Anti-American Since 1776

There is no doubt that the Bush administration’s policies have seriously hurt America’s image in the eyes of millions of Europeans, but one can hardly blame anti-Americanism on Bush or any other U.S. president. Recent European outrage at American foreign policy is merely the latest episode in a long history of disdain among European elites that dates back before the Declaration of Independence. Even before its inception, America evoked a much more passionate response from Europeans than any of Europe’s other overseas creations and possessions. America became deeply unsettling to Europe’s elites before it had any power that would rival theirs.

There has always been something desperately seductive about the U.S., something that European elites have regarded as a menace and a threat. To them, the U.S. was shallow, vulgar, uncultured, crass, inauthentic, materialistic, naive, venal and degenerate. At the same time, however, they could not deny that it was somehow irresistible and dangerously attractive—particularly to millions of Europe’s masses, who voted with their feet in hopes of attaining something in America that eluded them at home.

Many notable European intellectuals regarded America as the epitome of a modernity they feared and scorned, from Friedrich Nietzsche to Sigmund Freud, Frances Trollope to Charles Dickens. There were exceptions, of course. Karl Marx voiced his outspoken support of the Union in its struggle against the Confederacy, and a few social democratic and liberal intellectuals—in the European sense—expressed favorable views of the United States. But on the whole, negative views predominated among Europe’s elites, regardless of country or political conviction.

No corner of Europe has been safe from the tropes of antipathy that have come to be known as “anti-Americanism.” They are as much in evidence in Britain as in Germany, France and Italy—on the political right, as well as the left. Nazi and fascist characterizations of America barely differ in either tone or content from those of the extreme left. During the Cold War years, the presence of the Soviet threat—perceived a greater evil—muted disdain for America. But once this danger disappeared, old antipathies reemerged with new strength in a Europe that was about to embark on an unprecedented state-building process of a scale and scope unmatched in human history.

Anti-Americanism suddenly attained a new political function as a source of unity through othering. While it still remains unclear what concrete commonality Danes and Greeks share in their daily lives—and anchors their abstract notion of being “European”—they are both very tangibly not American. The Bush Administration’s policies, especially in the war against Iraq, have helped Europeans a great deal in legitimizing this abstraction.

It is not by chance that many Europeans see February 15, 2003—the day when millions of antiwar demonstrators engulfed virtually every large city in Europe—as the birth date of something akin to a European nation. There is no way to tell whether this sentiment will endure, but active opposition to the U.S. has clearly given Europeans a common bond that they can experience on an emotional level.

What makes anti-Americanism so difficult to categorize is that it merges what America does with what America is. One is a critique of actions, while the other, more deeply entrenched, is one of existence. While no analysis can ever succeed in untangling the two, I have tried to work with that very distinction in a study of European views of America from 1992 until 2002. The study focuses on areas as far from “big” politics as possible—such as the world of soccer—in which the United States has never assumed a position of leadership or importance.

It’s telling that European views on those issues have been as full of irritation, resentment, ridicule and Schadenfreude as they have been in “big” politics—on Iraq, the Kyoto Treaty and the International Criminal Court. At every single stop on a German book tour in support of my book OFFSIDE: Soccer and American Exceptionalism, I was asked whether American arrogance was to blame for the fact that the U.S. never developed a soccer culture comparable to that in most of the world. When the U.S. was awarded the World Cup in 1994, the European press was virtually unanimous in deriding the decision. The tournament became far and away the most successful in the history of the World Cup, but European elites dismissed American enthusiasm as a sign of America’s naïveté and lack of sophistication. Real soccer aficionados, as some European commentators joked, would have never filled a huge stadium on a Wednesday afternoon for a game between Morocco and Saudi Arabia.

Poor play on the part of the U.S. team has always led to scorn, but so did its Cinderella performance in the 2002 tournament, when it reached the quarterfinal and lost narrowly to Germany. Worried European elites complained that arrogant Americans were on the verge of conquering the world of soccer. The success of women’s game in the United States—the best in the world—is perceived as another example of Americans perverting and subverting a venerable tradition. It is just as arrogant and threatening when Americans play well, according to European elites, as when they do not participate at all. Even the rare American contributions to progressive politics such as affirmative action and the women’s movement are frequently met with derision, caricature and contempt by many European elites, including those on the left.

The persona and policies of Vice President Al Gore ’69 might have incurred a less acute anti-Americanism than what is fashionable throughout Europe today, but they would have faced it nonetheless. Anti-Americanism endured even the harrowing spectacle of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when some European media began reporting that the Americans clearly had it coming to them while the World Trade Center towers still burned. Among elites, antipathy for all things American is woven into the very history and structure of European societies.

Professor Andrei S. Markovits is the Deutsch Professor of Comparative Politics and German Studies at the University of Michigan. This piece is adapted from a speech he will deliver this afternoon in Ann Arbor in honor of Karl W. Deutsch, an eminent political science professor, who taught for 16 years at Harvard.