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The Problems with Anti-Americanism
2003-12-4
Regardless of whether the United States’ recent actions are right, wrong, or anything in between, the fact is that most people in the world oppose both them and the United States in general. People in many countries hate what they perceive as the United States’ intrusion on them and their way of life, regardless of whether such intrusion is direct, as in Iraq, or indirect, i.e. via globalization and multinational corporations, as in the poor countries of East and Southeast Asia and Latin America. It doesn’t matter whether what the United States does is generally in the right or wrong direction, or whether it will be good for the United States to increase in power, decrease in power, or remain as strong as it is: most people in the world are anti-American in one way or another.
Now, one problem with finding out who exactly is anti-American is that the term has a very negative connotation, and as such very few people apart from radicals such as Osama Bin Laden would call themselves anti-American, however justified the term is in describing them. Even Howard Zinn, probably the second most anti-American intellectual in the United States (the first is Noam Chomsky, needless to say), calls himself a true patriot. This is because very few people support anti-American terrorism in general and Osama Bin Laden in particular; on September 12th, 2001, Le Monde ran an editorial proclaiming, “We are all Americans,” for example—and anti-Americanism unfortunately connotes radical terrorism, which is even more resented than the United States.
The key question at this point is, what kinds of anti-Americanism are there, apart from radical terrorism? Evidently, there are many kinds, because after all, Noam Chomsky, Mahathir Mohamad, and Jacques Chirac are all anti-American in one way or another, but they are different not only from Bin Laden, whom all oppose, but also from one another.
The first kind of anti-Americanism I will deal with is the kind most commonly encountered in the United States, namely the kind of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn. This kind is definitely the most left wing; however, it is foolish to mistake it for liberal. Chomsky and Zinn’s anti-Americanism is very simplistic. A People’s History of the United States, for instance, claims in the concluding chapter that the bottom 99% of society have the same interests but the top 1% keep dividing them using wedges such as race, religion, class, and political orientation. This statement is somewhere between laughable and idiotic, for personal and group interests are far more complicated than just top 1% versus everyone else. Similarly, both Chomsky and Zinn have made simplistic anti-American statements, including but not limited to blaming the United States for Pearl Harbor (from A People’s History) and supporting the Japanese occupation in Southeast Asia. Another characteristic of this kind of anti-Americanism is its failure to blame the American people for things they should be blamed for. Sometimes its conspiracy theories are true, as in the case of the USS Maine and the Spanish-American War, but in most cases they are false, as in a supposed corporate conspiracy to dumb down the American people using spectator sports that Chomsky advances (from Understanding Power).
The second kind of anti-Americanism is cultural conservatism, particularly East Asian conservatism. Liberalism and conservatism, at least as terms referring to change and tradition respectively, are relative terms. Since East and Southeast Asia are much more conservative than the United States, anti-Americanism there is necessarily conservative; indeed, liberalization in Southeast Asia sometimes occurs due to pressure from the United States. East Asian conservatism has a very authoritarian element; the best example is the “It’s our culture!” cries of people such as Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia and Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore, which in effect subordinate the people to the local culture as the leader defines it. Unlike radical left-wing anti-Americanism, described above, East Asian conservatism is fairly moderate and complicated as far as its opposition to the West in general and the United States in particular goes, and it is willing to concede that many of the United States’ actions are and have been good. This kind of anti-Americanism tries to appeal to liberals by claiming to support multiculturalism and by playing the cultural relativism card, but in reality it is very right wing and very authoritarian; the best way to argue against it is simply to make the assertion that people shouldn’t be subordinated to the local culture and thus that human rights are a universal rather than Western conception.
The third kind of anti-Americanism, anti-globalization, has some ideas in common with cultural conservatism, but it really is its own form of anti-Americanism. It is important to note that not all anti-globalists are anti-American and not all anti-globalists who are anti-American fall under this kind of anti-Americanism (after all, it is almost certain that all anti-Americans are anti-globalists in some way). Rather, anti-Americans of this kind oppose globalization primarily for economic reasons; examples include the surge in anti-Americanism in Latin America caused primarily by the failure of globalization in Argentina and Brazil, and the resistance of China’s government to more open trade and a floating currency. One notable point about anti-globalist anti-Americanism is that it almost always comes with some form of nationalism and support for a national rather than global identity. From a global perspective, economic globalization is clearly beneficial; the problem is that in many individual countries it does not work for a variety of reasons, from mere corruption to an economic condition that combined with free trade wreaks havoc on the economy. This kind of anti-Americanism is wrong only insofar as it blames problems that have a significant local component on globalization and the United States. A further problem with anti-globalist anti-Americanism is that it is usually simplistic, like radical left-wing anti-Americanism, and demonizes globalization much more than it deserves.
The fourth kind, plain nationalism, has things in common with both cultural conservatism and anti-globalization. Like cultural conservatism, it is based on national interests and on preservation of a national identity, and like anti-globalization, it opposes what it perceives as economic domination by the United States. This kind of anti-Americanism is not really anti-American in principle but simply nationalistic; since in terms of national power, the interests of the United States are at odds with those of probably every other country (and definitely every country in Europe, where this kind of anti-Americanism is the strongest), people who are pro-German or pro-French or pro-Russian are also anti-American. The level of anti-Americanism exhibited here is the weakest so far because it is based entirely on circumstances. While the circumstances that make, say, German and French interests coincide to a large degree and the interests of either be clearly contrary to American interests, are long-term and likely to remain as they are for decades, nationalistic anti-Americanism remains weak in its nature. There hardly needs to be an argument against this kind of anti-Americanism because it is based only on power play and nationalism.
The last kind is of course radical terrorism, which probably doesn’t need any explanation. In reference to the other four common kinds of anti-Americanism, it combines the worst of each: like the radical left it is extremely simplistic and paints every single thing the United States does as evil, and it is very clearly culturally reactionary, anti-globalist, and fervently nationalistic. It goes without saying that the most distinctive feature of radical terrorism is not what it believes in but the violent way it executes its beliefs, as its name implies.
The problem here is that none of these five kinds of anti-Americanism will go away even if the United States starts acting more responsibly and benevolently. Weaker kinds such as circumstantial anti-Americanism (opposition to most of the United States’ recent actions) will, and a lot of the opposition to the United States lately is circumstantial, but the main five kinds, those that are here to stay, won’t. It is impossible to convince them, because most of them either have a huge personal or national gain from anti-Americanism (culturally conservative dictators often have what they call “our way of life” and perhaps economic success as the sole legitimacies to their rule) or are too fanatical to care about facts and reason.
However, it is possible to undermine their support by destroying circumstantial anti-Americanism, on which they usually rely. The first and third kinds of anti-Americans are in most cases fanatical enough not to budge from their positions, but they can be marginalized using various techniques: giving places where globalization failed enough aid to pull them out of their problems, conceding the bad things the United States has done in order to sabotage the myth of the United States rewriting history to fit its agenda, and in the long run help people develop critical thinking skills by starting teaching critical thinking in public schools. None of this will convince Chomsky, Zinn, or their most fanatical followers, but any will help convince more sensible or moderate people that the United States isn’t synonymous with evil (note that the United States will be able to do any of the three only after it starts acting more benevolently in general).
Cultural conservatism is much harder to beat, and requires the places where it is strongest, namely East Asia and Muslim areas, to undergo a process of Enlightenment. This puts a huge obstacle before a possible liberal United States, because it can only happen in the long run. In the short run, all that can be done from outside is destroying the legitimacy of regimes such as Malaysia’s whose sole source of legitimacy is their economic performance by convincing people in those countries that democracy and cultural liberalism can and do succeed economically as much as and usually more than culturally conservative dictatorships. Radical terrorism ultimately can only be beaten this way because using force against it only fuels it even more, but because it kills people in real time, it should also be quenched in the short run using foreign aid to necessities of life as well as health and education.
Finally, it’s probably impossible for any country to weaken nationalism, because nation-states rely on nationalism as a cohesive force. Fortunately, evidently the era of nationalism is coming to an end, as the European Union is becoming more and more federal and less and less confederal and as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is slowly becoming more of a single economic unit. The only organization that can attack nationalism without weakening itself is the United Nations, which doesn’t have enough power to do anything.
Regardless of whether the United States is going in the right or wrong direction, most people in the world nowadays are anti-American. And further, regardless of whether anti-Americanism in general is justified, the common kinds of anti-Americanism are false due to oversimplifications, anti-humanism, blaming the United States for things that are mostly not its fault, putting too much emphasis on nationalism and national identity, or similar. Further, while all of those kinds of anti-Americanism are false, they are distinct from the radical terrorism of Al Qaida.
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