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Anti-Americanism book by Stephen Haseler
National Review, March 28, 1986 by Chilton Williamson
Anti-Americanism
ACCORDING TO Stephen Haseler, professor of government at the City of London Polytechnic: "[Anti-Americanism] is more keenly felt in the mid-1980s than at any other time since the United States emerged from the Second World War as a superpower. And it is no passing phenomenon: Anti-Americanism is here to stay, as long as the United States retains its powerful role on the world stage. How the country deals with this challenge will be a fundamental test of its superpower status." In fact, Haseler--a founding member of the new Social Democratic Party and a former deputy mayor of Greater London--has written a brief book on the subject, published in the United States by the Ethics and Public Policy Center (1030 15th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20005; $5), with a 386-word foreword by Midge Decter, in which he concludes that anti-Americanism is essentially a reaction, not to America nor even to bourgeois capitalism, but to the idea of democratic society itself.
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Dismissing as naive the consternation of the editors of Newsweek upon discovering that Iranians appeared not to love or even like Americans, Haseler begins by identifying what anti-Americanism is not, and by explaining why it is that most of these bogus manifestations of the real thing should not disturb us. Anti-Americanism, he insists, is not necessarily the basis of policy disputes between the U.S. and its allies; it is not to be confused with honest re-assessments by "foreign publics and elites" of which side in the war for the world is the winning one; it cannot be presumed to be the impetus behind a country's attempt at railroading Washington into permitting it some national advantage, usually of a pecuniary nature, or into granting it a presumption of independence and self-determination. That is not to say, of course, that in the case of all or even most of these misunderstandings the United States is guilty and its disputants blameless--merely that at the bottom of many much contretemps lies not irrational bias but enlightened, even respectable, self-interest.
In its crudest form, anti-Americanism ("primitive anti-Americanism") is no more than resentment, based on envy and masquerading as moral indignation at "American imperialism." Even at this level, of course, Marxist-Leninist ideology is at work, yet it is a fig-leaf only, a vain disguise and a pretext: Nobody, Haseler argues in his chapter "The Demise of Communist Anti-Americanism," believes any longer in either the moral or the technical supremacy of the Soviet Union in particular or Communism in general. Paradoxically, however, "As the ideology of Communism dies, anti-Americanism becomes simply destructive, critical, and bitter, and such negativism becomes an ideology in itself." HAseler pursues the point:
Unlike anti-American rioting in the Third World or "Peace demonstrations" in Western Europe, the persistent and growing ideological assault against the United States should be taken seriously. This intellectual attack is really a non-Communist repudiation of liberal democratic capitalism and its attendant values. It is based neither upon ephemeral rage nor upon specific policies: Instead it represents a fundamental and enduring opposition to the course that American society has taken over two centuries. Perhaps "ideology" is too strong a term: "impulse" might be more accurate. This Western anti-Americanism is slippery and subtle, rarely overtly expressed, certainly less coherent than other traditional isms. Even so it remains the dominant intellectual framework of much of the Western and Westernized intelligentsia.
Haseler traces much of this animus to conservative and reactionary tendencies still prevalent among certain European social and intellectual classes as well as, of course, in the ruling elite of most Third World countries, the first group arguing that "the rise of the masses" destroys culture, the second that it destroys everything else (including them). Ultimately, then, anti-Americanism is "the product of a debate about the nature and development of Western man"--with representatives of the Soviet Union and its satrapies listening in, ready to capture by microphone and amplify hugely whatever arguments happen to fit its needs of the moment.
There is, therefore, a sense in which anti-Americanism begins at home: "not in the sense that its exponents primarily live and work in the United States but rather in the sense that anti-Americanism can flourish only if Americans themselves either choose to believe what others say about them, or, alternatively, come to be dependent on the approval of others." Thus, in the "complacent" Fifties, anti-Americanism was at a low ebb, while today, in the "concerned" Eighties, it is running higher than ever before. If it is true, therefore, that hatred of the United States is intimately associated with hatred of democratic society and free government, Haseler is indeed correct in predicting that, in an increasingly authoritarian world, America will have still more ill-wishers. As a sympathetic Englishman, his advice to us for the coming years is as follows: "Americans should no longer care about being liked. They should seek to be trusted and respected instead."
COPYRIGHT 1986 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
