Anti-Americanism in Western Europe

Abstract

Anti-Americanism consists not of opposition to particular policies but of “persistent patterns of gross criticism of the main values of the U.S. Constitution.” It is a historic attitude of the ruling classes in continental Europe, to whom every American success meant a failure of their own, of either prediction or achievement or both. Ordinary Europeans have generally admired the United States, to the point of migrating there. Americans have not reciprocated with anti-Europism, perhaps because of Europe's nonexistence as an entity and the waning weight of its components. Today, anti-Americanists damn the United States if it does and if it does not, for U.S. security, economic, and cultural policies. They resent the American conversion of the primacy of foreign policy into the primacy of domestic politics. Anti-Americanism will diminish, however, as the procedures of American domestic politics spread over the world.