Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

Born and educated in England, Simon Schama taught at Christ's College, Cambridge University before tutoring in modern history at Brasenose College, Oxford. He then spent 13 years as professor at Harvard and is now professor of history at Columbia University, New York, where he specialises in European history and the history of art. Who better, then, to assess the current bout of anti-Americanism that has so much of Europe in its thrall? In "THE UNLOVED AMERICAN" in the current issue of the New Yorker, Schama looks at the root causes of Ameriphobia and declares:

"Modern anti-Americanism was born of the multiple insecurities of the first decade of the twentieth century. Just as the European empires were reaching their apogee, they were beset by reminders of their own mortality. At Adowa in 1896, the Ethiopians inflicted a crushing defeat on the Italians; in 1905, the Russian Empire was humiliated in war by the Japanese. Britain may have ruled a quarter of the world?s population and geographical space, but it failed to impose its will decisively on the South African Boers. And Wilhelm II's Germany, though it was beginning to brandish its own imperial sword, remained fretful about 'encirclement'. The unstoppability of America?s economy and its immigrant-fuelled demographic explosion worried the rulers of these empires, even as they staggered into the fratricidal slaughter that would insure exactly that future."

In between such succinct historical analysis, Schama peppers his article with comments from the writings of Rudyard Kipling, Knut Hamsun, Fanny Wright, Frances Trollope and Charles Dickens. All of them visited the United States and all found something to dislike about American society, but it in the competition to detest America the most it was the French who outdid all contenders. Says Schama:

"For French writers like Kadmi-Cohen, the author of The American Abomination, the threat from the United States was not just economic or military. America now posed a social and cultural danger to the civilization of Europe. The greatest 'American peril' (a phrase that became commonplace in the literature) was the standardization of social life (the ancestor of today's complaints against globalization), the thinning of the richness of human habits to the point where they could be marketable not only inside America but, because of the global reach of American capitalism, to the entire world. Hollywood movies, which, according to Georges Duhamel, were 'an amusement for slaves,' and 'a pastime for the illiterate, for poor creatures stupefied by work and anxiety,' were the Trojan horse for the Americanization of the world. Jean Baudrillard?s belief that the defining characteristic of America is its fabrication of reality was anticipated by Duhamel's polemics against the 'shadow world' of the movies, with their reduction of audiences to somnolent zombies sitting in the dark."

THE PECULIAR FRENCH LOATHING of things American is examined by Walter Russell Mead in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. "Why Do They Hate Us?" asks Mead in his review of two new French books that examine the phenomenon. The volumes are "L'obsession anti-americaine: Son fonctionnement, ses causes, ses inconsequences" by Jean-Francois Revel and "L'ennemi americain: Genealogie de l'antiamericanisme francais" by Philippe Roger.

Both Revel and Roger contend that anti-Americanism is a self-referential Franco-French indulgence that does not allow facts to get in its way, Mead notes. Revel and Roger, Mead and Schama are all in broad agreement that the rise and persistence of the phenomenon reflects historical trends. French Ameriphobia is so virulent because the United States has diminished France, and what makes this all the more galling is that there's no comparable American anti-Gallicism. This is because France is seen as little more than a nuisance in the United States. What the French would like to regard as a global conflict about culture and economics in which they are key players, the Americans treat as irksome noise which they prefer to tune out. Mead's sole criticism of Revel and Roger:

"If there is anything missing in these books, it would be a discussion of the relationship between French Anglophobia and French anti-Americanism. Both in France and beyond, new anti-Americanism is simply old Anglophobia writ large. Anti-Anglo-Saxonism has been a key intellectual and cultural force in European history since the English replaced the Dutch as the leading Protestant, capitalist, liberal, and maritime power in the late seventeenth century. The image of Anglophone "New Carthage" — cruel, treacherous, barbarous, plutocratic — that Jacobin and Napoleonic propaganda assiduously disseminated contains the essential features of anti-Anglo-Saxon portraits so familiar today. The humiliations and setbacks that France suffered at American hands in the twentieth century chafe so badly in part because they rub the old wounds that the British inflicted in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The British destroyed the empires of the Bourbons and Bonaparte; the rise of the United States established a new superpower league in world politics in which France can never compete. The dog-eat-dog competition of Anglo-Saxon capitalism forces French firms to adjust, and it steadily undermines France's efforts to maintain its social status quo. The English language has replaced French in science, diplomacy, and letters; the list goes on."

Does the fact that writers such as Ravel and Roger are finally giving French Ameriphobia a critical hiding mean that Paris will now start to accept reality? Alas, no, says Mead. French anti-Americanism is likely to persist as long as its causes exist:

"These causes are not, as perennially optimistic Americans want to think, American shortcomings and failures. America's failures and crimes are the patrimony of anti-Americanism, its treasures and its darlings. They inflame and disseminate anti-Americanism, but they are not its root cause. For that we must look to American success, American power, and America's consequent ability to thwart the ambitions of other states and impose its agenda on the rest of the world.

The challenge for Americans and non-Americans alike is not to end anti-Americanism; only the collapse of American power could accomplish that task. Today, the task is to manage pragmatically the resentments, irritations, and real grievances that inevitably accompany the rise to power of one nation, one culture, and one social model in a complex, divided, and passionate world."

Diarist of the day: Evelyn Waugh, 6 March 1946

"An offensive letter from a female American Catholic. I returned it to her husband with the note: 'I shall be grateful if you will use whatever disciplinary means are customary in your country to restrain your wife from writing impertinent letters to men she does not know."