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Paul Hockenos:

Andrei S. Markovits: Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America

Examining European attitudes toward the United States

The measuring of anti-Americanism is an imprecise business. Though social scientists have been at it for decades, distinguishing between an all-encompassing animus toward the country and its people, on the one hand, and legitimate criticism of US government policies, on the other, has proven to be difficult. Only the former is anti-Americanism: an often irrational, deeply embedded cultural aversion to a presumed American "national character" and "American values." A standard, shorthand distinction between America-bashing and rational critique is that between disapproval of what America is and what America does. Yet as much disunity as there is among the field's experts, they concur that the two inevitably blur into one another. After all, what one is informs what one does, and vice versa.

Another matter of consensus, perhaps the only other among the multinational authors reviewed here, is that in Europe negative feelings toward America and US policies have soared since 2002 when divergent assessments of and responses to the post-9/11 terrorist threat brought a range of simmering irritants across the Atlantic to a boil. One opinion poll after another (the barometer of this science) has registered precipitous drops in Europeans' confidence in America and support for its foreign policies. A post-World War II nadir, only 36 percent of Europeans view US leadership in world affairs as desirable. But markedly lower is their approval of the Bush administration's international stances: a dismal 17 percent at last measure.

But do the numbers present incontrovertible evidence one way or the other about anti-Americanism? They show that elites and the general publics alike, including America's through-thick-and-thin ally Great Britain, are harshly critical of Washington's unilateralism, use of force to resolve conflicts, and disregard for international treaties. Europeans perceive US motivations as destabilizing and potentially injurious to Europe. A variety of post-Iraq War polls show that Europeans think the United States itself is the greatest threat to international security. Israel was second. In France and Germany, sizeable majorities claim that the United States "is conducting the war on terrorism in order to control Mideast oil and dominate the world." Everywhere in the European Union these shifts have been accompanied by a preference for a greater EU role in global affairs, with Germans (87 percent) and Spaniards (81 percent) at the top. In one survey of 15 European countries, clear majorities in every case felt ill at ease with the United States being the world's sole superpower.

Alone among the present company of authors, the American political scientist Andrei S. Markovits comes to the stark conclusion that an unrivalled-though not historically unprecedented-wave of anti-Americanism is sweeping Europe. In Uncouth Nation, Markovits charges that Europe's hostility to "everything American" these days is a "massive Europe-wide resentment of America that reaches well beyond American policies, American politics, and American government," and rather than being shunned in good company, as it had been in the past, crass anti-Americanism is now worn as a "badge of honor" across Europe. It is important to note that Markovits is a prolific, widely respected left-of-center intellectual who teaches at the University of Michigan; he was not an Iraq War supporter, like many of those who reduce European hostility to US policies as undiluted contempt for the United States as such.

Markovits contends that the Bush administration's contentious foreign policies have simply shot into overdrive a hatred for America that has long flourished in Europe. With plenty of evidence, he demonstrates that anti-Americanism has thrived in the Old World for hundreds of years. Even before "America" became a world power (or an independent country), clichés abounded about its vulgarity, mediocrity, and inauthenticity. Europe's dislike of things American has "always" outweighed its fascination with the country, argues Markovits. Winding through the 18th and 19th centuries, Markovits finds ample illustrations of America chastised for its ahistoricity, rootlessness, and inability to replicate European culture and political models. No less than Hegel and Goethe chimed in. On the right, European nationalists despised America as the epitome of the modern, a materialistic and hedonistic place run, ultimately, by Jews. The left-wing's anti-Americanism focuses on the United States being an imperialist power-and also in league with international Jewry, embodied in Zionist Israel.

Markovits is not wrong: Anti-Americanism is alive and well in Europe. As an American who has lived abroad for two decades I can attest to the maddening stereotypes that some Europeans cling to. The far right and the far left in both eastern and western Europe are particularly culpable. But Markovits is wrong, I believe, about how pervasive anti-Americanism is and the extent to which it dictates European attitudes about the United States and European leaderships' responses to US policies.

There are a number of studies, for example, that show that while there is a "structured anti-Americanism" embedded in Europe, it is actually quite thin: in Great Britain, Germany, France, and Italy it hovers at around 10 percent and fluctuates during transatlantic political crises, rising as it did during the 1954 French-American crisis, the Suez dispute, the Vietnam War, and the 1980s deployment of intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Europe. At the same time, the same studies show about a quarter of the populations in all four countries consistently sympathetic to the United States. And even at the height of the Cold War's greatest crises most Western Europeans favored maintaining a strong alliance with the United States. During the mass disarmament protests in the early 1980s, only 20 percent of West Germans advocated the withdrawal of US troops from the Federal Republic or Bonn's exit from NATO. The superb study of the American political scientists Robert O. Keohane and Peter J. Katzenstein, Anti-Americanisms in World Politics, demonstrates that negative European attitudes, even at their peaks, had no impact whatsoever on policy-or on tourism, trade, or consumer behavior.

But Markovits finds traditional anti-Americanism everywhere in contemporary Europe-and these days not just among German Social Democrats, the Austrian far right, English novelists, and, of course, Frenchmen of all stripes. (In fact, surveys indicate that America antipathy is strongest in Greece.) Markovits's showcase example, however, demonstrates the ambiguities in play. Indeed, German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder's 2002-03 opposition to the US-led invasion of Iraq illustrated how European elites can and will tap into anti-American sentiments when its suits them. The Schröder case is particularly tricky because Schröder did revert to cheap populism with his outspoken rejection of an American military "adventure" in Iraq during a tightly contested election campaign in 2002. Yet the overwhelming reluctance of both the German political elite and public-like citizenries across Europe-to attack Iraq was not founded foremost on bias against America as such. After all, Germany participated in the 1999 NATO campaign against Milosevic's Serbia, as well as far-reaching post-9/11 anti-terrorism measures, and the toppling of the Taliban, all of which had popular backing. Opinion polls showed immense solidarity with the United States after 9/11; this however declined gradually as European and Bush administration conceptions of the means to counter terrorism diverged. Most Germans felt the military option was only one option available in the campaign against terrorism. There were others, such as diplomacy, dialogue with the Islamic world, democracy and aid programs, brokering a peace deal between Israel and Palestine.

Something Markovits does not mention is the very different way that Schröder's foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, handled the Iraq crisis. In his famous rebuke to Rumsfeld in early 2003, Fischer underscored that he was "not convinced" that Saddam Hussein had close links to Al Qaeda or that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and was therefore unwilling to back the regime's overthrow. This was a rational moment, a conclusion based on dispassionate analysis, not pathos. It left open the possibility that had Fischer been convinced, the German position might well have been different. At no time did Fischer or the Greens stoop to populism, and in the fall 2002 vote it was the Greens, not the Social Democrats, that wracked up the gains necessary to reelect the coalition.

Ultimately, Markovits's resort to anti-Americanism to explain Europe's anti-war feelings is apolitical-and plays straight into the hands of the neoconservatives. He tosses both anti-American tropes and perfectly reasonable, clear-sighted evaluation of the Bush administration's foreign policy blunders into the same pot, robbing the latter of political content. This effectively discredits all critique of America's global policies, whether it is climate policy, dealings with the UN, or human rights issues in Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Although Markovits claims to distinguish between anti-Americanism and honest differences of opinion, in his book they wind up lumped together.

Historically, Europe's take on America has never been one-sidedly negative. In the excellent German weekly, Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte, historian Jessica Gienow-Hecht argues that robust philo-American currents have always existed alongside prejudice, and that the two are in fact closely related to one another. In the decades after the American Revolution, Europeans effused with enthusiasm about the new country, which, in the aftermath of the French Revolution, was the only early 19th century country to preserve the ideals of the Enlightenment in its state form. America's modernism, its freshness, and vigorous concept of liberty (the same qualities denigrated by romantic nationalists) fired the imagination of liberal-minded Europeans as well as the millions who migrated there. Gienow-Hecht argues that very often anti-Americanism has stemmed from Europeans' disappointment in an America that failed to live up to the very ideals that it professed.

In my own work on the student uprising in the West German sixties, I was consistently impressed by how many of its former partisans told me how essential American influences were for their 1967-1969 campus revolt and the kulturrevolution that it set in motion. Even protesting the Vietnam War and US imperialism, the student activists were conscious that they were using US protest forms: sit-ins, teach-ins, and other forms of civil disobedience picked up from the US civil rights movement. They told me their politics would have been inconceivable without Dylan's lyrics, the works of Kerouac and Ginsberg, and the examples of Martin Luther King and the Berkeley Free Speech Movement. The bastion of the German student movement was the US-financed Free University in West Berlin, set up by the American military authorities in West Berlin as an antidote to the "not free" university in East Berlin. The spirit of the project was to instill a new critical and participatory democratic ethic in postwar Germans. Its American founders certainly had no inkling that the German students would take the mandate so literally. In the spirit of Gienow-Hecht's argument, the students' gripe with America was, in part, that it had jettisoned its own principles in Indochina and elsewhere in the Third World.

Europe's Alternative

Italian historian Federico Romero takes the whole discussion a qualitative leap further in his intriguing essay "The Twilight of American Cultural Hegemony" in David Farber's collection What They Think of Us. The transatlantic estrangement, he argues, is the product of a substantive cultural and social parting of ways that began with the conclusion of the Cold War. During the East-West conflict, there was a consensual view of what "the West" and "Western" meant - in terms of shared values, institutions, and procedures that stemmed from a common cultural representation of the West and its history. This transatlantic cultural hegemony was largely dictated by the United States, a result of Europe's postwar weaknesses. Younger generations that came to age in the era of mass culture pushed back the boundaries of European distinctiveness even further. Contrary to Markovits, Romero says that hard-core America haters were ever fewer as the decades progressed and were increasingly marginalized by the adherents of American-inspired modernizing trends: "By the 1980s traditional anti-Americanism could be plausibly dismissed as a relic of the past, and public culture often celebrated the advent of a homogenized transatlantic society."

The end of the Cold War not only altered Europe's strategic dependence on Washington but also decoupled Europe from the United States as an economic model, a cultural mecca, and a political beacon. This post-Cold War Europe was significantly more self-confident and a veritable "rollback" of America's cultural presence ensued. This process was abetted by ongoing social changes in Europe and the United States that only accentuated those differences (in religious attitudes, demography, wealth distribution, migration patterns). Moreover, the generation that has come of age in a globalized world no longer relies on the one-time cultural hegemon for orientation. Its cultural references are global. These young people in Western Europe, for example, need the United States far less than their more-radical '68er parents.

This shift, argues Romero, is due largely to Europe's own self-perception as an adherent to a "European social model" based on collective solidarity, secularism, welfare state practices, post-nationalism and limited sovereignty, the primacy of civil liberty, and environmental responsibility. Europeans, even those who favor US strategic leadership in the world, have become increasingly convinced that their model is more humane and more effective than the American one. These differences exploded into the open with the Bush administration's post-2002 anti-terrorism strategies and increasingly belligerent international behavior.

Certainly, differences of emphasis existed during the Cold War years, too, but no one would have spoken of a full-scale "alternative European model" that most of Europe identified with. However, this changed with the demise of the bipolar world, the enlargement and political integration of the European Union, and the beginnings of a common European foreign policy under its auspices. The Europeans' preferences for soft power, multilateralism, conflict prevention, and international justice have resulted in ever more autonomous EU security and diplomatic policies.

These contrasting preferences in social model, cultural bearing, and international strategy indeed go beyond what America does and penetrate the essence of what America is. But as long as these differences are based on rational comparative analysis and not knee-jerk antipathy, then they represent valid alternatives. For most of their adherents, they can neither be traced back to anti-Americanism nor anti-Semitism. And, luckily, there is no reason for Americans to feel personally offended or cancel holidays to the Alps or Provence: while the Europeans' opinion of America has suffered, the polls reveal that the overall perception of the American people remains quite positive-even in Old Europe.

Paul Hockenos is editor of Internationale Politik–Global Edition and author of "Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic: An Alternative History of Postwar Germany" (OUP, 2008).

This book review was first published here by our partner Internationale Politik.

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