Anti-Americanism and Obamania

Anti-Americanism: It is the sea monster of dinners in town, the obligatory aperitif at the Café du Commerce. Like the Loch Ness Monster, it is talked about by people who have never really seen it. But we are sure that it exists—it is too useful not to. For starters, it frames the foreign-policy debate, just as notions of right and left frame the domestic-policy debate. And above all, it helps define the elusive French spirit. The more French one is, the more one feels required to oppose America. To wit, De Gaulle.

Will this cliché survive the extraordinary wave of French support for Obama? Since Joan of Arc, has any politician sparked so much admiration, so much hope, so many dreams? Paradox of paradoxes, this politician is the prototype American; he belongs with every fiber to that country from which came the financial crisis with its deadly poisons, hedge funds and subprime mortgages.

What psychoanalyst at long last will put France on the couch and try to shed some light on the great fantasy of anti-Americanism? Why do these two countries, each of which feels it has a universal mission, get along like cats and dogs? Each feels itself entrusted with a civilizing mission. Each has a lesson to give the world. But the two lessons are not the same. The Americans would like to solve the planet’s problems with two methods: money and morality. In France, money has never been an end in itself. Rockefeller does not inspire the dreams of Frenchmen. And morality, in its puritanical form, just makes Frenchmen laugh; Clinton and Strauss-Kahn would not have generated even a minor commission of inquiry or a blurb in the Canard Enchaîné. As for lies, so deadly in American politics, they have never killed any careers in France.

The fundamental conflict is that America would like to impose on the world an American vision of things, establish the dominance of its conception of civilization. France, for its part, seeks for all nations, through France and its values, to develop, without denying their particularities, a universal patriotism. This is the ambition that the French believe they have glimpsed, fraternally, in Obama. From now on, it will be difficult to speak of anti-Americanism, unless to admit that it dissolves in Obamania.