Ugly American

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It was on September 11 that the resentment against the U.S., festering in the hearts and minds of many around the world, manifested itself for the first time this century. The terrorist attacks provoked the question “Why do they hate us?” Initially that inquiry was directed towards extremists in the Muslim world. Americans found some consolation in the sympathy and solidarity expressed in Europe immediately after the attacks.

I remember going to a memorial concert in Berlin, one year after the attacks. The concert was sponsored by the German State Department. One and a half years later, the U.S. government embarked on the war in Iraq. To the best of my knowledge, that was the end of concerts put on by the German government in memory of September 11.

A survey by the Pew Global Attitudes Project conducted in the spring of 2006 asked people around the world for their opinion of the U.S. and of the American people. In that poll,

Lowisch takes a break for a little laugh relief during her semester teaching at UM. Every T. Anthony Pollner Professor teaches a class based on what they specialize in - her’s dealt with being a foreign correspondent. Photo by Tim Kupsick.

an average of 56.6 percent of the people questioned in four European countries – Britain, France, Germany and Spain – said they had an unfavorable opinion of the U.S. The American people, as opposed to their country, fared somewhat better, with 59.25 percent still having a favorable opinion of Americans. I will spare you the poll numbers from places with mostly Muslim populations. At this point, the only people that still like all things American are the Japanese.

Americans have always struck me as people who want to be liked around the world. I know that from talking to them, but if you don’t want to take my word for it, just take another look at the polls. In 2006, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs found that six out of ten Americans thought that the U.S. should be more willing to make decisions within the United Nations when dealing with international problems, even if this means going along with a policy that is not its first choice. So most Americans actually want their government to form alliances, instead of going to war unilaterally. For me, that’s as good an indication as any that they care about what other people think and that they want to win back the respect of the rest of the world.

I believe that to turn things around, one needs to know about the forces that created the image of the ugly American in the first place. I mean the forces of history and foreign policy, of public diplomacy and popular culture, of interest groups in the U.S. as well as of the media. Rather than trying to give a moral critique of policies and behaviors, what I want to describe here is how these forces impacted the way the U.S. and its people are perceived in the rest of the world.

The scrutiny the U.S. faces as a superpower is not new, and much predates September 11. Look at Latin America, whose people in large numbers seem to have hated the Yankees forever. Some of us chuckled, some of us shuddered, but we all listened up, when Hugo Chavez, the president of Venezuela, called George W. Bush “the devil” in front of the U.N. General Assembly on September 9, 2006. Yet millions of people from Latin America keep on coming to the U.S., throwing their loyalties, their spirit and their workforce across the border to make this country even stronger.

Latin American resentment against the U.S. is partly the result of imperial overreach in the past, sometimes the very recent past. Similar instances of imperial overreach, like Vietnam, have contributed to an uninterrupted undercurrent of anti-Americanism in Europe, which is still dealing with the consequences of its own imperial past.

When I first lived in this country for an extended period, in the 1980s, I had a punching ball hanging over my television set. Whenever Ronald Reagan would come on, I’d punch the hell out of that ball. We tend to forget just how much young Europeans despised Reagan at the time. We seriously thought he’d get us all killed, with his Pershing missiles and other arms race projects. This was all before he went down in history as the man who won the Cold War.

People around the world tend to resent a nation that seems to have unchecked power. Their resentment tends to increase when that nation chooses to make use of that power the way it sees fit, with little or no regard for other opinions. To counterbalance this resentment, before it escalates into hate, the U.S. needs to address these concerns by agreeing to at least some limits on its power. For example those expressed in international law, the laws of war or other existing treaties. Then, to safeguard its credibility, America will have to adhere to those limits as well.