renata
9th March 2003, 05:36 PM
An article about history of European criticism of America over the past two centuries. Nothing new under the sun. I was amused about how little changed, how animosity and characterizations remain the same, it is just the current factual circumstances change.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030310fa_fact
The face of the unloved American did not, of course, come into focus all at once. Different generations of European critics added features to the sketch depending on their own aversions and fears. In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America’s naďve faith that it had reinvented politics. Later in the century, American economic power was the enemy, Yankee industrialism the behemoth against which the champions of social justice needed to take up arms. A third generation, itself imperialist, grumbled about the unfairness of a nation’s rising to both continental and maritime ascendancy. And in the twentieth century, though the United States came to the rescue of Britain and France in two world wars, many Europeans were suspicious of its motives. A constant refrain throughout this long literature of complaint, and what European intellectuals even now find most repugnant, is American sanctimoniousness, the habit of dressing the business of power in the garb of piety.
...
Other characteristics of American life alienated the Romantics: the distaste for tragedy (a moral corrective to illusions of invincibility); the strong preference for practicality; the severance from history; and, above all, what the Germans called bodenlosigkeit, a willed rootlessness, embodied in the flimsy frame construction of American houses. Europeans watched, pop-eyed, while whole houses were moved down the street. This confirmed their view that Americans had no real loyalty to the local, and explained why they preferred utilitarian “yards” to flower gardens. No delphiniums, no civility.
...
Modern anti-Americanism was born of the multiple insecurities of the first decade of the twentieth century. Just as the European empires were reaching their apogee, they were beset by reminders of their own mortality. At Adowa in 1896, the Ethiopians inflicted a crushing defeat on the Italians; in 1905, the Russian Empire was humiliated in war by the Japanese. Britain may have ruled a quarter of the world’s population and geographical space, but it failed to impose its will decisively on the South African Boers. And Wilhelm II’s Germany, though it was beginning to brandish its own imperial sword, remained fretful about “encirclement.” The unstoppability of America’s economy and its immigrant-fuelled demographic explosion worried the rulers of these empires, even as they staggered into the fratricidal slaughter that would insure exactly that future.
...
American generosity (in the French view) toward German reparation schedules fed into the conspiracy theories that seethed and bubbled in the anti-American press in the nineteen-twenties and early thirties. In “The American Cancer,” Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu went so far as to argue that the First World War had been a plot of american high finance to enslave Europe in a web of permanent debt, a view that was echoed in J.-L. Chastanet’s “Uncle Shylock” and in Charles Pomaret’s “America’s Conquest of Europe.” The newspaper France-Soir calculated the weight of debt to the United States at seventy-two hundred francs for every French man and woman. Nor was there much in the way of sentimental gratitude for General Pershing’s doughboys. Why, it was asked, had the engagement of American troops on the western front been delayed until 1918? The answer was that the United States had waited until it could mobilize a force large enough not just to win the war but to dominate the peace.
For French writers like Kadmi-Cohen, the author of “The American Abomination,” the threat from United States was not just economic or military. America now posed a social and cultural danger to the civilization of Europe. The greatest “American peril” (a phrase that became commonplace in the literature) was the standardization of social life (the ancestor of today’s complaints against globalization), the thinning of the richness of human habits to the point where they could be marketable not only inside America but, because of the global reach of American capitalism, to the entire world. Hollywood movies, which, according to Georges Duhamel, were “an amusement for slaves,” and “a pastime for the illiterate, for poor creatures stupefied by work and anxiety,” were the Trojan horse for the Americanization of the world. Jean Baudrillard’s belief that the defining characteristic of America is its fabrication of reality was anticipated by Duhamel’s polemics against the “shadow world” of the movies, with their reduction of audiences to somnolent zombies sitting in the dark.
The charge that the United States was imposing its cultural habits on the prostrate body of war-torn Europe returned with even more force after 1945. Americans thought of the Marshall Plan (together with the forgiveness of French debts) as an exercise in wise altruism; European leaders like de Gaulle bristled with suspicion at the patronizing weight of the program. Complaints against Coca-Colonization, the mantra of the anti-globalizers, were already in full cry in the nineteen-fifties. But as Arthur Koestler, who bowed to no one in his loathing of “cellophane-wrapped bread, processed towns of cement and glass . . . the Organization Man and the Readers’ Digest,” put it in 1951, “Who coerced us into buying all this? The United States do not rule Europe as the British ruled India; they waged no Opium War to force their revolting ‘Coke’ down our throats. Europe bought the whole package because Europe wanted it.”
Yet somehow, in the present crisis, American democracy has let itself be represented as American despotism. Some in the European antiwar movement see the whole bundle of American values—consumer capitalism, a free market for information, an open electoral system—as having been imposed rather than chosen. Harold Pinter told peace marchers in London two weeks ago that the United States was a “monster out of control.” And while representatives of the Iraqi exile community in Britain narrated stories of the atrocities their families had endured at the hands of Saddam Hussein, banners in Hyde Park equated the Stars and Stripes with the swastika.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030310fa_fact
The face of the unloved American did not, of course, come into focus all at once. Different generations of European critics added features to the sketch depending on their own aversions and fears. In the early nineteenth century, with Enlightenment optimism soured by years of war and revolution, critics were skeptical of America’s naďve faith that it had reinvented politics. Later in the century, American economic power was the enemy, Yankee industrialism the behemoth against which the champions of social justice needed to take up arms. A third generation, itself imperialist, grumbled about the unfairness of a nation’s rising to both continental and maritime ascendancy. And in the twentieth century, though the United States came to the rescue of Britain and France in two world wars, many Europeans were suspicious of its motives. A constant refrain throughout this long literature of complaint, and what European intellectuals even now find most repugnant, is American sanctimoniousness, the habit of dressing the business of power in the garb of piety.
...
Other characteristics of American life alienated the Romantics: the distaste for tragedy (a moral corrective to illusions of invincibility); the strong preference for practicality; the severance from history; and, above all, what the Germans called bodenlosigkeit, a willed rootlessness, embodied in the flimsy frame construction of American houses. Europeans watched, pop-eyed, while whole houses were moved down the street. This confirmed their view that Americans had no real loyalty to the local, and explained why they preferred utilitarian “yards” to flower gardens. No delphiniums, no civility.
...
Modern anti-Americanism was born of the multiple insecurities of the first decade of the twentieth century. Just as the European empires were reaching their apogee, they were beset by reminders of their own mortality. At Adowa in 1896, the Ethiopians inflicted a crushing defeat on the Italians; in 1905, the Russian Empire was humiliated in war by the Japanese. Britain may have ruled a quarter of the world’s population and geographical space, but it failed to impose its will decisively on the South African Boers. And Wilhelm II’s Germany, though it was beginning to brandish its own imperial sword, remained fretful about “encirclement.” The unstoppability of America’s economy and its immigrant-fuelled demographic explosion worried the rulers of these empires, even as they staggered into the fratricidal slaughter that would insure exactly that future.
...
American generosity (in the French view) toward German reparation schedules fed into the conspiracy theories that seethed and bubbled in the anti-American press in the nineteen-twenties and early thirties. In “The American Cancer,” Robert Aron and Arnaud Dandieu went so far as to argue that the First World War had been a plot of american high finance to enslave Europe in a web of permanent debt, a view that was echoed in J.-L. Chastanet’s “Uncle Shylock” and in Charles Pomaret’s “America’s Conquest of Europe.” The newspaper France-Soir calculated the weight of debt to the United States at seventy-two hundred francs for every French man and woman. Nor was there much in the way of sentimental gratitude for General Pershing’s doughboys. Why, it was asked, had the engagement of American troops on the western front been delayed until 1918? The answer was that the United States had waited until it could mobilize a force large enough not just to win the war but to dominate the peace.
For French writers like Kadmi-Cohen, the author of “The American Abomination,” the threat from United States was not just economic or military. America now posed a social and cultural danger to the civilization of Europe. The greatest “American peril” (a phrase that became commonplace in the literature) was the standardization of social life (the ancestor of today’s complaints against globalization), the thinning of the richness of human habits to the point where they could be marketable not only inside America but, because of the global reach of American capitalism, to the entire world. Hollywood movies, which, according to Georges Duhamel, were “an amusement for slaves,” and “a pastime for the illiterate, for poor creatures stupefied by work and anxiety,” were the Trojan horse for the Americanization of the world. Jean Baudrillard’s belief that the defining characteristic of America is its fabrication of reality was anticipated by Duhamel’s polemics against the “shadow world” of the movies, with their reduction of audiences to somnolent zombies sitting in the dark.
The charge that the United States was imposing its cultural habits on the prostrate body of war-torn Europe returned with even more force after 1945. Americans thought of the Marshall Plan (together with the forgiveness of French debts) as an exercise in wise altruism; European leaders like de Gaulle bristled with suspicion at the patronizing weight of the program. Complaints against Coca-Colonization, the mantra of the anti-globalizers, were already in full cry in the nineteen-fifties. But as Arthur Koestler, who bowed to no one in his loathing of “cellophane-wrapped bread, processed towns of cement and glass . . . the Organization Man and the Readers’ Digest,” put it in 1951, “Who coerced us into buying all this? The United States do not rule Europe as the British ruled India; they waged no Opium War to force their revolting ‘Coke’ down our throats. Europe bought the whole package because Europe wanted it.”
Yet somehow, in the present crisis, American democracy has let itself be represented as American despotism. Some in the European antiwar movement see the whole bundle of American values—consumer capitalism, a free market for information, an open electoral system—as having been imposed rather than chosen. Harold Pinter told peace marchers in London two weeks ago that the United States was a “monster out of control.” And while representatives of the Iraqi exile community in Britain narrated stories of the atrocities their families had endured at the hands of Saddam Hussein, banners in Hyde Park equated the Stars and Stripes with the swastika.