Anti-Americanism (also known as anti-American sentiment) is a term that can describe several sentiments and positions, including opposition to, fear of, distrust of, prejudice against, or hatred toward the United States, its federal government, foreign policy, or culture, or toward Americans in general. Anti-Americanism can be contrasted with American nationalism or pro-Americanism, which refers to support, love, or admiration for the United States.
The political scientist Brendon O'Connor at the United States Studies Centre in Australia suggests that "anti-Americanism" cannot be isolated as a consistent phenomenon, since the term originated as a rough composite of stereotypes, prejudices, and criticisms that evolved into more politically based criticisms. The French scholar Marie-France Toinet says that use of the term "anti-Americanism" is "only fully justified if it implies systematic opposition – a sort of allergic reaction – to America as a whole." Some scholars frequently accused of anti-American biases, such as Noam Chomsky and Nancy Snow, have argued that the application of the term "anti-American" to other countries or their populations is "nonsensical" as it implies that disliking the American government or its policies is socially undesirable or even comparable to a crime. In this regard, the term has been likened to the propagandistic usage of the term "anti-Sovietism" in the Soviet Union.
Discussions on anti-Americanism have, in most cases, lacked a precise explanation of what the sentiment entails (other than a general disfavor), which has led the term to be used broadly and in an impressionistic manner.O'Connor, Brendan, p 89. The author and expatriate William Russell Melton argues that criticism largely originates from the perception that the U.S. wants to act as a "world policeman".William Russell Melton. The New American Expat: thriving and surviving overseas in the post-9/11 world. (Intercultural Press 2005. p. XIX.) Anti-Americanism has also been identified with the term Americanophobia, which Merriam-Webster defines as "hatred of the U.S. or American culture".Denis Lacorne, "Anti-Americanism and Americanophobia: A French Perspectives." (2005).
Negative, hostile, distrustful, or critical views of the United States, its influence, or the American people have been historically present across numerous regions and countries worldwide. Today, such views are strongest and most widespread in Europe and the Asia-Pacific, including in Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, China, Pakistan,U.S. Global Leadership Project Report - 2012 Gallup Russia, Serbia, and several countries in the Greater Middle East, including Tunisia and Turkey, but remain low in India, Israel, Vietnam, sub-Saharan Africa (especially Ghana, Kenya, and Nigeria), and numerous countries in central and eastern Europe (especially Albania, Kosovo, Lithuania, Romania, and Ukraine). Additionally, anti-Americanism is present in several Western countries, including Australia, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom, as well as in some Latin American countries such as Bolivia, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, and Venezuela.
Etymology In the online Oxford Dictionaries, the term "anti-Americanism" is defined as "Hostility to the interests of the United States".
In the first edition of Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) the term "anti-American" was defined as "opposed to America, or to the true interests or government of the United States; opposed to the revolution in America".
In France, the use of the noun form antiaméricanisme has been cataloged from 1948,Le Petit Robert entering ordinary political language in the 1950s.Roger, Phillipe. The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism, introductory excerpt , University of Chicago Press, 2005.
History
Background There was Native American opposition and resistance to the European colonization of the Americas in the colonial period before the Thirteen Colonies became the United States. Enslaved Africans also opposed and resisted their forced transport to North America and the institution of slavery in the colonies.
18th and 19th centuries The Haudenosaunee have referred to George Washington and later US presidents as —‘town-destroyer’—for the US assault that razed 40 Haudenosaunee towns during the American Revolutionary War.
European Anti-Americanism
Degeneracy thesis In the mid- to late-eighteenth century, a theory emerged among some European intellectuals which stated that the landmasses of the New World were inherently inferior to that of Europe. Proponents of the so-called "degeneracy thesis" held the view that climatic extremes, humidity, and other atmospheric conditions in America physically weakened both men and animals. The American author James W. Ceaser and the French author Philippe Roger have interpreted this theory as "a kind of prehistory of anti-Americanism" and have (in the words of Philippe Roger) been a historical "constant" since the 18th century, or again an endlessly repetitive "semantic block". Others, like Jean-François Revel, have examined what lay hidden behind this "fashionable" ideology.Denis Lacorne, ANTI-AMERICANISM AND AMERICANOPHOBIA : A FRENCH PERSPECTIVE , March 2005. Purported evidence for the idea included the smallness of American fauna, dogs that ceased to bark, and venomous plants; one theory put forth was that the New World had emerged from the Biblical flood later than the Old World. Native Americans were also held to be feeble, small, and without ardor.
The theory was originally proposed by Comte de Buffon, a leading French naturalist, in his Histoire Naturelle (1766). The French writer Voltaire joined Buffon and others in making the argument. The Dutch philosopher Cornelius de Pauw, court philosopher to Frederick II of Prussia, became its leading proponent. While Buffon focused on the American biological environment, de Pauw attacked the people who were native to the continent. James Ceaser has noted that the denunciation of America as inferior to Europe was partially motivated by the German government's fear of mass emigration; de Pauw was called upon to convince the Germans that the new world was inferior. De Pauw is also known to have influenced the philosopher Immanuel Kant in a similar direction.
De Pauw said that the New World was unfit for human habitation because it was "so ill-favored by nature that all it contains is either degenerate or monstrous". He asserted that, "the earth, full of putrefaction, was flooded with lizards, snakes, serpents, reptiles and insects". Taking a long-term perspective, he announced that he was, "certain that the conquest of the New World...has been the greatest of all misfortunes to befall mankind."C. Vann Woodward, The Old World's New World (1991) p 6
The theory made it easier for its proponents to argue that the natural environment of the United States would prevent it from ever producing a true culture. Echoing de Pauw, the French Encyclopedist Abbé Raynal wrote in 1770, "America has not yet produced a good poet, an able mathematician, one man of genius in a single art or a single science". The theory was debated and rejected by early American thinkers such as Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson; Jefferson, in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), provided a detailed rebuttal of de Buffon from a scientific point of view. Hamilton also vigorously rebuked the idea in Federalist No. 11 (1787).
One critic, citing Raynal's ideas, suggests that it was specifically extended to the Thirteen Colonies that would become the United States.
Roger suggests that the idea of degeneracy posited a symbolic, as well as a scientific, America that would evolve beyond the original thesis. He argues that Buffon's ideas formed the root of a "stratification of negative discourses" that has recurred throughout the history of the two countries' relationship (and been matched by persistent Francophobia in the United States).
Culture
According to Brendan O'Connor, some Europeans criticized Americans for lacking "taste, grace and civility," and having a brazen and arrogant character. The British author Frances Trollope observed in her 1832 book Domestic Manners of the Americans that the greatest difference between the English and Americans was "want of refinement", explaining: "that polish[,] which removes the coarser and rougher parts of our nature[,] is unknown and undreamed of" in America.Also reprinted in 2004 as:
, According to one source, her account "succeeded in angering Americans more than any book written by a foreign observer before or since".David Frost and Michael Shea (1986) The Rich Tide: Men, Women, Ideas and Their Transatlantic Impact. London, Collins: 239 The English writer Captain Marryat's critical account in his Diary in America, with Remarks on Its Institutions (1839) also proved controversial, especially in Detroit where an effigy of the author, along with his books, was burned. Other writers critical of American culture and manners included the bishop Talleyrand in France and Charles Dickens in England. Dickens' novel Martin Chuzzlewit (1844) is a ferocious satire on American life.
Sources of American resentment are evident following the Revolutions of 1848 and the ensuing European class struggles. In 1869, after a visit to his country of birth, the Swedish immigrant Hans Mattson observed that, "...the ignorance, prejudice and hatred toward America and everything pertaining to it among the aristocracy, and especially the office holders, was as unpardonable as it was ridiculous. It was claimed by them that all was humbug in America, that it was the paradise of scoundrels, cheats, and rascals, and that nothing good could possibly come out of it." After seven years in the US, Ernst Skarstedt, a graduate of Lund University and native Swede, returned to Sweden in 1885. He complained that, in upper-class circles, if he "told something about America, it could happen that in reply (he) was informed that this could not possibly be so or that the matter was better understood in Sweden." The dedication of the Statue of Liberty in 1886 solidified The "New Colossus" as a beacon to the "huddled masses" and their rejection of the "storied pomp" of the old world.
Simon Schama observed in 2003: "By the end of the nineteenth century, the stereotype of the ugly American – voracious, preachy, mercenary, and bombastically chauvinist – was firmly in place in Europe". O'Connor suggests that such prejudices were rooted in an idealized image of European refinement and that the notion of high European culture pitted against American vulgarity has not disappeared.
Politics and ideology The young United States also faced criticism on political and ideological grounds. Ceaser argues that the Romantic strain of European thought and literature, hostile to the Enlightenment view of reason and obsessed with history and national character, disdained the rationalistic American project. The German poet Nikolaus Lenau commented: "With the expression Bodenlosigkeit (absence of ground), I think I am able to indicate the general character of all American institutions; what we call Fatherland is here only a property insurance scheme". Ceaser argues in his essay that such comments often repurposed the language of degeneracy, and the prejudice came to focus solely on the United States and not Canada nor Mexico. Lenau had immigrated to the United States in 1833 and found that the country did not live up to his ideals, leading him to return to Germany the following year. His experiences in the U.S. were the subject of a novel titled The America-exhaustion (Der Amerika-Müde) (1855) by fellow German Ferdinand Kürnberger.The Reader's Encyclopedia (1974) edited by William Rose Bennet: 556