Americanization and Anti-Americanism

Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through 20th-Century Europe. By Victoria de Grazia. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. 608 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

The American Enemy: The History of French Anti-Americanism. By Philippe Roger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. 536 pages. $35 (cloth).

Anti-Americanism. Edited by Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross. New York: New York University Press, 2004. 344 pages. $65 (cloth). $19.95 (paper).

Après l'empire: Essay sur la décomposition du système américain. By Emmanuel Todd. Paris: Gallimard (2002), 2004. 192 pages. $29.95 (cloth).

Apparently, in much the same way that there are offers one can't refuse, there are empires one can't resist. Or so at least Victoria de Grazia seems to suggest in the title she gave to her book, a title that nicely captures the gist of her argument. There is the hint of powers of seduction in America's imperial sway that reminds us of Richard Kuisel's study Seducing the French.¹ These associations locate both books in the area of studies of Americanization, of France and of Europe, or for that matter of other parts of the world. But as Bertold Brecht has taught us in The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a parable on Hitler's ascent to power set in the 1930s' Chicago of protection rackets and gang turf wars, empires can be resisted in their rise. That is also the lesson of the other books under review here. If there are histories of Americanization to be told, there are also many histories of anti-Americanism in the many places of the world that have experienced the intrusion of forms of American power, soft or not so soft, overt or covert.

The title of the volume of essays edited by Andrew Ross and Kristin Ross and based on a symposium at New York University in early 2003, therefore, might well have used the plural. The topicality and timeliness of the symposium, as of so many other recent books on anti-Americanism, are clearly related to its rising tide in much of the world, like a tsunami following the shock of the Bush administration's turn in foreign policy. But wisely, the symposium, like other recent books, takes this present conjunction as a cue for a revisit of longer-term patterns of anti-Americanism. The contributors, all working at NYU, bring their expertise in various cultural regions or national settings to bear on the many forms that anti-Americanism has assumed over time and across the map of the world. Anti-Americanism, as they apply the term, shows a bewildering array of faces that do not easily make for one composite picture. What further complicates matters is that, in addition to the freedom the authors had in applying anti-Americanism as a diagnostic term, the word has its own history of vernacular uses, mostly of a partisan and polemical nature. When used, for example, by Americans, diplomats, journalists, and politicians alike, their views often chime with Paul Hollander's reading of anti-Americanism as an irrational response to forces of modernization radiating from America. They thus, in a self-legitimizing way, reaffirm the United States as both the embodiment and the defender of a universal model of modernity. Only rarely is the term used by parties displaying attitudes and behaviors that observers may construe as forms of anti-Americanism. Castro's Cuba may be among those rare cases in which an open and self-professed anti-Americanism is part of the national doxa, as a yardstick for measuring people's correct revolutionary attitudes.

If the various contributions to the NYU volume make one thing clear, it is that anti-Americanism may be a term that unduly skews the reading of the relevance of America's presence in other people's minds and lives. America more often than not plays the role of a tertium comparationis, a significant other whose difference provides people elsewhere with the terms for internal struggles and debates...