[The Montana Professor 16.1, Fall 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]
Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin
New York: Oxford University Press, 2004
307 pp., $29.95 hc
Paul Trout
English
MSU-Bozeman
trout@english.montana.edu
This new book by the scholarly team of Barry and Judith Colp Rubin is the first comprehensive history of anti-Americanism as it developed abroad. Though not a global history, Hating America covers a lot of ground, tracing anti-Americanism through two centuries and three regions--Western Europe, Latin America, and the Middle East. The result is a compendium of dismayingly hostile remarks and slurs that have been flung at this nation for a very long time, and not just by second-raters; Freud, for example, described America as a "gigantic mistake."
The thesis of the book is that anti-Americanism is the result of a profound historical misunderstanding of the real nature of American civilization--of its values, institutions, motives, policies, and people. Early European observers--often ignorant of the facts and ethnocentrically biased, "misperceived" the true nature of America and so made false, exaggerated, canards soon crystallized into two negative stereotypes--the "conservative" and the "romantic"--which then took on a life of their own, perpetuating themselves by inculcating new generations with the same negative depictions of America. These hostile stereotypes acquired further currency and legitimacy as regimes and ideological movements exploited them for political purposes. As a result, anti-American claims exhibit remarkable historical continuity.
The perceptions that coalesced into the "conservative" stereotype reflected the concerns of European aristocrats and institutional elites who feared that the American experiment would unsettle the status quo and threaten their privilege. These fears were understandable considering the political oratory of prominent Americans. In 1821 President John Quincy Adams bluntly informed the European diplomatic corps that America represented a new type of government "destined to cover the surface of the globe. It demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest. It swept away all of the rubbish of accumulated centuries of all governments founded upon conquest." The response of European elites to the looming threat of American influence was to discredit the country as a possible model for other nations. In book after book, writers and intellectuals (most of whom knew nothing about daily life in this new land) described Americans as boorish, simpleminded, provincial, ignorant, unruly, and violent. According to this view, not much could be expected of a country composed of the "scum" "washed up on the shores of the New World" (as one British intellectual delicately phrased it). A nineteenth-century English traveler concluded that "the experiment has been made, and it has failed." A century later Spanish philosopher Ortega Y Gasset could still dismiss the United States as a land of "primitive people" who crush everything that is "excellent, individual, qualified and select."
The "romantic" version of anti-Americanism emerged when the American experiment failed to bring forth the aesthetic and spiritual paradise long dreamed of by European reformers and visionaries. These embittered romantics typically denounced the new country for being anti-intellectual, ugly, materialistic, utilitarian, unpoetic, and soulless. An Italian writer of the 1820s feared that the United States would debase Europe's "supremely poetic" "other world" of "pleasant dreams" and "beautiful imaginings." A century later, a Mexican writer expressed the same romantic fears when he deplored American utilitarianism and "muscular strength" as threats to the "contemplative dreamy tendencies" of his more spiritually elevated culture. Even today, the United States is still indicted for being a nation of ill-informed and soulless materialists.
Seeing the "powerful continuity" of anti-American claims over two centuries, the Rubins come to a startling, and debatable, conclusion: that anti-Americanism is not a reasonable response to actual American policies, values, or actions. If the cause of anti-Americanism were "American values," they reason, "then why is it that those supporting relatively similar values, notably in Europe, are often the most hostile?" And, if it were caused by bad foreign policies, "then why has anti-Americanism been so continuous over time, repeating the same false claims in dramatically different circumstances?" The real cause of anti-Americanism, the Rubins contend, is the continuous and pernicious influence of those two hostile stereotypes. Resulting from "misperceptions," these two stereotypes continue to foment misperceptions. As they explain it, "both American policy and values must be interpreted by others. Why do some put the most negative possible light on these things? In other words, anti-Americans may deride politics and values in ways that so distort them as to transform both into made-up stereotypes and monsters. The opposition, then, is not to the American values and policies that actually exist but to the stupid or evil things they appear as in these caricatures." Foreign anti-Americanism arises from an original and enduring misunderstanding of a country "with such decent intentions and frequent successes."
The claim seems to be that the policies and actions of the United States are essentially irrelevant to explaining anti-American hatred, or at least that they do not contribute to that hatred in any meaningful or significant way. Either wording functionally exonerates the United States--regardless of what it says or does--from playing a material role in the dynamic of anti-Americanism./1/ One can certainly understand the appeal of such an argument, given the repulsive efforts--both here and abroad--to explain the murder of Americans by jihadists as a justified reaction to American foreign policies. But it seems implausible to contend that all--or even most--manifestations of anti-Americanism are unrelated to, or disconnected from, anything the United States says or does, that the United States itself is nothing but a pretext for the expression of otherwise inchoate and free-floating hatred.
Surely it was the nature and deeds of the United States that led the Soviet Union to promulgate anti-Americanism as state policy and to foment it around the world. Today, such core American values as religious pluralism, gender equality, and sexual liberation repulse many Muslims. Yes, Arab regimes (and others) fan and exploit anti-Americanism to solidify their internal power over their people, but the smoldering hatred exists in the first place because many Arabs and Muslims have decided that American values and institutions are incompatible with their own. And if they think they are, then they are.
Even less convincing is the claim that American foreign policy plays no role in stoking anti-Americanism. The claim rests on the observation that although American policies have changed through history, the attacks have remained the same; thus, the attacks are not in response to policies. But there is another way to interpret this paradox. Every change in policy creates new losers who voice the old complaints about America's "bad" policies. That a policy may be so objectionable to a nation or a group as to incite murderous hatred neither automatically discredits the policy nor exonerates the murderers. Surely this country's policy of supporting Israel stimulates much anti-American hatred and violence in the Middle East. To understand and accept this relationship is not to sanction the hatred nor impugn the policy. Some policies are worth dying and killing for. The challenge, of course, is figuring out which policies could or should be changed and then how to change them, and which should be maintained even at considerable cost. As the most powerful country on the planet, and as the go-to explanation for everything that happens on the planet, the United States will always be in a double bind whatever its policies, damned by some nation or another no matter what it does. But this does not support the notion that its policies or deeds have little bearing on fomenting anti-Americanism. It is naïve to think that all would be well if only America's "decent intentions" were seen in a "positive" light. Despite the efforts of the Rubins, those in "Anti-American Studies" (as I hereby christen it) still face the vexing challenge of disentangling the political and social-psychological threads that connect the United States to the hatred directed at it.
Admittedly, the hate-provoking power of hostile stereotypes does help explain some of the intensity and irrationality of certain anti-American claims./2/ The fanciful notion that the United States controls the world is a handy way to make it responsible for all the evil in the world, the Great Satan, "the all-powerful devil" (Khalid Amyreh) that "dismembers all, destroys all, and swallows all, in sporting laughter" (as a Latin American writer put it in 1960).
But certainly some of the claims leveled at the United States are neither paranoid nor delusional, and even those that seem so could be provoked by a reasonable and grounded perception of reality. Outlandish accusations may be rhetorically exaggerated for political effect or to vent very real fears and understandable animosities. To paraphrase Andrew Sullivan (talking about hate), anti-Americanism may not be rational, but it usually has its reasons.
Hating America itself provides evidence for another explanation of anti-Americanism, one more connected to historical realities and events than hostile stereotypes (though these cannot be discounted). Many countries (sometimes the regimes, sometimes the people), for a variety of reasons, feel threatened--not without a warrant--by the economic, military, and cultural power of the United States.
As this book makes clear, very early on Europeans sensed that America would eventually become powerful enough to influence, rival, and even threaten long-established and hitherto dominant countries and civilizations. As the economic and military might of the United States grew, so did the fear that this upstart nation would influence other countries in unwelcome and perhaps even injurious ways. These fears were not unreasonable, nor conjured up by some perverse misunderstanding of America's core values and characteristics, but by developments in the United States itself. From the 1880s on, the stunning economic and military growth of the United States revealed to people throughout the world just how powerful this once despised country had become. This strength was demonstrated dramatically with America's involvement in World Wars I and II. With the fall of the Soviet Union, its power became unrivaled. American mass culture, technology, products, investments, and ideas could be found everywhere, and such global forces as Westernization, globalization, industrialization, and modernization were widely seen--and justifiably so--as emanations of American society or endorsed by it.
Influences that Americans could interpret as benign, others could interpret--and often justifiably so--as directly or potentially harmful. To rehearse the obvious, each nation wants to preserve its sovereignty, stability, and uniquely configured combination of values, customs, institutions, and processes. Each nation would like to think that it is in control of resolving internal conflicts and of bringing about social change at an acceptable and tolerable pace. Naturally, any nation is inclined to fear an external influence that is powerful enough to unsettle its particular balance and blend of values and institutions. But this explanation, which may explain French and German anti-Americanism, does not fully account for the lethal ferocity sometimes directed at the United States, a country so benign that even citizens who profess to hate it refuse to leave.
My argument about influence also explains why the United States has been feared and hated by the likes of Hitler, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Ladin, and so many other mass murderers and imperialists. Totalitarians clearly understand that their values are utterly incompatible with the Western liberal values espoused and (imperfectly) embodied in the United States (as well as other countries). Their fear and hatred are not the result of an unfortunate "misunderstanding" spawned by "hostile stereotypes" but by a clear-sighted understanding that the United States does indeed threaten their regimes and world ambitions.
Stereotypes and paranoid fantasies certainly exacerbate fears, but they do not create them out of nothing. These fears may be expressed, from the point of view of the United States, in viciously unfair ways, but the fact that an accusation is distorted does not prove that it is based on a misunderstanding arising from the lingering influence of hostile stereotypes, even though these stereotypes may be invoked and exploited to put a menacing face on the Enemy. To dismiss such fears as the product of a "heated imagination" and so as "largely independent of American policy or presence" (Berman) is an attempt to relieve us of the vexing task of understanding the complex relationship between the nature and influence of the United States and the hostility--not always delusional or fantastic--that they provoke.
If anything explains the origin and persistence, and current intensity, of anti-Americanism abroad, then, it is fear that America is powerful enough to destabilize and distort the country and culture one cherishes. The fear of American influence is neither "xenophobia" (Berman) nor unrelated to historical events and developments. It often arises--as it did in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union--from a realistic understanding of American power--a power that has increased through history and that itself arises from American values, institutions, and policies. By the close of the book, the Rubins would seem to have come to the same conclusion: "in the end, anti-Americanism was a response to the phenomenon of America itself, precisely because of that country's uniqueness and innovation, the success it has achieved, and the challenge it poses to all alternative ideologies or existing societies." Pace President John Quincy Adams.
Notes
[The Montana Professor 16.1, Fall 2005 <http://mtprof.msun.edu>]