Anti-Americanism: A short history

The habit of European intellectuals to denigrate America – for its supposed materialism and philistinism, its imperialist hubris, the populist drift of its presidential system, etc. – is almost as old as the United States itself. This lecture traces the complex and shifting history of anti-Americanism from the Founding Fathers to Trump and ponders the future of transatlantic relations.

Two anniversaries – 250 years of U.S. independence and 25 years since 9/11 – frame this exploration of Europe’s troubled relationship with America. Its principal aim is to show that European anti-Americanism has a complex, changing history that long predates Donal Trump and George W. Bush. Ever since the thirteen colonies broke away from Britain, European intellectuals and policymakers have denounced the leveling tendencies of US democracy (populism, “mob rule”) and derided the “vulgar materialism” of American culture.

In the 19th century, European critiques of America were still imbued with a sense of superiority: even as millions of its inhabitants emigrated across the Atlantic, the Old World looked down on the New as forever mired in mediocrity, a land without tradition and spiritual depth, driven by commercial frenzy and religious zeal.

When it became clear, sometime between the end of World War I and World War II, that the 20th century would be “the American century”, European hubris turned to horror. The sobering realization of economic and military dependence coincided with quasi-hysterical anxieties about “Americanization” in the Cold War era, when European civilization seemed to be taken over by US consumer culture (“Coca-Colonization”). The terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the ensuing “War on Terror” heightened fears among European elites that the United States was now the sole hegemon and a trigger-happy “global policeman” whose security concerns overrode liberal values and international laws.

Today, as America’s foreign political interests are pivoting from the Atlantic to the Pacific and Trumpism ushers in a new form of isolationism, it is increasingly obvious that while we may still feel outraged by the US, the US no longer feels much or anything about us. All the more reason to ponder the history of European anti-Americanism and to rethink our vexed relationship with Uncle Sam.

Martin Ruehl teaches German intellectual history at the University of Cambridge. His research concentrates on the ideas and ideologies that shaped German society and culture from Bismarck to Hitler.

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