by Amy Chua
Global markets may well hold the key to long-term greater prosperity for the poor and not-so-poor countries of the world. But like Latin America’s European-blooded elites or Southeast Asia’s hypercapitalized Chinese, America has a massive head start over the rest of the world. Thomas Friedman suggested a few years ago that America is “the country that benefits most from today’s global integration.” Friedman was recently corroborated by a 2002 New York Times report indicating that the United States, rather than the developing world, has been the overwhelming beneficiary of globalization. “Perhaps aside from China the only country that appears to have benefited unambiguously from the trend toward open markets worldwide is the United States, where a huge inflow of capital has helped allow Americans to spend more than they save, and to import more than they export.” The report goes on to quote financier and philanthropist George Soros: “The trend of globalization is that surplus capital is moving from the periphery countries to the center, which is the United States.”7
Global Backlash
Like the market dominance of any minority in the world, American market dominance provokes intense resentment. Indeed, the rest of the world, if anything, exaggerates America’s disproportionate wealth and power. Just as Russian hate-sites insist that “Yids control the entire economy,” and just as indigenous Burmans often say that “the Chinese control all Mandalay,” many in the world today see America as “controlling the global economy,” either through its multinationals or its “puppets,” the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.
Like resentment against market-dominant minorities in individual countries, anti-Americanism around the world is not a monolithic phenomenon. In some countries, anti-Americanism is particularly fierce among the elite, who in turn foment anti-American sentiment among the lower classes. Some have suggested that this is true of France. In other countries, anti-Americanism originates among the lower classes, who—even as they covet Nike sweatshirts and Madonna CDs—see and resent America as the powerful extension and protector of their own corrupt elites. This is true of many developing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
As with resentment against other market-dominant minorities, anti-Americanism is often a perverse blend of admiration, awe, and envy on one hand and seething hatred, disgust, and contempt on the other. Thus, for millions, perhaps billions, around the world, America is “arrogant,” “hegemonic,” and “vapidly materialistic”—but also where they would go if only they could. In Beijing, for example, many of the same screaming students who bombarded the U.S. embassy with stones after the U.S. bombing of China’s embassy in Belgrade returned a few weeks later to line up for U.S. visas. One of them, interviewed by U.S. News & World Report, explained that he wanted to attend graduate school in America and that “If I could have good opportunities in the U.S., I wouldn’t mind U.S. hegemony too much.” Similarly, in another interview with U.S. News, Oscar Arias Sanchez, Costa Rica’s former president who won a Nobel Peace Prize for brokering peace in Central America, charged that America “want[s] to tell the world what to do. You are like the Romans of the new millennium.” Yet Arias vacations in the United States and has a son at Harvard and a daughter who graduated from Boston College.8
Another example of the world’s love-hate relationship with the United States was seen when a quarter million Brazilians packed into a Rio de Janeiro concert hall to ogle U.S. teen pop idol Britney Spears. Delirious with adoration, the crowd nevertheless hissed and booed when she waved an American flag.9 And many, of course, have pointed out that an ironic number of the cheering Palestinians, captured on television celebrating the destruction of the World Trade Center, were wearing American T-shirts, sneakers, and baseball caps.
Along with many other market-dominant minorities around the world, Americans are often accused of being “greedy,” “selfish,” and ungenerous, especially given our spectacular wealth. European governments frequently point out that America’s foreign aid budget is a much smaller percentage of GNP than that of other OECD countries.10 Further, what foreign aid we provide is often given on the condition that it be spent on U.S. products or consultants. (Japan is just as guilty of this as we are.) Moreover, the U.S. government is quite willing to make exceptions to our embrace of free trade for our own benefit; our farming subsidies enrage even our Australian allies. American rebuttals to these charges are, by now, also familiar. What government in the world isn’t self-interested? What country has done more for the rest of the world than America? Who bailed out Europe in the Second World War?
It is important to stress, however, that in some respects the analogy between market-dominant minorities at the national level and America as a market-dominant minority at the global level is imperfect. For one thing, at least from an internal United States perspective, Americans are not a single “ethnicity.” On the contrary, from our own point of view America is the quintessential multiethnic country, a self-proclaimed mosaic or melting pot. In addition, the “rest of the world” is not a single self-perceived “indigenous majority,” in the same way that, say, blacks feel that they are “indigenous” in South Africa as opposed to whites.
On the other hand, ethnicity in any context is always a highly subjective and artificial phenomenon. This is true even in South Africa, where, at first glance, ethnic lines seem to be particularly stark. In fact, South African “whites” include diverse peoples of British, Dutch, and German Jewish origins. South Africa’s whites are viewed as (and view themselves as) a single “ethnicity” only against the background of the country’s predominantly “black” majority, which itself is made up of numerous different African tribes, speaking mutually incomprehensible tongues. Nevertheless, the fact remains that, as a matter of general perception, the major social fault line in South Africa today is between blacks and whites and, moreover, that whites are widely viewed as a market-dominant “outsider” minority, wielding egregiously disproportionate economic power vis-à-vis the country’s indigenous majority. America occupies much the same role at the global level.
We are viewed by the rest of the world as one “people”—and for that matter, a “white” people. As one U.S. Department of Justice official put it, “with all acknowledgment to Colin Powell and Norman Mineta, the world surely thinks of our ‘face’ as white.” More fundamentally, all over the world, American products, companies, and investors are viewed as “outsider” threats to the legitimate “indigenous” society. America’s geographic separation is no bar to this perception of Americans as a global market-dominant minority. On the contrary, most market-dominant minorities—among them the Chinese in Southeast Asia, Lebanese in West Africa, Indians in East Africa, and whites in South Africa—are all the more resented precisely because of their “insular” self-segregation. Indeed, America’s increasingly restrictive immigration policies are another source of hostility for the rest of the world.
But America is unusual, compared to other market-dominant minorities, in numerous additional ways. As well as being an economic superpower, America is the world’s preeminent military, political, and cultural power. As a result, global anti-Americanism reflects not only our market dominance, but also our military unilateralism, our foreign policy, and our cultural “hegemony”—all of which have provoked intense resentment in many quarters. Yet even in these respects, America’s position is surprisingly comparable to that of many market-dominant minorities.
The “entrepreneurial” market-dominant minorities of Southeast Asia and Africa tend to be politically weak. Often just 1 to 2 percent of the population, they have little or no military strength or influence on governmental policy (other than through cronyism, which in any case benefits only a very few). But this is not true, for example, of the light-skinned elites in Latin America, the Tutsi minority in pregenocide Rwanda, or the white minority in apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia. All these minorities are or were both economically and politically dominant, typically controlling every sector of governmental policy and the military as
well. In all such cases, as with America today, there is much more than economics behind the often-violent animosity felt by the frustrated majority. At the same time, the humiliation or oppression felt by the majority because of the minority’s political dominance is inextricably woven together with, and immeasurably magnified by, the minority’s wealth and economic power.
Similarly, while America’s global cultural dominance today is historically unique—and certainly not reducible to mere economics—the world’s reaction against American “cultural imperialism” is again strikingly parallel to standard reactions against market-dominant minorities. A characteristic feature of societies with economically powerful “outsider” minorities is the reported feeling, on the part of the “indigenous” majority, that they are in danger of being “swallowed up,” their culture taken over or eradicated by the minority.11 Thus in Rwanda, genocide was justified in the name of Hutu “self-protection” and Hutu “self-defense.” A constant theme among Russian hatemongers today is that Jews “are waging a destructive campaign against our fatherland and its morality, language, culture and beliefs.” A pervasive sentiment in Burma, bitterly expressed by a Mandalayan businessman, is that “we are becoming a Chinese colony.” The tiny market-dominant Chinese minority, it is said, “are smothering us”; “they have turned us into second-class citizens in our own towns.” “Burmese identity is being destroyed.” Such sentiments are highly analogous to those expressed today by groups all over the world fearful of the invasion of American products and entertainment.
Finally, and most important, the United States differs from other market-dominant minorities in that the non-American majority is not organized in a single national territory. With the exception of the previous chapter on the Middle East, this book has focused on dynamics internal to nations: specifically, the danger, within individual countries, of rapid democratization in the face of pervasive poverty and a resented “outsider” market-dominant minority. In the case of America as a global market-dominant minority, however, there is no counterpart to democracy at the global level. Notwithstanding various efforts at global integration and the rise of numerous international political organizations, the truth is that there is no democratically elected “world government.”
The closest thing there is to a world democratic government is the United Nations General Assembly, where each member state gets a vote and where, as a result, the Third World commands a substantial majority of the votes. (Of course, the national representatives to the General Assembly are usually not democratically elected.) And indeed, one finds in the General Assembly precisely the anti-U.S. and anti-market reactions that America’s market-dominance would be expected to produce. These reactions range from Resolution No. 3281 in 1974, which purported to expand the authority of member states to “regulate,” “supervise,” and “expropriate” multinational corporations within their jurisdiction (the vote was 120 to 6, with the dissenters being five Western European countries and the United States), to the May 2001 ouster of the United States from the United Nations Commission on Human Rights (while Sudan and Sierra Leone, for example, remain members).12
But the anti-Americanism expressed in the United Nations is largely symbolic and rhetorical. The real outlets are elsewhere. Against America’s global market-dominance, there is not one but a host of nationalist, majority-supported backlashes, spread throughout the world, varying widely in quality and intensity, ranging from the friendly to the homicidal.
Friendly Anti-Americanism
Anti-Americanism extends to every corner of the world. This includes even the Western countries most similar to us: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In all these countries, the September 11 attack on America brought an instantaneous show of sympathy and support for the United States, both from the governments and from individual citizens. (Terrorism, after all, presents a common threat; bin Laden demonized not only the United States but all Western countries, and plots by terrorists thought to be associated with bin Laden have been uncovered in England, Canada, and New Zealand.) At the same time, in each country, heated debates erupted over the causes of the attack and the extent to which American attitudes or policies had contributed. There were also widespread concerns that the United States, with its military might and characteristic self-absorption, might respond with excessive force, acting unilaterally without taking into account the interests of its allies.
In the United Kingdom, America’s staunchest ally in the war in Afghanistan, anti-American feeling has increased since September 11, according to a recent article in the Guardian. Citing a survey taken by a leading advertising agency, the Guardian reported that “British consumers have become more distrustful of overtly American brands” and that “more than two-thirds of British consumers are concerned the world is becoming too Americanised.” As a result, there is a growing trend away from American brands to what advertising strategists call “glocal” brands—brands that savvy multinationals successfully portray as “locally relevant.” Somewhat surprisingly, one of the leaders in “glocal” marketing was said to be McDonald’s, which “has adapted itself so successfully to foreign markets that consumers outside the US often believe it is a domestic company.” (In England, McDonald’s employs “[o]vertly British advertising” and sells “British favourites, such as curry, alongside Big Macs.”) By contrast, companies like Gap and Starbucks suffer because they market themselves as distinctly American.13
Generally speaking, however, resentment against the United States in all these English-speaking countries is, as one Canadian put it, “good-natured anti-Americanism,” unlikely to become a major election issue or to be translated into anti-American policies. This is not to say that anti-Americanism in these countries is not serious, or even, in some quarters, ferocious. There are an appalling number of Australian websites filled with assertions that the United States “deserved” the attacks of September 11. Mary Beard, a university lecturer in classics at the University of Cambridge, enraged many American readers when she described in the London Review of Books the “feeling that however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.”14 But these views are probably unusual in their harshness. For the most part, historical connections, cultural affinities, and high standards of living go a long way in blunting anti-Americanism in our fellow English-speaking Western nations.
The European Response
It is probably safe to say that anti-American feeling is more intense in continental Europe than in, say, Canada or England. In part, this is because American culture—including not just our cowboy capitalism but language, food, and political traditions—clashes more directly, or at least more obviously, with European culture. To be sure, our Canadian neighbors hate being mistaken for Americans and, along with Australians and New Zealanders, constantly stress how different in “national character” their countries are from the United States (for example, “humble” and “quietly patriotic” as opposed to “arrogant,” “preachy,” and “hilariously oblivious to the rest of the world”). Nevertheless, more Europeans seem to perceive America’s position of world power as a fundamental threat to their national identity.
Nowhere is this more plain than in France, where the interplay between Americanization and anti-Americanism has produced something of a national existential crisis. In the 1960s, French authors were already churning out books like René Etiemble’s Parlez-vous franglais? (1964) and Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber’s Le défi américain (1967). The former called for a campaign to save French culture from “the American ‘air-conditioned nightmare.’” The latter started the publication L’Express to offer a French-language alternative to America’s Time and Newsweek.15
Today, with the United States now the world’s sole economic, political, and military superpower, the “American problem” has assumed unprecedented proportions, cons
tantly in the news. Many have suggested that French anti-Americanism is principally a preoccupation of French elites, who, in culture, diplomacy, and politics, writes international historian David Ellwood, look “ever more beleaguered, overtaken and outpaced by the appeal of American dress-styles to their children, of fast-food to their youth, and of Hollywood to their cinema audiences.” “The government, and the elites, realize that culture, writ large, is a battle that they’re losing,” observes Alain Franchon, an editorial writer for Le Monde. “They’re very jealous of America’s power to seduce. When faced with that you have to fight, even if you risk looking ridiculous.”16
The French political class is certainly fighting. In a phrase-coining moment, Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine recently declared that France “cannot accept a politically unipolar world, nor a culturally uniform world, nor the unilateralism of a single hyperpower.” (The term has stuck; now all of Europe calls the United States “the hyperpower.”) Vedrine echoed former president Mitterand’s famous statement in October 1993 that no single country “should be allowed to control the images of the whole world. What is at stake is the cultural identity of our nations, the right of each people to its own culture.” A few months earlier, Mitterand’s minister of culture, Jack Lang, had attacked Jurassic Park as a threat to French national identity. More recently, Lang has argued that if France’s cultural heritage is not “to dwindle into insignificance, economics and culture should learn to live together in France.” Calling for a new Ministry of External Cultural Relations, Lang wants “more energy, more openness, more international operations by French television channels and a whole-hearted build-up of a European identity ‘of imagination, youth, and spirit.’” Else, “the Old World could remain frozen in the shadow of American culture. . . .” Meanwhile, Le Monde routinely criticizes an America “whose commercial hegemony menaces agriculture and whose cultural hegemony insidiously ruins culinary customs, the sacred gleams of French identity.”17