Cowboys and Speculators: Europe and the “Evil Yankees”

Anti-Americanism in Europe is greatly adaptable. In the future it will continue to ebb and flow.

The U.S. presidential campaign has so far attracted little attention in Austria. This disinterest stands in contrast to the situation of about a decade ago, when the United States stood in the center of public interest, and debates about America reached their high point. A review of the past decade, which was marked by the terror of Sept. 11, 2001, illustrates this discrepancy only too well.

The attacks of 2001 were undoubtedly the most extreme manifestation yet of a violent, fundamentalist anti-Americanism. Accordingly, the shock was great nearly worldwide. In Austria, too, all party lines were horrified by the terror and expressed solidarity with the stricken United States.

But soon after the first shock the spontaneous solidarity began to crack and the discourse shifted — away from the victims and to the possible causes and consequences of 9/11.

The fear of a (world) war dominated the public mood in Europe, although at this point it was not motivated by the actual reaction of the U.S. government, but by the preemptive campaign of blind revenge many assumed it would undertake. Some also showed a certain satisfaction, a Schadenfreude, over the humiliation of the superpower and over the fact that “the Yanks got what they asked for.”

Need for an Explanation

America’s status as a victim was offset and conspiracy theories spread — and not just in the paranoid corners of the Internet. All this shows how difficult it was for many in these parts to unconditionally accept the United States as a victim. There certainly was a need for an explanation of the monstrous act— but some of the interpretations downplayed the terror and blamed the United States. While some stamped the offenders as irrational religious fanatics, others viewed the event through the paradigm of social justice and interpreted the attacks as a kind of revolt of the poor and oppressed against the rich and the powerful of the world.

Following the motto, “he who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind,” American policies of recent decades were above all held responsible for the attacks. That is to say, all of America’s political transgressions were listed — not just American policy in the Middle East, which one could legitimately discuss in this context, but also each and every sin the United States has ever committed, past and present. Behind this interpretation was the conviction that the Americans were “ultimately to blame” for the attacks. The roles of victim and perpetrator were, in this way, reversed. With the impact of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, these criticisms of America gained strength. The image of the U.S. in all of Europe massively deteriorated (which was reflected in all opinion polls). George W. Bush was branded “public enemy number one,” and he took his place among the most unpopular U.S. presidents in history from the Austrian perspective (alongside Wilson, Roosevelt and Reagan).

In light of these developments, well-known intellectuals have spoken of anti-Americanism as a European “lingua franca” (Andrei Markovits), as the “Master Narrative of the Age” (Tony Judt), and have characterized the young 21st Century as the “Anti-American Century” (Ivan Krastev). How should these opinions be assessed from the distance of time and from a historical perspective?

Bush, the Ideal Bogeyman

Without question, criticism of the United States in the decade after Sept. 11 was ubiquitous and sometimes quite justified. With both his politics and his habits, President Bush presented himself as the ideal bogeyman.

But in many cases the America-bashing after 9/11 went beyond factual critiques of U.S. policy and of the Iraq War. It was often simply a pretext for already existing prejudices and was not always free from the conceit of moral superiority.

Again and again, anti-American sentiments have been stirred, and — depending on the political atmosphere and generation — Europeans have indulged in different aspects of the long tradition of anti-Americanism. Today, a clear dividing line between “right-wing” and “left-wing” anti-Americanism can hardly be identified anymore, as the criticism of globalization in the context of 9/11 has shown.

Certainly it should be qualified that there have also been strong pro-American attitudes in Europe during the last decade, that there is no unified European position, and that European anti-Americanism is, in spite of persistent feelings of resentment, comparatively moderate and politically ineffective.

Inevitable Disappointment

Europe is not the present-day heartland of anti-Americanism. Its most radical forms are found in the peripheries of the globalizing world: In the Middle East and in parts of Latin America, Southeast Asia and Africa.

With the election of Barack Obama and his downright euphoric reception in Europe, the (short) anti-American decade seemed to have come to an end. Obama the intellectual represented the antithesis to the “cowboy” Bush. He was perceived as “un-American” and was loved in Europe for just that reason.

A disappointment, which was almost inevitable, promptly set in. The enthusiasm for Obama has waned considerably, and so — it seems — has interest in the United States. The death of Osama bin Laden and the Arab Spring, which is often interpreted as the “anti-thesis to 9/11,” have given the events of Sept. 11 closure and have pushed public discourse about America into the background.

Part of Our Culture

Meanwhile, anti-American sentiment has again grown stronger in cultural and economic areas and has found ammunition on side issues such as the Strauss-Kahn affair, in which typical American prudishness and political correctness have been pilloried. Or in the form of an undifferentiated critique of capitalism and globalization, that is sweepingly directed against the “financial capital” and “speculation” on Wall Street and expressed with anti-American (and anti-Semitic) clichés.

The “concern” that anti-Americanism might even run out of material is, in any case, unfounded. A certain amount of it is — if only for the purpose of expressing our identity — a part of our culture.

As history shows, it is extremely adaptable and will continue to ebb and flow.

Margit Reiter, lecturer on contemporary history at the University of Vienna. She studies the themes of anti-Americanism, criticism of Israel, and anti-Semitism. For the summer semester of 2012, she is a visiting professor at the University of Salzburg.