World on Fire World on Fire World on Fire
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In a recent, particularly acerbic essay called “Toujours l’antiaméricanisme: The religion of the French elite,” David Pryce-Jones states that ordinary French people on the street don’t have time for the “neo-Napoleonic” “inferiority complexes” of the French elite. “An American almost anywhere in France is virtually certain to receive a friendly greeting, and to hear praise for the latest Spielberg movie, and perhaps even for Euro-Disneyland, that genuine cultural freak.”18
But as with any ethnonationalist movement targeting a market-dominant minority, it is difficult to know the extent to which French anti-Americanism is an elite-generated phenomenon as opposed to a reflection of bottom-up popular sentiment. Certainly not all French agree with José Bové, who became something of a national hero in 1999 when he vandalized a McDonald’s and made Roquefort a global issue. After all, some 790 McDonald’s are flourishing in France, having proliferated at a rate of around eighty per year starting in the mid-1990s. On the other hand, reports Philip Gordon of the Brookings Institution, “67 percent of the French worry that globalization threatens French identity; 52 percent reject the American economic model; and 80 percent do not want to emulate the American lifestyle.” Best-sellers in France these days include The World Is Not Merchandise, The Economic Horror, and Who Is Killing France?19
While typically more muted, similar anti-Americanism exists in all our Western European allies—though, needless to say, each country has its own historical relationship to and distinctive set of grievances against the United States. In Germany, for example, there is an intellectual strand of anti-Americanism dating back to the poet Heinrich Heine’s scorn in the 1800s for Germans who emigrated to the Americas to get rich. More recently, Germany was furious when the United States effectively vetoed Berlin’s nominee to run the International Monetary Fund.
A general cultural fault line between America and Europe, however, bears directly on American market-dominance. François Bujon de l’Estang, French ambassador to the United States, put it this way: “What we may see emerging now is a new ideological rift. On one side is the American model of free-market capitalism, which was emulated by Margaret Thatcher’s United Kingdom. On the other is a milder, European model that includes a stronger social safety net with attributes such as a national health care system and government-funded retirement and unemployment plans. Most Europeans, as well as the Canadians, are very attached to that model.” Philip Gordon suggests that there is a feeling in Europe, and especially in France, “that globalization is playing to America’s strengths by reinforcing the dominance of our economic model and business practices. . . .”20
Many of the European nations—among them France, Germany, and Spain—were of course once great world powers, both militarily and culturally. For these countries, being eclipsed today by America’s upstart, hotdogging rise to global dominance is additionally grating. The same might be said of Great Britain. As Jonathan Freedland recently wrote in London’s Spectator only half-facetiously, “After all, it was the Yanks who dared pushed Britain off its top perch in the first half of the last century,” and then had “the impertinence to force us to give up our empire by stopping our adventure in the Suez.” On the other hand, Britain has an advantage over Europe because of its linguistic, cultural, and historical links to the United States, which arguably give Britain a better shot at influencing Washington—“playing Athens to America’s Rome,” as Prime Minister Harold Macmillan once put it.21
In any event, far more so than in Great Britain, European anti-Americanism has translated into concrete economic and political policies that, while not exactly inimical to U.S. interests, are clearly directed at offsetting America’s global power. Most crucially, the interest in a stronger, more united Europe—indeed, the European Union itself—is based in large part on the hope of making Europe competitive with, if not superior to, America as a global economic and political power. “[T]alk of European integration has increasingly gone hand in hand with anti-American rhetoric,” James Kitfield noted recently. “The whole debate in Europe is now dominated by charges of U.S. ‘hegemony’ and ‘unilateralism,’” adds an editor with Suddeutsche Zeitung. “Germans are rallying to the common cause of ‘Euronationalism,’ fueled in part by anti-American sentiment.” The deputy director of a Berlin think tank agreed: “[W]e are beginning to catch the ‘French disease,’ which holds that you can only build greater European unity around anti-American rhetoric.”22
Similarly, the euro is in part a desire to counter the global dominance of the American dollar, although only the French government has openly admitted this. European plans for a new “Euro-army”—formally, the European Rapid Reaction Force—have alarmed analysts on both sides of the Atlantic. In December 2000, then–defense secretary William Cohen warned France that a Euro-army “could, if mismanaged, render NATO a relic.” More recently, a British official criticized the Rapid Reaction Force as indicative of the “virulent strain of anti-Americanism in Europe,” which reflected the rivalrous “political ambitions” of “some in Europe” and was “in danger of infecting the whole transatlantic relationship.”23
Nevertheless, the European nations—even France, which has been the most obstreperous—remain allies that the United States can generally count on in moments of great import. All the European nations ultimately supported the United States’ war in Afghanistan. Again, it helps that these countries enjoy high standards of living and the distractions of affluence. In any case, while anti-Americanism in Europe has triggered both reactive nationalism and rising “Euronationalism,” these movements, by and large, have not reflected totalizing mass hatred or confiscatory backlashes—and certainly not the desire to kill. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of great parts of the non-Western world.
Anti-Americanism in the Developing World
If America’s global dominance produces resentment even among our Western allies—who have plenty of wealth and influence of their own—anti-American hostility is a thousandfold more intense in the non-Western world. Moreover, anti-Americanism outside the West has increased over the last few decades, coinciding with the United States’ emergence as the world’s sole superpower.
Why? As proponents of free markets correctly point out, global capitalism has, in certain important respects, done wonders for the world, including many developing countries. Global per capita income has tripled in the last thirty-five years. Technology has transformed even small villages. Life expectancy and adult literacy rates have, on the whole, increased significantly in the developing world. Global infant mortality rates are lower than ever.
Unfortunately, these macro statistics are not what real people in the real world experience. To begin with, many “advances”—for example, the spread of the Internet and television, and even improvements in education—are two-edged swords, often producing growing discontent along with growing awareness. Globalization generates not only new opportunities and hopes, but also new social desires, stresses, insecurities, and frustrations. At the same time, the benefits of global markets have been distributed extremely unequally, both across and within countries. The spread of global markets in recent decades has unambiguously widened the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries. Today, the richest 1 percent of the world’s population own as much as the poorest 57 percent. Half the world’s population live on less than two dollars a day; more than a billion people live on less than one dollar a day. Meanwhile, the top 20 percent of those living in high-income countries account for 86 percent of all of the world’s private consumption expenditures.24
In a newly released report, the World Bank, one of the most ardent institutional promoters of markets, notes that over two decades ending in the late 1990s some two billion people, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East, and the former Soviet Union, have not benefited from globalization. To the contrary, the economies in these regions have generally contracted while poverty has risen. On a more positive note, the report notes that twenty-four de
veloping countries increased their integration into the world economy. These countries, home to some three billion people, enjoyed an average 5 percent growth rate in per capita income. The report goes on to note, however, that even within these countries that have succeeded in breaking into global markets, integration has not, typically, led to greater income equality.25
This was not what globalization promised.
Just a decade ago, in the early 1990s, hundreds of millions of the world’s poorest, from Johannesburg to Rio de Janeiro, believed that it was only a matter of time before market liberalization, democratic reforms, and globalization would hike their standard of living closer to that enjoyed by Americans. American policymakers and pro-market developing-country politicians were equally irresponsible in cultivating these dangerously inflated expectations. Today, as London’s Financial Times recently put it, “Americans are richer while people in most transition economies and emerging markets still struggle, their frustration heightened by cheap, almost universal access to images and information about how much better Americans live.” While anti-Americanism used to be driven by what America did, “now it is also motivated by what America is.”26
And what is America? In the eyes of the vast majority of the developing world, America is the antithesis of what they are. America is rich, healthy, glamorous, confident, and exploitative—at least if Hollywood, our multinationals, our supermodels, and our leaders are any indication. America is also “almighty,” able to “control the world,” whether through our military power or through the IMF-implemented austerity measures we have heartlessly forced on developing populations. They, on the other hand, are hungry, poor, exploited, and powerless, often even over the destiny of their own families. Obviously their condition is not all America’s fault. But like the wildly disproportionately wealthy Chinese in Indonesia, Indians in East Africa, or Jewish “oligarchs” in Russia, America is an obvious scapegoat, practically calling out to be hated.
And Americans are indeed hated in the developing world. Of course, “the poor” in developing countries are not homogeneous, and surely—hopefully—the prominent Hanoi professor who said he believed “fully 80 percent of the world’s population” “privately praise[d] the September 11 attacks” was exaggerating.27 Nevertheless, the fact remains that after the two towers of the World Trade Center collapsed—horrifically killing three thousand men, women, and children—many outside the United States rejoiced.
In Indonesia and Malaysia, gleeful, hate-filled youths went from one luxury hotel to another, looking for Americans. In Brazil, Osama bin Laden masks rolled off assembly lines, not fast enough to satisfy exploding consumer demand. “I don’t give a shit,” wrote a Chinese man in an inflammatory anti-American e-mail that circulated in Australia and Europe. “America deserves this, because of all the suffering it has caused humankind,” said a Vietnamese university student, interviewed on September 13, 2001. “The United States is king of the jungle,” said another. “When the king is attacked, the other animals are happy.” And: “I feel sorry for the terrorists who were very brave because they risked their lives.”28
Many hundreds of millions of others in the developing world take a more moderate view, condemning the killing of innocent people but at the same time firmly declaring that “America had it coming,” “This is what they get,” and “What do Americans expect?” Indeed, this seems clearly to be the dominant, majority-held view in the developing world: condemnation of the attack but sympathy for the attackers and the causes motivating them.
Moreover, across Africa, Asia, and Latin America, the theme of American market dominance repeatedly emerges, with more frequency, bitterness, and clarity than the charges against American foreign policy with which they are sometimes interwoven. Thus, Daijhi, a popular Nepalese commentator, condemned the attack on America as follows:
Those men who carried out the plane bombings . . . chose specific targets. The World Trade Centre was the High Temple of capitalism. It housed thousands of highly paid financial workers who were seen as soldiers fighting an economic war that forces 80% of mankind to live in poverty. The bombers did not see them as innocent civilians. They felt these workers were directly responsible for the suffering of millions. . . . We should never rejoice in the death and suffering of other people even if they are our enemies. But America should not ignore the widespread hatred that is felt against it. No empire can successfully oppress other nations and cultures indefinitely. Unless the wealth of the whole is fairly shared among all its members there will always be rebellion and terrorism.29
And from Michel Fortin of Africana Plus:
The World Trade Centre was a symbol of the scandalous thirst for profit on the part of the Western countries, which practice a one-way commercial traffic. It was attacked by terrorists who wished to humiliate the Financial Monster, the leader of the modern world. Whatever the background, this attack deserved of course the strongest condemnation. . . . Yet we have to recognize that this deplorable act of aggression may have been, at least in part, an act of revenge on the part of desperate and humiliated people, crushed by the weight of the economic oppression practiced by the peoples of the West.
It is therefore the interference of the West in the economies of the Third World which has produced the underdevelopment which it was supposed to be curing. . . . Development agencies are becoming increasingly aware that multinational companies are siphoning off the wealth of poor countries.30
These excerpts are representative of literally thousands of similar statements from inhabitants of the developing world. Much less representative is the following defense of America from the November 2001 Internet issue of Brazzil magazine after a slew of post–September 11 anti-American diatribes:
The reaction of Brazilians to the attack on the United States by Muslim terrorists portrays the dubious nature of [the] human mind. [The] United States is the country that the government and people of Brazil try to imitate as much as they possibly can, not to mention the ever-present long lines of Brazilians waiting to obtain their travel visas at American Embassies and Consulates all over the country.
If the people of the United States and their government are such bad people that deserve to be slaughtered as on September 11, 2001, I wonder why anybody would want to visit the country. I don’t see the same long lines of Brazilians in Iraqi, Iranian, Libyan, and Saudi Arabian embassies waiting for visas to travel to those countries.
My theory regarding the reactions of Brazilians and, in fact, of people in many other third world countries is that those reactions are a mixture of envy and frustration. These are countries that have failed to move forward in economic development. Even though Americans are always the first to arrive with help at a scene of disaster anywhere in the world, that is not what people think about when they think of the United States. They just want to live the way Americans live without realizing that Americans worked hard to get to where they are, and still work hard, and do things the right way to stay there. The dubious nature of [the] human mind makes these people feel good when the so-called mighty is brought down because they somehow irrationally believe that that would make everyone equal.31
In sum, the vicious, passionate, often self-contradictory anti-Americanism experienced by so many among the world’s poor is strikingly analogous to the resentment directed against market-dominant minorities around the world. The difference is that in this case America is a global market-dominant minority. Like resentment against the Chinese in Southeast Asia, anti-Americanism is not always active. But it is an ever-present vein of hatred, waiting to be mined, whether by a charismatic demagogue or a triggering event.
Still, it is important to keep in mind that justifying or even praising the September 11 attack after the fact is not the same thing as participating in it. Most people, however frustrated or angry, do not kill others, however “arrogant” or resented. Indeed, until relatively recently, anti-Americanism in the developing world typically found expression not in killing Americans—a
lthough there were certainly isolated cases of anti-American violence abroad—but rather through confiscations of American businesses or property in the name of the “rightful owners of the nation.” Like the expropriation of white-owned land in Zimbabwe or of Eritrean businesses in Ethiopia described in chapter 5, these confiscations are examples of a backlash against markets, targeting an “outsider” market-dominant minority.
Anti-market Backlash against Western Investors
For a hundred years throughout the developing world, the market dominance of Western foreign investors has provoked the same anti-market backlashes that have been directed at domestic market-dominant minorities. Indeed, from the viewpoint of the “indigenous” majorities, marketization and privatization campaigns in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America have been virtually synonymous with “handing over to foreigners” ownership and control of the country’s most valuable industries and resources, including oil, gas, timber, communications, utilities, transportation, and gold, silver, and copper mines. As American investors and corporations have become increasingly preeminent in global markets, Americans have come to bear the brunt of the reaction.
Confiscations of foreign-held property are an integral part of the history of most developing countries, often wrapped up with their most celebrated revolutionary movements. In the late 1930s, for example, Mexico’s President Lázaro Cárdenas famously nationalized the country’s railways, seizing control from wealthy American and British bondholders. More dramatically, decrying the “innumerable outrages [and] abuses” by foreign oil companies that pursued “private, selfish, and often illegal interests” while relegating Mexicans to “misery, drabness, and insalubrity,” Cárdenas nationalized the entire oil industry. This nationalization was immensely popular at every level of society, from bishops to bartenders to university students. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Mexicans marched through Mexico City carrying mock coffins inscribed with “Standard Oil” and the names of other fallen American behemoths.32 As is always true of expropriations targeting a market-dominant minority, Cárdenas’s nationalizations proved economically disastrous. Nevertheless, in Mexico to this day, Cárdenas stands for the promise of a “Mexico for the Mexicans.”