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Vive L' Anti-Américanisme

In 2003, Adam Gopnick wrote in The New Yorker of French anti-Americanism:

A kind of generalized anti-Americanism, not simply opposition to the war in Iraq, does exist, but it has become “a routine of resentment, a passionless Pavlovianism,” rather than a critique of United States policy, as the historian Philippe Roger concluded in “L’Ennemi Américain” ..... Anti-Americanism, though of course it has life as a muttered feeling, has almost no life as an idea or an argument.

French writers Bernard-Henri Lévy and Jean-François Revel have written books analyzing the phenomenon, but according to a new piece by Denis Boyles, it shows no signs of abating. And why would it? As Boyles says in his take on the Roger book, "that hatred has existed whether the president is George Bush or George Washington." More excerpts from the Boyles article:

...while your run-of-the-mill French roast is now passé to us, the French passion for anti-Americanism is still very much alive and well and living in Paris: French politicians still parade behind the anti-American banners. French diplomacy still is based on undermining American interests. Cartoons in French newspapers still routinely portray Uncle Sam as a baby-killer and worse...

...French anti-Americanism isn't predicated on a critique of a specific policy — say, tariffs or Iraq or cultural theories — nor even on a particular parsing of history or politics. Instead, it's a general, all-over, feel-good kind of hatred, one that lives in a state of sublime emotional inebriation on several levels at once.

On a personal level, French people who hate America are like American people who hate TV — and not just a particular program, but the invention itself: They loathe it because loathing it makes them feel superior.

On an economic and cultural level, it's the deep jealousy felt by a failed pessimist when confronted by a successful optimist. This is why France is the special love of American liberals.

On a political and social level it has more in common with anti-Semitism, since it's based on a kind of racial hatred of a people and a place: Perhaps hating America is for those for whom hating Jews just isn't enough.

But on any level, it's just goofier than a Sponge Bob weekend. As Paul Johnson noted not long ago in Commentary, "Among academics and intellectuals...[anti-Americanism] has more of the hallmarks of a mental disease."

Americans had to be convinced to even notice. In fact, it took the blow-up over Iraq to make most of us even aware that for more than two centuries anti-Americanism has been the prevailing European intellectual motif, adding a flourish to all those other nihilistic continental contributions to modern thought, including fascism, atheism, socialism, and Communism, all of which have been packaged at one time or another and delivered with the bundle of goods and services — ranging from exotic radio programs to free health care to free funerals — that Europeans have come to expect from their governments.

That notion finds a certain sympathy on this side of the Atlantic. Government-as-provider is the default position of the disgruntled American left, for whom France often holds high the dim, plastic night-light of leftwing virtue...American leftists, and especially our academic slackers, instinctively know that guys smart enough to think up existential atheism and deconstructionism must be right about the wrongs of American mainstream political philosophy and its attendant evils: individualism, faith-based morality, free markets, and the view that the government's job is to be as scarce as possible, since wherever government intrudes, incompetence follows.

Also at NRO, Michael Radu writes about the French students' "mass rejection of reality", as they took to the streets last week to preserve their high unemployment rates:

The immediate reason for the students' outburst is the contrat première embauche (CPE — roughly translated as "first job contract"), Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin's idea for reducing France's stubbornly high unemployment rate, which now stands at 9.6 percent, the second worst in Western Europe after Germany's 10-percent plus. The law would allow employers the discretion to fire new employees within their first two years on the job. Currently, any worker who is fired must be paid an enormous severance, no matter what the reason for the dismissal.

Outside of France, that may be seen as economic literacy 101, but France's brightest youth, as the above-mentioned slogan demonstrates, prefer the status quo — namely, 23 percent of those between 18 and 25 years of age being unemployed (a number that rises to 50 percent in the majority-Muslim suburbs).

The French rejection of free market capitalism is implicitly anti-American, or at least derives from those sentiments. In a TAE article on anti-globalism from 2004, Jean-François Revel had this to say:

Resentments that lead to the rejection of every idea that comes from America simply because it is American can only weaken countries. To follow such a course is to let phobias become guiding principles. Does anyone really believe today that nations which substitute government edicts for economic markets are likelier to prosper? Must we close our eyes to the achievements of the last 50 years of increasing economic liberty, when worldwide production grew by a factor of six and the volume of exports by a factor of 17? Must investment capitalism abroad, the engine of extraordinary, racing progress for many previously poor countries, be banned just because it often brings links to America?

We French have had little to say against Saddam Hussein, Muammar Qaddafi, Kim Jong Il, Fidel Castro, Robert Mugabe, the imams of the Islamic Republic of Iran, or the bosses of China and Vietnam. We reserve our admonitions and our contempt and our attacks for the U.S., for Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, and for Europeans like Margaret Thatcher, Silvio Berlusconi, and Tony Blair, because they are insufficiently hostile to capitalism. Our enemy is not the dictator but the free market economy.

Anti-globalizers make the same mistake. What's important to them is not the eradication of poverty. Rather, it is the propaganda value they gain from linking poverty to the spreading market economy. But this puts them on the wrong side of all evidence, of reality, of history.

Taranto today had his own thoughts on the sources of European anti-Americanism (though he was coming at the topic from a context of the U.S.- Israel relationship)

... the close U.S. relationship with Israel has a psychological basis as well as a moral and strategic one. Both the U.S. and Israel, after all, are immigrant nations, founded and originally settled by people who, for various reasons, got the hell out of Europe. One can see why Europeans who stayed behind, and whose societies are considerably less dynamic than either ours or Israel's, would resent those who rejected the European way.

Further, World War II left Europe owing an incalculable moral debt to both America and the Jews: America because it saved Europe from its own savagery, Jews because they were the primary victims of that savagery. European anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are often hard to tell apart, and it may be because they both reflect a self-loathing aspect of the European psyche--a neurotic need to compensate for an overwhelming sense of historical guilt.

Related:

Hating America by Bruce Bawer

The Decline of France by Christopher Caldwell

Posted by dan at March 21, 2006 06:30 PM | TrackBack