Tuesday, May 1. 2007
Posted by Sonja Bonin in
Transatlantic Relations on Tuesday, May 1. 2007
“Some sort of gripes of the globe, fluctuating in strength, manifest themselves in the critique of the United States,” says Jan Roß in the esteemed German weekly newspaper DIE ZEIT. “This anti-Americanism forms a new global ideology, the mainstream culture (“Leitkultur”) for all protest against the current state of affairs, like the different shades of socialism used to be over the last decades.”
This dominating undertone against the United States, claims Roß, transcends all tangible controversial issues at hand. It’s proved long-lasting and not confined to traditional foes or the losers of globalization. In fact, according to a BBC poll, dramatically fewer people, from the Philippines to India to Germany to South Korea, believe in a “mostly positive” influence of the US any longer. A divided attitude towards America “drives Europe and the Atlantic alliance apart; for most governments, everything American has become “politically radioactive”: Touch it, and you’re inevitably contaminated in the eyes of the voters at the next election.
Outside the transatlantic community, the idea takes root that the EU’s main raison d’être should be to “put the arrogant United States in place”. Asia doesn’t participate in the “global psycho-game with Americans in need to feel loved on the one hand and bitter Europeans or Arabs on the other hand; it just profits from it.”
UPDATE: Richard has translated one of the key paragraphs of the Zeit article "Anti-Americanism: The Global Bellyache." Thank you!
A kind of global bellyache in varying intensity is showing up in criticisms of the United States. Anti-Americanism is a new global ideology, the predominate culture of protest against prevailing relations, just as it was over decades for the various incarnations of Socialism (...)
The basic atmosphere against the United States reaches far beyond all the concrete questions in dispute. When Angela Merkel travels to Washington for the EU/USA summit at the beginning of next week, she'll encounter the tamest, most cooperative American regime in a long time. At the meeting, a project to harmonize the transatlantic economy will be initiated, which doesn't really interest the Americans and which they're including mostly to humor the Chancellor. American diplomacy is doing overtime to deal with NATO and the Russians over the disputed missile defense szstem. The administration in Washington has given up its grandiose reform plan for the Islamic world, which was considered the height of madness in Europe, and is again backing the small potatoes of a traditional Mideast peace policy. The weakend Bush II Administration, humiliated in Iraq, is probably a more docile partner than the Clinton administration, for which they still yearn in Europe, ever was. But it's no use. Everyone who comes into too close contact for too long becomes contaminated to the point of unelectability. Great trembling in Germany's CDU/CSU began immediately when the SPD discovered the conflict and mobilization potential of the US missile defense plans.
UPPERDATE: Ray D. has translated the entire article for Davids Medienkritik.
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