Anti-Americanisms in World Politics

4. Disaggregating Anti-Americanism: An Analysis of Individual Attitudes toward the United States

4 Disaggregating Anti-Americanism: An Analysis of Individual Attitudes toward the United States G I A C O M O C H I O Z Z A 93 In the wake of the terrorist attacks on the United States, anti-Americanism—the opposition to America, its name, its ideals, and its actions—has become a central feature of public discourse in the United States and the world over. That antiAmericanism is spreading and deepening is taken as a matter-of-fact statement that does not deserve any further empirical validation. Charles Krauthammer, the influential Washington Post columnist, popularized this notion with harrowing words: “It is pure fiction that this pro-American sentiment was either squandered after Sept.  or lost under the Bush Administration. It never existed. Envy for America, resentment of our power, hatred of our success has been a staple for decades, but most particularly since victory in the cold war left us the only superpower.”1 In this scathing indictment of the “Opinions of Mankind,” the views of European , Arab, and Muslim publics are usually singled out as the most rabidly opposed to the United States and the most deserving of ridicule and dismissal. For Daniel Pipes and Russell Berman, the negative view of the United States in the Islamic world and Europe is primarily a reaction to the perception of the weakness of the United States that only unadulterated shows of power could redress by inspiring awe I thank Carol Atkinson, John Bowen, Miles Kahler, Peter Katzenstein, Bob Keohane, Doug McAdam, Henry Nau, Abe Newman, Samuel Popkin, and Paul Sniderman for comments and suggestions. I also thank Joe Grieco, Hein Goemans, Chris Gelpi, and John Aldrich for their support and guidance. This chapter was written when I was a fellow at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard University. I thank the Olin director, Stephen Peter Rosen, for his support during my year there. An appendix containing tables with the full details of the regression models and additional information about the survey items, including a list of all countries in the survey, is available on request from the author and the editors. Mistakes, omissions, and other assorted infelicities are my own responsibility. . Krauthammer , . and respect.2 For Barry and Judith Rubin, criticism of the United States is a persistent psychological device that societies resort to—and have been resorting to ever since America appeared on the world scene—in order to compensate for their own failures, because America epitomizes the notion of success and symbolizes the realization of a better world.3 Fouad Ajami summarized the state of America’s standing worldwide with no equivocation: If Germans wish to use anti-Americanism to absolve themselves and their parents of the great crimes of World War II, they will do it regardless of what the United States says and does. If Muslims truly believe that their long winter of decline is the fault of the United States, no campaign of public diplomacy shall deliver them from that incoherence.4 But concerns over the diffusion of anti-American sentiment are not the exclusive preserve of the conservative intellectuals who have defined the theoretical foundations of U.S. foreign policy during the reign of President George W. Bush. The editorial page of the New York Times laments that “if there is such a thing as the European street, anti-American feeling is strong and universal.”5 Scholars of the realpolitik school are no less inclined to pass judgment on the strategic choices and policy stances of the United States in terms of their alleged impact on the rise of antiAmericanism . Thus, to take a least likely example, John Mearsheimer bemoans the reliance of American grand strategy on military force as a factor that would contribute to increasing popular hostility toward the United States and, instead, invokes winning the “hearts and minds” of Islamic publics as the blueprint for improving America’s security.6 In this chapter I take these expressions of concern to task and investigate whether anti-Americanism has indeed become the dominant frame through which foreign publics relate to the United States. The empirical analyses that I pursue in this chapter offer an overview of the attitudes toward the United States as they are portrayed in mass surveys. Thus, in this chapter I place the phenomenon of antiAmericanism at the mass popular level and identify the patterns of evaluative reactions that the United States elicits among ordinary people in the post–cold war, post–September...