of any prejudice, anti-Americanism also says much more about those who hold it than about the object of its ire and contempt. But where it differs markedly from "classical" prejudices — such as anti-Semitism, homophobia, misogyny, and racism — is in the dimension of power. Jews, gays and lesbians, women, and ethnic minorities rarely if ever have any actual power in or over the majority populations or the dominant gender of most countries. However, the real, existing United States does have considerable power, which has increasingly assumed a global dimension since the end of the 19th century, and which has, according to many scholarly analyses, become unparalleled in human history.

While other public prejudices, particularly against the weak, have — in a fine testimony to progress and tolerance over the past 40 years — become largely illegitimate in the public discourse of most advanced industrial democracies (the massive change in the accepted language over the past three decades in those societies about women, gays, the physically challenged, minorities of all kinds, and animals, to name but a few, has been nothing short of fundamental), nothing of the sort pertains to the perceived and the actually strong. Thus anti-Americanism not only remains acceptable in many circles but has even become commendable, a badge of honor, and perhaps one of the most distinct icons of what it means to be a progressive these days.

So, too, with hostility to Israel. Because of its association with the United States, Israel is perceived by its European critics as powerful, with both countries seen as mere extensions of one another. To be sure, there is something else at work here as well, because America has many other powerful allies that never receive anywhere near the hostile scrutiny that Israel confronts on a daily basis. Clearly, the fact that Israel is primarily a Jewish state, combined with Europe's deeply problematic and unresolved history with Jews, plays a central role in European anti-Semitism. But today we are witnessing a "new" anti-Semitism that adds to traditional stereotypes: It is an epiphenomenon of anti-Americanism.

The Swiss legal theorist Gret Haller has written extensively to a very receptive and wide audience about America's being fundamentally — and irreconcilably — different from (and, of course, inferior to) Europe from the very founding of the American republic. To Haller, the manner in which the relationships among state, society, law, and religion were constructed and construed in America are so markedly contrary to its European counterpart that any bridge or reconciliation between those two profoundly different views of life is neither possible nor desirable. Hence Europe should draw a clear line that separates it decisively from America. In a discussion with panelists and audience members at a conference on European anti-Americanism at the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna, on April 29, 2005, at which I shared the podium with Haller, she explicitly and repeatedly emphasized that Britain had always belonged to Europe, and that the clear demarcation was never to run along the channel separating Britain from the European continent, but across the ever-widening Atlantic that rightly divided a Britain-encompassing Europe from an America that from the start featured many more differences from than similarities to Europe. The past few years have merely served to render those differences clearer and to highlight their irreconcilable nature.

That widely voiced indictment accuses America of being retrograde on three levels: moral (America's being the purveyor of the death penalty and of religious fundamentalism, as opposed to Europe's having abolished the death penalty and adhering to an enlightened secularism); social (America's being the bastion of unbridled "predatory capitalism," to use the words of former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, and of punishment, as opposed to Europe as the home of the considerate welfare state and of rehabilitation); and cultural (America the commodified, Europe the refined; America the prudish and prurient, Europe the savvy and wise).

Indeed, in an interesting debate in Germany about so-called defective democracies, the United States seems to lead the way. Without a substantial "social" component, a democracy's defects are so severe that one might as well consider labeling such a system nondemocratic, or at best defectively democratic. To be sure, no serious observer of the United States would dispute the considerable defectiveness of its political system. But what matters in this context is not so much the often appropriate indictment of American democracy, but the total silence about the defects of German and (Western) European democracy. As Klaus Faber, one of this argument's major progressive critics, has correctly countered, surely most segregated and alienated immigrants in the suburbs of Paris or the dreary streets of Berlin would be less likely than America's critics to extol German and French democracies as free of any defects. Indeed, if one extends the "social" dimension to include the successful integration of immigrants, surely America's democracy would emerge as much less defective than the alleged models of Western Europe.

Many of the components of European anti-Americanism have been alive and well in Europe's intellectual discourse since the late 18th century. The tropes about Americans' alleged venality, mediocrity, uncouthness, lack of culture, and above all inauthenticity have been integral and ubiquitous to European elite opinion for well over 200 years. But a bevy of examples from all walks of life highlights how pervasive and quotidian anti-Americanism has become. I have collected my examples from outside of what one would conventionally associate with politics precisely to demonstrate that the European animus against things American has little to do with the policies of the Bush administration — or any other administration, for that matter — and is alive and well in realms that have few connections to politics.

Let us turn to language: In German, the terms "Amerikaniesierung" (Americanization) and "amerikanische Verhältnisse" or "amerikanische Bedingungen" (American conditions) almost invariably refer to something at once negative and threatening — something to be avoided. Thus, for example, the Junge Union (the youth branch of the conservative Christian Democratic Union) derided the Social Democratic Party's attempts to introduce primaries on the American model, insisting that German politics needed democratization, not Americanization. The union equated the former with competence in problem solving, the latter with blowing bubbles in the air. For its part, the left has made "Americanization" a pejorative staple of its vocabulary. In Britain, "Americanisation" and "American-style" also have an almost exclusively negative connotation — often with the adjective "creeping" as a telling modifier in front: the creeping Americanization of the car's feel for the road, the cult of guns fueled by creeping Americanization through violent films, the creeping Americanization of the growing girth of British novels, the creeping Americanization of British sport.

Indeed, it seems as if the British find every aspect of the sporting world's Americanization fearful. Thus, for example, The Guardian reported complaints in 1995 that British stadiums have increasingly come to resemble those in America and are now equipped with good seats, restaurants, and even dance floors: Abolishing those infamous standing-room sections, or "terraces," where nearly 100 people lost their lives in riots at Hillsborough in Sheffield, has made the sport too "nice." In 1998 The Independent intoned: "The creeping Americanisation of British sports, in terms of ubiquitous coverage and potential for earning, means that niceness is at a higher premium than ever before." Americanization has also been blamed for taming fans, who previously cared passionately about whatever game they were watching; now they allegedly attend events primarily to see and be seen.

The world of soccer offers a fine example of my point because, whatever one wants to argue about this sport and its culture, it is clear that the United States was at best an also-ran in it throughout the 20th century. America simply did not matter — and still matters very little — in the world of soccer. It was never a threat to Europe; or, to put the point in the right style, America was never a "player." Nevertheless, the discourse about this game on the European side has always had a cynical, aggressive, irritating, and above all condescending tone.

When the United States was chosen as host of the World Cup for the summer of 1994, many of the European news and entertainment media were appalled. Instead of rejoicing that the last important terra incognita for soccer was about to be conquered by the "beautiful game," Europeans loudly voiced the usual objections to American crassness, vulgarity, commercialism, and ignorance. They argued that giving the tournament to the Americans was tantamount to degrading the game and its tradition. Awarding Americans the World Cup was like holding a world championship in skiing in a country in the Sahara or playing a major golf tournament in Greenland — an anomaly bordering on impudence, cheekiness, and inauthenticity, since, in the European view, the environment wasn't suited to the sport. The facilities were denigrated, the organization ridiculed, the whole endeavor treated with derision. When the stadiums were filled like in no other World Cup tournament before or since, when the level of violence and arrests was far and away the lowest at any event that size, the European media chalked it up to the stupidity and ignorance of Americans. Of course Americans came to the games because they like events and pageantry, but did they really enjoy and understand the sport?

The concept "Americanization" also connotes, to give another example, every kind of deterioration in the European world of work — stress through job insecurity, disqualification through work intensification, "flexibility," "mobility" — and is a synonym for all things negative in the very complex entity of a rapidly changing capitalism. People criticize an alleged decline in workmanship and quality of European products, for which they blame the increased competition that Americanization exacts. And the quantity of work is constantly expanding, particularly for managers and others in leading positions. The oxymoron "working vacation" has entered the European vernacular, which again testifies to an Americanization of Europe's work life. Yet rarely, if ever, have I read anything about a purported "Japanization" or — of increasing relevance — "Chinazation" of European work life.

Or consider European discussions of higher education. When, in an article about the American higher-education system that I wrote for the magazine Spiegel Spezial, I praised the seriousness with which teaching is viewed in America and also (in contrast to the situation in Germany) evaluated by students, I received numerous letters of protest from my German colleagues. "We are not, thank God, in America, where universities are just upgraded [secondary] schools," wrote one furious correspondent. That students might be allowed to evaluate their professors' teaching was rejected by almost all of my German colleagues as a bad American habit that commercialized the university and damaged professorial and scholarly autonomy. The late conservative Cologne sociologist Erwin K. Scheuch, spokesman for the equally conservative Bund Freiheit der Wissneschaft (Federation for Academic Freedom, founded in 1970), had been warning against Americanization in German universities for some time. In a 2002 lecture, "Model America," he argued that only some 50 institutions of higher education in America deserve the term "university." He went on to call for blocking any attempt to introduce American course credits to German institutions, and decried the introduction of performance-oriented salaries, which he said would destroy Germany's "collegial structures."

Across the Channel, in a 1994 article in The Guardian, the journalist Peter Kingston wrote, "Bubblegum University's funny ways are becoming familiar in colleges over here. The huge range and exotic combinations of courses, the spoon-feeding mode of classroom teaching, the obsession with grades, the general acceptance that many students have to take jobs through college," he wrote, "these have become standard features of universitas Britannica." Note: Bubblegum University goes with the purported lowering of traditional standards. It can hardly get more stigmatizing than that.

It is only to be expected that European conservatives would make fun of American feminism, multiculturalism, affirmative action, and the related reform movements that are allegedly ruling the best universities in the United States. There is a bevy of material that mocks such reforms under the rubric of "political correctness." Damned if you do, damned if you don't. While Europeans, as a rule, have complained about the arrogance and elitism of American universities, now they are reproaching them for the exact opposite: that their achievements are being destroyed by the unqualified in the name of political correctness. However, Europe's left-wing liberals have just as much trouble tolerating the themes that are part of that complex. While the thrust of their criticism is different, the tenor is surprisingly similar. During the Clinton-Lewinsky crisis, many European leftists regarded the critical position of some American feminists toward Clinton as laughable. Of course puritanism was (again) to blame.

The Americanization of many aspects of the legal worlds and the administration of justice in Europe also raises anxiety. At an informal meeting with trade unionists in 2002, Germany's former Justice Minister Hertha Däubler-Gmelin claimed that America has a lausiges or "lousy" legal system. That view is widely shared in European intellectual circles. There is also a disparaging of America's "claims mentality" and the rapacious litigiousness thought to accompany it. The possibility of introducing courtroom television broadcasts into Germany is seen as succumbing to "American conditions." In Britain, the perceived menace is wide-ranging: ever-larger law firms, higher fees for top-flight attorneys, an epidemic of lawsuits, the proliferation of special courts as part of a doubtful "therapeutic justice"--all are creeping and creepy.

European holidays are allegedly increasingly Americanized, with Santa Claus displacing the Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus at Christmas, with the semi-pagan Halloween becoming more prominent, and with birthday celebrations supplanting "name day" ceremonies of yore. Even the wildlife is said to be succumbing to America's influence: In Hamburg and Vienna, there is a growing resentment that predatory black squirrels, brought to Europe from America, are displacing their indigenous, more peaceful cousins.

All of these "Americanizations" bemoan an alleged loss of purity and authenticity for Europeans at the hands of a threatening and unwelcome intruder who — to make matters worse — exhibits a flaring cultural inferiority. America is resented for everything and its opposite: It is at once too prurient and too puritanical; too elitist, yet also too egalitarian; too chaotic, but also too rigid; too secular and too religious; too radical and too conservative. Again, damned if you do, damned if you don't.

The future of anti-Americanism in Europe's public discourse will remain deeply tied to the fate of Europe's unification process, one of the most ambitious political projects anywhere in the world. Fundamentally, the European views about America have little to do with the real America but much to do with Europe. Europe's anti-Americanism has become an essential ingredient in — perhaps even a key mobilizing agent for — the inevitable formation of a common European identity, which I have always longed for and continue to support vigorously, although I would have preferred to witness a different agency in its creation. Anti-Americanism has already commenced to forge a concrete, emotionally experienced — as opposed to intellectually constructed — European identity, in which Swedes and Greeks, Finns and Italians are helped to experience their still-frail emotive commonality not as "anti-Americans" but as Europeans, which at this stage constitutes one sole thing: that they are "non-Americans."

Anti-Americanism will serve as a useful mobilizing agent to create awareness in Europe for that continent's new role as a growing power bloc in explicit contrast to and keen competition with the United States, not only among Europeans but also around the globe. Anti-Americanism has already begun to help create a unified European voice in global politics and will continue to be of fine service to Europe's growing power in a new global constellation of forces, in which an increasingly assertive Europe will join an equally assertive China to challenge the United States on every issue that it possibly can.

For the time being, there seem to be no visible incentives for Europeans to desist from anti-Americanism. Its tone is popular among European publics. Far from harming Europe and its interests, anti-Americanism has helped Europeans gain respect, affection, and — most important — political clout in the rest of the world. Anti-Americanism has become a European currency whose value fluctuates greatly, but whose existence does represent a chip that Europe will cash in with increasing gusto. By cultivating an anti-American position, Europe feigns membership in a global opposition of the downtrodden by America.

It is completely unclear which direction and what kind of political and symbolic content this waving of the European flag will assume: a negative, exclusionary, and therefore arrogant identity formation that Hannah Arendt labeled "Europeanism," or a positive and universalistic ideology that builds on the commonalities of Western values and then forms the basis for further European state and nation building. But there can be no doubt about one thing: Outfitted with a mass base and a congruence between elite and mass opinion, anti-Americanism could, for the first time in its long European history, become a powerful political force going well beyond the ambivalences, antipathies, and resentments that have continuously shaped the intellectual life of Europe since July 5, 1776.