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The interaction between French Anglophilia and Anglophobia is traced particularly in the 18th and 19th centuries. The USA is regarded as a modernized Britain and especially since the 20th century has superseded it as the main Anglo-Saxon ‘other’. The arguments for and against the American antithesis are analysed.

This chapter takes two quips as its points of departure. The first is that “the only culture the Europeans have in common is American popular culture”; the second that “the only culture shared on both sides of the Atlantic is European culture.” America was to a large extent founded on European culture, and only when it had defined itself as separate from Europe could America begin to export its own mass culture. This mass culture was then adopted by groups in Europe for their own purposes. While there is a broad mass culture unifying the two sides of the Atlantic, this culture is always complex and often contradictory. Thus, the chapter concludes by arguing that, “if anti-Americanism has risen steeply all over the world, surely in Europe as well, it may have to do cruciallywith what many see as the betrayal by Americans of something distinctly American, of ‘truths held to be self-evident.’”

Roland Barthes’s writings were very positively received in the United States – in 1979 Wayne Booth called him the strongest influence on American criticism today – but America played a strange, often contradictory role in his work. In his middle years he visited the US four times – in 1958, 1961, 1966, and 1967 – but his initial enthusiasm for New York City was soon qualified by a range of negative comments about the country and its culture, and after 1967 he only returned once, very briefly, though he was much in demand. While opposing the knee-jerk anti-Americanism common among French intellectuals in his day, and especially resistance to America’s modernity, he soon made America a foil for Japan, which represented true exoticism, the opposite of bourgeois Western culture. There are relatively few references to America or American literature in his writings, though American cinema was a significant cultural reference for him, but these do help to reveal the complexity of Barthes’s affective and intellectual engagements, especially since there is often a comparative dimension to them. This chapter explores the varying attitudes and comments about America in Barthes’s letters and his published writings.

The internationalization of the world has been proceeding for centuries, though not with the “thickness” of pace and intensity of globalization today. The notion that globalization is tantamount to Americanization is commonplace but simplistic. While the spread of U.S. economic and cultural influence is an important feature of globalization, the latter is a very much wider phenomenon that is affecting U.S. society itself. While U.S. preponderance is engendering centers of resistance in some cultures, the globalization being resisted is actively assisting socioeconomic development – and it is the changes being induced by this modernization, rather than by the American presence in it, which informs the antimodernism that presents itself as anti‐Americanism. What U.S. foreign economic policy needs to guard against is the emergence of patterns of economic inequality, which foment hatred, and this will require U.S. assistance in the creation of global networks through which preventive governance can be exercised.

This chapter details the rise of anti-Americanism in France, in particular French socialist minister of culture Jack Lang's attack against American popular culture. Lang began by refusing to attend the American film festival at Deauville in September 1981; several months later he gave a notorious address denouncing American cultural imperialism at a UNESCO conference in Mexico City; and then he tried to organize a global “crusade” to combat cultural imports from the United States. Lang was a flamboyant young politician whose movie-star good looks, iconic pink jacket, dramatic initiatives, and hyperactive ways won him both admiration and ridicule. He presided over the Ministry of Culture from 1981 to 1986 and again from 1988 to 1993.

This chapter first offers a general overview of Islamist positions vis-è-vis the United States in both Jordan and Kuwait. Second, it emphasizes the exogenous nature of anti-Americanism, arguing that it is a function of U.S. policies. It also shows how international developments influenced Islamist stances relative to the United States. Jordan's dependency on the West, the continuation of the occupation of Palestinian lands by Israel, the Jordanian peace treaty with Israel, the so-called War on Terror, and the War on Iraq have further reinforced anti-American sentiment among Jordan's Islamist opposition. Finally, the chapter posits that the democratic reversals in Jordan, which marked much of the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century, were directly linked to the fear of anti-American opposition movements then gaining momentum. It concludes with a discussion about the role regimes and the United States play in sustaining barriers to democracy in these settings.

This chapter provides a detailed account of how ordinary citizens rationalize their political preferences. First, it documents the causal logics citizens employ when supporting the monarchy in Jordan. It illustrates how people who believe that the current regime has privileged and important relations with the United States may come to support a regime even when it is otherwise not in their apparent interest. This is so because they fear the role anti-American Islamists may play in harming the relationship if they come to power. Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates that this is not the case in Kuwait, because the Islamist opposition is pro-American. Second, it examines the ways citizens who oppose the regime in Jordan cling to an elastic definition of Sharia, one that seeks to challenge the geopolitical status quo altogether. This chapter relies on a series of open-ended interviews conducted by two research teams in Jordan and Kuwait.

This chapter offers quantitative support to the causal logics citizens employ when engaging democracy, authoritarianism, regime stability, and transition in Jordan and Kuwait. Because the argument advanced in this book is multi-layered, the chapter attempts to unpack the argument incrementally. It offers an empirical strategy that gradually addresses the microfoundations of the argument. This argument can be sketched briefly as follows: Citizens in client states (especially those who value access to global economic markets) will want to ensure stable ties to the patron in the event of transition. Therefore, citizens living in countries with organized anti-American opposition movements that have considerable constituency basis will be more likely to favor less democracy to ensure that anti-American forces do not harm relations with the United States. Ultimately, then, citizens in client states with similarly large opposition movements that are less anti-American will more likely favor democratization because the changes in regime will not jeopardize relations with their patron.

This chapter focuses on Morocco, highlighting how citizens across the North African monarchy rationalize authoritarianism through the prism of strategic utility to U.S. (and EU) ties. Morocco includes one of the most progressive Islamic movements in the region, and citizens, while applauding the movement's moderation, remain wary of its foreign intentions. Enhancing ties with the United States and maintaining ties to Europe were often cited as key reasons why the status quo was preferable to increasing levels of democracy. It became apparent that although the Islamic Party for Justice and Development is considered moderate in terms of its internal Islamic agenda, many in the kingdom worried about the party's stance toward the United States.

This chapter discusses how anti-Americanism continues to thwart the democratization trajectory in the Arab world. Anti-Americanism has often been seen as simply a problem relevant to East–West relations, terrorism, and the clash of civilizations. However, anti-Americanism has also stifled grassroots efforts toward democratization in the Arab world. The sheer dependence of the Arab world on U.S. patronage has meant that Arab citizens take their cues from the United States to secure the status quo. While the preference for democracy exists on the street, it needs to be fully endorsed by the patron. Anti-American forces have dampened U.S. enthusiasm for democracy, which in turn has stifled democratic demands from below. Given the fact that increasing international dependency has resulted in greater anti-Americanism, the democratic option remains all the more elusive today.

As the twentieth century drew to a close, Americanization was transforming how the French ate, entertained themselves, conducted business, and even communicated. Yet the fin de siècle also witnessed the strongest expression of anti-Americanism since the 1960s, which was visible in opinion polls, newspapers, books, television, and politicians' pronouncements. This chapter examines this paradox, this tension between a society seemingly immersed in America and one that posed America as “the other.” The growing anti-Americanism can be briefly explained as follows: once the Cold War ended, the transatlantic superpower, from a French perspective, became more overbearing. The French in turn became more critical of domestic trends in the United States and less comfortable with the inroads of American culture. As a result they intensified their efforts at both asserting their independence and defining themselves differently from their American cousins.

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some thoughts about Franco-American relations. It also discusses the reasons why the French were more eager to confront America than other Europeans. First, more than other Europeans, the French aspired to, and had the means to exercise, international leadership. If they conceded that they lagged behind the hyperpower, they were still persuaded that they were an elite nation with the power, both hard and soft, as well as the experience and self-confidence, to merit a commanding position in Europe and beyond. More keenly than others the French also distrusted American hegemony, found it unreliable and self-serving, and linked the United States with the invasive process of globalization. Second, American practices and values targeted signifiers of identity more closely in France than they did those of its neighbors.

‘Everywhere there emerged the centrality of America — whether loved or loathed — as the crucial term of comparison when the topic was building the future in any form’; the challenges of 1920s modernity now become obvious: mass democracy, mass production, mass communication, and the last two bore unmistakeable signs of America all over them. A wave of adaptation ensued, particularly in Germany, where Fordism was thought to be the key to reconstruction. While the Americans, particularly Herbert Hoover, started to elaborate a new theory linking the survival of democracy to the promise of mass prosperity, a surge of self-conscious criticism of American mass society arose in Europe. Here French intellectuals created a new tradition, but disquiet in Britain was strong across the political and business classes. They attempted a controlled, limited, adoption of American ways, but were not particularly successful.

This chapter looks at the decade of the 2000s: from 9/11 to the triumph of Obama, from the Iraq war to the financial crisis of 2008; the fall from grace of America's models of modernity (except Silicon Valley and Hollywood); Europe from place-holder for critics of Bush foreign policy to discredited source of alternatives; the re-assertion of identity politics, and the unwitting role of America in dividing Europeans: the British governments so anxious to adopt American patterns of renewal, the French so keen to assert an alternative tradition and view of the world, the rest at various places in between; Obama's election as a moment of redemption in many European eyes (not all), in spite of his many lines of continuity with traditional American views of the world's progress, especially those linking democracy and liberty to economic growth under free-market capitalism.

In comparison and in contrast to Schaff, the philosopher Jacques Maritain offers another example of positive engagement with the American experiment and its consequences for religious belief and practice. This chapter explores Maritain's career and writings, focusing in particular on his commentary on the United States. Maritain sought to interpret the United States through a distinctively Catholic-Thomist political philosophy that he developed and first expressed in his Integral Humanism of 1936. Like Schaff, Maritain sought to expose European anti-Americanism (whether from the Right or Left) and champion American religious liberties and the historical conditions that had produced them. His views on religious liberty and America contributed considerably to the climate of thought within the Catholic Church that led from earlier condemnations of ‘Americanism’ and religious ‘indifferentism’ to the Second Vatican Council's epochal Decree on Religious Liberty (Dignitatis humanae). Maritain's esteem for the United States makes him something of anomaly among early and mid-20th-century French intellectuals.

This chapter examines Bertrand Russell's politics. focusing on three things. First, the Russell whom one might describe as the heir of 1688 and the Whig Revolution was a considerably useful liberal influence. Second, there was about Russell an antipolitical streak. This was not 1688 but 1968, when there was a demand for new visions, for the total reconstruction of everything. In this vein, Russell did not contribute to politics. And lastly, there was the side of Russell that is impossible not to like—he did wonderfully well, not just in his popular work but also in his more academic writing. The chapter discusses the discrepancy between Russell's violent antipathy to the Vietnam War and the philosophical underpinnings of that antipathy. It also explores Russell's liberalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-imperialism, along with his views on Marxism and pacifism.