Interviewed by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow recounted a particular episode in his career, his move to Paris in 1948:


In Europe, especially in France, anti-Americanism fundamentally structures political life and thought. In its most extreme forms, it embodies a whole way of interpreting the world. Explanation by means of America offers us the vertiginous feeling of the panoramic and allows us to embrace the totality of the real.

If America didn’t exist, we’d have to invent it: upon what other convenient scapegoat could we so conveniently load our sins and dump our garbage? Where else would we find such a place to whitewash the crimes of the planet, since anything that goes wrong on earth, from global warming to terrorism, can be laid at America’s door? It’s a stroke of good luck for a dictatorship or a criminal gang finally to be chased down and singled out by the United States. It gains them immediate sympathy, the goodwill of all for whom, in Chris Patten’s words, “the only authorized racism in the modern world is anti-Americanism.” We don’t doubt it for a moment: if the June 1944 landings were happening today, Uncle Adolf would enjoy the sympathy of innumerable patriots and radicals of the extreme left with the excuse that Uncle Sam was aiming to crush them.

Let’s immediately dispose of one paradox: anti-Americanism is not a critique of America, of its faults or its crimes. As any democracy and especially as a superpower that uses and abuses its power, the United States is eminently criticizable—and Americans don’t deprive themselves of the opportunity to do so when it arises. In the same vein, let’s not confuse anti-Americanism with hostility to George Bush, that unpopular ambassador of freedom, whose style, a mixture of militant bigotry and exalted messianism, has earned him near-universal antipathy. As long as his administration remains in power and carries the burdens of a semi-failure in Iraq and institutionalized torture, the United States will suffer an additional amount of rage and aversion from the rest of the world in addition to the animosity it usually inspires.

No, anti-Americanism is an autonomous discourse of its own. It feeds upon itself and is emancipated from reality: an event doesn’t shake it but confirms or reinforces it even when the event seems to contradict it. Produced by the intellectual caste for two centuries, anti-Americanism shapes one of those grand narratives of modernity imbued with a unifying and allegorical capacity: speaking about the United States is a way of speaking about the Hexagon [France] and the Old World in general. Of course there exist a thousand reasons to hate America once it is decked out with all the signs in which we recognize the guilt of the Occident: as rich as it is inegalitarian; dominating, arrogant, polluting; founded upon a double crime—the genocide of the Indians and the enslavement of the blacks; thriving upon threats and guns; indifferent to the international institutions it supports by lip service alone; entirely dedicated to the worship of the almighty dollar—the only real religion of that materialist country. For Western Europeans, let’s add that it remains difficult to forgive the United States for having liberated us from the Nazi and Fascist yoke and to have spared us the trials of communism.

Some kinds of generosity are offensive, especially when they underline our weaknesses and prove how much the little Yankee cousin has surpassed her continental ancestors in creativity and vigor. One doesn’t criticize the great American Satan the way one criticizes Italy, Spain, France, or Russia. In Europe and elsewhere, the United States is the focus of a specific repugnance that nearly constitutes an homage: such hatred amounts to the same thing as admiration. It proves the nation is taken seriously, while the benevolent sympathy that Europe now enjoys merely signifies that our continent no longer counts. Because America, in the eyes of its enemies, is condemnable not only for what it does but for what it is. Its only crime is to exist. Whatever it does, whether it intervenes on the international stage or remains cloistered within its frontiers, it’s in the wrong. The more our intellectuals are secular and disenchanted, the more they need an American devil in whom they believe with all their might. Raymond Aron said of Sartre that the United States played the role in his imagination that Jews played in National-Socialist demonology. There is a kinship between anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism, because both are pathologies of proximity. Americans are cursed as a result of their minuscule deviation from Europe—enemy brothers, almost alike, yet different. Hatred targets the relative, the cousin whose unbearable contiguity one disavows. America is the Bad Europe, colonizing and arrogant; her dissolute, illegitimate daughter who brings together all the negative traits of her native parent countries. She may be the double of Europe, but only in the sense that the healthiest parents may give birth to monsters. For an irrevocable verdict to be reached about Washington, this dishonorable progeny must be assigned contradictory roles. She must be the relative and outcast, her near-neighborliness must not hide an unbridgeable distance. In short, she must represent the growing canker at the heart of the Occident.

As soon as somebody mentions the United States, the best minds leave the realm of reason. In the eighties, Alan de Benoist, a Nouvelle Droite ideologue, wrote, “I’d still rather be under the yoke of the Red Army than have to eat hamburgers.” In the beginning of 1999, French philosopher Jean Baudrillard showed in Libération how the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and Washington had plotted to aid Slobodan Milosevic in liquidating the Kosovar Albanians. In 1991, Le Monde’s film critic compared Hollywood movies to Goebbels’s Propaganda-Staffel. During the brief Kosovo conflict, the English playwright Harold Pinter, since winner of a Nobel Prize, declared in Libération, “Here’s a definition of American foreign policy: ‘kiss my ass, or I’ll stomp on your face.’ Milosevic refused to kiss American ass, so Clinton stomped on the Serbs’ face.” At the same time, the Trotskyist philosopher Daniel Bensaïd rejected both Milosevic and NATO as “two perfectly twinned, contemporary forms of modern barbarism.” For his part, the director of the Picasso museum in Paris, Jean Clerc compared Belgrade to Guernica and American aviators to Nazi pilots, indifferent to the populations they were crushing.

The attacks of September 11 also gave rise to some choice bouquets: let’s begin with the conspiracy theories started in France by Thierry Meyssan and in Germany by former Social Democratic Party minister Andreas Von Bülow. They “revealed” that the Pentagon itself had launched the airplanes against the towers in order to take power. German writers Günter Grass and Botho Strauss pointed to the towers’ fall as “the amputation of finance’s accusing fingers” and to the Afghanistan expedition as “a war of bad guys against bad guys.” The prize goes to Baudrillard, who confessed himself fascinated with the “joyous” aesthetic of the attacks, like Nero faced with Rome in flames. He also put the principal antagonists back to back. The American system has so monopolized force, according to Baudrillard, that the terrorists were obligated to respond by a definitive and brutal act: “Terror against terror, there’s no more ideology behind this.”

In 2003, during the buildup to the second Gulf War, a former socialist minister placed George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden on equal footing (he later denied that he’d done so) and the Nouvel Observateur depicted the head of the White House with all the trappings of the dictator—of Charlie Chaplin playing with the globe—that is to say, they merged Bush with Hitler! Also in 2003, the demographer Emmanuel Todd announced the ineluctable crumbling of the American system and the irresistible rise of Europe in his book After the Empire. It was therefore useless to be anti-American because an America caught up in its militarist delusions would soon be finished anyway. I won’t be cruel enough to confront these propositions with the reality of a Europe in tatters and a France in aggravated crisis. But, I repeat, the complexity of the world is the chief enemy of these “theoreticians” who go to their stash of cardboard cutouts to “interpret” the world; that is, annex it to their prejudices. We are no longer in the arena of political analysis but of the religious register, where “anathema” is pronounced.

To sum up: not only is America the reincarnation of the Third Reich, “Hitler made in the USA” as the French communists of the fifties used to say, but, even worse, we’ve been “coca-colonized,” to take up another old expression. American power will occupy our brains by “Hidden Persuasion” to use Vance Packard’s famous title. We all have “America in our heads,” and those who believe they’re speaking and choosing freely are simply Uncle Sam’s dummies. Somebody else is pulling our strings.

“With CNN,” writes Régis Debray, “the planet enters America and the metropole’s foreign policy manages to be integrated within its internal domestic politics; and the interior of the American McWorld provides everyone with sounds and images, on big and little screens, furnishing the collective unconscious according to its wishes—everyone from ghetto youths to government ministers. . . . America no longer has any need to be dominating, it has become irrefutable, that is, internalized.” Because America formats the style and rhythm of modern images, “it penetrates us through our eyes” explains Ignacio Ramonet of Le Monde diplomatique in his book Silent Propaganda. It doesn’t matter that the films or miniseries are French, German, Italian, Chinese, Brazilian; at bottom they are all won over to the Yankee aesthetic.


We remember that the Antillean psychiatrist Frantz Fanon used the metaphor of “black skins, white masks” in the sixties to describe the phenomenon of colonization. The mentality of the colonizer penetrated the skull of the colonized and falsified his vision of the world, leading him to contract with his master against his interests.

Put another way, with or without consent, we are collaborators with the American giant that has taken up residence in our private life, reigning over us. It’s true that anti-Americanism wouldn’t be so virulent if it didn’t hide an important amount of fascination. America: the greatest power of attraction and the greatest of repulsion. It makes our hackles rise while it places us under its spell because it incarnates modernity in its best and worst aspects with that little bit of excess and incommensurability that makes it unique. That exceptional and promised land has opened new horizons for other peoples, in the furor it inspires and the stupor, in admiration and in jealousy. So the United States—that rotary republic, nouveau riche, without style and whose manners are a paragon of vulgarity and chintz arouses a singular adulation, even among its detractors. To be execrated across centuries, generations, and political divides is a privilege. No power today is so defamed and stepped upon, and therefore no power is as venerated. The same people who burn the stars and stripes gorge themselves on fast food; only watch movies “Made in the USA”; and when they try to disgorge the American giant, they have to use America’s symbols as a purgative.

Here is the problem of France: it has always lived in rivalry with the United States. They are the only two nations imbued with the messianism of universalism. Even though Paris and Washington have never gone to war, a bellicose coexistence characterizes our countries’ relations, all the more since, by its successes, Anglo-Saxon civilization eclipsed French civilization. It’s not an exaggeration to write that France today, turning away from its neighbors, looks toward America, the only object of its resentment. France hates America because it looks too much like it, only in miniature: the same fatuousness, the same certainty of excellence incarnate, the same mix of moralizing and cynicism. But it lacks the means of power. To that end, anti-Americanism in France is a machine for producing consensus, the only means of reconciling all of its political and intellectual families. Debray, remarking with bitterness on Poland’s decision to prefer American F-16s over French Mirages, qualified that nation in 2003 as “The America of the East,” the supreme insult. If Europe’s newest entrants do not swear allegiance to the Gallic way, they are thrown into the Yankee camp, accused of servility. During the referendum campaign for the European Constitution in 2005, the partisans of both “Yes” and “No” votes accused each other of playing George W. Bush’s game. As Dominique de Villepin has often put it, our country’s principal title to glory lies in its resistance to America, its ability to underline its weaknesses, to put a stick in its spokes, to denounce it always and everywhere. This is actually an inversion of the Gaullist tradition, because General de Gaulle kept the principle of supporting America during periods of crisis and opposing it only during periods of calm. Many in Paris prefer to destroy the community of democratic nations rather than stick to America’s side in the destruction of dictatorships. It’s for this reason that the December 25, 2003, issue of Le Monde summed up the successive difficulties and chill in Paris-Washington relations with the front page headline “United States and France reach state of incipient war!”

What an enormous word to translate a disagreement among allies. It seems not to be a slip but a pious vow, a wish to tear things apart at the seams. This banner headline also recalls one of Benoist’s phrases, explaining in 1984 that the twenty-first century’s world war would pit Europe against America.

How can we not see that this animosity is a stronger link than any superficial friendship? In France, America is an old passion that accompanies our long-ago implantation in Canada and Louisiana: the attraction of open spaces, the conquest of the West, the Indian epic, comic books, thrillers, film noir, jazz, blues, soul, funk, rap, continue to make us dream on this side of the Atlantic. The French are one of the triumphs of Hollywood’s dream factory; they read and translate almost all American novelists, even the worst; glue themselves to televised miniseries about the New World, and show up each year to surrender themselves to New York and Miami. We won’t even mention the new pidgin that has expanded like wildfire in business and advertising: the use of English words or sentences in conversation. It’s like the Anglomania of the corporate class of the nineteenth century. The use of franglais is inversely proportional to one’s knowledge of Shakespeare’s idiom and insults the genius of both languages. Our most famous national pop singer, Johnny Hallyday, is an Elvis Presley clone, an imitative rocker entirely inhabited by American musical mythologies. In short, all of this isn’t without snobbism and jingoism. The French have an irrepressible tendency to copy the faults of America—political correctness and excessive litigiousness—and avoid its good qualities. The more they adopt certain Anglo-Saxon methods at work or in the law, the more they hide the origin. The gap expresses itself through denigration and denial. It’s easy to venerate America by favoring those “dissident” Americans who claim the mantle of the counterculture and pretend to be critics of their country. Such love, then, believing itself to be dispassionate and lucid, instead consumes itself. To love America through the hatred of America expressed by some of its artists constitutes, without doubt, one of the most solid forms of attachment to America.

What is it that seduces us about American culture, popular or elitist? First off, in literature or film, it speaks of the world and not of the self, expands our horizons beyond the thin joys of introspection, narcissism, and “autofiction.” It also knows how to reconcile formal innovation with the charms of storytelling. Finally, it has faith in the perfectibility of man, a cult of the ordinary hero, man or woman, trapped in a difficult situation and forced to get out of it with only courage and will as weapons. America remains carried away by a meliorist optimism while Europe combines an idealism in international relations (peace, tolerance, dialogue) with pessimism about change.

Here we reach the heart of the matter. In February 2005, Condoleezza Rice went to Paris to preside over the renewed warmth between our two countries. Speaking at the Institute for Political Studies, the school that trains almost all of France’s political class, both left and right, she spoke of the mission of democracies to expand liberty and overthrow tyrannies: “We know,” she said, “that we must face up to the world as it is but we don’t have to accept the world as it is.” The French media, astonished at this language, reared up and spoke of its grandiosity, its extremism. Strange amnesia: because the American secretary of state, by these simple words, reminded the French that we have forgotten the message of our revolution of 1789. America embodies the democratic inheritance that we have repressed. We despise it for having grown great as we’ve diminished, but above all we despise it for defending, sometimes in brutal and quarrelsome fashion, those values that we’ve buried. As a son takes up the torch abandoned by his fathers, America reminds us of our mission. We detest it for its good side, because America has remained, in spite of everything, the country of militant liberty, as Old Europe, with the notable exception of the United Kingdom, decided to limit freedom to its borders and to deal with any regime, no matter who it is. The United States still believes in the virtues of communal action when Europe cordons itself behind prudence and the defense of the status quo, burned by its own terrible history. You can regret it, but everywhere people suffer and shiver in their chains—Bosnia and Kosovo yesterday, Georgia, Ukraine, Kurdistan, today—they turn toward the United States and not to Paris, Brussels, or Berlin. Even the Palestinians have more faith in Washington to build their state than in the virtues of the European Union.

For the Old World, which thinks of itself as postnational, postmodern, and posthistorical, the major crime of the United States (and of Israel to a lesser degree) is to be history’s fomenters and favorites. They are still stuck writing that bloody drama from which we have exited at great cost. “They are still there!” we exclaim when we see the GIs stuck in the mire of Iraq. Because of them, the old funeral procession of massacre, revenge, and extermination risks starting up again: their warlike folly puts us in danger. Old nations, seamed with scars and still dying from yesterday’s errors, admonish this young superpower and beg it to stay calm, to renounce war for the sake of negotiation and concert. We are the world’s reason; they, its folly. This is exactly what de Villepin explained on March 23, 2005: “Europe and France have gained a head start on other nations. We have returned from numerous wars, trials, and barbarisms from which we have learned lessons.”

This virtuous reasoning leaves out one little detail: that Europe, for the moment disarmed of credible political and military tools, still depends on the Yankee big brother for its security. It is he, as criticizable as he is, who continues to play the thankless role of world policeman, even if he’s an awkward and overworked cop. Thus our flagrant immaturity: we prefer to curse, not to grow. Europe has not yet [re]acquired the stature of a historical agent and has no alternative solution to offer to the politics of the White House, unless it is a lapdog diplomacy that yaps and nips to prove its existence. One could dream of sharing responsibility between the New World and the Old. Above all, one could dream of a conversation between two cultures that have much to teach each other in terms of audacity and wisdom, moderation and passion. Europe has unlearned the drunkenness of conquest, she has at last gained a sense of the fragility of human affairs. But today she is undermined by a growing skepticism that prevents her from becoming an effective and intelligent counterweight to her Atlantic cousin’s hegemony. Anti-Americanism is but the symptom of this weakness. This love-hate relationship still has some good times ahead of it.

Translated from the French by Marco Roth.

Pascal Bruckner’s books in English include The Temptation of Innocence, The Tears of the White Man, Evil Angels, and The Divine Child.

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