Western Europe's America Problem
When my father and I arrived in the United States as immigrants from Romania — by way of Vienna — in the summer of 1960, we spent a number of weeks living with American families in the greater New York area. Some were Jews, like us; most were not. But all spoke some German because our English was virtually nonexistent at the time. What impressed me no end, and will always remain with me, was how all those people adored my Viennese-accented German, how they reveled in it, found it elegant, charming, and above all oh-so-cultured. For business and family reasons, my father had to return to Vienna, where I attended the Theresianische Akademie, one of Austria's leading gymnasia. The welcome accorded to me in that environment was much colder and more distant than it had been in the United States, not by dint of my being a Tschusch and a Zuagraster, an interloper from the disdained eastern areas of Europe, but by virtue of having become a quasi American.
Uncouth Nation: Why Europe Dislikes America
Foreword vii Preface xi Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Anti-Americanism as a European Lingua Franca 11 Chapter 2: European Anti-Americanism: A Brief Historical Overview 38 Chapter 3: The Perceived "Americanization" of All Aspects of European Lives: A Discourse of Irritation and Condescension 81 Chapter 4: The Massive Waning of America's Image in the Eyes of Europe and the World 135 Chapter 5: "Twin Brothers": European Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism 150 Chapter 6: Anti-Americanism: A Necessary and Welcomed Spark to Jump-start a European Identity? 201 Notes 225 Index 265
A genealogy of anti-Americanism
AMERICA'S rise to the status of the world's premier power, while inspiring much admiration, has also provoked widespread feelings of suspicion and hostility. In a recent and widely discussed book on America, AprOs L'Empire, credited by many with having influenced the position of the French government on the war in Iraq, Emmanuel Todd writes: "A single threat to global instability weighs on the world today: America, which from a protector has become a predator." A similar mistrust of American motives was clearly in evidence in the European media's coverage of the war. To have followed the war on television and in the newspapers in Europe was to have witnessed a different event than that seen by most Americans. During the few days before America's attack on Baghdad, European commentators displayed a barely concealed glee--almost what the Germans call schadenfreude--at the prospect of American forces being bogged down in a long and difficult engage-