It’s a relief to turn from these writers to young Jedediah Purdy, who in Being America actually presents a recognizable picture of America and the world, conveys a genuine respect for American democracy, and refuses to sentimentalize countries that are rife with beggary and corruption.11 Like Hertsgaard, Purdy begins by asking why foreigners feel as they do about America; unlike Hertsgaard, he makes a serious attempt to answer the question. Traveling the Third World, he interviews religious and business leaders, activists and journalists, ambitious young would-be capitalists, and teenagers hanging out at malls. His conclusion? Quite simply, that the spread of democratic capitalism is essentially positive, though hardly problem-free; that young Third Worlders’ self-contradictions on the subject of America (cheering Osama one minute and Microsoft the next) reflects a simultaneous attraction to both American liberalism and anti-American violence; and that it’s in America’s interest to encourage the liberalism and discourage the violence.
Well, fine. But how? Purdy’s advice: America should approach the world with greater modesty, for “what we do well will speak for itself. It is better not to speak too loudly of one’s own principles.” Is it? Surely one of the major problems in intercultural contexts is that actions often don’t speak for themselves, and that if principles aren’t clearly spelled out, motives may be tragically misinterpreted. If Westerners, as Purdy affirms, need to understand better the way people in other cultures think, surely the Muslim world, by the same token, needs an intensive course in the concepts of pluralist democracy and equal rights. Purdy might also do well to recall that modesty in men is often viewed by Islamic cultures not as a virtue but as a contemptible sign of weakness. Every time one of Purdy’s young interlocutors expresses admiration for Osama bin Laden, Purdy tolerantly lets it slide; does he really think that by being passive in the face of such provocations he is increasing his interviewees’ respect for him, for America, or for democracy?
But while Purdy may not have a reasonable solution to anti-Americanism, he’s far better than Hertsgaard at explaining why it exists. We’ve seen Hertsgaard approvingly cite an Egyptian’s complaint about the unruliness of American children; Purdy, too, quotes an Egyptian—a Christian, as it happens—who explains, with refreshing honesty, that his own reason for hating America is that it welcomes Muslim immigrants and tolerates homosexuality. Purdy is to be congratulated for not sweeping such attitudes under the rug. (How many such remarks has Hertsgaard heard and chosen not to repeat?) Plainly, Purdy has no delusion that the foundations of anti-Americanism are noble; and he finds it ridiculous to speak of an “imperial America.” Yet he can still see why even highly Americanized foreigners refer to the U.S. as an empire. Why? Because as they struggle to learn and speak English and to find a comfortable meeting place between America’s culture and their own, these foreigners are acutely aware that Americans don’t have to make a comparable effort. English is our language; American culture, our culture. It is our exemption from this otherwise global burden of adaptation, Purdy suggests, that makes us seem “imperial.” He’s right; indeed, an intense consciousness of the imbalance he describes, and the resentment it fosters among non-Americans, is an ever-present factor in the life of any remotely observant American expatriate. “While there is no need,” Purdy adds, “to admire or accept” the notion of American empire, “there is no escaping the need to understand it,” for “the idea of American empire is a part of the world’s imaginary landscape.” Purdy has a sense of proportion that Hertsgaard, Hutton, and Prestowitz lack; when discussing America and the world, his allotment of criticism and praise feels just about right. May his tribe increase.
The fact that Richard Crockatt is an academic (he teaches American history at the University of East Anglia) comes through clearly on every page of America Embattled: September 11, Anti-Americanism and the Global Order.12 In a plodding, prudent, professorial prose, Crockatt first sums up “how America sees the world” and “how the world sees America,” then offers a potted history of political Islam, of U.S. involvement in the Middle East, and of the war on terror, all the while patently seeking to strike an inoffensive balance, as if such a thing were possible with such a topic. Crockatt’s book has a cultivated colorlessness: he seems incapable of making the blandest assertion without qualifying it to death or using the word “arguably” (which recurs here with the frequency of expletives in a rap lyric). Whether the issue is globalization or the role of Israel, Crockatt painstakingly outlines the arguments for almost every imaginable position, only to move on, once that’s done, to the next issue, leaving the reader baffled as to where the author himself stands. To be sure, we’re given hints now and then: Crockatt seems more favorably inclined toward the U.N., NGOs, and the BBC than toward NATO, the IMF, or CNN; he tiptoes gingerly around the issue of European and Muslim anti-Semitism; he pays more attention to the purported U.S. mistreatment of prisoners at Guantánamo than to all of Saddam’s atrocities; and he is capable of stating, absurdly, that Le Monde cannot “be regarded as . . . anti-American.” But for the most part his book is a tame, toothless summary, a tissue of self-evident points (“An understanding of Islam must surely play a part in explaining the events of September 11”) that ends in conclusions whose obviousness (“September 11 brought terrorism to the forefront of the global agenda”) defies parody.
Dinesh D’Souza seeks not to encourage or explain anti-Americanism but to counter it by answering the question posed in his book’s title: What’s So Great about America?13 D’Souza, a former Reagan aide and longtime fixture at right-wing think tanks, reminds us that many of the Third World societies that leftists such as Hertsgaard and Hutton affect to admire are (hello!) fiercely reactionary. Indeed, D’Souza makes it clear that his own conservative moral perspective owes much to the traditional cultural values of his native India. “The critics of America,” he asserts—referring not to European socialists but to reactionary Muslims—are “onto something.” Their critique, he says, is moral in character, and D’Souza (a Catholic) gives little indication of disagreeing with their moral criteria, including their equation of morality with religious orthodoxy. “The West,” he proposes, “is a society based on freedom whereas Islam is a society based on virtue.” How about: Islamic societies enforce stifling Koranic notions of virtue, and punish infractions with brutal Sharia justice, while democratic societies do not presume to dictate individual moral convictions? D’Souza shares the Islamic view that “there is a good deal in American culture that is disgusting to normal sensibilities.” (He never tells us what he means by “normal”—and one is not sure one wishes to know.) Muslims, he notes, “say our women are ‘loose,’ and in a sense they are right.” (Yes, if by “loose” you mean that they have the same sexual freedom as men; it’s called “equal rights.”) The father of a young daughter, D’Souza says he has “come to realize how much more difficult it is to raise her well in America than it would be . . . to raise her in India.” (Yes, if by “raise her well” you mean—oh, never mind. You get the idea.)
Despite America’s lack of virtue, however—all the “crime, drugs, divorce, abortion, illegitimacy, and pornography” (given his track record, the omission of homosexuality from this list is surprising)—D’Souza chooses the U.S. over India. Why? Because “I know that my daughter will have a better life if I stay. I don’t mean just that she will be better off; I mean that her life is likely to have greater depth, meaning, and fulfillment in the United States than it would in any other country.” For he’s come to see that there’s “something great and noble about America”: namely, the fact that in the U.S., you’re “the architect of your own destiny.” He tries, not with undivided success, to distinguish between the founding American principle of self-determination (good) and the narcissistic do-your-own-thing mentality of the 1960s (not so good). As an example of the former, he movingly describes how his talk of feeling “called to be a writer” and of wanting “a life that made me feel true to myself” baffled his Indian father; as an example of the latter, he unfeelingly mocks a young man with “a Mohawk, earrings, a nose ring, tattoos” who waited on him at a Starbucks and whom D’Souza dismisses as “a specimen.” Not a pretty performance.
In Of Paradise and Power, Robert Kagan, who like Prestowitz worked for the State Department during the Reagan administration, serves up a dispassionate, definitive account of the current transatlantic strategic relationship. The book reminds us of some plain, but often obscured, facts.14 For one thing, America’s Cold War strategy of risking nuclear attack to protect Western Europe was “extraordinary”—a “historically unprecedented example” of “the most enlightened kind of self-interest.” For another, European history is not a cozy chronicle of congenial community, as Hutton and others would have it, but a long, grim tale of corrupt, power-mad kings and pointless, protracted, bloodthirsty wars. Europeans, Kagan points out, “invented power politics”; by contrast, “Americans have never accepted the principles of Europe’s old order nor embraced the Machiavellian perspective.” Far from evolving naturally out of the community-minded premodern Europe of Hutton’s (and others’) fantasy, moreover, the EU was the product of “an act of will” by “born-again idealists” set on “the integration and taming” of Germany. And why have these Machiavellians become idealists? Because they no longer have power —and, being powerless, they resent U.S. power, even when it’s used not to conquer but to help.
Which brings us to the thesis of this compact, meticulously argued work: that the “paradise” of peace and prosperity Europe now enjoys is made possible, quite simply, by American power. Provided with “security from outside,” Europe requires no power of its own; yet protected “under the umbrella of American power,” it’s able to delude itself that power is “no longer important” and “that American military power, and the ‘strategic culture’ that has created and sustained it, is outmoded and dangerous.” European leaders, says Kagan, see themselves as inhabiting a post-historical world in which war has been rendered obsolete by the triumph of international “moral consciousness”; yet most of them
do not see or do not wish to see the great paradox: that their passage into post-history has depended on the United States not making the same passage. Because Europe has neither the will nor the ability to guard its own paradise and keep it from being overrun, spiritually and well as physically, by a world that has yet to accept the rule of “moral consciousness,” it has become dependent on America’s willingness to use its military might to deter or defeat those around the world who still believe in power politics.
In short, though the U.S. makes Europe’s “paradise” possible, “it cannot enter the paradise itself. It mans the walls but cannot walk through the gate . . . stuck in history, [it is] left to deal with the Saddams and the ayatollahs, the Kim Jong Ils and the Jiang Zemins, leaving most of the benefits to others.” And when it does address those threats, furthermore, it feels Europe’s wrath, for “America’s power and its willingness to exercise that power—unilaterally if necessary—constitute a threat to Europe’s new sense of mission.” If Europe’s intellectual and political elite was briefly pro-America after 9/11, it was because America was suddenly a victim, and European intellectuals are accustomed to sympathizing reflexively with victims (or, more specifically, with perceived or self-proclaimed victims, such as Arafat). That support began to wane the moment it became clear that Americans had no intention of being victims.
Of Paradise and Power (which the popular media have summed up by quoting Kagan’s memorable statement that “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus”) has drawn both praise and condemnation. In this reader’s opinion, it’s simply a straightforward, incontrovertible description of reality by an author whose eyes are wide open. To be sure, the Europe/America opposition appears at this writing to be somewhat less black and white than Kagan, writing prior to the invasion of Iraq, may have recognized. An attack on Iraq, he says, would be “an assault on the essence of ‘postmodern’ Europe . . . an assault on Europe’s new ideals, a denial of their universal validity.” Yet much of Europe, as we know, ended up endorsing that assault. In January 2003, leaders of Britain, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, Denmark, and the Czech Republic urged Europe to join the U.S. in opposing Saddam; in February, ten Eastern European nations issued a similar statement; in March, British, Danish, Spanish, and Polish troops took part in the invasion alongside Americans and Australians. There is, then, considerable resistance on the Continent—especially in former Iron Curtain coun- tries—to “postmodern Europe,” a concept intimately tied up, one might add, with French and German ambitions.
If America is founded on liberty—and on the idea that its preservation is worth great sacrifice—those who steer the fortunes of Western Europe have no strong unifying principle for which they can imagine sacrificing much. Their common cause is not liberty but security and stability; the closest thing they have to a unifying principle is a self-delusionary, dogmatic, indeed well-nigh religious insistence on the absolute value of dialogue, discussion, and diplomacy. This dedication has its positive aspects, but it can also make for moral confusion, passivity, and an antagonism to the very idea of taking a firm stand on anything.15 If, in the view of many Americans, a love of freedom and hatred of tyranny provide all the legitimacy required for taking actions like the invasion of Iraq, European intellectuals, having no such deeply held principles to guide them, turn instinctively to the U.N., as if it existed, like some divine oracle, at an ideal, impersonal remove from any possibility of misjudgment or moral taint.
IV
It is not only in the U.S. and Britain that the bookstores have lately been filled with books harshly critical of America—and that responses to these works have begun to appear. France has seen a spate of volumes with titles like Dangereuse Amérique and Après l’empire: Essai sur la décomposition du système américain; Thierry Meyssan’s L’effroyable imposture, which argues that no plane struck the Pentagon on 9/11, was a bestseller. So, however, was Jean-François Revel’s L’obsession anti-américaine, which has now appeared in the U.S. as Anti-Americanism.16 Revel’s earliest opinions of America, he tells us, were formed by “the European press, which means that my judgment was unfavorable”; yet those opinions changed when he actually visited America during the Vietnam War. Decades later, he notes wryly, the European media still employ the same misrepresentations as they did back then, depicting an America plagued by severe poverty, extreme inequality, “no unemployment benefits, no retirement, no assistance for the destitute,” and medical care and university education only for the rich. “Europeans firmly believe this caricature,” Revel writes, “because it is repeated every day by the elites.” The centrality of this point to the entire topic of European anti-Americanism cannot, in my view, be overstated.
Item by item, Revel refutes the European media’s picture of America. Poverty? An American at the poverty level has about the same standard of living as the average citizen of Greece or Portugal. (Indeed, according to a recent study by the Swedish Trade Research Institute, Swedes have a slightly lower standard of living than black Americans—a devastating statistic for Scandinavians, for whom both the unparalleled success of their own welfare economies and the pitiable poverty of blacks in the racist U.S. are articles of faith.) Crime? America has grown safer, while the French ignore their own rising crime levels, a consequence of “permanent street warfare” by Muslim immigrants “who don’t consider themselves subject to the laws of the land” and of authorities with “anti-law-and-order ideologies.” Revel contrasts France’s increasingly problematic division into ethnic Frenchmen and unassimilated immigrants with “America’s truly diverse, multifaceted society,” pointing out that “the success and originality of American integration stems precisely from the fact that immigrants’ descendants can perpetuate their ancestral cultures while thinking of themselves as American citizens in the fullest sense.” Bingo. (Most Americans, I think, would be shocked to realize how far short of America Europe falls in this regard.)
Media? Revel recalls that when he first visited the U.S., he “was struck by the vast gulf that separated our [French] state-controlled television news services—stilted, long-winded and monot- onous, dedicated to presenting the official version of events—from the lively, aggressive evening news shows on NBC or CBS, crammed with eye-opening images and reportage that offered unflinching views of social and political realities at home and American involvement abroad.” (Take that, Mr. Hutton.) He also observed a difference in the populace: “whereas in France people’s opinions were fairly predictable and tended to follow along lines laid down by their social role, what I heard in America was much more varied—and frequently unexpected. I realized that many more Americans than Europeans had formed their own opinions about matters—whether intelligent or idiotic is another question—rather than just parroting the received wisdom of their social milieu.” True: by Western European standards, I’ve come to realize, Americans are very independent thinkers.
To Revel, the tenacity of European anti-Americanism, despite historical developments that should have finished it off once and for all, suggests “that we are in the presence, not of rational analysis, but of obsession”—an obsession driven, he adds, by a desire to maintain public hostility to Jeffersonian democracy. The European establishment, Revel notes, soft-pedals the fact that Europeans “invented the great criminal ideologies of the twentieth century”; it defangs Communism (at “the top French business school,” students think Stalin’s great error was to “prioritize capital goods over . . . consumer goods”); and it identifies the U.S., “contrary to every lesson of real history . . . as the singular threat to democracy.” Revel’s vigorous assault on all this foolishness might easily have been dismissed in France (or denied publication altogether) but for the fact that he’s a member of that revered symbol of French national culture, the Académie Française.
Two books, though at present available only in Norwegian, are worth mentioning here for the light they shed on Western European attitudes. Herman Willis’ Ich Bin Ein Amerikaner caught my eye at an Oslo bookstore with its cover picture of the Twin Towers ablaze.17 “Is there anyone,” asked the jacket copy, “who thinks solidarity [with the U.S.] should wait until the first suicide bomber blows herself up here [in Norway]?” It looked promising. Yet the book Willis has written isn’t a brief for solidarity with America but a brisk, rambling, opinionated, and rather familiar account of the author’s recent travels in the U.S. Its tone—a mixture of chummy irreverence and defensive condescension—is familiar from other European travel books about America, as are its ingredients: Willis eats barbecue, extends unsolicited sympathy to American blacks, enthuses over Elvis, expresses his disapproval of the My Lai massacre; he seeks out the company of rednecks and left-wing intellectuals, which allows him to depict an America torn between racist boneheads and people who think like, well, members of the Scandinavian establishment; and he labors (in precisely the fashion described by Revel in his critique of the French media) to leave the impression that the U.S. has no public schools, pensions, unemployment insurance, or media debate. Willis’ anecdotes range from the funny (he tells us that young Norwegian lawbreakers, who thanks to American TV shows are more familiar with the U.S. justice system than their own, routinely ask their arresting officers: “Aren’t you going to read me my rights?”) to the disturbing (Willis informs us, and doesn’t seem to find it particularly worrisome, that his “Arab friends” in Oslo consider 9/11 a Jewish conspiracy).
The closest Willis comes to a thesis is a not altogether tidy theory that he concocts after hearing an American refer to soldiers dying for “others’ freedom.” Like many Europeans, Willis doesn’t get this “very American” thing about fighting and dying for freedom, and he figures that behind all the talk of freedom there must be some other, more comprehensible motive or value. Pondering the insights of a friend who defends the French Empire as an admirable “attempt to spread French civilization and culture” but who condemns American wars as being “only about money,” Willis decides that this business about “freedom” must, indeed, have something to do with money—specifically, with the American drive to succeed. But at this point Willis introduces a twist: deep down, he says—and he plainly thinks this is a major insight—Americans aren’t preoccupied with success but with failure. Why, after all, do Europeans erect monuments to military victories, while Americans build memorials to their war dead and require children to memorize the Gettysburg Address? Because, Willis says, Americans “worship defeat.” Case closed. Likewise, if “the U.S. has never developed totalitarian ideologies,” it’s not because Americans love freedom but, rather, has something (it’s not clear exactly what) to do with our “dynamic of success.”
What does it mean when even a relatively America-friendly European writer is capable of such colossal misunderstanding? For make no mistake: as European writers and intellectuals go, Willis is indeed at the pro-American end of the spectrum. He argues, for example, that the U.S. isn’t necessarily “corrupt and/or fanatical” just because it rejects the Scandinavian welfare model (gee, thanks, Herman!). In his closing pages, moreover, he contradicts much of what he’s said earlier by declaring that the U.S. and Europe are, in fact, extremely similar, since they share many things, including “the threat of terror” (which he’s hardly mentioned). The main difference between the U.S. and Europe, he argues, is that America “is miles ahead of us in tolerance and equality.” He’s right—but this statement comes at the end of a book that seems largely intended to suggest the opposite.
Though focusing predominantly on Norway, Stian Bromark and Dag Herbjørnsrud’s Frykten for Amerika (Fear of America) does a splendid job of illuminating European anti-Americanism generally.18 The authors begin by examining the geographical distribution of anti-Americanism, which, while low in Asia, South Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and Eastern Europe, is widespread in the Islamic world, is even higher in Western Europe, and is highest of all in France. (53% of Frenchmen “take a negative view of American democratic ideas,” while 64% of Czechs, 67% of Venezuelans, and 87% of Kenyans are positive.) Though fewer than 14% of Frenchmen have visited America, “most have strong views” of it; indeed, “Europeans who have not been in the U.S. . . . have the strongest opinions” about it, and malice toward America is inversely proportional to the amount of time individuals have actually spent there. Another illuminating statistic: contrary to the notion that anti-Americanism is a reflection of opposition to Republican presidents and U.S.-led wars, French sympathy for the U.S. stood at 54% in 1988, during the Reagan administration, but dropped to 35% by 1996, when Clinton was in office. Why the decline? Simple: in 1988 the U.S. was a protector; in 1996, after the Berlin Wall fell, it was a resented “hyperpower” (to employ French politician Hubert Védrine’s gratuitous term).
Asked their view of the U.S. from several perspectives (politics, society, foreign policy, etc.), Western Europeans give a thumbs-up only to American popular culture. Why? Because they’ve experienced American movies and music firsthand and can judge for themselves, whereas their social and political views are based on what they’ve been taught in school and told by their media. This gap between negative views inculcated by educators and journalists and positive views founded on personal experience is perhaps nowhere vaster than in Norway, where school textbooks give bogus “materialistic-capitalistic explanations” for one U.S. action after another—presenting as fact, for instance, that America’s motive for invading Iraq was oil—but where teenagers, according to a BBD&O study, boast Europe’s highest “Americanization index.” (The Norwegian press sneers about Americans’ devotion to McDonald’s and Coca-Cola, but both corporations have bigger market shares in Norway than in the U.S.)
To be sure, Western European intellectuals often claim, as Norwegian author Jens Bjørneboe did in a 1966 essay, “We Who Loved America,” that they once were pro-American but, owing to some social change in America or some U.S. government action, have altered their position. The current claim is that Europeans loved America until the Iraq War; before that, it was a truism that they loved America until Vietnam. But Bromark and Herbjørnsrud state flatly that “It wasn’t the Vietnam War that made European intellectuals, authors and academics anti-American. The truth is that they had been anti-American all along.” As early as 1881, the Norwegian author Bjørnsterne Bjørnson argued that Europe’s America-bashing had to stop; even earlier, in 1869, James Russell Lowell complained that Europeans invariably saw America “in caricature.”19 Indeed, nineteenth-century European aristocrats despised America as a symbol of progress, innovation, and (above all) equality, ridiculing it as a mongrel land of simple-minded Indians and blacks; later, avaricious Jews were added to the list. These stereotypes soon spread to Americans generally, resulting in today’s European-establishment view of Americans as materialistic morons.
If privileged Europeans of generations ago quaked in fear because they knew that America, and American equality, represented the future, so too did many of the Continent’s leading authors and intellectuals. Bromark and Herbjørnsrud examine the rather sorry Norwegian record (to which that nation’s twin titans, Ibsen and Bjørnson, were honorable exceptions): in 1889, Knut Hamsun denounced what he considered to be America’s sexual equality; in 1951, Agnar Mykle sneered that American mothers “raise children, not as boys and girls, but first and foremost as people who will become adults, with clean souls, well-scrubbed teeth, well-ordered hair, clean hands and a big smile.” (America’s excessive cleanliness was long a European theme: Hamsun whined that in the U.S. you couldn’t “spit on the floor wherever you want.”) But the main flash point was race: in America, complained one Norwegian writer, one “had to fight for one’s blond scalp in conflict with bloodthirsty natives.” Bjørneboe wrote in his teens that the physiognomy of immigrants to America changed after three years (“Northern and Central Europeans become Indian, Southern Europeans become Negroid”); Hamsun grumbled that the U.S., by allowing blacks to work in white restaurants, had created “a mulatto stud farm”; Mykle, spotting a mixed-race couple in New York, had “the same uncomfortable feeling as when you see a bulldog mate with a birddog.” Note that these writers were not marginal cranks: they were major literary figures. Nor were these Norwegian writers very different from their colleagues south of the Skaggerak. For an appalling number of them, America’s supreme iniquity was, as Bromark and Herbjørnsrud put it, its “project of [ethnic] blending.” Such views, which remained in the European mainstream well into the 1950s, had by the 1970s, however, been supplanted by reflexive, supercilious condemnations of American racism, the implication usually being that racial prejudices of the sort found in the U.S. were utterly foreign to Europeans.
Envy and insecurity have played a role in anti-Americanism, too. Over the generations, men who saw themselves as metropolitan sophisticates traveled to America and were suddenly confronted with their own provinciality. Mykle, we’re told, “felt humiliated as a Norwegian from the moment he arrived in New York”; days after a customs official asked him how to spell Oslo, the question still rang in his ears.20 The beloved Norwegian author Rolf Jacobsen, who wrote several anti-American poems before finally visiting the U.S. in 1976 (when he was nearly seventy), complained in a postcard home that “There’s not one mountain here—not one mountain ridge.” Away from familiar surroundings, these men felt uprooted, robbed of their souls; this personal disorientation, alas, led not to enhanced self-understanding, but to defensive attacks on America as rootless and soulless (a charge that is now, of course, a cliché).
Even in Revolutionary times, fear of America meant fear of the modern. Throughout the twentieth century, many Europeans regarded technological progress not as a natural development but as Americanization and considered such phenomena as canned food to be symbols of American dehumanization. Even Sigmund Skard, Norway’s leading postwar “expert” on the U.S., who was instrumental in shaping the way Norwegian students were (and are) taught about America, admitted that “the modern scares me” and projected this fear onto the United States. “Consumer civilization,” he charged, threatened “our old civilizations . . . the roots, the simple, classic life.” As distorted as Skard’s account of modern America, note Bromark and Herbjørnsrud, is his sentimental idealization of “traditional Norway,” whose history of grim poverty, isolation, and deprivation he turns “into something . . . exclusively positive.” It would appear, then, that when the Norwegian media, in June of 2001, chose to represent my rural experience in Telemark as a face-off between homely, traditional Norwegian virtues and American “McDonald’s culture,” it was only following in Skard’s footsteps.
New wrinkles were added in the 1960s, when, bizarrely, the longstanding reactionary critique of Americans and American popular culture was supplemented by, and combined with, socialist vitriol about the U.S. political system and the American state. Americans were now not only stupid and vulgar; they were also arrogant, power-hungry imperialists. The terms of this new critique, of course, were lifted largely from America’s own counterculture; as Bromark and Herbjørnsrud succinctly put it, “American artists’ imaginations, knowledge, and quality . . . have seduced Europeans into thinking that Americans have no imagination, knowledge, or quality.” This practice has continued to the present day, when major European newspapers eagerly fill page after page with nonsensical anti-American rants by the likes of Gore Vidal and Noam Chomsky.
When European journalists and intellectuals aren’t relishing the latest windy jeremiad by one of these cranks, they’re busy congratulating themselves for their appreciation of nuance. That’s their term of choice for what they have and America doesn’t. Americans, they argue, are possessed by naïve, simplistic ideals, while Europeans are more aware of real-world complexities. Actually the opposite is closer to the truth. Yes, America is built on an idea, namely liberty; but far from being divorced from reality, it is an idea that Americans have realized, developed, and successfully exported for more than two centuries. We have demonstrated the depth of our commitment as a people to this idea by waging a revolution, a civil war, two World Wars, several smaller wars, and the Cold War in its name. It is, in short, an idea that is utterly indissoluble from our own living, breathing, everyday reality. By contrast, much of Western Europe is founded on an idea of itself that is significantly, and dangerously, divorced from reality. That idea, as Robert Kagan explains so adroitly, is that the world has moved beyond the necessity of war. It is a pretty fiction, but a fiction nonetheless. And keeping it alive requires that one ignore dangerous realities—such as the growing problem of militant Islam within Europe’s own borders.
Europeans mock American religiosity. But American religion, for all its attendant idiocies and cruelties, has never prevented Americans from acting pragmatically. Secular Western European intellectuals, however, have their own version of religion. It is a social-democratic religion that deifies international organizations such as the Red Cross, Amnesty International, and, above all, the U.N. Not NATO, which is about waging war, and which has for that reason been the target of much European criticism in recent years; no, the NGOs are about waging peace, love, brotherhood, and solidarity, and, as such, are, for the elites of Western Europe, beyond criticism, for they embody Western Europe’s most cherished idea of itself and of the way the world works, or should work. The elites’ enthusiasm for these institutions, whether or not they are genuinely effective or even admirable, is a matter of maintaining a certain self-image and illusion of the world that is intimately tied up with their identity as social democrats; America’s unforgivable offense, as Kagan notes, is that it challenges that image and that illusion; and the degree to which the reality of America is distorted in the Western European media is a measure of the desperate need among Western European elites to preserve that self-image and illusion. It sometimes seems to me a miracle, frankly, that America has any friends at all in some parts of Western Europe, given the news media’s relentless anti-Americanism. There is no question that the chief obstacle to improved understanding and harmony between the U.S. and Western Europe is the Western European media establishment. It is an obstacle that must somehow be overcome, for Western civilization is under siege, and America and Europe need each other, perhaps more than ever. More sane, sensible European books along the lines of Revel’s L’obsession anti-américaine and Bromark and Herbjørnsrud’s Frykten for Amerika can help.
1 Besides, European multilingualism is overstated and very unevenly distributed. Some indications of relative comfort levels in English: American TV shows are subtitled in Scandinavia and the Netherlands but dubbed nearly everywhere else on the Continent; a Canadian friend in Amsterdam was denied a job as a KLM flight attendant because he was fluent only in three of the required languages, Dutch, English, and French, but not in the fourth, German (how many American Ph.D. programs require fluency in four languages?); on the annual Eurovision Song Contest broadcast, twenty-odd countries report their votes in English and one (ahem) reports in French.
2 THE EAGLE’S SHADOW: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, by Mark Hertsgaard. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $23.00; Picador, $14.00.
3 According to an April 2003 poll, 69% of Norwegian journalists are socialists, compared with 43% of the general population; the Progress Party, the social-democratic establishment’s only serious challenger, is supported by 22.5% of Norwegians, but only 3% of journalists (and most of that 3%, I’d wager, work for local weeklies, not national dailies).
4 What is striking is that the Scandinavian countries, despite the subsidized newspapers and media watchdog agencies, routinely rank highest on earth in press freedom (which suggests, of course, that the rankings are in fact measuring something else).
5 Hertsgaard’s most pro-U.S. moment is probably the paragraph in which he admits that Americans saved Bosnians while Europeans engaged in “pious hand-wringing.” Yet he ruins even this by introducing it as follows: “Nor have all of America's overseas military interventions been on the side of darkness.”
6 Similarly, Hertsgaard holds up the Muslim world as a model, quoting an Egyptian’s complaint about American individualism: “Parents [in the U.S.] don't know much about their children, and if they tell the kids not to do something, it doesn’t matter; they do it anyway. Here, family is more important.” Yes, Muslim children are indeed expected to obey absolutely. This is especially true of Muslim girls, a high percentage of whom are subjected to forced marriages and who, if they resist, risk an “honor killing” at the hands of their fathers or other male relatives. Is this Hertsgaard’s idea of admirable family values?
7 A DECLARATION OF INTERDEPENDENCE: Why America Should Join the World, by Will Hutton. W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. $27.95. (Original U.K. title: The World We’re In.)
8 ROGUE NATION: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions, by Clyde Prestowitz. Basic Books. $26.00.
9 The innocuous-sounding mention of “charitable giving institutions” here refers to the discovery that Saudi “charities” fund terrorism.
10 Prestowitz’s selective approach to truths about the Arab and Muslim world is also exemplified in his reference to Charles Freeman, whom he quotes approvingly to the effect that “we need a war on arrogance as well as a war on terror.” Prestowitz identifies Freeman simply as “a longtime State Department official and former ambassador to Saudi Arabia”; one would never know from this that Freeman is an intimate of the House of Saud and head of the Saudi-funded Middle East Policy Council, and is, in the words of Matt Welch, one of “the rancid crew of non-Arabic-speaking ex-ambassadors to Saudi Arabia” who serve as apologists for Saudi leaders (a service for which, it is widely assumed, they are generously compensated).
11 BEING AMERICA: Liberty, Commerce, and Violence in an American World, by Jedediah Purdy. Alfred A. Knopf. $24.00.
12 AMERICA EMBATTLED: September 11, Anti-Americanism and the Global Order, by Richard Crockatt. Routledge. $90.00.
13 WHAT’S SO GREAT ABOUT AMERICA?, by Dinesh D’Souza. Penguin. $15.00p.
14 OF PARADISE AND POWER: America and Europe in the New World Order, by Robert Kagan. Alfred A. Knopf. $18.00.
15 Typical of this reflexive attitude was a December 2003 editorial in which the Norwegian newspaper Dagbladet—dodging the controversial question of whether public schools should prohibit the wearing of head coverings by Muslim girls—made the ludicrous statement that the only solution to the conflict lay in taking the girls seriously as “partners in dialogue.”
16 ANTI-AMERICANISM, by Jean-François Revel. Trans. by Diarmid Cammell. Encounter. $25.95.
17 ICH BIN EIN AMERIKANER, by Herman Willis. Schibsted. 298kr. (Yes, the title is in German, but the book is in Norwegian.)
18 FRYKTEN FOR AMERIKA: En europeisk historie, by Stian Bromark and Dag Herbjørnsrud. Tiden. 329kr.
19 Similarly, Crockatt cites a 1928 British essay by C. E .M. Joad, “Does England Dislike America?” (Joad's answer: yes) and a 1930 French book entitled The American Cancer. (Plus ça change . . .)
20 In Ich Bin Ein Amerikaner, Willis meets a Southerner who doesn’t know where Norway is; Willis chooses to interpret this—with a vengeance—as proof not of his own country’s obscurity but of Southern feeble-mindedness.