Views from Abroad Changing European Attitudes toward the United States of America between Utopia and Dystopia

University of SalzburgViews from Abroad: Changing European Attitudes toward the United States of America between Utopia and Dystopia... The “American Century” Already forty years prior t

(University of Salzburg)

Views from Abroad:

Changing European Attitudes toward the United States

of America between Utopia and Dystopia

Setting the (Back-)Stage

During a lecture tour through the US in 1958, the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge,

a master of the English prose and outragoues wit, whose late conversion to Catholicismmade him a satirist in search of salvation, quipped

It's quite easy to explain why America is unpopular in Europe It's because youare rich, powerful and unbeatable Everyone hates you if you are rich, powerfuland unbeatable A hundred years ago everyone hated the British Empire because

it ruled the world Now it is the turn of the Americans It comes with the job Theonly difference is that we British seemed to quite enjoy being disliked, whereasyou Americans don't like it at all.1

If only it were that simple!

In the spring of 2003 one of my colleagues told me completely flabbergasted that shehad overheard her two small children play war games in their garden – and both wanted

to be Iraqis, neither son nor daughter wanted to play the Americans And another friendwas quite surprised when he overheard an Austrian boy telling his mother in front of theMcDonald´s in the Getreidegasse of Salzburg that he wanted to go somewhere else for abite because he did not want to support the war against Iraq

So what is going on here? Is this a short term aberration in an otherwise unproblematicset of relations or something that goes quite deep? I suggest we first take a magicalhistory tour and then interpret some recent poll results

The History of Mentalities

The history of mentalities is always a history of ambiguities, and the history of themeaning of America in Europe especially so Since Columbus, the European reaction toAmerica was situated between condescension and fear, ignorance and fascination,superiority complexes and inferiority feelings At best, it resembled a marriage ofconvenience where alienation (on both sides) was programmed, at worst a dangerousmixture of a love-hate relationship – and it should be noted that in the German word

Hassliebe hate comes first

For centuries, the term America has been ambivalently placed in the landscapes ofEuropean minds: on the one hand it has represented the prime example of modernityand a laboratory for global social change On the other hand it has stood for a nostalgialonging for a pioneering past, freedom and individualism The list of the appropriation ofvarious modules of "typical American" images and their rearrangement by Europeans isendless "America" (probably more as construct, invention, and simulation than as

"reality") has functioned as a distorting mirror on which European social, economic,political and cultural changes were reflected and often misinterpreted European dreams

1 See the entry “Anti-Americanism” in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Americanism

[accessed 21 July 2003]

and nightmares about America are as old as her discovery and conquest They clearlypredate the foundation of the United States but later were projected on the US after ithad assumed a hegemonic position – first in its own hemisphere and then globally.America became a metaphor for total enthusiasm, but also for total rejection already in the

16th century The mental baggage of Europeans filled with images in which the New Worldwas situated between El Dorado and barbarian wilderness, paradise and hell, noblesavages and bloodthirsty cannibals The phantasmagorias provoked by America´sexistence show that the discovery of the New World was accompanied by a simultaneousinvention of America

A Fata Morgana in the West

America appears to be filtered through a distorting mirror of European inadequacies,frustrations, and failures For the most part, we find an America only in the eyes ofothers, the image of a Strange New World as a European vision The creation of Europeanimages of America shows that there exists no cognitive hierarchy between the reality ofAmerica and the symbolic invention of the New World The European helplessness vis-à-

vis the enigma "America," this fata morgana in the West, is further deepened by

extremely complex interactions between European clichés about America and USprejudices toward Europe, between auto- and hetero-stereotypes: the US-cowboy and the

Euro-wimp have a long tradition, they clearly belong to the realm of the longue-duree

Naturally, European stereotypes have become modified as a result of an increase ingeographic knowledge, colonization, emigration, economic, political, and militaryinterdependence However, technical progress has mostly increased the quantity ofinformation available while doing little to change the quality of stereotypes It is of vitalimportance to understand that the increase of infotainment emanating from the UnitedStates does not necessarily facilitate a better understanding Undoubtedly, thecommunication possibilities have been dramatically improved – from the caravels ofColumbus to the Internet It would be much too optimistic, though, to expect thedisappearance of geocentric and ethnocentric stereotypes, just because of technologicalimprovements

The European images of America were produced by a time machine that transformed

European myths of the past and the future America mostly was seen in two ways:

either as a part of Europe's illusionary past, namely, in the sense of a paradise granting

a second chance, or as anticipatory dreams of America as Europe's future, which, moreoften than not, turn into nightmares

"The West," an ambiguous conception of both space and time, had fascinated since

antiquity Long before Columbus set sail, "the West" had already become a fundamentallyfixed image These anticipations of America range from the Greek science fiction ofAtlantis to the medieval legend of the Golden Epoch The Pillars of Hercules did not

prevent the New World from casting its shadow as magical reality By no means was thismythical West limited to Elysium, the blissful empire of the dead It also included Eden, theIsland of the Enchanting Women, El Dorado, Ultima Thule, Arcadia, eternal life (which, inits most recent version, turned into “Forever Young”), total happiness, andimmeasurable wealth The identity of America as a frontier, as the New Canaan, as theNew Jerusalem, is a European creation Augustine's City of God became the City upon theHill, and the profanity of the Old World found its reflection in the holiness of the New Formany Europeans America, therefore, represented a territorial map rather than ageographic reality.

The Construct America

America represented a massive intellectual challenge Thomas More's Utopia and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis initiated the discussion about the ideal Republic, the ideal

Commonwealth, with America as the background However, Utopia meant not only agood place or an ideal state but, in an ironic inversion, a place that did not exist, a no-man's-land, a cloud-cuckoo-land

The construct "America" in European imagination all too often denoted something thatAmerica never was and never could be – Asia, Utopia, paradise on earth with gold liningthe streets When America failed to fulfil these European dreams, the disillusionmentbecame even more intense Instead of correcting them, instead of admitting that theEuropean dream of the American dream had always been unreal, the disillusioned nowaccused America of fraud

The dialectical tension of America as Utopia and as Dystopia runs through all literarydiscussions The image of the young, innocent, and mythical New World ofShakespeare, Marlowe, and Spenser soon found its counterpart in accusations ofbarbarism, degeneration, immaturity, soulless materialism, and cultural inferiority.Georges Leclerc Comte de Buffon`s outrageous accusations about the absolutedegeneration of all life in America remained influential until well into the twentiethcentury

Although the contours of European images of America became more precise after 1776,they still maintained the character of magical reflections fluctuating between total hopeand complete rejection While liberals and republicans, socialists and even communists,directed many of their hopes toward the land of freedom, virtue, and prosperity, for the

representatives of the ancien regime, many conservatives, and the 20th century extreme

right, the US became the horrific example for the insurrection of the mob and barbaric

excesses of democracy, whose influence on the European order must be hindered at allcost

Even in the nineteenth century, most European authors perceived America as a continent

untouched by culture, as natural wilderness The United States remained outside of historyand the most important opposition read soulless uprooted techno-civilization versustraditional culture Now alienation became the major theme Americans becameespecially suspect with regard to their outward appearance, tastelessness, pluralisticconformity, superficiality, naive optimism, and infantilism The European accusationagainst US culture as being uniquely based on a denial of any limitation of humanexistence is quite absurd, especially when such an accusation was made by theinhabitants of a continent, whose people Europeanized large parts of the world,including North, Central and South America

The “American Century”

Already forty years prior to the proclamation of "The American Century," the power of theUnited States of America could no longer be ignored In 1901, the year in which GreatBritain became the first European nation to receive credit from the US, W T Stead's

cautionary book Americanization of the World; or, The Trend of the Twentieth Century was

published in London The book created a sensation, was published in Germanimmediately and set a trend

After the First World War, the USA stood for a distorted vision of mass democracy,consumer abundance, standardization, mass production, automation, Taylorism, Fordism,and – most important – it stood for mass culture, especially jazz and Hollywood USeconomic dominance transformed the City on the Hill into the Factory on the Hill Thetotal rationalization of human society by Fordism again was interpreted as a purelyAmerican phenomenon and not as a general possibility inherent in every capitalistculture Many Europeans, especially those who felt to have a monopoly on high, pure,and true culture, were convinced that the US was a cultural wasteland It is alsointeresting to note that those US artists and intellectuals who were accepted by themodernist European elite were precisely those who were labeled as un-American in theUS

It was the United States of America, European authors implied, that was the originalversion of and metaphor for modernity From Charles Dickens to Gerhard Hauptmann,from Rainer Maria Rilke to Franz Kafka, from Vladimir Majakovsky to Salvador deMadariaga, from Georges Duhamel to Bert Brecht, America stood for vulgarity andemptiness, coldness, anonymity, loneliness, and the inhumanity of modern business.The United States, dominated by predatory capitalist exploiters, appear as the futuristnightmare of a streamlined doomsday Synonymous with the pending destruction ofculture, Americans were either accused to be all little boys or otherwise they populatedthe global stage with the violence and greed of ur-capitalist gangsters Ultimately, with

Evelyn Waugh's Loved One, we come back to the point of departure: the European

conception of the West as the kingdom of the dead The Elysian Fields found their realequivalent in the cemetery culture of Southern California

European interwar images of the US were quite similar to those existing before Britishideas about the US seemed so misguided and miserable to Ambassador Joseph P.Kennedy, even on the eve of the Second World War that an intensive culturalenlightenment campaign seemed necessary "so that the people in England wouldbelieve that something happens here besides gangster shootings, rapes andkidnappings."2 A poll taken in October 1940 showed that only 27 percent of Britons werepositively disposed toward the US The popularity rating of Americans was rankedbehind that of Greeks, Poles, and Jews Immediately after its entry into war, the US mayhave been in the number-one position on the popularity scale, but already the frictionthat had arisen toward GIs who were in Britain in massive numbers during the SecondWorld War ("oversexed, overpaid, and over here") indicated the postwar trend After

1945 the popularity of the United States sank back to the prewar level

The prevailing French prejudices were somewhat more qualified because of a longer anddeeper interaction with US themes Although US capitalism was vehemently rejected,many intellectuals nevertheless admired the American myth of freedom French authors

introduced American art, literature, film, and jazz in Europe and praised le style

americain The situation in Italy was similar to that in France Despite twenty years of

fascism, primitive anti-Americanism did not take hold in Italy

National Socialist propaganda against the US marked a low point of European lack ofunderstanding America was seen as a boundless continent that wanted to usurp worldrule as part of the Jewish world conspiracy; as a world power of trivialities; as astandardized homogenous and canned civilization The streamlined imperialism of Ameri-canism was denounced as the absolute death of culture Anti-American sentiments surelyreached their peak during the reign of the Nazis, but the propagandists of the "ThirdReich" hardly invented new prejudices They could easily build upon deep-seatedstereotypes, and these, mixed in with a shot of extreme anti-Semitism, were driven tothe height of paranoia

During the Cold War the American Century blossomed – especially when we consider notonly its political, military, and economic character but also its profound culturalimplications If we understand the Cold War years as a period of essential crises fortraditional European cultures as a result of the immense human and material losses andmoral depravation after the Second World War then the endless flow of "American"goods and ideas into European life and consciousness acquires a different dimension.However important the military power and political promise of the United States werefor setting the foundation for American successes in Cold War Europe, it was theAmerican economic and cultural attraction that really won over the hearts and minds ofthe majorities of young people for Western democracy

2 David Reynolds, “Whitehall, Washington, and the Promotion of American Studies in Britain during World War

II” in Journal of American Studies 16 (August 1982); 165-188, 171.

To be sure, abstract American freedoms had their attraction for quite a few, but howmuch greater was their appeal when they came in a new package – as Liberty Corn,Freedom Grain, and Equality Beans However alien some American practices seemed,however much US naiveté and pragmatism were mocked, however strongly UScivilisation was despised, the century-old attraction the United States had heldespecially for the European poor was now bolstered by one decisive factor Since 1945,more than ever before, the United States signified the codes of modernity and promisedthe pursuit of happiness in its most updated version: as the pursuit of consumption.Whenever real consumption climbed into the ring chances were high that real socialismhad to be counted out

The End of the Magical History Tour…

…and the Beginning of an Academic Debate?

Of course, this magical history tour of traditional European America-stereotypes doesnot mean that the United States should not have provoked criticism in a great variety

of social, economic, political, military, and cultural matters, just to the contrary Still,many European accusations against “typical American phenomena” clearly have adifferent quality than criticism toward similar developments in Europe They usuallyreveal two dimensions of unease, a double alienation: they are similar to accusationsmade by disillusioned lovers who themselves had lost their innocence long ago andsimply would not acknowledge that the supposed virginity of their transatlanticmistress had never been anything else but a European fantasy if not a European folly,which, to be sure itself found fertile grounds in America and were easily transplanted

Because seen from a vantage point from outside the United States of America as well asEurope, that is from the vantage point of the large majority of the world´s population,these differences actually become quite academic, really representing two sides of thesame coin – the Janus face of the Euro-Americanization of the world Robert Kagan´smuch quoted characterization of US-Americans living on Mars while Europeanssupposedly are inhabiting Venus certainly holds some entertainment value (and may berepresentative for a majority of the present economic, political and media “elites” in anumber of countries), this dichotomous division – if not Manichean vision – itself only isfurther proof for the longevity and shallowness of clichés as well as the durability ofstereotypes.3 Furthermore, the juxtaposition of US-Americans as warmongers andEuropeans as peace-lovers neglects the fundamental reality that millions of US citizensopposed the war against Iraq while millions of Europeans, though not the majorities,supported it

Especially Europeans, as Gary Younge argued in The Guardian should realize that

3 Robert Kagan, “Power and Weakness” Policy Review Online June 2002

http://www.policyreview.org/JUN02/kagan.html

the split between Europe and the US is strategic, not moral There is nothinginherent in European political culture that makes it more liberal and less imperialthan America European leaders and commentators are right to criticise the USfor its brutality and imperialist pretensions But they must do so with sufficientself-awareness to see what most of the rest of the world has seen: that theirnations have acted in similar and even more pernicious ways whenever theyhave had the opportunity… The difference between Europe and the US issignificant and has been accentuated in recent months, but to the vast majority

of the developing world American domination represents a development in thenarrative of European empire, not a break from it.4

The Polls

So what about the post-Cold War world? While the image of the US in Europe alreadyexperienced a strong boost during the Clinton-years it skyrocketed after the terrorattacks of September 11, 2001 – only to fall into a massive dive as a reaction to some ofthe policies of the administration of president George W Bush

Polls clearly are tricky instruments, instruments of politics themselves and highlyunreliable historical sources The following data – for whatever polls are worth, if carriedthrough properly they still do indicate tendencies of shifts within public opinion –certainly reveal that traditional stereotypes do continue to hold their power Still, manyresults also clearly indicate that it is not the United States of America as such or highlyesteemed US-values which are opposed by many people around the globe but ratherspecific actions and decisions carried through by the administration of president George

W Bush Here we are potentially confronting a new development that cannot simply beexplained as primitive residues of anti-Americanism

It is the unilateral application of the global use of force, the military, economic, culturaland political power of the United States that produced these shifts – not any opposition

to traditional liberal values of US-democracy in Europe This is proven as a matter ofcourse by the growing number of millions of US-citizens exactly opposing the samestrategies as non-Americans because they fear that the unprecedented domestic andforeign policy measures introduced after the terror attacks of September 11, 2001,instead of defending endangered liberties will actually result in a weakening ofdemocracy instead – within and outside the United States

Robert D Kaplan hit the bull´s eye recently when he mentioned the obvious “It is acliché these days that the United States possesses a global empire – different fromBritain’s and Rome’s but an empire nonetheless It is time to move beyond a statement

of the obvious… How should we operate on a tactical level to manage an unrulyworld?”5

4 Gary Younge, “Twin Visions of Empire” The Guardian Online 10 February 2003

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,892465,00.html

[accessed 21 July 2003]

5 Robert D Kaplan, “Supremacy by Stealth,” Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2003, 66-83.

All of the following data therefore have to be read in this context These resultsdocument various reactions to the more and more pervasive realization of the existence

of a global US empire And they also reveal increasing doubts about the compassionate

character of the benevolent global hegemon – the USA

The German Marshall Plan Fund of the United States and Chicago Council of Foreign Relations Poll, 2002

In this poll more than 6,000 Europeans (in Great Britain, France, Germany, Poland, Italy,and the Netherlands) and roughly 2,000 US-citizens were interviewed about theiropinions about US-European relations.6 While a majority of Europeans, in contrast to US-citizens, believed that US foreign policy contributed to the attacks of September 11,

2001, and Europeans generally were more critical of the foreign policy of the Bushadministration, other results of this poll demonstrate that, generally speaking, thesimilarities of opinions on both sides of the Atlantic are more striking than thedifferences Some of the most interesting results:

It is clear that Europeans were more critical of the Bush administration's handling offoreign policy than US-Americans Only 38% viewed its foreign policy as "excellent" or

"good," 56% saying it is "fair" or "poor" But the Bush administration got much highermarks for its handling of terrorism (47% "excellent" or "good") and the war inAfghanistan (35%) than for its handling of the Arab-Israeli conflict (20%) or the situation

in Iraq (21%)

These differences of opinion are even stronger when the following results about thefuture role of the United States and Europe as super powers are compared

6 The German Marshall Plan Fund of the United States and Chicago Council of Foreign Relations Poll, 2002

http://www.worldviews.org/key_findings/transatlantic_report.htm#kf1 [accessed 22 July 2003]

In contrast, Europeans and US-citizens mostly agreed about respective strategiesagainst international terrorism It is interesting to note though that more US-citizens (77percent) proposed immigration restrictions as a remedy against terrorism thanEuropeans (63 percent).

US-citizens and Europeans generally also shared threat perceptions to a high degree.The greatest aberrations in their views can be found in their perception of the dangersemanating from Iraq and the development of China as a world power

Even more interesting are the results of this poll when comparing European and USattitudes in regard to a potential war against Iraq Contrary to the perception created bythe media during 2002, the interviewees on both sides of the Atlantic came closer intheir approval or disapproval whether Iraq should be attacked or not than in any othersample – with great majorities favoring UN approval US-citizens (65 percent) camesecond only to the French (69 percent) in their support for an invasion only with UNapproval and support of allies Consequently, it needed more media hype as well assexed-up threats about weapons of mass destruction in the following months.

THE IMAS INTERNATIONAL POLL, February 2003

IMAS International in a representative poll, which was published in February 2003, askedAustrians and Germans aged over 16 years:

The American way of life, US policies and economics represent a model for Europe Is thatcorrect or not?7

German answers:

15 percent correct

42 percent partially correct

35 percent incorrect

The question who are the most disliked politicians was answered by Austrians:

Saddam Hussein 59 percent

George W Bush 45 percent

By Germans:

Saddam Hussein 77 percent

George W Bush 47 percent

While these results clearly showed a massive decline of positive opinions in regard to theforeign policy of the United States since the Clinton years, this was not only typical forAustria or Germany In a Dutch poll of October 2002 US-Americans were counted as one ofthe most unpopular nationalities, besides Moroccans and Turks And in a British poll ofFebruary 2003 the United States were deemed to be the most dangerous nation on theglobe, even ahead of Iraq and North Korea

IMAS POLL May/June 2004

What do you think: did the general attitudes towards the United States recently

7 Umfrageberichte von IMAS International Nr 4, February 2003: Amerika aus der Sicht der Deutschen und Österreicher: Nur Wenige betrachten USA als ein Vorbild für Europa

http://www.imas-international.com/report/2003/04-02.pdf [accessed 21 July 2003]