Anti-Americanism Historicized

"Why do they hate us so much?" was a question on the minds of many Americans in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.¹ The answer most commonly given was "anti-Americanism." Foreigners, often unspecified by national group, became typecast as jealous and resentful of Americans for their liberties, power, and opportunities. The dislike or even hatred that American critics of anti-Americanism have often discerned abroad has been assigned in popular media, government policy assessments, and academic scholarship to the category of an irrational and totalizing discourse. In this account, the roots of anti-Americanism lie not in real social and political grievances against the United States, but in the psychological impulses of a virulent sentiment. This reading of foreign perceptions has had profound and damaging consequences for American diplomacy because it does not require the United States to rethink its basic interventionist policies on a global level. So argues Max Paul Friedman, and he sets out to correct the record in this insightful synthesis.

When Americans project a rigid anti-American hostility upon foreign populations, the discourse they produce depends, in Friedman's view, on an ideology of American exceptionalism through which foreign opinions are received and interpreted. The idea of the United States as a distinctive and superior nation lying outside the normal trajectory of history underlies the question "why do they hate us." Since the United States is widely assumed to be a nation embodying the spirit of a unique freedom, it would follow that hatred of it abroad must inevitably reflect envy, ignorance, or willful rejection of American superiority, not flaws in U.S. actions and history.

Critiques of anti-Americanism have typically lacked historical context. In contrast, Friedman seeks to explain anti-Americanism abroad as a sentiment that waxes and wanes over time in line with American military, political, and economic actions. In a secondary argument, Friedman balances anti-American opinion with pro-American viewpoints, showing how such divergent views not only coexisted in the same countries at the same time, but also could be held by the same individuals. He concedes that, at times, foreigners of many political stripes have revealed anti-American traits, but he argues that this is not a dominant or systemic discourse. Even when someone such as Jean-Paul Sartre displayed anti-American animus, Friedman posits that this was not true of the French existential philosopher at all times and to the same degree. Like representative public intellectuals in Germany, Sartre had admiration and even affection for the United States, or at least for parts of its culture. Moreover, his opposition to racism in the United States mirrored the objections of anti-racists within the United States. On foreign policy, he was as critical of French colonialism as of American empire. Here as elsewhere, Friedman resists the urge to essentialize complex foreign responses into the common stereotypes of the anti-American.

In this way, Friedman makes easy work of critiques offered by Paul Hollander, Barry and Judith Rubin, and sociologist Andrei Markovits.² He convincingly locates faulty academic research within the spectrum of American official, semi-official, and wider media opinion, thus historicizing the historiography as well as the history of anti-Americanism. Friedman does an excellent job of deploying approaches derived from Quentin Skinner, J. G. A. Pocock and others who contend against "parsing definitions of 'essentially contested concepts,'" and he recognizes that "their meaning inheres in the way that they are used over time" (p. 7). Using this method, Friedman outmaneuvers anti-anti-Americanism.

The alternative to Friedman's argument would be that of the Rubins in Hating America: A History, where they argue that anti-Americanism has always been with us. Markovits similarly sees "European antipathy towards America" as "easily" traceable to "July 5, 1776, the beginning of the republic."³ In these views, the animus against the United States cannot be a response to what the nation has done in...