The Bush response only aggravates the
problem
William Pfaff IHT
Monday, October 7, 2002
iht.com
Anti-Americanism in Europe
Paris A good deal of printer's ink has been spent
debating anti-Americanism during the last year,
both in and out of the United States. The latest
instance followed Germany's parliamentary election
at the end of September, when Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder's party coalition won a narrow victory,
credited by analysts to his stand against German
participation in any American attack on Iraq.
The German chancellor's lèse-majesté provoked
outrage in the Bush administration and warnings in
American neoconservative circles that it will be 50
years before Germany will have recovered the trust
of the United States, and thereby once again become
an important state.
In fact, from the European side of the Atlantic, it
seemed that Schröder's stand added to Germany's
international authority. Germany previously having
tended to be seen as a satellite of Washington's
rather than a nation with convictions of its own.
Since a majority in German public opinion already
opposed an attack on Iraq, and Schröder merely
profited from supporting the majority, it is a surprise
that the Germans have not been given the same
propaganda treatment the French got a few months
ago, attacked in U.S. neoconservative circles as an
anti-Semitic society because of popular French
pro-Palestinian sympathies. Official Washington has
perhaps realized that the United States needs U.S.
bases in Germany, but Germany does not. They are
essential to the U.S. global strategic position.
The subject of anti-Americanism can, however, be
intelligently discussed, an example being a recent
exchange between a French writer with a long
record of sympathy for the United States,
Jean-François Revel, and a younger colleague with
family connections to the United States and a
British education, Emmanuel Todd.
Todd maintains that the United States today
actually is displaying weakness. He says, "I have
always had a positive vision of the United States"
and "taken for granted that it was a reasonable
power" but now "I have the sense of a disquieting
semi-bellicosity, an agitation, a feverishness."
He puts this down to an unarticulated sense of
vulnerability in the United States, caused by its
budget dependence on European and Japanese
investment and its lingering strategic anxiety about
Russia and China.
He argues that current American emphasis on
military and diplomatic action against weak rogue
states is a kind of unacknowledged compensation for
this anxiety.
Thus embargoes are imposed on countries incapable
of defending themselves, and tribal armies and
"disarmed civil populations" are subjected to
high-tech bombardment. He presumably has Serbia
in mind.
Revel answers that blaming America has always
been a reflex of European intellectuals. He says that
American politicians are given to hyperbole that
should not be taken too seriously, and that
Europeans have only themselves to blame for today's
American predominance, since Europe's own failures
in the 20th century made a gift of global power to the
United States.
He also says that the French themselves would be
obsessed with terrorism if suicide planes had
simultaneously attacked the Opéra, the Arc de
Triomphe, and other prominent Paris sites -
although he himself mentions the series of attacks
on crowded Paris stores and train and metro
stations in 1995, which were met without panic.
It strikes me that the two are actually discussing
two separate kinds of anti-Americanism. The old
kind, which Revel stoutly opposed, was influential
some thirty years ago, when news of the Gulag was
only belatedly being admitted by a French
intelligentsia traditionally disposed to uncritical
support for the left.
Then, every American Cold War measure was
attacked as if it were an unprovoked provocation to
the Soviet Union.
The new kind of anti-Americanism is the one Todd
talks about, and is a reaction to the post-Sept. 11
policies of the Bush administration, which he takes
as revealing deep-seated anxieties in American
society which have economic and demographic
structural causes - a fragile economy, and loss of
the old sense of national identity.
He also argues that Washington's preoccupation with
the rogue states and China - actually a weak state -
and its concern that they might become allies with
Russia, avoids looking at the real strategic threat,
which is that a nuclear Russia would ally itself with
the two most important real power centers outside
the United States, which are Europe and Japan.
This analysis is not one that seems to concern
Washington, which makes much of the symptoms of
anti-Americanism in Europe while actually making
the problem worse. Chancellor Schröder did not whip
up anti-Americanism in Germany. It was there
already. That is what should worry Washington.
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