If America’s global dominance produces resentment even among its western allies – who have plenty of wealth and influence of their own – anti-American hostility, especially after the war in Iraq is a thousandfold more intense in the non-western world.
Moreover, anti-Americanism outside the west has increased over the last few decades, coinciding with the United States’ emergence as the world’s sole superpower.
As proponents of free markets correctly point out, global capitalism has, in certain important respects, done wonders for the world, including many developing countries. Global per capita income has tripled in the last thirty-five years. Technology has transformed even small villages. Life expectancy and adult literacy rates have, on the whole, increased significantly in the developing world. Global infant mortality rates are lower than ever.
Unfortunately, these macro statistics are not what real people in the real world experience. To begin with, many advance for example, the spread of the Internet and television, and even improvements in education – are two-edge swords, often producing growing discontent along with growing awareness.
Globalization generates not only new opportunities and hopes, but also new social desires, stresses, insecurities, and frustrations. At the same time, the benefits of global markets have been distributed extremely unequally, both across and within countries.
The spread of global markets in recent decades has unambiguously widened the gap between developed and underdeveloped countries. According to statistics of the Word Bank, today the richest one percent of the world’s population own as much as the poorest 57 percent. Half of the world’s population live on less than two dollars a day; more than a billion people live on less than one dollar a day. Meanwhile, the top 20 percent of those living in high-income countries account for 86 percent of all of the world’s private consumption expenditures.
Today, as London’s Financial Times recently put it, “Americans are richer while people in most transition economies and emerging markets still struggle, their frustration heightened by cheap, almost universal access to images and information about how much better Americans live.” While anti-Americanism used to be driven by what America did, “now it is also motivated by what America is.”
In the eyes of the vast majority of the developing world, America is the antithesis of what they are. America is rich, healthy, glamorous, confident, and exploitative – at least if Hollywood, America’s multinationals and supermodels are any indication.
America is also “almighty”, able to “control the world”, whether through its military power or through the IMF- implemented austerity measures forced on developing populations. They, on the other hand, are hungry, poor, exploited, and powerless, often even over the destiny of their own families.
Today, America sits on top of the global economy. As with the market-dominant Chinese in Southeast Asia, global marketization has intensified America’s disproportionate wealth and economic power.
As with resentment against other market-dominant minorities, anti-Americanism is often a perverse blend of admiration, awe, and envy on one hand and seething hatred, disgust, and contempt on the other. Thus, for millions, perhaps billions, around the world, America is “arrogant”, “hegemonic,” and “vapidly materialistic” – but also where they would go if only they could.
It is probably safe to say that anti-American feeling is more intense in continental Europe than in Canada or England. In part, this is because American culture – including not just capitalism but language, food, and political traditions – clashes more directly, or at least more obviously, with European culture.
Many of the European nations – among them France, Germany, and Spain – were of course once great world powers, both militarily and culturally. For these countries, being eclipsed today by America’s upstart, hot-dogging rise to global dominance is additionally granting.
Nevertheless, the European nations – even France, which has been the most obstreperous – remain allies that the United States can generally count on in moments of great import. All the European nations ultimately supported the United States’ war in Afghanistan. It helps that these countries enjoy high standards of living and the distractions of affluence. In the aftermath of the war in Iraq, it remains to be seen if France will be given the opportunity to participate in the reconstruction of that country.
Insight, The Bahama Journal
