With Us or Against Us
Page 16
tion, the chancellor entered the crisis like a strong, vigorous man who
made promises for which he could be held accountable. Without a
doubt, it was Schröder’s behavior that was key to the spectacular and
surprising success of the Social Democrats in the federal elections of
2002. The self-destruction of the FDP after they presented themselves
as the “the fun party,” allowed their adversary, the Greens, to appear
more serious. At the same time, the Green foreign minister, Joschka
Fischer, enjoyed unflagging popularity. Joschka Fisher did not become
popular through anti-Americanism, however. Against the basic princi-
ples of his fellow party members, he pushed through—together with
the chancellor who has faced similar problems in his own party—
German participation in the war in Kosovo and in the “war on terror”
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D etlev Cl aussen
in Afghanistan. The opposition was not able to distort his rejection of
the Iraqi intervention as a contemptible brand of anti-Americanism,
or to profit from it in any way, because it too is plagued by an ambiva-
lent relationship with America. Indeed, it is from the opposition that the
Stahlhelmfraktion comes. Composed of both members of the so called
“wertkonservativ,” value or traditional conservative, and voters, the
Stahlhelmfraktion repudiates basic aspects of American society on
account of its alleged permissiveness and supposed dictatorship of
political correctness. They also maintain a specifically post–National
Socialist brand of pacifism, which is always sounding the alarm, out of
“their own experience,” against the guerrilla wars that are possible in
any intervention—as if the Nazi army marching toward Yugoslavia
was the same as NATO troops trying to end ethnic cleansing. With
their slogan “war is war,” wisdom disappears, as does any real distinc-
tion between them and the neo-pacifist camp of the Greens. The
Christian Democratic opposition, by comparison, would not have
gained any votes by expressing unequivocal support for German
participation in the Iraqi intervention. So they tried a zigzag course
instead. At home, they portrayed themselves as moderately peaceful
and in Washington, as the only reliable German ally of the Bush
administration. This made them look untrustworthy and their foreign
policy less than convincing. When the voters reject this brand of politics,
it is hardly a sign of deeply rooted anti-Americanism.
Does anti-Americanism, to say nothing of a new anti-Americanism,
exist at all then? At the close of 2003, anyone who pays attention to
the German mass media, or listens to conversations in universities and
public forums, or observes book publishing, where anti-American
conspiracy theories do great business, would probably have the impres-
sion that a flood of anti-American sentiment is gradually reaching a
high point. Personalities in the media and politics are trying to shape
what they consider to be the people’s consciousness. The sudden
identification of a prevailing mood of pacifism and fundamentally
anti-American convictions is integral to their own mainstream views—
views that do not match reality. It is they who have interpreted the
established ambivalence of the people toward politics and the media as
an anti-American social psychology. This leads them to find anti-
Americanism everywhere. Anti-American interpretations associate
America in general, and George W. Bush personally, with the negative
aspects of a widespread ambivalence toward power and violence. For
reasons of realpolitik, rulers must, nonetheless, once again curb these
voices, since no responsible European can be interested in an American
disaster in Iraq. This results in making those who fanned the flames of
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Is There a New Anti-Americanism?
91
anti-American opinion look unreliable, which in turn strengthens
indifference toward politics. It is an old story. In all democratic coun-
tries, an antiwar mood predominates, even when, if not exactly when,
elites, whether for good or bad reasons, act like war hawks. The
assumption that the American people and their respective presidents
lust for war is at the core of anti-American propaganda. With such a
worldview in place, high moral status is awarded both to Germany’s
own peacekeeping policies and to the counterfactual conviction,
which is especially popular in Germany, that violence is no way to con-
duct politics. In psychoanalytic terms, the anti-American worldview
permits a narcissistic reevaluation. Moral superiority compensates for
inferiority in the arena of power politics. Germans understand this
mechanism especially well because they can pretend that this feeling of
moral superiority is a historical lesson. Yet, it is a common European
phenomenon that such a self-reevaluation comes at the expense of an
imagined America. This is something that at least “Old Europe,” as
Donald Rumsfeld disparagingly termed it, had grasped. Politically,
this sense of moral superiority is supposed to compensate Europe for
the insecurity that accompanies its new role in world politics. It is
in this state of insecurity, however, that the governing and the gov-
erned encounter one another.
The mystery of an omnipresent anti-Americanism in the post-1989
period can only be solved in social terms, since it is not only in a polit-
ical sense that a new world emerged after the collapse of the socialist
societies. Germany was overwhelmed by this transformation and has
reacted by refusing to recognize it. The more idealistic expression
“reunification” quickly gained acceptance over the more realistic
expression, “unification.” The internal dynamics of western societies,
which could be termed their internal Americanization, has again led
to a renationalization of Europe. This has not meant a return to old
forms of nation-states, though. Nothing makes this clearer than the
catchphrase “multicultural society,” which has come to describe a
society that is no longer ethnically homogenous. Even from this point
of view, America appears like a role model to be both admired and
feared at the same time. National–cultural conspiracy theories con-
cerning 9/11 rationalize the attacks as an act of self-defense by a
group of fanatical desert rebels who symbolize an essentially invented
tradition of impotence. In Europe, ambivalence toward the process of
social modernization has typically been expressed in anti-American
terms. This response pattern dates back to the end of the nineteenth
century, the age of the “invention of tradition.” Anti-Americanism
can best be understood as part of a Weltanschauung—a German word
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that gained international currency at the same time as Kultur began
to be contrasted with Zivilisation in the German-speaking world.
Anti-Semitism can also be a part of a Weltanschauung but its essential
core consists of a practice that is direc
ted against Jews and is violent in
word and deed (“Jewish blood must flow”). The anti-American
Weltanschauung commonly intersects with the consciousness of the
average person who, in coping with the demands that society places
on a sovereign citizen, elevates the everyday to the status of a kind of
religion. In the magical square of work and exchange, power and vio-
lence, in which all members of society must find their way, the average
person tries to find his or her orientation in the certainties of the
everyday. These self-affirming certainties are meant to provide security
in uncertain times. Thus, what many fear is that the unbridled, glob-
alized economy of “neo-liberalism” will dismantle the welfare states of
old-Europe—the kind that competed with socialism. Fears of poverty
are bound up with the threats implicit in the fear-inducing expression,
“American conditions” such as freezing homeless people in a New
York winter—a terrible vision of Europe’s future. The oil crisis of
1973–1974, brought the Golden Age to an end, ushering in a massive
social transformation in western societies. This transformation
brought new life to old patterns of interpretation. The paradigm of
identity that was developed in academic circles in the 1970s, provided
a way to interpret collective subjectivity in a new manner and set this
new interpretation in a familiar framework. In this way, anti-American
patterns of interpretation accomplish a genuine sociological miracle:
one can feel like a member of a culture that is old, and thus superior
to America, even though it is only recently that Europe has emerged
as a political and social reality. Anti-Americanism has become, therefore,
an ideological playing field in a self-proclaimed, post-ideological age.
Note
Translated by Raymond Valley and Michelle A. Standley.
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5
A merica’s Best Friends
in Europe: East-Central
E uropean Perceptions and
P olicies toward the
U nited States
Jacques Rupnik
On the eve of its long-heralded unification, Europe has been deeply
divided. Less by the merits of the Iraqi crisis per se than by the per-
ceptions of and policies toward American power. The transatlantic
divide became an intra-European one with the countries of Central
and Eastern Europe tipping the balance in favor of the American lead-
ership. The letter entitled “United We Stand,”1 a British–Spanish
initiative signed by the leaders of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech
Republic, became the symbol of that divide. It stressed the primacy of
the “transatlantic bond guaranteeing our freedom.” It was followed
on February 5 by the letter of the “Vilnius Ten” (from Albania to
Estonia) pledging their readiness to contribute to an international
coalition to enforce the disarmament of Iraq.2
“I do not see Europe as being France and Germany. I think that’s
old Europe. If you look at the whole Europe its center of gravity has
moved to the East,” said the American secretary of defense adding
that what is the characteristic of the “new Europe” is that “they are
not with France and Germany, but with the United States.” The
undiplomatic bluntness of Donald Rumsfeld’s statement or its debat-
able terminology (most of the capitals of Central Europe are,
of course, just as “old” as those of Western Europe; as for new Europe,
it is actually in the making through the enlargement of the European
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J acques Rupnik
Union [E.U.] to 10 new members) should not preclude the obvious
element of truth it entails: all the countries that used to belong to the
so-called Communist East—“from the Baltic to the Adriatic” to use
Churchill’s phrase from his famous iron curtain speech—have, with
varying degrees of enthusiasm, pledged their support to the United
States.
Hence the question: has the former Soviet bloc now become an
“American bloc,” the new backbone of the “American party” within
an enlarged E.U.? Was the crisis related to the war in Iraq a temporary
transatlantic disturbance, of which there have been many since Suez in
1956 to Bosnia almost 40 years later? Or was it a catalyst of deeper
trends concerning European perceptions of and policies toward the
United States? If the latter is the case and the transition period stretch-
ing from the end of the Cold War in 1989 to 9/11 is now over, then
it is relevant to treat the contrasting responses to the crisis in the “core
countries” of the E.U. and the East-Central European newcomers as
part of a broader post–Cold War realignment. It also, therefore, justi-
fies an attempt to briefly contrast the perceptions of America in the
country now seen in the United States as the archetype of European
anti-Americanism (France) with the perceptions of the East Europeans
claiming to be “America’s best friends” on the continent.
Several necessary caveats: first, one should use the term “anti-
Americanism” with a degree of caution because of its diversities and
ambiguities (the frequent combination of resentment of American
power and the persistent attraction of the “American dream”) and try,
as much as possible, to distinguish the revival of an anti-American
political discourse (when in doubt, blame the American “hyperpower”)
or expressions of alleged threats to a nation’s cultural identity (on se
pose en s’opposant) from the formulation of legitimate political differ-
ences over a wide range of political and economic issues or even
the very nature of the “new international order.” To express, as most
European countries have done, opposition to the Bush administration
over environmental issues (Kyoto) or even to the use of force without
a UN mandate does not qualify as anti-Americanism (though both
arguments might be used in anti-American discourse). When a London
weekly runs a cover story entitled “Unjust, unwise, un-American,”3
criticizing America’s plan to set-up military commissions for the trial
of terrorist suspects, it might be read in Washington as an illustration
of an anti-American bias, until it is made clear that this comes from
The Economist with impeccable “atlanticist” credentials and a tendency
to identify the international role of the United States with its own free
market agenda. Similarly, to argue that effective fight against terrorism
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America’s Best Friends in Europe
95
implies a political effort focusing on the conditions that helped to
bring about its emergence might be read in circles close to the present
U.S. administration as “European pundit being ‘soft’ in the war on
terrorism,” or as giving excuses for anti-American terror if the author
was no other than a former national security advisor to the president
of the United States with strong connections to the new Europe
going back to the Cold War era.4
No less importantly, to be put in a proper perspe
ctive, the study or
the assessment of the intensity of European anti-Americanism should
nowadays be conducted in parallel with, or at least taking into account,
“Anti-Europeanism” in America.5 The two phenomena are mutually
reinforcing and have implications on the understanding of different
attitudes among Europeans.
Second, an assessment of post-9/11 perceptions of America needs to
be put in a historical perspective. Anti-Americanism in Europe has a his-
tory that suggests that it has been a cyclical phenomenon.6 Post-war
French anti-Americanism receded in the 1970s and 1980s with the
parallel decline of Gaullism and communism in French politics, only to
resurface in a new context two decades later. Similarly, to the extent that
the current East European bout of Americanophilia is, at least partly, a
reaction to decades of Soviet imposed domination justified by adversity
with the United States, it is likely to change over time.
Third, there is a variety of perceptions of America in East-Central
Europe, which is by no means a homogeneous bloc. Poles, Balts, and
Albanians are clearly and for different reasons (opposition to Moscow
for the former, opposition to Belgrade for the latter) the most closely
identified with U.S. foreign policy. Hungarians, Czechs, or Slovenes
displayed a more lukewarm support and concern for its implications
on the European scene. Similarly, there is, as attitudes to U.S. military
action in Iraq revealed, a great deal of differentiation between the
political and intellectual elites on the one hand and public opinion on
the other.
What used to be a French idiosyncrasy (the obsession with American
power) has become a more broadly shared West European concern.
The recent bout of anti-American feeling is at least as acute in Germany
as it is in France. Never in the history of the Federal Republic had the
chancellor lashed out so brazenly against its oldest ally, says Josef
Joffe, the editor of the Hamburg weekly Die Zeit. More than Chirac’s
neogaullist posture, it was Schröder’s open defiance of the United
States that marked the end of the transatlantic consensus.7 And it is