America through European Eyes: British and French Reflections on the New World from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (review)

A subtitle for this book could be: 'Beyond Tocqueville and Trollope'. While both writers are well represented here, several of the articles in America through European Eyes concentrate on lesser-known authors, who often provide fascinating insights into the ways in which the various images of America — or, for the purposes of this book, the United States — have evolved. It is interesting to see, for instance, that a writer with the improbable name of Guillaume Tell Poussin clearly discerned in the middle of the nineteenth century what Tocqueville had not: 'the United States as an emerging world power' (Jeremy Jennings, p. 173). This collection of eleven articles is well organized and frequently insightful. As is usually the case, some contributions are better written than others, but almost all will be useful to scholars. In his excellent introductory article, Alan Levine provides a broad outline of the main interpretative schemas that have dominated the disparate European concepts subsumed under the term 'America': 'the perceptions of America are based more on European dynamics than on the reality of America itself' (p. 29). In spite of Levine's generous attempts at being even-handed, the sheer stupidity of some of Jean Baudrillard's pronouncements on America is also highlighted (pp. 34–37). At a much higher level, Costica Bradatan's article on 'Berkeley's New World' (pp. 45–69) examines an example of the utopian discourse that was one major component of early European images of America. Another noteworthy article is found in Russell Hanson's comparative analysis (pp. 213–36) of Tocqueville's concern over the possibility of a 'tyranny of the majority' arising from American democratic institutions, and of James Bryce's assessment of a 'fatalism of the multitude' that seemed to enforce an unhealthy level of conformity throughout the growing population of the United States. One of this reviewer's few regrets after reading America through European Eyes is that there were relatively few other instances of an explicitly comparative approach to these 'British and French reflections'. Since America is at once an outgrowth of Europe and Europe's 'Other', texts written by Europeans have been influential not just in the Old World, but also as fodder for the ongoing process of self-definition within the United States: 'America's self-image was not a purely homemade construct, it was and remains inseparable from its image in Europe and the rest of the world' (Guillaume Ansart, p. 89). Unlike many such collections of articles, this book includes a valuable conclusion (by Jeffrey Isaac, pp. 259–77) that summarizes some of the main themes and updates them to an early twenty-first-century context, when the arrogant rhetoric and bellicose behaviour of the Bush administration tended to polarize how Americans and Europeans viewed each other's societal evolution. Editorial deadlines no doubt prevented a consideration of the implications of the 2008 elections in the United States. It is to be hoped that the current Obama administration will promote a less hegemonic trans-Atlantic relationship, and that the ongoing European-American dialectic will no longer degenerate into simplistic and misleading formulations about 'Venus' and 'Mars'.